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"Fight Club" Teacher Taught Fighting Before, Cried When Confronted

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  • "Fight Club" Teacher Taught Fighting Before, Cried When Confronted

    "Fight Club" Teacher Taught Fighting Before, Cried When Confronted

    "Fight Club" Teacher Taught Fighting Before, Cried When Confronted - Gothamist
    Joseph Gullotta, of Long Island
    Thursday's incident wasn't the first time a fourth grade teacher at PS 65 in Ozone Park allegedly turned his classroom into an impromptu fight club. In the wake of yesterday's publicity, another student's parent has come forward, claiming that last year Joseph Gullotta told his class that if 10-year-old Jovan Ortiz got up from his seat, the others were, in Jovan's words, "allowed to punch me in my face." His mother, Wajana Vallechillo, tells the Daily News she filed a complaint after classmates punched Jovan in the stomach twice, and says that during a meeting with Gullota, he cried and said he was just trying to "toughen up" Jovan.

    School officials refused to comment on Vallechillo's allegation, but she says, "If this would have been nixed then, this wouldn't have happened. He teaches through violence. He incites violence in children." Thursday's incitement started when 10-year-old Tomas Rivera got into an argument with a classmate, and Gullotta suggested that instead of taking out his anger on his adversary, Rivera should wrestle a younger classmate, 9-year-old Justin Stokel. He then had the door closed and told the others to stand back.

    In the scuffle, Rivera head-butted Stokel, resulting in a laceration and bleeding to Stokel’s lower lip and bruising to Rivera’s head. Rivera's father found out about the incident when he overheard the two boys talking about it while playing video games. "I heard him go, 'Oh, they were cheering you more than they were cheering me,' " the father tells the Post. Apparently, much like WWE adversaries, in real life Rivera and Stokel are not bitter adversaries but good friends, and Gullotta, a self-styled Vince McMahon, had them fight to blow off steam.

    Rivera reported the incident to school officials the next day and then went to the cops, who "found it so strange and unorthodox that they arrested him," Rivera says. Both families now plan to sue the city, and Gullotta has been sent to go cry in the rubber room. Along with 43-year-old teacher's aide Abraham Fox, they've both been charged with acting in a manner injurious to a child and face up to a year in prison if convicted. But Fox's father was confronted by the News last night and angrily defended his son, saying, "He saw no fight in the classroom. Nothing happened, nothing untoward, nothing unusual... They should have said there's no evidence to back your statement based on two 10-year-old children."
    To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway
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