The Water Polo Scandal That Rocked LA’s Most Elite Private School

In response to a request for comment, Harvard-Westlake emailed the following statement: “Harvard-Westlake will not offer specific comment other than to say that it unequivocally disputes many of these allegations that mischaracterize facts and the school’s actions. The school treated reports of inappropriate behavior in its water polo program with urgency and seriousness, promptly initiating an investigation and complying with its mandatory reporting obligations. The school also cooperated completely with law enforcement.”

Coach Grover did not immediately respond for a request for comment. Lillian Chu, a lawyer for Kim—who now plays as an attacker on the Harvard University water polo team—issued the following statement to Vanity Fair on March 9: “The statements made in the complaint about Connor Kim are false. Although Connor is not a named defendant in this case, it’s important to point out that these claims and the assertion that he admitted to wrongdoing are simply not true.”

The complaint demands a jury trial because, Aidan and his parents say, he doesn’t want what happened to him at Harvard-Westlake to happen to anyone else. His story—reported through exclusive interviews with the Romain family, Victim Two and his father, and other school parents, along with texts and school communications—outlines how the Romains allege an elite school operates when faced with claims that threaten its reputation and bottom line. The story also describes the everyday racial cruelty that Aidan and Victim Two say they faced at a predominantly white private school.

More than two years after Van der Woude’s arrest, Aidan’s father, Alex, can’t quite keep his composure when he talks about the day he found out what was happening to his son at Harvard-Westlake. “I was in shock that Aidan could have told people at the school and no one did anything,” he says. “No one said anything. No one told us.” I hand him a napkin and he wipes his eyes. “We haven’t really slept since October of 2023.”

California is the epicenter of US water polo—more than 75% of all the sport’s high school players live in the state—and it reflects both the best and worst of the state’s swim-and-surf culture. Picture the quintessential male surfer: He’s tall and tan, with winglike deltoids and a casually individualistic mien. Some water polo players in Southern California look that way because they grew up that way, surfing the beaches of San Diego, Orange County, and Malibu before hitting the pool. But water polo has roots in the state’s racial divides, from red-lined neighborhoods to segregated swimming pools and beaches. And those laid-back surfers? Some are as sunny as a drive along the coast; others are aggressive, competitive, and deeply territorial.

Harvard-Westlake water polo players, in particular, breathe rarified air. The high school overlooks Studio City and is dotted with white stucco and red-tiled roofs that are reminiscent of a Santa Barbara luxury hotel. According to ProPublica, the school has $832 million in gross assets; per its student newspaper, it has an endowment of around $250 million. And that pretty pool will soon have an even shinier companion: Charlie Munger, the former vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, was on the Harvard-Westlake board for 54 years and, before he died, helped the school buy a nearby public golf-and-tennis club. Next fall the school will reportedly debut its new $200 million sports complex, with a brand-new aquatics center.

Such riches have long attracted Hollywood parents—Apple Martin, Lily Collins, Billie Lourd, and Chet Hanks all went to the school—and some of the unfamous kids who attend Harvard-Westlake live just as well. Melissa Romain remembers the moment Aidan asked her for $200 so he could help buy one of his teammates a Gucci belt for his birthday. “I was just like, ‘Sweetie, I love you. But we’re not gonna do that,’” she says. “And, like, no judgment—I would love to have a Gucci belt.” (Full disclosure: I attended seventh and eighth grade at the Westlake School for Girls before it merged with the Harvard School for boys to become Harvard-Westlake in 1991.)

The school’s water polo program is considered competitive, but in the fall of 2022, the Wolverines were especially good: Ranked number three nationally, they had a new coach in Jack Grover, a three-time NCAA national-championship winner fresh off a stint as assistant water polo coach at UCLA. According to the Los Angeles Times, he’d inherited a bench stacked deep with talented players.

That roster included Aidan, who wasn’t like a lot of the kids from Harvard-Westlake’s so-called water polo families. An A student from Washington, DC, with benevolently strict parents, he’s the son of first-generation Americans—Melissa’s parents are from Jamaica and Guatemala; Alex’s parents are from Haiti. Aidan didn’t start playing water polo from the moment he could swim, which is what kids from water polo families do, nor did the Romains spend his early years going to meets at the Los Angeles Premier Water Polo Club—which holds its practices at the Harvard-Westlake pool—so they could network with coaches and university scouts. Sources tell me that water polo families are an insular bunch; if their kids excel in the sport, they might one day swim their way into playing for top universities like Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton. Unlike more competitive and democratic sports like football and basketball, water polo is niche and relatively inaccessible. To them, that’s considered a plus.

Aidan is genuinely talented. In 2022, Harvard-Westlake’s new coach christened him the school’s “golden freshman,” which made him the only 14-year-old on the varsity team. His parents were thrilled. “You know when somebody finds their thing in life?” Alex Romain tells me at a restaurant in Downtown Los Angeles. “Water polo is Aidan’s thing.”

The celebration didn’t last. According to the complaint, Aidan’s first varsity practice was also the first time Van der Woude assaulted him. Over Zoom, he tells me that he was eggbeating—water polo slang for treading water—when he felt someone grab one of his buttocks and insert a finger inside his anus. He jumped up and looked to see who was behind him. It was Van der Woude. “I was like, ‘Why did you do that? What are you doing?’” Aidan says. “He just laughed.”

Other teammates were laughing too, Aidan says. But because the water was up to his neck, he doesn’t know if they actually saw the incident. Either way, he says, it was clear to him that Van der Woude had social flex. Van der Woude’s mother, Nilda, was the team mom—which, the suit says, meant she handled logistics and communications with parents. “I guess I viewed him as untouchable,” Aidan says.

Aidan says in court documents that he faced a barrage of racial harassment from his teammates. Kim and Van der Woude “constantly dehumanized” him, he claims, and they called him “ni,” a short form of the N-word. “This constant degradation—which occurred virtually every single day for five months—was a frequent reminder of Plaintiff’s status as an outcast on his own team,” the lawsuit says. The complaint also says that Kim and Van der Woude beat Aidan in the gym with a sports-equipment-grade jump rope—eight times, by Aidan’s calculations. “They weren’t trying to hide it,” Aidan says. “When the lights would turn off, they would say, ‘Where’s Aidan?’ or ‘Where’s arbitrary Black person?’” He also alleges that they said he was going to be the team’s secret weapon at night games. “It was just straight, blatant racism,” he says.

Aidan describes himself as nonconfrontational; he comes off as the kind of guy who was raised by parents who prize character over clout. His demeanor is thoughtful, his sentences measured. When he was a child, Melissa says, he was afraid to go out in public wearing a black hoodie. His parents have counseled him to avoid engaging if someone picks a fight, lest it make the situation worse. His height—Aidan’s now six feet five—makes him a target, as does the color of his skin.

Aidan says that he didn’t tell anyone what Van der Woude was allegedly doing—silence is common among sexual assault victims—including his parents. “I want to be an Olympian,” he says. “I want to play D1 in college. I want to play professionally in Europe. I didn’t think that I would be able to achieve any of my dreams if I wasn’t playing water polo at Harvard-Westlake. And so I thought that I just kind of had to endure it.”

The lawsuit says that during spring break of Aidan’s freshman year, he and multiple members of the Harvard-Westlake team went with the Los Angeles Premier Water Polo Club to Spain, where they trained at Club Natació Barcelona. (The city is considered a mecca for the sport.) He was on the team bus when a teammate allegedly started chanting the N-word at another Black player, whom the complaint identifies with the initials “J.M.” J.M. told the teammate to stop, but another player warned Aidan and J.M. to keep quiet, adding that nobody would believe two Black players against the rest of the group. A chaperone then reached out toward J.M., “smacking him across the side of his head with considerable force,” the lawsuit says, and threatening to get him ejected from the team if he didn’t shut up. “That was one of those moments where you almost feel like you’re in a movie,” Aidan says. “Everything is in slow motion, like, what’s going on?”

On the trip, Harvard-Westlake athletic director Matt LaCour was acting as a chaperone and Grover was coaching because of their work with Los Angeles Premier. Aidan alleges that LaCour asked him to tell them what happened on the bus and to demonstrate how J.M. was hit. “I didn’t want to do it because the whole team was watching me,” he says. “But they insisted.”

Afterward, according to the complaint, LaCour and Grover told him that they didn’t believe him. But according to the complaint, the student in question later admitted to using the racial slur.

Melissa was also on the trip. After she heard about the incident, she approached Grover to tell him that she was concerned about Aidan’s safety on the team. According to the complaint, Grover told her that he’d decided not to punish the player in question and that the player had said using the slur was “a joke.” According to the suit, Grover also assured her he’d make sure Aidan was safe, texting her, “my eyes are going to be on him.”

But Aidan says the opposite happened: Because Grover didn’t impose disciplinary action, it was as though his teammates had permission to act out with impunity. “From that moment on, really, the team just hated me,” he says. “I already didn’t feel safe on the team because of Lucca…and the whole culture that was there. But I went from not feeling safe to feeling actually unsafe on that team.”

There’s a saying in water polo: What happens under the water, stays under the water. On the surface, players appear to be focused on the ball. Beneath, it’s a dog fight. TikTok is rife with underwater-cam videos showing players kicking, scratching, yanking at their opponents’ swimsuits, and trying to pull one another into the depths. Players boast about injuries and bloody noses on social media. Such high contact is not only normalized, it’s strategic.

“Many swimmers do not warm up to water polo for the very reasons animating this story—because of what happens underneath the water, and because there is so much touching in general,” says a former swim coach at an independent East Coast school. “As long as the official doesn’t see it, all is permissible, and so the skill set includes learning strategies to get away with things.”

Aidan’s claims of racism at Harvard-Westlake also aren’t anything new. After George Floyd was killed by policeman Derek Chauvin in 2020, alumni and students from private schools on both coasts, including Harvard-Westlake, created Instagram accounts where anonymous students, alumni, and family members of color vented their frustration with how they were treated. On @blackathw, a soccer player alleged his teammates called him an ape. As one of the account’s founders told the school’s student newspaper, “All Black people at Harvard-Westlake know that, at many times, it can feel very unwelcoming.” A parent who posted on the account directed at LA’s all-girls Marlborough School directly addressed the problem some parents say they face at private schools: “The parent community is racist, snobby, cliquey[.] the warm welcome is reserved for white people of wealth. The expectation is that we are on aid (and even if we are not) we must be humble and grateful, and not expect to have an equal voice or influence.”

Case in point: Melissa says she long suspected that a fellow parent thought Aidan and his sister, who went to Harvard-Westlake’s lower school, were on scholarships. They weren’t; she’s worked as a consultant for performing arts centers, while Alex is a high-profile attorney who helped exonerate late senator Ted Stevens of corruption charges. “She’d make comments, and I was like, Melissa, be kind in your mind,” she says.

When said parent eventually visited their home, Melissa says, she was surprised to discover that the Romains lived in Bel Air. “She was like, ‘This is how you lived this whole time? You’ve been to my house! Why didn’t you tell me?’”

A vice principal at one Los Angeles school says that today’s elite institutions function like corporations. There are powerful boards that must be answered to and wealthy donors to prioritize. “Private schools are in the service industry,” another administrator says. “And the service better be first-class.” One teacher who worked at Harvard-Westlake tells me staff are under a lot of pressure to deliver a “VIP” experience for kids and their parents. A former Harvard-Westlake employee says that when he was working there, parents went ballistic if he tried to discipline their children. “They’ll defame you to whoever will listen,” he says. “They’ll call you a liar.”

It wasn’t until homecoming day of Aidan’s sophomore year that Alex and Melissa heard anything more about the racial abuse Aidan says he was facing on the team. That’s when he told them about the litany of comments he’d endured. (To be clear, at that time, he says he was still afraid to tell his parents about the alleged sexual assaults lest it lead to his being pulled off the team.)

The lawsuit outlines a gauntlet of subsequent emails and meetings between Alex, Melissa, Grover, head of athletics Terry Barnum, and Janine Jones, Harvard-Westlake’s assistant head of school for community and belonging, to “discuss the ongoing issues Plaintiff was facing on the water polo team and ways to ensure his safety and well-being.” At one meeting, Melissa says, Grover told the Romains that he’d asked his “professional coach” what to do. “Grover was like, ‘Well, my coach suggests that I get all the parents in the room and tell them that this is unacceptable and they have to stop or their kids are not going to play,’” Melissa says. But then, according to the complaint, Grover said, “Can you imagine how upset the parents would be if I raised this issue with them?” Alex and Melissa later tell me that they looked at each other, incredulous. “We were like, ‘We’d be fine with that,’” Melissa says. (Grover did not return a request for comment.)

In an October 17 email to Jones, acquired by Vanity Fair, the Romains asked for her help. They also told her that Aidan must not be interviewed by any coaches alone. But in another email sent later that night, they said that Grover had pulled Aidan aside after a practice and told him that Van der Woude and Kim “cannot relate to [his] culture and don’t understand what it is like to be a Black water polo player.”

Nevertheless, the complaint says that Barnum “later told Plaintiff’s parents that he had met with Connor Kim and Lucca Van Der Woude, shown them the October 17, 2023 letter that Plaintiff’s parents had sent to Janine Jones (cataloguing the racial abuse described above), and asked Connor Kim and Lucca Van Der Woude about each of the listed allegations. Barnum told Plaintiff’s parents that both Connor Kim and Lucca Van Der Woude admitted to the acts listed in that October 17 letter.”

The repercussions for Aidan were swift and severe. He describes how, after meets, he saw pictures on social media of his teammates getting food without him. On the pool deck, players didn’t speak to him. In the pool, they yelled at him. After one particularly rough meet, Aidan tells me, he left abruptly because team members had been screaming at him. In the car on the way home, he says, members of the team started messaging him in a text thread that included the coach and seemed like a setup.

“How can we trust you when you constantly disrespect us and never show up when we ask you for help?” one text said, chastising him for not staying to clean up. “Yeah Aidan we love you so much man but that wasn’t cool today,” texted another player. After dinner, Melissa and Alex could see Aidan looking at his phone, distraught. “Do you see this?” he said. “Do you see how they talk to me?”

Aidan’s parents allege that they also became personae non gratae. They also say that some parents seemed resentful when a college coach talked to Aidan, and that players were no longer passing him the ball. “It was like they thought this Black kid was jumping the line, getting too much playing time, and getting too much attention in the water when the scouts were there, and they had a really big problem with that,” Melissa says.

According to the complaint, the Romains held more meetings with Grover in November 2023, begging him to address the team’s behavior. But, they say, Grover did nothing. “The problem is that our son said, ‘I would like not to be called a n—-r anymore,’” Alex says. “I think that’s an ugly word, but it needs to be said. Why didn’t the school say, ‘This is not how we are. This is not how we act’? They wanted to talk about the kids and not bring the parents into it. But the parents weren’t speaking to us. It was like, How dare your son ask to not be called a n—-r every day? How dare you?”

Aidan’s lawsuit refers to policies outlined in Harvard-Westlake’s 2023–2024 Upper School Student/Parent Handbook, which says the school is “committed to a ‘working and educational environment that is free of harassment…discrimination, and retaliation,’ and explicitly prohibits ‘verbal, written, visual, and physical conduct’ of a harassing nature.” The suit also says that the handbook “pledges that all school employees ‘must report’ misconduct or harassment disclosures to the Head of the Upper School.”

But despite Harvard-Westlake’s policies, Melissa knew, she says, that Aidan would face some racism at the school: “You have to expect that and have a plan for when that happens. You’re in a situation where you trust the people who have your kid in their care. But one thing that always grated me was they would say, ‘What do you think we should do in this situation?’ And I’d be like, ‘You’re the experts. What do you think you should do to change this situation, given the ideals you say your school lives by?’”

Things came to a head in mid-December. “On or about December 14, 2023,” the complaint says, “during a practice session at the Harvard-Westlake pool, Lucca Van der Woude sexually assaulted a former water polo teammate, ‘Victim Two,’ by digitally penetrating him underwater.”

I interviewed Victim Two last summer. The son of a salesman, he lives in central Los Angeles, not Bel Air. His father says he and his wife were ecstatic when their son got admitted to Harvard-Westlake on a scholarship that covered a portion of the school’s tuition, which in 2025 was $52,500. “It was a life changer for the family,” Victim Two’s dad says.

In an exclusive interview, Victim Two tells me he quit the water polo team before the first game of his sophomore year. Van der Woude was assaulting him the same way he assaulted Aidan, he says, while teammates mocked him in a Mexican accent. It pained him to stop playing, he says, because, like Aidan, he wanted to play Division I in college and go to the Olympics. But later, Victim Two says, he started to worry that he’d quit the team too soon.

Victim Two and Aidan attended a water polo practice in mid-December 2023, the complaint says. They were in the pool when Van der Woude and his friends arrived. Victim Two described what happened next in an email reviewed by Vanity Fair, which he says was sent to upper school dean Sharon Cuseo and Barnum: “I was waiting for the ball, and then suddenly someone under the water had fingered me,” he wrote. “I looked behind me, and that someone was Lucca Vanderwoude [sic].”

A scuffle between him and Van der Woude broke out, Victim Two says. Aidan grabbed his friend to hold him back. The email continues: “I told [the other players] that Lucca had just fingered me, and they just kept laughing at me, and talking to me in a [M]exican accent saying…‘Oh Foreal Man’…[T]hey even said ‘What the hell is [he] saying.’”

When he called his mom to tell her what happened, Victim Two says, he was so overwhelmed and angry that he cried. His attorney, Jessica Pride, says he intends to file a civil suit against the school.

The day after the incident, the complaint says, Cuseo found Aidan during a morning assembly and told him she wanted to speak with him. When they entered her office, dean of students Jordan Church and Victim Two were allegedly already there. Aidan tells me that he sat on the couch next to his friend and listened as he recounted how Van der Woude allegedly assaulted him. Victim Two, the lawsuit says, “lamented that he was being vilified and accused of lying, and [he] insisted he was telling the truth.”

According to the complaint, Aidan stepped in and did what he had been avoiding since he joined the varsity team, telling the deans that he believed Victim Two because Van der Woude had been doing the same thing to him for a long time.

Cuseo allegedly asked Aidan and Victim Two to further explain what they were describing. So, the complaint says, Aidan “grabbed a pillow from the couch in Dean Cuseo’s office, folded it in half, and inserted his finger into the crease to demonstrate clearly to [the deans] how Lucca van der Woude had sexually abused him.”

Aidan tells me that when he left Cuseo’s office, it was like having to do a perp walk. He was besieged by students and tried to keep his head down as Van der Woude’s friends surrounded him. One student held up a cell phone to record. “Lucca didn’t do anything, right, Aidan?” they asked. “He didn’t do anything, right?”

But later that same day, according to the complaint, Cuseo met with both students again and told them that the school had interviewed four of the sophomores who were in the pool with them, and that they denied any assault occurred. Victim Two says he asked to look at security camera footage, to no avail. He says he was told that Harvard-Westlake couldn’t do anything more.

The next day, Victim Two’s parents say, they emailed the school his account of what had happened: “We would like to know what kind of investigation took place that was determined to reach this conclusion within 24 hours,” says an email they provided. “[B]ased on your mission statement and vision, how can this be addressed so that [our son] can feel a sense of belonging, equality, and inclusivity once again?”

Under California’s Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Act (CANRA), teachers, counselors, coaches, and administrators are mandated reporters. When they are told of—or reasonably suspect—abuse, they are required to notify law enforcement and/or the hotline operated by child protective services. After Victim Two’s parents complained, according to his father, the school reported the alleged assault, but, Aidan’s lawsuit says, it did not file a report about what he says happened to him. Regardless, Van der Woude remained on campus, where, Victim Two says, he acted as though nothing had happened.

Sometime in February, an anonymous caller reported Van der Woude to the police. He was arrested 11 weeks after the time Aidan and Victim Two say they reported their assaults to the deans. The night of Van der Woude’s arrest, the Romains say, a detective with the LAPD called them to request an interview with their son. They were surprised when he insisted that he could only go before school; otherwise, he said, students might conclude that he was a snitch. The detective said they could meet at 6 a.m., when the precinct would be practically empty.

Walking into the station, Melissa and Aidan stood out. She’s five feet two; he’s more than a foot taller. It was obvious that they’d never been in a police precinct before, Melissa says. (“Even after all my years watching SVU, later, Alex and I were like, ‘Should we have hired an attorney?’” she says.)

The detective began the interview by asking Aidan general questions about the water polo team. Who was on it? Did he know Victim Two? Then she turned to the alleged incident. But as Aidan responded to her questions, Melissa started to hear details she’d never heard before. When Aidan told the detective what he had told the deans—that he believed Victim Two because he, too, had been sexually assaulted by a fellow water polo player—Melissa was shocked.

She says it felt like she left her body. Like she was suddenly watching the interview from the ceiling. While Aidan spoke with the detective, he occasionally shot his mother worried glances. She says she responded with reassuring nods while thinking, “Melissa, fix your face and let your son do what he needs to do.”

In the parking lot, she says, she told her son that he had nothing to be ashamed of and that she was proud of him for telling the truth. Not knowing what to do next, Melissa dropped him off at school, then called Alex to tell him everything.

One of the core issues in the Romain case is the family’s claim that, despite the CANRA law, the school didn’t report Aidan’s allegations to the authorities. The suit alleges that, as a result, “Lucca Van Der Woude digitally penetrated Plaintiff for the final time in approximately January 2024, as Plaintiff was walking up a flight of stairs on Harvard-Westlake’s campus on his way to his French III Honors class.”

The complaint also says that Aidan “found himself in a contentious situation when a teammate, B.B., entered the shower area and demanded access to his stall.” Aidan said no, and B.B. “became incensed” and “proceeded to assault Plaintiff, grabbing him by the shoulder and delivering blows to his back, buttocks, and genitals. The attack escalated and the teammate forcefully grabbed Plaintiff’s penis while simultaneously striking him in the testicles.”

Harvard-Westlake retained Susan Oliver of Tyson & Mendes, a firm that sells itself on its website as specializing in helping clients avoid “nuclear verdicts” in high-stakes trials. In a June 2024 letter to Daniel Watkins, Aidan’s attorney, she wrote, “While Harvard-Westlake is aware of an incident where Lucca was alleged to have sexually assaulted another water-polo player in December 2023, it was only via your correspondence that Harvard-Westlake was first advised, by anyone, that Aidan claims Lucca sexually assaulted him.” Oliver did not respond to interview requests last September or to requests for comment regarding Aidan’s recent filing.

I ask Victim Two if Aidan told the deans while they were both in Cuseo’s office that Van der Woude sexually assaulted him. He doesn’t remember the exact time frame, he says, because the events in question occurred nearly two years earlier—but he corroborates Aidan’s story. “Aidan just, like, comes in the office out of nowhere and just, like, echoes my words,” he says. “I hadn’t even talked to him [about Lucca] before that day.”

I ask him if “echoing his words” means that Aidan told the deans he had also been sexually assaulted. “He came in and said exactly what I said,” Victim Two says. “So yeah.”

Aidan says that he grew afraid of being framed in retribution after someone—he doesn’t know who—created a fake Instagram account in his name and tried to obtain nude pictures from his friends. Melissa was fielding calls from fellow parents. “They were saying, ‘Hey, I struggled greatly [with] whether or not I should make this phone call, but I just came from this dinner party, and people are talking horribly about you guys,’” she says. “‘Saying that you have messed with the wrong people and that you’re going to be lucky if Aidan goes to the school. That, you know, your financial aid’”—financial aid her family wasn’t getting and didn’t need—“‘is being revoked and you need to worry about that.’”

Around the same time, Aidan’s sister, who is two years younger than he is, called crying from her dean’s office. “She said, ‘Mommy’—and pardon my French—‘people [are] telling me that we’d fucked with the wrong people and that they’re going to take our house,’” Melissa says.

According to Pride, who says she’s represented scores of clients who have sued schools for mishandling students’ reports of sexual abuse, Aidan’s and Victim Two’s experiences aren’t unusual. “You would think it’s the expensive private schools that have all the resources, that have the best training,” she says. “In fact, I’ve found they’ve had the worst.”

Public schools are often represented by the same insurer, she says, which can offer them free access to mandated-reporter education while pressuring them to reduce claims. But in general, private schools can choose their own training program, and if they don’t accept federal funds, which many don’t, they’re not subject to Title IX.

“The law says, if you see something, you have to say something if it’s a reasonable suspicion of suspected child abuse,” Pride says. “You do not get to [just] do your own internal investigation and blah, blah, blah bullshit.” A school’s internal investigation can also be flawed. “If there’s allegations, right, they then maybe don’t do a good job. And if you don’t substantiate [the abuse], then you go, ‘Well, nothing happened. Let’s keep going. Let’s keep our heads in the sand.’”

Sources tell me that private schools can delay or deflect reports of sexual abuse, racism, and violence in the hope that families will remove their children, thus resolving the problem without exposure. It often happens that the burden is shifted onto the victim, says a swim coach who’s worked for independent schools.

During the time of the suicides, a former school employee said, he noticed that “Harvard-Westlake [was] very big on protecting their reputation. Huge.”

When Van der Woude was arrested on February 28, 2024, everything was out in the open, but not in a good way. “There were things [students] were saying, like, ‘Oh, like, they’re saying that you got fisted, or saying that you got raped, or just, like, these cruel, cruel rumors going around that I thought would never even go around,” Victim Two says. A screenshot of a text that Aidan sent to Melissa the following day reads, “Mom, I talked to Ms. Cuseo and [Victim Two] again today. Apparently everyone in the school knows. Literally.”

After the arrest, Harvard-Westlake banned Van der Woude from campus and forbade him from playing water polo for the school, according to the complaint. Water polo activities on campus were suspended until a third-party review could be completed. In an email sent to parents, Barnum wrote, “Harvard-Westlake is sympathetic to the range of emotions that our players and their families are experiencing…We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your patience as we work through this process.”

After reading the email, Alex says, “I thought, What range of emotions? Ours? When we just found out our son was assaulted for 18 months? When you say you’re sympathetic to a range of emotions in a situation where at least two minors have been sexually assaulted by another person, it only confirms that your highest objective is not actually to protect all the minors in your care. Is there any other appropriate reaction other than outrage?”

According to the complaint, “The Orange County Register reported that on November 7, 2024, Lucca Van Der Woude ‘admitted in Los Angeles County Juvenile Division Court…to sexual penetration with a foreign object (digital penetration) against a minor’ as part of a plea agreement with prosecutors.” For reasons that were not explained to the Romains, they say, the district attorney’s office decided to drop the charge involving Aidan while keeping the charge involving Victim Two as part of a plea agreement. But Van der Woude was issued a no-contact order, and Aidan was invited by the court to read a victim impact statement during Van der Woude’s hearing. “We were on Zoom. Lucca was in court,” Alex says. “We could see him. He was very, let’s say, nonchalant.” Van der Woude was later ordered to pay Aidan $49,266 in restitution for an offense listed by the Los Angeles County Probation Department as “sexual penetration with a foreign object.”

After leaving Harvard-Westlake, Van der Woude transferred to Orange County’s Newport Harbor High School, where he played for the water polo team and was instrumental in helping it win the CIF Southern Section Open Division title. In 2024 he was named The Orange County Register’s water polo player of the year.

Van der Woude was offered a spot on the UCLA water polo team. But after the Register broke the story that Van der Woude had left Harvard-Westlake after his arrest to play for Newport Harbor High School in Newport Beach, there was an uproar in the student newspaper. Van der Woude enrolled at Golden West College, a community college in Huntington Beach, where he’s reportedly on the water polo team.

The Romain family says they are still experiencing the ramifications of his time at Harvard-Westlake. After withdrawing from the school, Aidan, Melissa, and his younger sister relocated to Barcelona, where he could work with a top coach. He’s now finishing his senior year via an online school. Alex visits from Los Angeles whenever he can.

The Romains have submitted a report to the US Center for SafeSport, a nonprofit authorized by Congress in 2018 to protect young athletes affiliated with US Olympic and Paralympic sports from abuse. According to sources and documents obtained by Vanity Fair, as of last September, SafeSport was investigating a complaint against Grover, who has been on the coaching staff of the USA Water Polo athlete development program. In response to an email request, SafeSport’s communications manager said organization officials “do not speak to specific cases to maintain the integrity of the investigative process.” The Romains say that Aidan and Van der Woude were in the pool together multiple times while at Olympic training camp events.

SafeSport has also been conducting an investigation into Van der Woude and has the authority to ban him from participating in future Olympic events. Alex says the family is awaiting its decision.

One of the many painful outcomes, Aidan says, was that while his former teammates were admitted to play water polo at schools like Stanford, Harvard, and UCLA, he met with multiple Division I colleges only to find some of the coaches asking him to explain his actions at Harvard-Westlake. “​​All the schools I visited, I had to explain in detail what happened because they all had heard some form of lie about me, including that I had been arrested or I had ruined another player’s life,” he says. “After I sent them my impact statement in the hopes that they would be more comfortable recruiting me.”

Aidan reluctantly decided to take a gap year. In August of 2025, he started with the Spanish pro club CN Mataró, which makes him the youngest American player in the team’s history. In February of this year, he was at last able to verbally commit to an Ivy League school. He says he’s “extremely excited” that he has a coach who is willing to believe in him.

Of course, water polo is a small community, and, starting in the fall of 2027, he’ll be back in the thick of it. Aidan says he’s unphased. “The people who blame me for having been sexually assaulted and hate me for standing up for myself will still do that,” he says. “I am focusing on joy and all of the wonderful people who are supporting me.”

Just after New Year’s Day, I spoke with the Romains over a Zoom call. They were gathered in their apartment in Barcelona, looking happy and relaxed. Both kids can speak Spanish now. They’re hopeful about the future, though the past has left scars. Later, Alex tells me that Aidan is working with a therapist to address what allegedly occurred while he was at Harvard-Westlake.

Victim Two says he is still playing water polo and processing his own disappointment. “Going into the school, I thought it was a diverse community and inclusive,” he says. “Even the booklet I got before attending the school had all these words like integrity, diversity, inclusiveness…But apparently, if you’re [a] minority, you’re not really viewed as [being as] valuable as others.”

He adds that if he had done what he and Aidan allege Van der Woude did, he would have been kicked out of school or worse. “Arrested, put in jail, on the spot, no questions asked,” he says. “That’s how I feel.”

While interviewing Victim Two and Aidan, I’m struck by their idealism. Neither of them speaks the cynical language of lawsuits, reputation management, and retribution. Instead, they seem to be longing for a mea culpa from the school they loved. “I thought that there was somebody at that place that would have my back, that would care,” Aidan says. “But there wasn’t. There was no support. It didn’t get better for me.”

In September 2025, Harvard-Westlake dropped from the 11th-best private high school in the country to number 40, according to Niche, a site that ranks K–12 schools and colleges. (Back in 2023, it was ranked number two.) Niche grades schools according to various factors, including the percentage of seniors who go on to attend four-year colleges, along with survey responses on school culture, diversity, and the overall experience of students and parents. The site releases some, but not all, survey results online.

In an interview with Harvard-Westlake’s student paper, school president Commons said he was perplexed by the fact that the school now ranked 40th out of 1,708 schools on Niche’s list of “best high schools for athletes in California.” The website, he noted, “gives us A+ grades in every area but athletics. That’s the real surprise, given that I think our athletics program is broader and more excellent than nearly all the schools ranked ahead of us in the ‘best private schools’ ranking.” He added, “I admit totally to the fact that it furrows my brow when we’re not somewhere close to the top.”

But then Commons heartened himself, telling a student reporter that Niche wasn’t necessarily something one should take seriously. “We’ll try to learn more and understand more about their criteria and figure out if there is something legitimate that we can improve as a school,” he said, “or whether it’s really just a random thing.”

This story has been updated with a statement from an attorney for Connor Kim.