A former student at the elite Horace Mann School in The Bronx says his pedophile English teacher bragged about driving 12 kids to suicide — and vowed to make him the 13th.
“You will join a long list of willful children who lashed out and then couldn’t make it on their own,” Robert Berman told one of his teen victims, Stephen Fife, according to Fife’s upcoming memoir, “The 13th Boy: A Memoir of Education and Abuse.”
“Suddenly, Mr. Berman was rattling off a long list of 12 names with sardonic glee,” writes Fife, now 61.
The names, Fife says, were Berman’s alleged victims who killed themselves.
“You will be the 13th boy, and you will have only yourself to blame,” Berman allegedly warned Fife.
Berman, accused of pedophilia before, has denied having sex with pupils. Attempts by The Post to reach him have been unsuccessful.
He now lives in a gated mansion upstate with one of his male former students.
In the book, Fife says Berman gained a hold over him and others amid what has been called a decades-long stretch of rampant sex abuse on campus involving scores of teachers and students.
Fife, whose mom, Barbara, was a deputy mayor to David Dinkins, said he initially admired Berman, who called him “the next Dickens.”
But Berman sexually abused him about a half-dozen times, Fife writes in his book, of which The Post got an advance copy. It hits stores Sept. 22.
Fife tells of one instance in Berman’s apartment on West 111th Street in 1970.
“He was on top of me on the sofa, holding my arms down, pressing his lips against mine,” he writes.
“I managed to throw him off and run for the door.”
Fife said he finally confronted Berman after graduation, saying, “You’re a terrible, destructive person.”
Berman replied with his suicide boast, Fife writes.
He says that he tried to report Berman to an administrator in April 1970, but that the official didn’t believe his sordid tale.
Fife is one of the 36 alums who reached monetary settlements with the school in 2013 over abuse allegations.
A spokesman for Horace Mann declined to comment.