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Poly Prep tennis coach accused of sexual abuse by second former student in new Brooklyn court filing

The New York Daily News - 2/19/2020

A second Poly Prep Country Day School alumna charged Wednesday that she was sexually abused by her alma mater’s tennis coach for more than two years, beginning when she was a 14-year-old freshman.

The plaintiff, a former high school cheerleader identified only by the pseudonym “Mary Coe,” was in her first year at the school when defendant William Martire allegedly initially forced her to perform oral sex on him in the early 1980s, according to a horrifying 18-page Brooklyn Supreme Court filing.

The victim "was forcibly compelled on numerous occasions to perform various sex acts ... by a strong and powerful man then in his 40s,” the court documents say. “Martire always used his superior strength and grabbed her head or her hands to force her to provide sexual gratification.”

The sexual abuse continued through her sophomore and junior years at the elite Dyker Heights private school, leaving the teen “ashamed, humiliated ... (She) felt dirty, anxious, terrified,” according to the suit filed by the law firm of Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss.

The older and athletic Martire often manhandled the underaged victim, and never spoke with her except to issue orders about their next rendezvous, the suit alleges.

The now middle-aged victim “suffered the scars of these multiple forcible sexual assaults throughout her adolescence and her adult life,” the lawsuit says, leaving her to struggle with anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and substance addiction.

A December 2019 lawsuit filed by another Poly Prep alum accused Martire of sexually assaulting her in the late 1980s when she too was in her freshman and sophomore years. Martire, who was working at Prep when the first suit was filed, is no longer employed by the school.

According to the new lawsuit, the unwanted sexual encounters with the second victim occurred throughout school property: The athletic department offices, the squash courts, empty classrooms, a stairwell and an equipment shed near the tennis courts.

On one occasion, Martire drove the freshman student to the home where he lived with his wife to engage “in a variety of sexual activity,” according to the lawsuit.

“Coe never felt any gratification or pleasure; she was treated with aggression and physical roughness and coercion,” the lawsuit claims. “There was never any real conversation between them ... She would see him looking at her with a predatory stare. She felt like a piece of meat.”

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages from Martire and the school. There was no immediate response provided by Poly Prep to the new allegations.

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