by Chessy Prout
I couldn’t fall asleep the night before the trial, even after taking two Advil PM. Christianna had stayed at home with a babysitter to start fourth grade, so I didn’t have my usual snuggle buddy. My pillow kept falling in the crack between the bed and the wall, so I put my head on my furry pink stuffed bear.
But even Bearsie couldn’t soothe me on this soupy August night. As I tossed and turned, I thought about the kids on Cat Island and felt guilty about not visiting them over the summer. If they had managed to escape abusive homes and live joyfully in a house with broken windows and no fresh water, certainly I could survive a two-week trial.
I remembered little Mark saying, “Please bless Chessy,” and calling each female leader by my name. His words clung to my conscience: my pursuit of justice was never entirely about me. I could stand up for many women, for Briana and the rest of the girls who Owen had violated. Finally I drifted off to sleep.
I dragged myself out of bed at six a.m. just in time to throw up into the toilet. Everyone could hear me in our house. I sat on the cool bathroom tile and rested my head on the seat. In that moment, coiling up near a pile of my own vomit seemed more appealing than getting on the stand.
I eventually hoisted myself up into the shower. I tossed on a white blouse and an oversize navy cardigan, even though it was over ninety degrees outside. Catherine didn’t tell me what to wear, but I wanted to look as bulky and ugly as possible so no one in that courtroom found me attractive. I couldn’t stomach anyone looking at me like that.
I joined the rest of my bedraggled family at the kitchen table. No one was hungry for breakfast. Uncle Tom had his traveling mass kit and passed out copies of Psalm 62. We held hands and prayed together:
In God alone is my soul at rest;
my help comes from him.
He alone is my rock, my stronghold, my fortress: I stand firm.
Dad, Grandma Prout, and Uncle Tom headed to court for opening statements while I stayed behind with Mom and Lucy. The three of us were identified as potential witnesses and sequestered until we testified. Carney had pulled more of his sick tricks and put Lucy on the defense witness list.
We had heard rumors that Carney was trying to make up a narrative that Owen was the victim of a sibling rivalry between me and Lucy, playing into misogynistic tropes that women are temptresses who seduce men and control their sexuality. Under this perverted worldview, Owen was a sympathetic guy who’d been tricked by two women—rather than a rapist who took what he wanted no matter how many times a fifteen-year-old said no.
Lucy pulled me aside in the kitchen and gave me a yellow Post-it Note that she had decorated with a giant C in the center and a shaded border like the Superman logo.
You are my superhero, she’d written on one side, and printed lyrics from Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” on the other.
And all these things I didn’t say Wrecking balls inside my brain I will scream them loud tonight Can you hear my voice this time?
“This is so you’ll have a piece of me with you when you testify,” Lucy said. “Go fight, Chess. You have it in you, strong girl.”
I slipped the note inside the pocket of my khaki skirt, giving the knight figurine a paper blanket. I heard Mom yelling by the door, freaking out that construction workers had dug a trench at the end of the driveway and blocked our car. She marched straight outside to confront the workers, who couldn’t comprehend her blistering rage.
“What do you want me to do, lady?” one of them said with a shrug.
Lucy and I followed Mom’s orders and got into the car. She lurched into reverse, then drive, and tore straight across the lawn and down an incline, narrowly missing exposed sewer pipes.
Mom pumped up the volume on the rental car and loaded her playlist. Hunched over the wheel, she picked a tune by Flo Rida because she liked the first line of the chorus, Welcome to my house. In Mom’s mind, the courthouse was her house, and where Owen would pay for what he’d done to me.
DAY 1
We parked at the prosecutor’s office to meet up with Catherine after opening statements. My heart flew out of my chest when I looked across the street at the courthouse and saw tents set up in the parking lot and rows of white trucks with satellite dishes on top of them.
“Why are there so many of them? Is this normal?” I asked Catherine.
“This is a lot of press coverage,” Catherine responded. “But don’t worry about them. We’re going to do whatever we can to protect your privacy.”
Unfortunately, my name had been inadvertently broadcast during opening statements, so Judge Larry Smukler suspended the live streaming before my testimony. But we had to rely on the goodwill of the media to protect my identity once I stepped outside.
I wanted to crawl inside a hole. Instead Catherine led us across the street and into the rear door of the courthouse to avoid the throngs of journalists who swarmed the front entrance.
Catherine brought us into a small room on the first floor, where Dad and Grandma Prout were waiting. I couldn’t believe this was finally happening. Nausea seized my body. The only way I could survive was to shut down.
“Listen, Chessy, anytime you need me, I am right here,” Dad said. “I am sitting ten feet away from you. You can keep your eyes on me.”
Dad was my hero. He had literally dropped everything and risked his career to make sure I was supported and protected each and every day. He had attended various court hearings over the past year so that Owen knew we weren’t going away and so the judge didn’t forget about me—the victim—and my family.
But there was nothing Dad could do in that moment to make things okay. I disintegrated into uncontrollable pieces: bloodshot teary eyes, trembling lower lip, sunken shoulders, shaking hands. I followed Catherine upstairs, stumbling over my feet with my head down, a blanket of shame on top of me.
Before we walked past the defense table, I shifted my body to Catherine’s right side and used her as a shield to hide me. I was at least half a foot taller than Catherine, but I tried to scrunch down to her height.
I walked toward the witness stand and grimaced at Judge Larry Smukler, bowing my head in respect. I had watched a ton of episodes of Law & Order over the years. But nothing could have prepared me for that courtroom. Harsh fluorescent ceiling lights had replaced the natural sunlight. Strangers packed the benches. I couldn’t tell who was an enemy and who was a friend. I spotted a few former classmates next to Owen’s family; it was a dagger in my heart.
After raising my right hand to get sworn in, I surveyed the important people around me: the judge, the lawyers, the constables. I felt so small and frail, like I could be blown away by the breeze of a nearby fan.
Catherine began her direct examination, asking me about my family, growing up in Japan, my relationship with Lucy.
“We are the best of friends,” I said, my voice quivering. “She has taught me so much throughout my entire life.”
I explained to Catherine how having an older sister at St. Paul’s made me a target for attention from senior boys as a way for them to tease Lucy, to get under her skin. When I described the Senior Salute, I refused to look over at Owen. A tunnel formed around my head, blocking out everything except Catherine’s understanding eyes. I hoped I could get through my entire testimony without seeing him.
But then Catherine asked me to identify Owen by describing what he was wearing in court that day. I turned my head in his direction, fighting every instinct to keep my gaze on the prosecutor’s table and Dad sitting behind. Owen stood up defiantly. His hair was thicker and darker and he wore thick horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like Harry Potter. It was as if he had put on a costume. I panicked again. I shook and gasped for air.
“Your Honor,” Catherine pleaded.
“He didn’t have to stand up,” Judge Smukler said.
“The defendant does not have to stand up,” Catherine scolded Owen before turning to me. “Chessy, do you see Owen in the courtroom today?”
“Yes, I do,”
I whimpered as I clenched the knight and sticky note in my pocket. “I’m sorry,” I said, apologizing for letting my emotions show.
I locked eyes with Dad. He gave little nods like the ones he’d make during softball games to let me know I was doing okay. I tried to keep my composure for the rest of the afternoon as Catherine questioned how well I knew Owen and asked about the photos of the two of us at Ecofest and the Nash Christmas party.
“Were you closely acquainted with the defendant at the time this picture was taken?”
I felt defiled just looking at the photos.
“No, I wasn’t. I was invited by a boy in the dorm, one of my friends. He invited me to the Christmas party,” I said. “And, again, these events are used to take a lot of photos for Facebook and stuff. But he just came up to me, jumped in a photo, and left.”
Catherine pressed me on why I agreed to go on the Senior Salute after initially rejecting Owen. I explained that a close friend had approached me and caught me off guard, and convinced me to change my mind.
“I’d been persuaded and told I was wrong on many accounts and he tried to make me feel comfortable with the idea,” I said. “And eventually I was thinking okay, here’s a person who has paid special attention to me, how nice.”
Salty tears burned my eyes as I listened to how truly naive I sounded.
DAY 2
The next morning was like Groundhog Day: my arms wrapped around the toilet, prayers at the kitchen table, and another Post-it Note from Lucy.
She drew a stick figure of a girl pumping her fists in the air.
Today you stand up. For you! For those who don’t understand For me, For Christianna For girls everywhere For the unheard For those silenced.
I put the yellow square inside my pocket along with the knight. Back on the witness stand I had trouble getting words out, much less speaking loudly. Court officials had to turn off a fan that was drowning out my testimony.
I clutched the figurine in my sweaty palm while I described pulling up my bra straps and holding on to my underwear in the mechanical room. My voice shook when I recounted Owen biting my breasts.
“Did you say anything to him when he did that?” Catherine asked.
“I didn’t say anything,” I responded.
“What were you thinking when he did that to you?”
“I was thinking, Ow, I’m in pain, but I couldn’t think of anything else,” I said. “I was—I felt like I was frozen.”
“What did you do when his face was near your vagina?”
“I took his head and I moved it up and said, ‘No, no, no, let’s keep it up here,’ ” I explained, gesturing above my waist.
“And what did you mean by that?” Catherine asked.
“I meant no, that I didn’t want any of that,” I said.
“What didn’t you want?”
“I didn’t want him to touch me down there,” I said.
“ ‘Down there’ means what to you?”
“My vagina. I didn’t want him down there orally, I didn’t want him down there with his hands, I didn’t—I wish I kept my pants on.”
“What did you think you were communicating to him when you moved his face and said, ‘No, no, let’s keep it up here’?”
“I thought that was a sure no,” I said. “I thought he would respect me. But he laughed and said, ‘You’re such a tease.’ ”
Catherine was trying to be gentle, but it felt like I was being stoned to death as I laid out the worst moments of my life in excruciating detail for a roomful of strangers. I broke down again when I talked about showering after the assault.
“I tried to wash every little part of me,” I said through tears. “I felt like something had just been taken away from me.”
I stared at Carney’s bald, egg-shaped head as he stood up. It was his turn now. I imagined I was standing in a boxing ring and silently hummed lyrics from Katy Perry’s “Roar,” one of the songs Lucy put on a playlist to make me feel brave on the stand: You hear my voice, you hear that sound, Like thunder gonna shake the ground.
I refused to return Carney’s fake smile and waited for the showdown to begin. He jabbed me with short questions at first, but they were embedded with wrong assumptions about me, about decisions I’d made, about words I’d used. I knew he was trying to lure me into agreeing with things that weren’t true, and it took all of my brainpower to decipher what traps he was setting.
First he insisted that Lucy taught me that I could ignore Senior Salute invitations. Then Carney said that school advisers recommended the best approach was to simply not respond.
“That’s not correct, no,” I said, looking straight into his beady little eyes. “They knew that they had no power in that situation, that these boys would still keep objectifying us.”
“Chessy, you’ve been using words like ‘power,’ ‘empowerment,’ and ‘objectify,’ ” Carney said. “Are these words that you’ve learned in the last year?”
“No, they are not.”
What a cocky, pretentious asshole. He’d fit right in at St. Paul’s. Did he not think teenage girls are capable of knowing what it means to be objectified? That they can’t understand what empowerment feels like?
Carney tried to pave a golden brick road to my meeting up with Owen, lined with romantic French poetry and flirty song lyrics. But he left out important facts—namely that Owen asked a boy to pressure me into accepting his invitation. I made sure not to let those details slip past the jury, and that pissed off Carney.
“Chessy, I think things would go better if I asked a question and if you can answer it yes or no, you do so. Would you be willing to do that if you can answer a question yes or no?”
I looked over at Catherine. I had zero court experience, but I was pretty certain that I didn’t have to answer with just a yes or no.
Catherine approached Judge Smukler: “I object that the witness cannot be restricted to merely yes-or-no questions and that she is allowed to explain herself.”
“She can explain,” Judge Smukler said, “but if it’s a yes-or-no question, she can answer either yes or no, then explain.”
Catherine: 1. Carney: 0.
Carney pushed his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose and moved on to my prior sexual experience—as if that had anything to do with whether or not I was assaulted.
“You hadn’t engaged in oral sex with a boy? Or you hadn’t been digitally penetrated by a boy?”
“No, I had not.”
Then Carney turned his attention to my expectations before meeting up with Owen. He showed me a copy of Catie’s interview with the police and pointed forcefully at the page. Carney got so close that I could smell his breath, rotten like sour milk.
“Did you tell Catie that your expectations were like I’ll probably let him finger me and like at most I’ll blow him and that’s what you would allow to have happen, right?”
“No, that’s not true,” I responded, completely blindsided.
“Isn’t that what you told Catie when you were talking about what your expectations were of what you were going to do that night when you were with Owen?”
“No, I honestly have no recollection of saying that to her,” I said. “And if I had—no, I have no recollection of saying that to her. And it wasn’t how I was feeling while he was doing these things to me.”
I loved Catie dearly, but I knew she could be spacey and say things off-the-cuff. All that mattered was what happened in the mechanical room. I said no. And if Carney had read out loud the rest of Catie’s interview, the people in that courtroom would have learned that I told her I said no. That I pulled up my bra straps and yanked up my underwear twice. And I didn’t just confide in Catie—I told several other friends.
But of course Carney didn’t do that. Instead he latched onto Catie’s words like a cat who wouldn’t let go of a dead mouse. He asked me the same question over and over again. He was a manipulative bully, just like his client.
Carney stopped the pummeling aroun
d four p.m., just after asking me for the definition of a blow job. He paused dramatically when I answered and then suggested it was time to recess for the day. I had been on the stand for less than an hour, but I felt bloodied and bruised.
As Carney bent down to collect his papers on the table, he turned and stared at Dad, as if daring him to jump over the bench. They locked eyes, and the tension was palpable.
“How can he treat me this way?” I bawled as I climbed onto Lucy’s lap in the room downstairs, where she had been holed up with Mom all day.
Back at the rental house, I numbed my brain by binge-watching episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and Young & Hungry. I closed the door for hours and resurfaced only when I smelled food downstairs. I couldn’t eat anything all day, so I was usually ravenous by dinner.
Around eleven p.m., Steve Kelly, the lawyer we had met in Washington, DC, came over for some late-night counsel. He wasn’t part of Catherine’s team prosecuting Owen. Steve was there solely to make sure my rights as a victim were protected in the criminal trial.
“He was a bully,” I said of Carney. “I didn’t know what to do. I was all jumbled with fear and anxiety.”
“You’re the star of the show,” Steve said. “This is your testimony, not his. So you can control everything about how this goes. You can control the pacing. I always tell witnesses to breathe and count to three before you answer. It gives you time to think. And it prevents him from getting into a rhythm.”
I scribbled in my notebook that I was supposed to use for my CSN homework: Power of the pause.
“If Carney asks questions about a document, ask him for your own copy of the document,” Steve said. “And if he’s asking a yes-or-no question and you can’t accurately answer it with yes or no, then say this question cannot be answered truthfully with just a yes or no. You’re not being evasive; you’re trying to be careful and answer the question honestly.”
