I Have the Right To

by Chessy Prout

  He didn’t deserve this. I’d wanted to get to know him better, ask his advice, work on cool media projects together. Most of all, I wanted to honor Uncle Ron by doing what he said I could do and doing it well. No more feeling sorry for myself. Uncle Ron had overcome so much—he had been homeless at one point and had to fight for his survival. I could do the same, thrive just like him. I could help people.

  Five days later I came home from school to find Mom weeping on the couch with the phone in her lap. Christianna and I cuddled up to her as she shared the news that Grandma had died.

  It felt surreal to be surrounded by so much death at once. Mom was a wreck when we got up to South Windsor, Connecticut. Lots of family and friends, including people Mom hadn’t seen in years, planned to attend the funeral. But then a blustery snowstorm blanketed New England, canceling flights and snarling traffic across the region.

  Mom was devastated as we sat in a hollow church, with high ceilings and two little windows covered in snow. Slowly people trickled in—Mom’s first-grade teacher, friends from Grandma’s Bible study group. Christianna, Lucy, and I tried to smother Mom with love to make up for the missing guests. I could never imagine life without Mom.

  Lucy accompanied Christianna to the front of the church to read a poem called “My Grandmother.” Christianna recited a few lines but then started quivering and handed her notes to Lucy.

  I went up to sing “Surely the Presence of the Lord Is in This Place,” one of Grandma’s favorite songs.

  “In the midst of His children the Lord said He would be.

  It doesn’t take very many, it can be just two or three.”

  I looked out in the pews at our small group of mourners. The people who showed up for Grandma were the same ones who had attended my trial just five months earlier, smushed together on another uncomfortable wooden bench.

  The song reminded me that it can be just two or three people to carry you through difficult times. My eyes connected with Mom’s and my heart swelled as I sang for Grandma, a strong, caring woman who had raised the most incredible daughter.

  Mom and Grandma shared a deep love, but sometimes they couldn’t talk about difficult topics—like my assault. Grandma brought it up to me once, saying these things happened when she was young. Mom thought she was being dismissive and took offense.

  After that, we never discussed it again. When we emptied the drawers of Grandma’s wooden dresser, Mom found a stack of newspaper clippings about my trial.

  “Wow, I had no idea she knew all this,” Mom said, breaking down in tears. “She loved you so much, Chess.”

  You’d think the last place on earth I’d choose to be was back in court. But there I was, trying out for my school’s mock trial team. I wanted to own the courtroom this time.

  I prepared as if my life depended on it, poring over documents, developing questions, practicing my approach. It was a powerhouse team run by the senior class president, the class valedictorian, and the son of the board’s president.

  The seniors brought me on, making me the youngest member and one of only two girls on the six-person team. They were all nice, smart, and determined to win. But I still had my suspicions that they let me on as a big joke, knowing what I’d gone through, and were plotting to humiliate me at some point. Thank God I was wrong.

  Mock trial teams from around Collier County prepared for months and then faced off in a competition. Each team had to know all sides of the case and be ready to serve as the prosecution or the defense.

  Once I got more comfortable around my teammates, I disclosed my one caveat: “I’m not going to do anything for the defense. If you put me on the defense, I just can’t . . .”

  My classmates tilted their heads to the side but didn’t ask questions, so I nervously chattered.

  “But I’ll do everything for the prosecution,” I vowed. “It’s just beyond me to defend someone.”

  Maybe they knew my story. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe it didn’t matter. I wasn’t Chessy the rape victim anymore. Now I was Chessy the prosecutor. I hoped Catherine would be proud.

  The case at hand: cyberbullying. More specifically, cyber-photo harassment and cyberstalking by a student against his ex-best friend. Go figure.

  The team leaders encouraged my enthusiasm and assigned me the prosecution’s opening statement. It seemed like a big deal, and I was up for the challenge. I combed through the case files, studying every bit of testimony and evidence to pull together a compelling narrative. We worked constantly, sometimes meeting three times a week for several hours to debate and dig deeper into the case.

  On the morning of the trial, I woke up early and made some last-minute tweaks to my opening statement. Then I put on my black pantsuit and nude-colored heels and pulled my hair back like Catherine. For the first time, I didn’t vomit before heading into a courtroom.

  I strode confidently up to the prosecutor’s table and put down my papers. It was so cool to sit in front of the bar, not silently behind it.

  My team had very specific courtroom protocol: no notes, keep the table organized, have enough laminated copies of evidence for members of the jury, the judge, and the witness.

  I also used the lessons I’d learned from watching Catherine: be personable with the witnesses, treat them with respect, and be assertive. I’m proud to say I took nothing from Carney.

  At the end of the first mock trial, a county judge running the courtroom gave us feedback. He complimented my opening statement for being poised and pointed, especially without any notes.

  “Have you done this before?” the judge asked.

  “This is my first year, Your Honor,” I said, laughing inside. If he only knew.

  I found Mom and Dad toward the back of the courtroom, shell-shocked. Dad said he had flashbacks to Courtroom 1. Mom looked at me in disbelief, as if she was seeing me for the first time.

  “I can’t believe you voluntarily stepped into a courtroom again,” Dad said, his eyebrows arched so high they nearly jumped off his forehead. “I’m just so proud of you, kiddo.”

  “You’ve got guts,” Mom said with a smile.

  I was exhausted but ecstatic. At the end of the day, I put the top down on my VW bug and called Lucy on the drive home.

  “Lulu, it was amazing. I want to do this for the rest of my life,” I yelled over the wind. “I want to be able to fight for other people.”

  I slammed my laptop shut and threw it across the bed. I had just watched part of a Law & Order: SVU episode called “A Misunderstanding.” It was obviously ripped from the headlines. My headlines. And they got it all wrong.

  The show’s sloppy interpretation made a farce of my assault. It minimized my pain; it justified what he did. If they were to depict something so close to the trial, they should have at least gotten some of the most important facts right. Like this wasn’t a fucking misunderstanding. Mom reached out to her old college classmate Peter Jankowski, who served as an executive producer for the show. He didn’t respond.

  I wanted to confront all the people who felt they could speak for or about me. I needed them to see who they were speaking for. I was a real human being! I wasn’t going to take this shit. This was not justice.

  In December, Mom and Dad told me about a horrendous story in Newsweek that featured a photo spread of Owen and his father building a chapel in the woods in Vermont. The writer, Matthew Cooper, sympathetically portrayed my attacker as an aspiring minister whose world imploded after breaking “Romeo and Juliet” laws, crimes that are rarely prosecuted.

  It made me gag. And Owen was complaining about people recognizing him and sending hate mail? Seemed like a great solution then to plaster pictures of his house in a magazine.

  I was desperate for the media to lose interest in my case. Didn’t they have better things to focus on? Couldn’t they sink their teeth into something far more important—like the surging popularity of Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primaries?

  I worried about Dad’s lengthy conversatio
ns with a Vanity Fair writer named Todd S. Purdum. He was a St. Paul’s alum married to Dee Dee Myers, a former White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton. Mr. Purdum was working on a story about my case and had been speaking with Dad for months. Dad trusted him and hoped Mr. Purdum would shed light on the ugly underbelly at St. Paul’s. But I didn’t trust anyone, especially a male graduate.

  Lucy and I both agreed it was a bad idea and tried to tag-team Mom and Dad one night while we were watching the news in the family room. Lucy and I were sprawled out on two side couches, and Mom and Dad sat together on the middle one.

  “I really think you shouldn’t give him your time. You can’t trust him,” I said. “He’s from St. Paul’s. He’s of the St. Paul’s breed. He’s gonna use your words against you. They all have their own agendas.”

  “You don’t have any control over what reporters do with your words,” said Lucy, who’d recently started working for her college paper.

  I had read a little bit of Vanity Fair before—it was one of the magazines Mom subscribed to when we were in Japan.

  Dad was visibly upset that we were second-guessing his openness. “This story is taking a broader look at the school,” he said, “and there are things people need to know.”

  Dad hated anything resembling a fight, so he switched topics: “Let’s watch a movie.”

  I refused to speak with Mr. Purdum, and Mom and Dad supported that. But I got nervous as publication neared.

  Mom and I had a trip to Los Angeles scheduled at the end of February 2016 to visit some colleges in California, as far away from the New England boarding-school bubble as possible.

  “Do you want to meet him?” Dad asked. “Mr. Purdum lives out in Los Angeles. I think the story is already done, but maybe you could just sit and talk to him?”

  “That sounds like a good idea, actually,” I said. “I’m tired of being an anonymous victim while my attacker is this superstar scholar athlete. I want Mr. Purdum and all the people who write about me to have to look me in the eyes and see I’m a person. I want them to know who the faceless, nameless victim they write about is.”

  Mr. Purdum invited us to his home and brought me and Mom into his study, where books and photos of important people lined the shelves. The windows were shrouded with Harvard-esque ivy. Mom and I sat close together on a brown couch while Mr. Purdum’s big, fluffy dog sat at my feet.

  Mr. Purdum seemed a bit reserved, doughy, with glasses and a slight gap between his two front teeth. We talked for a while about the broader issues at St. Paul’s, and at the end of the conversation, he finally asked, “Really, how has all of this been for you?”

  I looked him straight in the eyes, ready to tell my truth: “Honestly, absolutely terrible. Some days it’s made me lose my will to live. And the school completely turned its back on me. They have treated us like dirt.”

  Mr. Purdum turned white. “Oh, well, I’m so sorry.”

  I excused myself to use the bathroom. When I returned, I saw Mom and Mr. Purdum speaking quietly and seriously. They stopped talking as I approached.

  He signed a copy of a book he’d authored and gave it to me before we left. I handed it to Mom and walked out of his house, feeling relieved. Mr. Purdum had seen my face and heard my pain. Now, he’d have to live with whatever he’d written.

  While we were out in Los Angeles, Mom tried to get us a meeting with Mr. Jankowski at SVU so we could revisit “A Misunderstanding,” but once again, he didn’t respond.

  A few days later, the Vanity Fair story hit the stands. Mr. Purdum emailed Dad a copy.

  Alex,

  I realize all too well that the story only scratched the surface and I hope in that sense that it wasn’t too much of a disappointment. By the time the lawyers got done with it, some damning material fell away . . . .

  All best,

  Todd

  The headline said all I needed to know about how I’d be treated: “18-year-old scholar-athlete Owen Labrie and a 15-year-old freshman girl.”

  Of course. Once again, I was a blank nothing and he was a golden boy. It got worse when Mr. Purdum finally found words to describe me in the second sentence: privileged, preppy, naive, impressionable, flummoxed.

  It was as if Mr. Purdum picked up where Carney left off. He mentioned my daily medication for anxiety and depression and my shaving habits and anonymously quoted the father of one of my “contemporaries” saying I struggled at times with my identity “in competition” with my sister. Again, playing into the idea that women are evil temptresses, constantly fighting each other for the attention of men.

  What pompous, arrogant ass who knew nothing of me or my sister felt he had the authority to comment on our relationship? Things with Lucy were hard enough after pain and guilt had taken up permanent residence in each of our hearts. But we weren’t competitive. And now we had some strange, apparently all-knowing, anonymous source spreading lies in a national publication. Perfect.

  Owen, meanwhile, was depicted as captain of the varsity soccer team, handsome, suntanned, a winner of the headmaster’s award for selfless devotion to school activities who had won full-ride admission to five Ivy League schools and fell asleep on the floor of his house comforting rescue dogs that his mom took in. Oh, and his life was “in shambles.”

  I was hurt and disappointed, but at the same time, I had expected nothing more from a guy like Mr. Purdum. The feminist website Jezebel trashed the Vanity Fair story, saying it “echoes tropes from so many male-authored deep dives into rape investigations: he was the star, she was the confused child who ruined his life.”

  I called Lucy at Georgetown, and we tried to figure out who could have spoken with Mr. Purdum. The only father who both of us had met was Ivy and Georgina’s dad. We had a good laugh over how he must have gotten confused and really was describing the bizarre, competitive relationship between his own two daughters.

  I wanted to smash a wall. I stormed downstairs, clutching my laptop over my head.

  “See, Dad, aren’t you mad you spent all this time with this guy and he’s just spewing this?” I hollered. “It’s a glossy sleaze piece that people read when they get tired of their boring lives. This is terrible. This is my life that they’re exploiting!”

  Dad was speechless. Not knowing what else to do, he called up Mr. Purdum to tell him that I was spitting anger. Mr. Purdum apologized in an email to Dad, saying he regretted that his words “unintentionally hurt” me.

  What a cop-out. When would these men stop the shameless victim blaming? If we talk or write about sexual violence, the “complications” people seem most willing to discuss are based on victim blaming: Why did she put herself in that situation? What was she wearing? Isn’t she unstable?

  I slammed my door and lobbed myself onto the bed. I was pissed at Dad, but I couldn’t stay mad for long. He was trying to do right by me, right by our family. He thought he had found an ally in Mr. Purdum, someone who was invested in fixing the school as a fellow alum and could help by exposing the problems at St. Paul’s. But this wasn’t helping anyone, especially not me.

  I eventually resurfaced from my room and found Dad downstairs. I turned to him and as kindly as possible offered my advice: “I think you should stop talking to reporters and start talking to a therapist.”

  Hey, it was working for me.

  Mom called me in the middle of the school day on March 18.

  “His bail was revoked,” Mom said softly. “He’s going to jail, honey. He’s finally going to jail.”

  I broke down crying in the outdoor hallway lined with lockers. I’d never thought this day would come. Arielle was sitting with me on the green benches, and gave me a bear hug and let me vent.

  I had read a story a few weeks earlier by Susan Zalkind, a reporter for Vice, who had covered my trial and ran into Owen on a subway in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Owen said he’d gone out to brunch with his girlfriend, a student at Harvard University, the college he was supposed to attend. Then he lamented having his li
fe “torn apart” in the media. Poor Owen. At least he’d made it through high school.

  The story caught the attention of Detective Curtin in Concord, who wondered whether Owen was violating his curfew restrictions, which were part of the agreement keeping him out of jail while he appealed the verdict.

  The meticulous Detective Curtin went to work: she interviewed bus drivers and a ticket salesman and examined surveillance video. Her investigation revealed that Owen was regularly violating his curfew. At least eight times already! The news terrified me.

  “See, I’m not paranoid! They’re not watching him. He could come here and hurt all of us. He could go to DC and hurt Lucy,” I wailed to Dad. “He honestly doesn’t care about anybody besides himself and has no regard for the authorities or the legal system.”

  Catherine filed a motion to revoke Owen’s bail, but I had no confidence that he’d be punished because he seemed to weasel his way out of everything.

  “Have some faith in the system,” Mom said. “This is significant.”

  Judge Smukler agreed it was a big deal. He revoked Owen’s bail at a hearing and sent him to jail.

  The next day Dad handed me his iPad.

  “Look at this,” he said.

  It was a photo of Owen being handcuffed by a sheriff. His local New Hampshire lawyer tried to block the photographer from capturing the metal cuffs.

  “Why would you show that to me?” I hissed. “You know I don’t want to see that.”

  It made me queasy to see Owen’s face, like I was being violated all over again. I thought I’d feel triumphant knowing that my attacker was sitting in jail. Instead I was dejected that it had come to this.

  I grabbed Dad’s iPad and scrolled down past Owen’s head so all I could see was the sheriff’s badge.

  “Okay, that looks pretty cool,” I admitted. “He can wear those handcuffs forever, for all I care. He’s finally getting what he deserves.”