by Chessy Prout
“Those are incredible messages, Chessy. You have a voice and important things to share,” Angela said. “What does a win look like to you? What would you like to see happen?”
“I want the people at St. Paul’s to care. I want this victim blaming to stop. I want every person, boy or girl, who has been victimized to feel empowered. I want them to know that they have the right to be heard, to be respected, and to seek justice.”
I’d never met anyone like Angela. She was a pint-size fireball of passion and endless optimism. She made me feel powerful, really powerful, for the first time since my assault.
We talked about putting together a social media campaign and website based on Christianna’s fantastic idea for a girls’ bill of rights. I didn’t want to ignore male victims of sexual violence, so we kept it gender neutral.
I decided to call my campaign #IHaveTheRightTo—after the list I’d made with my sisters that day—to let other girls and boys know that they have the right to their bodies, respect, and a safe place to learn.
I had a voice. I had a message. I was almost ready.
Delaney and I began texting and FaceTiming almost every other day. I didn’t know how to share my story, so she told me hers first.
It was the last day of school in June 2011, and some friends came over to her house to celebrate. Her parents were away, and several boys brought pot and pressured Delaney to try it. The weed made her feel dizzy and sick, so she headed upstairs to sleep. Later, Delaney said, two classmates entered her bedroom, locked the door, and raped her.
For three months Delaney hid her assault from everyone except a few close friends. But then her parents found out and told administrators at her private Catholic school. The boys and their friends—older, wealthier, and more popular—began tormenting Delaney.
“They cornered me in the halls and followed me to class. They yelled ‘slut’ across the quad when they saw me and threatened me on social media,” Delaney said. “I had night terrors and panic attacks and I began sleeping in my parents’ room with the lights on. I never slept in my own bedroom again.”
Delaney’s parents never wavered in their support and tried to get the school to intervene. When rumors spread that one of the boys, Shane Villalpando, had sex with a freshman, Delaney approached the fourteen-year-old girl, and together they decided to report their assaults to the police.
Things at school took a turn for the worse. Kids shoved Delaney in the hallway, threw garbage at her during a football game, and made T-shirts that read #FREESHANE. Like me, Delaney had a community of people protecting the criminal rather than supporting the victim.
“And some of them were people I had considered friends,” Delaney said.
I examined Delaney’s heart-shaped face, her mouth contorting, her hazel eyes welling up with tears. No one deserved this.
“Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” I said, wishing I could reach through the phone and hug her. “My friends turned their backs on me, too. It’s disgusting how communities blame us, the victims, for the crimes these boys committed.”
One month after reporting her assault, Delaney hit rock bottom. She got dozens of text messages in one day from people calling her a liar. Delaney locked herself in the bathroom at home and sobbed as she wrote on the mirror, I am so sorry.
Then she took a bottle of pills.
Delaney’s mom heard her crying and broke down the door.
“I remember waking up in the hospital and wondering how my life had gone from normal to nightmare in such a short time,” Delaney said.
Both boys eventually took plea deals for her assault, but the harassment got so bad that Delaney left her school and moved to another town.
Several weeks after she started college, a friend of her attackers wrote a rap song that threatened to kill her, using her full name, and published it online. It was downloaded more than one thousand times.
In the middle of the chaos, Angela reached out to offer her support.
“Angela changed my perspective on my attack,” Delaney explained. “I was no longer Jane Doe, the high school rape victim. I was Delaney the survivor. I had a reason to fight and take back control of my life.”
Angela invited Delaney to speak at a fund-raiser for PAVE in California. Their first meeting was featured in the fall of 2014 on an episode of 48 Hours. Since then, Delaney had traveled the country, speaking out about her experience.
“My work for PAVE helped give me something I’d lost a long time ago”—Delaney paused—“hope and a purpose to live.”
A lump was growing in the back of my throat. I began to cry as I told her my story.
I was hanging out in my pajamas and surfing the web when I came across a story in the Boston Globe about St. Paul’s demanding the identity of Owen Labrie’s victim be made public.
I’d told Mom and Dad not to bother me with every legal development, but this seemed insane. I found the school’s response to our civil suit online and started reading. It was ridiculous.
St. Paul’s was in full denial—they literally used the words “denies” or “denied” 124 times in their response (Dad counted). The school was unwilling to even admit that Owen had assaulted me, despite the fact that he’d been convicted by a jury.
I thought about the email that St. Paul’s head of school, Mr. Hirschfeld, sent me on the day of the verdict.
Dear Chessy,
You will forever be an inspiration to me as a person of remarkable moral strength and as a truth teller. Your courage has inspired many others and it has prevented Owen Labrie from ever doing to another person what he did to you. As many others have also said, you are a hero.
Sincerely,
Mr. Hirschfeld
Tell me now, Mr. Hirschfeld, what did you mean?
And on top of denying everything, St. Paul’s sought to strip me of my anonymity and put a gag order on our attorney, Steve. If I was doing my math right, the school wanted to humiliate and silence me at the same time.
Archibald Cox Jr., president of the St. Paul’s board of trustees and son of the famous Watergate prosecutor who’d been fired for defying President Nixon, decried our family’s “coordinated media attacks.”
Mom and Dad looked warily at me as I stomped down the stairs and into the office, carrying my laptop like a weapon.
“So basically, St. Paul’s thinks they can shut me up by threatening to reveal my identity?”
“Yes,” Dad said tentatively. “But we’ll fight it. Don’t worry about it.”
He said this was straight out of the playbook for institutions trying to bully victims into silence. St. George’s School, a prep school in Rhode Island, had been in the news recently for covering up decades of sexual abuse.
In one instance, St. George’s tried to out the identity of a victim after the former student filed a lawsuit in 1989. The judge excoriated the school at the time, but the tactic worked: the survivor kept quiet for another twenty-five years. She spoke out publicly for the first time in 2015.
“So St. Paul’s still thinks that they’re going to keep me quiet? They think that’s going to push me down?” I laughed, my cheeks red with anger. “Well then, they’ve completely underestimated me.”
I dashed to my room and FaceTimed Delaney.
“That’s total bullshit,” Delaney declared after I gave her the update.
“I’m not going to let the school bully me into silence. I want to tell my side of the story. I want to reveal my identity,” I heaved into the phone.
Delaney paused. The silence felt thick.
“You need to trust your gut on this.”
“I’m worried about the negative responses,” I said.
“I first started talking to the media anonymously, and then I went public with my name. Both ways, the feedback was almost universally positive,” Delaney said. “You already know how the school community is going to respond. They won’t be nice, but you know that. You’ve experienced it already. It’s the rest of the world that
matters.”
“Do you think this could help other people?” I prodded.
“Yes. But this is your decision to make,” Delaney said gently.
Ugh. I really just wanted someone to tell me what to do.
“We met some really nice people at NBC who’ve asked many times for me to come on the Today show,” I said. “They’re willing to help raise awareness for other survivors. What do you think?”
“I think it’s awesome that they want to help survivors,” Delaney said. “But I can’t tell you what to do here.”
“How am I going to figure this out?”
“If you close your eyes and breathe in, you’ll feel your gut instinct and you’ll know what to do.”
I shut my eyes, and my lashes gently brushed against my cheeks. I inhaled deeply.
As the breath escaped my mouth, I felt the ground shifting and the earth pushing up beneath me, a force so strong that it nearly lifted me off my feet.
Before my eyes fluttered open, I whispered to Delaney, “I’m gonna do it.”
I met with Savannah Guthrie, cohost of the Today show, in June 2016.
Mom and I watched the sunrise from the top of the hermitage in Cat Island in July 2016.
TWENTY
Jane Doe, Revealed
Savannah and the NBC team graciously agreed to schedule the interview on Saturday, August 27, so I didn’t have to miss any school. I was just a few days into my senior year, and homework was already piling up.
On my first day back, I told two friends about the prospect of a TV interview as we chatted about our summers. I linked arms with Nicole and Hope while we walked to the library to have our yearbook photos taken.
“I met with the producers of the Today show because I’m thinking of telling my story publicly,” I said cautiously.
“That’s so awesome,” Nicole said. “I’m so proud of you.”
It meant a lot coming from Nicole. She was one of my friends at CSN who’d confided in me that she had been assaulted a few years earlier by a student at her old public school. I wanted other survivors to tell me I was doing the right thing.
After we took our yearbook photos, Hope joined me on the floor of the library while we waited for the first day’s assembly to begin.
When she plopped down next to me, she said, “Chessy, when I was on Cape Cod this summer, my friends who go to boarding school mentioned how their schools just started talking about sexual assault and consent because of your case at St. Paul’s. Isn’t that incredible?” she said. “You’re already making a difference.”
“Wow.” I teared up. “I had no idea.”
I grabbed her hand and smiled. I loved that my friends were comfortable talking about this with me and supported my efforts to speak out.
But as the weekend drew closer, my courage was a roller coaster. In the morning I’d be brave, around noon I’d fade, and by night I’d want to howl at the moon.
I FaceTimed Delaney whenever I needed to rebuild my backbone.
“I’m so nervous,” I said, my voice trembling, limbs shaking.
“Everything is going to fall into place,” Delaney promised.
I slumped down on the couch in my bedroom and hunched over my computer.
“You’re going to change lives,” Delaney insisted.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I whimpered.
“I know you can. This is a lot bigger than you and me,” Delaney said. “You’re not just speaking out for yourself; it’s for survivors everywhere.”
The opportunity to give others a voice weighed heavily on me, but it also lifted me up. I understood that I was getting a platform to speak in part because I was a white, privileged girl who somehow became an object of fascination. I wouldn’t necessarily have this chance if I was poor or a young woman of color or I attended a public school.
And I knew that my privilege had followed me throughout the justice system. My background and supportive parents established credibility with law enforcement that others might not have. I wondered what it would have been like for someone with a single parent. For a family who couldn’t afford to attend every court hearing. For someone with no family at all.
The trial was epically brutal, but at least I had a shot. Most rape cases never get prosecuted. Sexual violence is notoriously difficult to measure, but the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network has estimated that out of every one thousand rapes, only 310 are reported to police, and of those, just eleven cases get referred to prosecutors.
It wasn’t fair that some survivors didn’t have the chance to have a voice and to hold their attackers accountable. I knew I was in a unique position, and it seemed selfish to squander the opportunity to talk to those who didn’t get justice, who felt ashamed, isolated, silenced. I had a responsibility to help right these wrongs. I needed to tell them I believed them and that they were not alone. I wanted parents to see my family up there with me during the interview so that if their children were ever sexually assaulted, they knew to stand by their side.
“Okay,” I said to Delaney. “I’m really gonna do this.”
I’d only known Delaney for three weeks—and we hadn’t even met in person—yet she understood me completely. I was about to embark on a journey she’d already made and I needed her to steady my ship. NBC offered to fly my whole family, Angela, and Steve up for the interview. But I had one more ask: Delaney. When a producer at NBC said she would happily bring Delaney and her mom to New York City and put them up at a hotel, I burst into tears.
I woke up on the dark side of the morning feeling helpless and confused. It was Friday and I wasn’t sure I could get on that plane to New York. I rummaged around for my prayer book.
It contained daily devotionals, or spiritual readings for each calendar day—one in the morning, one at night. I’d been reading them since I was a child. Mom gave me and my sisters these books as gifts every year, hoping to share with us the faith that she held so close to her heart.
I opened the brown hardcover book and turned to August 26:
TRUST ME in the midst of a messy day. Your inner calm—your Peace in My Presence—need not be shaken by what is going on around you. Though you live in this temporal world, your innermost being is rooted and grounded in eternity. When you start to feel stressed, detach yourself from the disturbances around you. Instead of desperately striving to maintain order and control in your little world, relax and remember that circumstances cannot touch My Peace.
Seek My Face, and I will share My mind with you, opening your eyes to see things from My perspective. Do not let your heart be troubled, and do not be afraid. The Peace I give is sufficient for you.
I took a deep breath. Wow. Okay, maybe God had a plan for me after all. I realized I needed to untangle myself from other people’s opinions and know that God was taking care of me. I tucked the prayer book in my luggage and got ready for the flight.
When we arrived in New York, Angela was all smiles and literally bursting at the seams, half joking that her water could break at any moment. Nothing seemed to bother her—not the oppressive heat or her swelling feet.
I waited anxiously for Delaney and her mom in a conference room at the hotel where we were staying. Their plane was delayed and they were hours late. I paced back and forth. “I hope Delaney’s going to make it.”
Finally my petite blond soulmate arrived. We were in the middle of a meeting with Angela and our lawyers when Delaney ran over and bear-hugged me. We held each other and wept for several minutes.
After the exciting introductions, Angela focused us on prepping me for the interview: “Chessy, I just want you to remember that you can still change your mind. The choice is absolutely yours.”
“Okay,” I said. “This is really overwhelming, but I want to do this. And I’m so thankful that you’re all here with me.”
“I couldn’t be more proud,” Angela said. “I’ll be proud of you either way. But if you’re going to do this, let’s talk about ways for you to feel in contro
l of the interview.”
She launched into a number of tips for how to redirect an uncomfortable question and how to speak concisely.
“And don’t be afraid to tap into your emotions. It’s not all rainbows and butterflies,” Angela said. “It’s okay to be angry up there. It’s okay to be sad. You’re a survivor and that’s not easy.
“And whatever you do,” she advised, “trust your gut.”
It was August 27, 2016, the day to reclaim my identity. I wanted my voice back. I wanted my life back. And I also wanted my wardrobe back.
I put on the loose blue shirt that I’d worn the day after my assault, when I was trying to cover up my body. It had been one of my favorites, bright and flowy and full of life. But after the attack, it hung in my closet, fossilizing in the plastic dry-cleaning wrapper. Each time I saw the shirt, I thought of standing at the flagpole and Malcolm’s smirk. I shoved it farther back until it was completely hidden. Now I was finally ready to reclaim that shirt.
I picked out my jewelry: dangling dragonfly earrings that Aunt Cathy had given me. In Japan, dragonflies are symbols of courage and strength. I slid on the black-and-white beaded Lokai bracelet from Mandi so it nestled between woven friendship bracelets made by one of the little girls on Cat Island. A silver cross and an Italian glass pendant that Lucy had bought me hung around my neck. I wanted support clinging to every part of my body.
I asked for space that morning, staving off Christianna’s hugs and kisses. I needed to collect myself.
Dad dropped off Christianna at Grandma Prout’s apartment while the rest of us headed to 30 Rock. We got ready in the dressing room usually used by Jimmy Fallon’s guests. The woman doing my hair said the last person she’d styled was Zac Efron during the Olympics in Brazil. It was a nice distraction from the nerves snaking through my body.
Lucy sat quietly as makeup artists tried to get us camera-ready. They glammed me up a bit too much, so I asked them to remove some of the makeup.
“I’m sorry, I just want to look as natural as possible,” I said. “I just want this interview to be real. The real me.”
