By Bruno Matarazzo Jr.
KENT — A judge is considering whether dozens of former Kent School students whose personal information, photos and videos allegedly were accessed by a former school IT employee can move forward together in a class-action lawsuit.
Lawyers for the students and the school argued last week whether the alleged victims of Daniel Clery shared enough in common to justify class-action status.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys Jennifer Sclar and Joel Faxon argued that Kent School failed to protect students’ data for years, while the school’s lawyer, Daniel L. Schwartz, countered that each student’s experience was too different to combine neatly into a single case.
Clery is accused of unlawfully accessing students’ private photos and files stored on school computers over many years until 2023. A forensic report commissioned by the private school found that Clery viewed and copied images from student Google accounts, mostly targeting female students, and may have done so for sexual pleasure, according to Sclar.
The school’s investigation of the situation found Clery “had been accessing and transferring computer contents of at least 11 female staff members” as well as 70 current and former students, at least 68 of them female, “over a period of years,” according to the lawsuit.
A key point in the hearing for Judge Daniel Kalu was predominance, the legal standard requiring that common issues outweigh individual ones for a class action to proceed.
The judge called it the central question, noting that while Kent School’s overall duty to protect student data may be common to all, the case becomes more individualized when looking at what each student’s files contained, how Clery accessed them, and what harm may have followed.
Plaintiffs argued the opposite, saying the shared issues clearly predominate because the case turns on Kent’s institutional conduct, not the specifics of each student’s device.
The plaintiffs urged the court to certify a limited class focused only on whether the school breached its duty of care, with damages to be determined individually. Without that structure, they said, the court risks forcing “dozens of identical trials” over the same alleged failures in the school’s data-security practices.
The Kent School fired Clery in February 2023, according to one of several lawsuits. In criminal court, Clery faces two counts of first-degree computer crime charges but has not been accused of distributing the material.
The school’s attorney said the alleged breaches occurred at different times, in different ways with different kinds of content, and all those differences make it difficult to decide key questions in a single trial.
Schwartz, the school’s attorney, argued that the most efficient way to litigate the case would be to consolidate the multiple lawsuits for the purposes of discovery and the trial.”We really don’t know what the class is or whether or not there’s going to be a class because we know … the 70 individuals whose information was accessed, we don’t know what information was accessed,” Schwartz said.
One of the civil lawsuits against the school was filed for an employee who said Clery was working on her laptop computer in her office in summer 2022 when she returned to the office and found him scrolling through her personal photos.
The woman’s complaint says she recognized that the pictures he was viewing included both family photos and “intimate photographs of a sexual nature that were intended for her husband’s eyes only.”
The complaint says the woman was “extremely distressed by this” and notified her supervisor. But it says the school took no action against Clery until eight months later, when she happened to see more of her photos on his phone, including “a private nude photograph of herself that she had sent to her husband,” the suit says.
Clery is free on a $25,000 bond and is next due Nov. 25 at state Superior Court in Waterbury.
