A Manhattan judge sentenced the ex-Riverdale prep school teacher convicted in February of bedding a 16-year-old student to 2 1/2 years in prison as she lashed into him for the crime.
“His child victim came to him needing a shoulder to cry on and instead she got a penis in her mouth and that’s the unfortunate reality,” said Justice Jill Konviser of disgraced MIT grad Richard Hovan.
”That the defendant is a gifted and talented teacher and tutor is clear,” Konviser continued. “While the defendant may have made calculus bearable to the private school set, this case isn’t about math, it’s about rape, sodomy and endangering the welfare of a child.”
After a one-month trial, it took jurors four hours to find Hovan, 33, guilty of all nine counts against him for sleeping with the sophomore in 2011.
Hovan’s ex-fiancé Marina Bontkowski, 28, tearfully testified at trial in Manhattan Supreme Court that she walked in on the strawberry-blond student straddling the math teacher and reported it to authorities. Both women took the stand against Hovan but defense lawyer Vinoo Varghese insisted they were lying.
Varghese asked the judge to sentence Hovan to one year in jail, citing over 25 letters of support for the ex-Riverdale Country School geometry teacher.
Prosecutor Shanda Strain lobbied for a much stiffer sentence of 8 years.
She told the judge that two of Hovan’s students filed complaints against him for similar conduct although he was never prosecuted for those alleged incidents.
And the prosecutor blasted Hovan for his brazen dishonesty on the stand.
“Some of lies he told were so outlandish and so absurd, it was laughable,” said Strain. “It was absolutely laughable to sit in this court and take that oath and do what he did.”
Hovan implausibly claimed that when Bontkowski burst into the apartment, he and his former student, now 19, were just doing “crossword puzzles.”
Bontkowski, a Harvard grad, then noticed a half-empty bottle of lubricant on the coffee table.
Hovan told jurors that perhaps his cats had opened the bottle and spilt its contents.
Varghese said he plans to appeal.
