by Chessy Prout
But of course, we couldn’t find a moment of peace even while the jerk was locked up for several weeks in solitary confinement (for his own protection, apparently). We learned that Owen had recently asked for permission to meet with new lawyers in Washington, DC, where Lucy attended college.
In April, while Owen was still in jail, his lawyers filed a motion seeking a new trial based on ineffective counsel. They were claiming that Carney—the six-figure lawyer paid for by the precious St. Paul’s community—was ineffective. You had to be kidding me.
I didn’t understand what that meant. Would I need to testify again? Would this interfere with another year of high school? I didn’t have time to focus on the case. I had lines to memorize. I was the lead, Gabriella Montez, in our spring musical, High School Musical. Just as my life was becoming more normal every day, this other crap kept bringing me down.
Catherine told me not to think about it. There would be a hearing at some point, but I wouldn’t have to testify. Did Owen think I’d back down now? After everything I’d been through? Bring it on. I was more ready than I’d ever been. This was a totally arrogant move—one I hoped he’d come to regret.
EIGHTEEN
A Girls’ Bill of Rights
It was a lazy Sunday afternoon in early May, just a few days before my AP US History exam. I turned on a Netflix series about America in the 1960s to help prepare for the test and invited Mom and Christianna to watch with me in the family room. I draped myself over the couch while Mom snagged her favorite oversize striped chair and Christianna spread out next to me.
We snacked on cubes of watermelon and made it through five episodes, ending on “A Long March to Freedom,” an in-depth look at Martin Luther King Jr. and his efforts to lead the civil rights movement.
Halfway through the episode, Mom paused the show with Martin Luther King’s face frozen on the screen.
“So, girls, what do you think?” she asked. “What other rights do we need to fight for?”
It was a classic Mom move—trying to find a teachable moment in everyday life. But for once, I was on board and not rolling my eyes at her cheesy timing.
“Sounds like it’s time for a girls’ bill of rights,” Christianna declared matter-of-factly.
Mom and I looked at each other and grinned. Christianna was one strong, smart nine-year-old!
“Yes, Christianna, that’s a great idea,” Mom said, pivoting seamlessly to teacher mode. “What else? What kind of rights?”
“I dunno,” Christianna said, self-consciously receding into the crevices of the couch. She’d had her moment, and now she was done.
“That’s such a great idea,” I said, vigorously nodding my head. “Girls need a bill of rights.” I turned and faced Mom. “I didn’t even know that what happened to me was against the law. I didn’t know I had the right to be respected—the right to my body, something as fundamental as that!”
Christianna sat there wide-eyed, her head swinging back and forth between me and Mom. I’d never talked like this in front of her before.
“Let’s get this down on paper!” Mom exclaimed. “We can make this into a children’s book for kids Christianna’s age, so they know their rights. We should all make a list!”
Mom loved any reason to make a list.
“That sounds like an awesome idea,” I said, quickly feeling the pressure of this imaginary project land on my shoulders. “But can I just focus on my AP exams for now?”
I now knew my limits, especially after struggling through the first semester of junior year. I had forcefully told my teachers not to give me special treatment after the trial, and I ended up having to drop AP Chemistry and got a D in my first quarter of honors precalculus.
One of my teachers, Mr. Phimister, went out of his way to make sure I wasn’t overwhelmed, allowing extensions for weekly essays if any legal surprises came up. When I recently had a panic attack in his class, he ushered the other kids out of the room and handed me a box of tissues.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You can stay here as long as you need.”
Mr. Phimister became a huge ally, the kind of adult every survivor needs at school. Back at home, I wanted fewer demands on me, not more. But Mom wouldn’t let go of the girls’ bill of rights. Every other day it seemed like she was nagging me about the list.
“Chessy, you should start writing that down—making your list.”
“Uh-huh,” I said dismissively. “I’m keeping some notes on my phone.”
I wasn’t. I just needed to stay afloat.
Also, it was still difficult for me to acknowledge that I hadn’t known my rights as a fifteen-year-old girl. I had considered myself to be a pretty smart teenager, an independent kind of girl who had traveled the world and could take care of herself.
But during my assault and the days that followed, I thought I was being too sensitive, too much of a baby for being so distraught. I had no idea at the time that what happened to me was wrong, no clue that it was a crime. How could I have been so ignorant? Every time I thought about it, a little piece of my heart charred black.
I later realized that Mom’s semi-obsession with my list was as much about her as it was about me. Her own mother had a full-time job, and Mom was part of the generation who fought to secure women’s reproductive rights and to ban sex discrimination in the workplace and schools.
She assumed that her daughters would be treated equally at St. Paul’s, that our bodies and voices would be respected. She’d never imagined the most dangerous thing she could ever do was send us to boarding school. Mom felt complicit and she wanted us to claim the rights she’d thought we always had.
I walked into the kitchen one morning to make coffee and avoided Mom’s gaze so she wouldn’t pester me again about the darn list. I examined the Nespresso machine as if it was the most fascinating contraption in the universe.
Mom came over and kissed me on the forehead. “Take your time, honey. Whenever you’re ready. You don’t need to do the list right now.”
Of course, as soon as Mom said I didn’t have to do something, I wanted to do it.
Later that day Lucy and I splashed around in the swimming pool, trying to cool down from our volleyball game in the backyard. I looked over at Mom and Christianna, sitting in the shade, playing Bananagrams and eating Popsicles.
The ice pop dripped down Christianna’s chin and left blue streaks at the corners of her smiling mouth. That innocent little girl had always been the bright light in our family, helping me find my sense of purpose after the earthquake, giving me reasons to live when I locked myself in my closet and felt like I didn’t belong on this planet. She showed me that as long as we have each other and stick to what we believe in, things will be okay.
Finally I was ready to write my list. I stepped out of the pool, draped a towel around my waist, and dashed into the house. I grabbed a pink marker and a white piece of paper from my desk and folded the paper in half.
My hand was like a jet on a runway, tearing across the page and leaving a trail of empowering words:
I have the right to . . .
Dress the way I want.
Be alone with a boy without anything being assumed.
My privacy, keeping my well being first.
Say no, and be listened to.
Be respected.
Be upset, or sad.
Be happy and live my life.
Be respected when I bravely testify in a trial.
Be called a survivor, not an “alleged victim” or accuser.
A system that prioritizes healing.
I took a deep breath. That was good enough for now. I slinked back downstairs and joined Mom, Lucy, and Christianna at the table outside. I slid the list in front of them and said, “Momma, I did it.”
Mom teared up on cue. I passed out pens and scraps of paper to Christianna and Lucy so they could claim their own rights. While they worked, I stared out at the pool and watched tiny ripples move from the edges toward the center, joining together into one long line.
This was the beginning of something big; I could feel it.
After the trial had ended, Mom and Dad turned their full attention to St. Paul’s. The disturbing things we learned in that courtroom—revelations that will haunt me for the rest of my life—exposed how St. Paul’s fostered a toxic culture that put me and other students at risk for sexual violence.
Mom and Dad couldn’t bring criminal charges against St. Paul’s, of course, but they could use the civil courts to try and hold the school accountable for what had happened to me and make sure more kids didn’t get hurt.
It was undeniable that school leaders were aware of the sexual conquest games and did nothing to stop them. Months before my trial, Mr. Hirschfeld acknowledged in a chapel speech that he had heard students using the word “slay” and “slayer” a couple of years earlier: “While these words made me uneasy, I did nothing as the head of the school to address their use nor, to my knowledge, did anyone else.”
It was a stunning admission. Just a year before my assault, a male student brazenly sent a Senior Salute to Mrs. Hirschfeld—the wife of the head of school! It was the one useful tidbit that Vanity Fair dredged up on its own.
We’d also learned that Mr. Hirschfeld served as an adviser on a student project called “The Little Red Book,” where an entire page was devoted to scoring.
A few weeks after Owen’s sentencing, Mike Delaney, an attorney for St. Paul’s, reached out to our lawyer, Steve Kelly, to start negotiations. If talks were successful, St. Paul’s would avoid a lawsuit and prevent damaging information from becoming public.
Dad gathered me and Lucy in our office. He wanted us to come up with ideas for how to improve the school so Steve could present them in an upcoming meeting. Dad saw this as our chance to restore dignity to the school he still loved, to the place he’d once called home.
“Let’s try to make St. Paul’s a shining example of policies and procedures and training,” Dad said. “It would be a wonderful legacy.”
“Yeah right,” I grunted. Membership to the exclusive world of St. Paul’s required a blind and unwavering loyalty. Didn’t they see that?
“You guys are fooling yourselves if you think you can change things there,” I fumed. “The privileged boys run the school and the administration looks the other way. If they haven’t done anything to change it already, why would they do it now?”
Dad and Lucy bristled.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Lucy barked back, proving my theory that St. Paul’s could force anyone into being blindly loyal.
I balled my fists in anger thinking about all the times Lucy came to me her senior year to complain about the blatant sexism she confronted, the bullying she faced from the guys after she broke up with her longtime boyfriend because of his controlling and manipulative tendencies. I was there for it all. But I knew I couldn’t win this fight right now.
I sulked in the corner while Dad and Lucy duked it out. They wrote down more than twenty suggestions that focused on education, accountability, and transparency. Some of the ideas included publicly taking action against anyone involved in the Senior Salute; adding training to prevent sexual assault and support victims; empowering girls through gender studies courses; and having an outside agency survey the school community about sexual violence, bullying, and substance abuse and make the findings publicly available.
Dad even floated the idea of starting a foundation to set standards for preventing sexual violence and supporting survivors at private schools. Perhaps St. Paul’s could help fund the organization.
“Chess, do you have anything you want to add?” Dad asked.
“Fine,” I huffed. “Here’s my suggestion. If St. Paul’s refuses to implement our ideas, then return the school to an all-boys institution so no more girls get hurt. Right? If they won’t do what it takes to protect girls, then they shouldn’t enroll them in the first place.”
Months of conversations between the attorneys led nowhere. St. Paul’s trumpeted changes it had made, such as revisions to the school handbook, new locks on doors, and bystander training, as if they were more than just window dressing. I was furious when I learned that St. Paul’s invited a former college football player to give a talk about sexual violence. Why not give a young woman the platform to talk to the students?
Mom and Dad knew the problems at St. Paul’s ran deep. They’d been digging into the school’s past, exhuming appalling stories of abuse, of victims who had suffered in silence, shame, and isolation for decades.
Alexis Johnson, a St. Paul’s graduate from 1976, cold-called our house one night and talked to Mom for hours. Alexis worked as an attorney and was part of an alumni task force that launched after several people revealed at a reunion in 2000 that they were victims of faculty sexual misconduct. The group had gathered allegations against more than twenty adults.
Alexis told Mom about the first case of abuse they documented from 1949, when a boy named Samuel Collier hung himself in his dorm after being molested by a teacher and then hazed by students who knew of the abuse. Mom gasped. Samuel was related to the friend who had first tried to track down the Internet trolls behind the hate sites. Everything was so connected.
Mom and Dad discovered that school leaders back in 2000 refused to investigate many abuse allegations, including cases of rape, because the employees no longer worked there. St. Paul’s discouraged further reporting, ostracized survivors, and tried to hide the school’s history of abuse, according to alumni. The message was clear: St. Paul’s cared more about preserving its reputation than protecting students.
While researching for the civil case, Mom and Dad unearthed various student-on-student hazing incidents involving boys and girls. In one recent case that actually made headlines in 2004, senior girls forced freshmen—i.e., newbs—in their dorm to simulate blow jobs with bananas and answer sexually explicit questions as a way to introduce them to St. Paul’s. During Lucy’s first year, she heard that seniors in her dorm got a freshman so “drunk” on cough syrup that she later threw up.
Mom and Dad saw a direct link between the victims of faculty abuse, perpetual hazing problems, and my assault. St. Paul’s seemed like a noxious breeding ground for the abuse of power. The entrenched male entitlement—along with the school’s “deny until you die” mantra that Owen had adopted—had allowed this abuse of power to thrive among faculty and students.
Mom and Dad were drowning in the St. Paul’s cesspool. Sometimes I heard yelling coming from the office. Things were tough enough with Dad working in New York. And then he’d come home and spend most of his free time on this.
I barged into the office one evening. “This is toxic. Just stop it. Don’t let them waste another second of our lives. You shouldn’t have to fix everything for them.”
I was worried about the toll this battle would take on our lives. It was all we talked about sometimes. But I knew deep down that if it wasn’t our family dragged through the mud, then it would be somebody else’s. I had talked to other girls who’d been assaulted since I left St. Paul’s and had read letters during the trial written by past survivors from the school. I learned that a boy attempted to rape an employee’s child at the school—and the rector and board president would eventually find out. It made me sick to think that our secret society of St. Paul’s abuse victims would grow larger in the future. We had to do something to stop it.
The day after we filed our civil lawsuit in early June, another rape trial dominated headlines. A judge in California sentenced Brock Turner, a former Stanford University student, to a mere six months in jail for assaulting a young woman known as Emily Doe as she lay half-naked and unconscious next to a dumpster.
I was outraged by the judge’s sympathy for the twenty-year-old criminal: “A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him. I think he will not be a danger to others.” Did he even take into consideration the severe impact that this man’s actions had on the victim?
I felt guilty that Brock Turner got half the sent
ence Owen did. At least I didn’t end up unconscious next to a dumpster. My attacker only wrote about stabbing girls and throwing them in dumpsters. I’d heard that Emily Doe had written a lengthy victim impact statement that went viral on BuzzFeed, but it took me a few days to muster the courage to read it. I was scared about how my body would react. I closed the door to the office and curled up on the couch with my laptop resting on my knees.
My stomach churned as I recognized my own story in her words. I only made it through the first paragraph before I started sobbing uncontrollably. My leg muscles lit on fire, my hands clenched into fists. I pulled my legs into my chest, trying to make myself as small as possible, hiding my vulnerable body parts.
It seemed like we were going backward. How much pain would young women have to go through before people realized that what these men were doing was not okay?
As I finished reading Emily Doe’s statement, I remembered all the letters I’d received during my trial, how complete strangers had lifted me up. I never had a chance to respond to everyone individually. But I felt a responsibility to let Emily Doe know that she was not alone. I wanted to offer suggestions to help her heal, even if I was only a high school junior.
Dear: Warrior, hero, superwoman, amazing sister, survivor, pioneer, faraway friend . . .
I could go on forever in awe of you, but instead I want to share some things that have made me feel better over the last couple months:
1. let the panic attacks wash over you and squeeze yourself tight: no one can hurt you anymore, I like to believe that lightning doesn’t strike in the same place twice not only because the world is big, but because the earth is smart and learns from pain.
2. The fear will lessen over time.
3. Don’t get lost in Netflix like I did . . .
4. Write (You seem to have that part mastered!) and draw.
5. Follow Rachel Brathen on social media (Instagram and snapchat), her words brighten up my day and I hope they brighten up yours too.
6. Yoga. AND BOXING. I’ve been wanting to take self-defense classes forever but realized I like self-offense much better as a good anger outlet. (I never get tired of boxing . . . I also feel sooo much stronger)