Exprep star alleges sexual abuse by coach
Daphne Greene was mingling with her former classmates during a reunion at Branson, the private high school in Ross, when her former soccer coach arrived. She spun around and her smile flattened.
It had been four decades since Rusty Taylor, the nation’s winningest prep soccer coach, allegedly sexually abused her. It had been four decades since, she says, Taylor stole her innocence, her friendships and her childhood.
“He gave me a huge hug and I just wanted to throw up,” Greene recalled of the 2017 encounter. “I felt sick to my stomach.”
The pair made brief small talk as Greene
debated whether to run or scream or make a scene. She could no longer hear the laughter and excitement echoing among the high ceilings and large doors of the Branson Student Commons. She excused herself and quickly left.
“From that point on, my world fell apart, quite literally,” Greene said.
Over the next year, she said, for the first time in her life, she would confront her past — alleged sexual abuse that started in her sophomore year at Branson in 1976 as a 15yearold and continued until her soccer coach left the school after her junior year. The damage is detailed in a lawsuit Greene filed last month in Marin County Superior Court, alleging the affluent private school was negligent in its handling of Taylor. The former soccer coach is named in the lawsuit, but not as a defendant.
“I found my voice, and what Rusty did was a crime, and I was paying the price for a sexual predator who hadn’t even given it a second thought,” said Greene, now 59, who spoke to The Chronicle recently in the Mill Valley backyard of her attorney. “I couldn’t remain silent anymore.”
The Chronicle does not generally identify victims of sexual assault, but Greene agreed to be named in this story. She’s the first alleged victim to speak publicly. And when she came forward in 2018 to police and school officials, she set in motion a series of investigations that would unearth decades of alleged sexual abuse at two elite Bay Area high schools.
Taylor did not return multiple voice mails requesting comment, and no one responded to a knock at his Sausalito apartment with views of the Bay Bridge. In the past, his attorney has told school investigators that he declined to be interviewed or comment on the allegations, according to reports.
After a request for comment from The Chronicle on Wednesday, Branson’s Head of School Christina Mazzola and Board Chair Claudia Lewis sent a letter to the school community and The Chronicle addressing the lawsuit and saying policy forbids the officials from discussing specifics.
“What we can share is that we will handle this legal matter with consideration and respect for this alumna,” they wrote. “Branson acknowledges the tremendous bravery it takes to report abuse and, again, deeply apologizes for the pain that this alumna and any Branson student suffered because of facultyonstudent sexual misconduct.”
Sausalito police Lt. Stacie Gregory told The Chronicle that Greene contacted her department in May 2018, but said she could not comment further. While criminal statutes of limitations would likely have expired from a crime committed in the 1970s, Assembly Bill 218, enacted last year, granted victims of sexual abuse a window of three years to pursue civil litigation with no statute of limitations. Taylor has never been charged for any of the alleged assaults.
After visiting police, Greene approached Branson’s administration, along with two other alumnae with similar Taylor stories, according to Greene. Their accusations would lead Branson to conduct an internal investigation. An independent law firm in a report released publicly in 2019 “substantiated reports of sexual misconduct” involving Taylor and six girls, including Greene, that he coached during his tenure as athletic director and soccer coach at Branson.
Investigators named three other faculty members who they said also had allegations of sexual misconduct corroborated involving at least four more female students between the 1970s and 2013. Other alleged perpetrators were not named because the firm was not able to corroborate allegations.
Taylor left Branson in 1979 to coach soccer at University High, an elite San Francisco prep school. In 2020, that private school published its own independent investigation , determining Taylor had “engaged in serious sexual misconduct” with numerous girls between 1979 and 1991. That probe also found “corroborated sexual misconduct” involving two other faculty members. Other sexual misconduct over the decades by faculty was found to be credible, but teachers were not named because the investigators could not corroborate the allegations.
Both reports, which Greene filed in court as part of her lawsuit, found the schools’ administrators knew about inappropriate behavior by Taylor, but allowed him to continue coaching and avoid serious punishment. Those administrators have long since left the schools and one has died.
“They knew. They knew,” said Greene, dabbing the corner of her eye with a paper towel. “And that’s the part that hit hard.”
Greene was born and raised in Marin County, the youngest of six siblings. She came to Branson in 1975 and, as a freshman, played varsity soccer, volleyball and basketball. As a sophomore and senior she received the Sportswoman of the Year award. She was president of the Athletic Club and Spanish Club at the popular school for wealthy Marin County families that feeds students to top universities.
Rothwell “Rusty” Taylor came to Branson three years before Greene. The former AllAmerican midfielder at Lynchburg College in Virginia excelled at coaching, but quickly developed a reputation, according to the lawsuit.
In Taylor’s 1975 yearbook — which he gave to Greene decades ago and which she shared with The Chronicle — one girl wrote: “Rusty — have you ever heard of practicing what you preach? You’ve told at least 10 girls now not to cheat on you this summer. Your philosophy has rubbed off on your soccer team too — god help all females.”
The next year, he began coaching Greene as a 14yearold freshman. He was 31.
It started with “grooming,” Greene alleged in her lawsuit, Taylor slowly gaining her trust by driving her home and providing emotional support for a turbulent family life. As a sophomore, he would tape her ankle daily, slowly moving his hands up her legs, she said. Taylor ingratiated himself into her family, joining them on camping trips to Lake Tahoe.
Soon, he’d hold her hand as he drove her home, ultimately kissing her and bringing her to his Sausalito home, she alleged in the lawsuit. He would instruct her on how to perform oral sex, she claimed.
“When we would have sex, he would always say, ‘It will serve you well in the long run,’ ” Greene said in an interview.
Taylor would tell her he loved her and wanted to marry her, but to keep their relationship a secret, she alleged. He became jealous of her interaction with boys her own age, she said. It was a struggle for Greene.
“When everything’s a secret, you have to know how to compartmentalize for survival,” she told The Chronicle. “You’re like a hamster on a wheel trying to keep up with your own self and your own lies.”
Greene was not alone, according to the Branson investigative report. Investigators spoke to another former soccer player who said Taylor took her to his house, where she “remembers saying to Taylor that she did not want to go any further, but that he forced her into sexual intercourse and ‘rape[d]’ her.”
Another said he forced her hands down his pants. Another said he forced his hands down her pants. Another said they had sexual intercourse at his house. Yet another told multiple people she was “raped,” according to the school report.
Suspicions abounded on campus at the time, the report found. A Branson history teacher and coach, a friend of Taylor, went to his fellow coach’s home and found a 15yearold Greene there. He did nothing. Faculty members would see Taylor with Greene at a San Francisco sports bar. Some even went on double dates with the coach and student, according to the lawsuit.
A former school official told investigators he heard Taylor make “inappropriate,” “usually sexual” jokes to students, as well as commenting on “how cute they were.” But he told one student’s parents the coach was “harmless,” according to the report.
The Branson probe found that a school dean received complaints from two families about “sexual harassment issues” with Taylor. “Nobody filed a lawsuit or anything,” the report found, “they simply banned Rusty from coming to their homes.”
With the release of the report in April 2019, Branson’s head of school and board of trustees chair wrote a letter to parents.
“As an institution, we acknowledge our failing: Branson did not do enough to protect you and keep you safe while you were in the school’s care,” they wrote. “In several instances when Branson faculty or administrators learned of the sexual misconduct or inappropriate behavior, it is clear ... that some matters should have been handled more swiftly, more thoroughly and with greater sensitivity to the students who were harmed.”
In 1979, Taylor accepted an assistant athletic director and coaching job at University High in San Francisco. The private school had recruited him to give its soccer program a boost. They had no idea about the allegations of abuse.
Last year, as the pandemic took hold in the Bay Area, that school published its own independent report prompted by the Branson probe.
“There were reports, and we found evidence, of corroborated sexual misconduct by multiple perpetrators toward multiple students of SFUHS during the period 1976 to 1992,” the report concluded. In addition, the investigators found credible but uncorroborated reports of sexual misconduct with other faculty members.
Taylor was named in the report and a similar pattern emerged. Students at the time noticed the popular coach would flirt with girl players on his soccer team, give massages, drive them home, investigators said. He became so comfortable with families, he began asking for personal loans, they reported.
Among his victims, the report found he had intercourse at his home, forced the touching of his penis, forced a kiss after driving a girl to a remote location, and followed a girl as she walked home.
The report found that administrators were warned of Taylor’s behavior on multiple occasions, but tried to calm complaining parents down. He eventually received a warning letter that was placed in a “segregated file” kept apart from other teachers’ personnel files in an administrator’s desk drawer. Taylor stayed at the school until 2004.
From 1994 to 2015, Taylor coached girls soccer at a variety of other private high schools across the Bay Area, including Carondelet in Concord, Bentley in Lafayette and The Bay School in San Francisco. None of those schools have received any reports of inappropriate behavior by Taylor, school officials told The Chronicle. He accumulated over 1,300 wins at all his prep stops, becoming the country’s leading prep soccer coach.
University High brought him back in 2015, the report found, but the new administrators found the segregated file and ordered Taylor to resign after a few months.
“Based on the evidence we reviewed, we conclude that when incidents of sexual misconduct were reported to administrators, the administrators sometimes handled those incidents in a manner that did not promote optimal student safety,” the University High report concluded. “In addition, actions taken by some administrators left survivors with a perception that the school would not protect them and either did not believe them or was more concerned with the possible impact of the report on the alleged perpetrator.”
Taylor went on to coach the San Francisco Nighthawks, a Women’s Premier Soccer League team, for five years, said General Manager Jill Lounsbury. She released him in 2019 after the Branson report was publicized. She said he had developed a rare form of cancer at the time and no longer coaches. She said she saw and heard of no inappropriate behavior by Taylor during his tenure with her team, calling him “nothing but kind and generous.”
Greene cries when she thinks about how different her life might be without her Branson horrors. She suffers from posttraumatic stress disorder, depression and can’t escape the abuse, she alleges in her lawsuit.
“I’m not going to have children and risk the fact they could get injured,” Greene said. “How do you fully trust men? You already feel like you’re damaged goods. Every possible part of my life I looked at through the prism of this abuse.”
Greene now lives with her partner in Marin County and runs a company; she’s an offroad driving instructor and event planner. She has remained an active alumna, but when she learned the full extent of the school’s role in her alleged abuse, she was stunned.
“Rusty sexually abused me, but fundamentally, Branson betrayed me and that’s not OK,” Greene said. “To keep those secrets all of those years to protect Rusty and to find out Branson was complicit is just unforgivable ... it’s not different than what the Catholic Church or Boy Scouts did. It started at Branson and they passed him on and now it’s decades of young girls who he’s sexually assaulted.”
None of that might be known, her attorney Paul Llewellyn said, if Greene had not decided to speak out.
“Without Daphne’s bravery in coming forward and telling her story, Branson’s sordid history may never have been exposed,” he said. “No doubt she has served as an inspiration and role model for others to come forward and tell their story.”
In May 2016, Taylor was elected to the San Francisco Prep Hall of Fame, and several faculty and administrators from University High attended the ceremony. The school decided to take no position on his nomination, the report said. The same year, a Branson administrator nominated Taylor to the Branson Athletic Hall of Fame — the same organization that inducted 1992 graduate and nowfirst partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom four years ago.
The San Francisco Prep Hall of Fame removed Taylor last year, and his Branson honor never went through, much to the delight of Greene, a 1993 inductee.
Greene could have filed her lawsuit as a Jane Doe. She could have remained anonymous and not shared her story.
“It’s about breaking that code of secrecy,” she said. “There are a lot of victims and survivors and it’s time to give them a voice.”