by Chessy Prout
Lucy called and said she was hearing from old friends she’d lost touch with from Japan, former teachers, and acquaintances. Even her old head of house at St. Paul’s reached out.
“They’re all saying how incredible the interview was and are sending their best wishes,” Lucy said. “I’m so proud of you, Chess. You’re doing the right thing.”
I realized Lucy had been attempting to protect me, still trying to make up for the ways she thought she’d failed to safeguard me from the boys at school. It meant so much to have Lucy by my side and hold my hand during the interview. We didn’t always see eye to eye on everything (what sisters do?), but Lucy had put herself out there to support me time and time again. She carries my heart.
The reason I’m still standing here today is because of those four words Lucy uttered when I told her what happened in the mechanical room: It’s not your fault. Her immediate support saved me.
I learned from Angela that the first person survivors disclose to can have a tremendous impact on their healing process. Oftentimes, when we hear that someone we love and care about has been hurt, the initial reaction can be to deny or rationalize what happened. But that can come across as minimizing and disbelieving and can shame victims into silence.
I hoped to get that message across in the statement I put together for the rest of the media.
#IHaveTheRightTo find my voice and to use it when I am ready. #IHaveTheRightTo be called a survivor, not an “alleged victim” or “accuser.” #IHaveTheRightTo spend time with someone and be safe. #IHaveTheRightTo say NO and be HEARD. #IHaveTheRightTo not be shamed and bullied into silence. #IHaveTheRightTo not be isolated by the crime against me or by people who want to shame me. #IHaveTheRightTo name what happened to me because being sexually assaulted is never excusable or “complicated.” There is no perfect victim. #IHaveTheRightTo be happy, sad, upset, angry, and inspired anytime during the process of my healing without being judged. But most importantly, #IHaveTheRightTo stand with you.
Angela called, her voice jumping with enthusiasm.
“Chessy, #IHaveTheRightTo is trending on Twitter,” she said. “The response is phenomenal. And New Hampshire senator Jeanne Shaheen just gave you a shout-out!”
I clicked on the link she sent.
@SenatorShaheen: Chessy Prout is a remarkable, brave young woman. Thank you for sharing your story to change stigma of sexual assault. #IHaveTheRightTo
My interview was everywhere. BuzzFeed—the place where I usually go to distract myself from reality—featured it as one of the top stories.
#IHaveTheRightTo was taking off on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat. Hundreds of people sent videos and photos of themselves holding up signs and declaring their rights. Old friends, even strangers were taking part. But no one from St. Paul’s.
Instagram was filled with photos of smiling women holding up handmade signs:
#IHAVETHERIGHTTO DEFEND MYSELF AND MY BODY AND TO BE RESPECTED
#IHAVETHERIGHTTO STAND UP TAKE ACTION & BE A CHANGEMAKER
#IHAVETHERIGHTTO LIVE WITHOUT THE FEAR OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE
#IHAVETHERIGHTTO TELL MY STORY, TO HELP + INSPIRE OTHERS, AND TO DEMAND JUSTICE
#IHAVETHERIGHTTO HAVE A VOICE!
A girl from the volleyball team my freshman year at St. Paul’s commented on a photo of the interview that I posted on my Instagram page thanking the people who had stood by me. She had left the school, too.
I, obviously, witnessed the toxic culture that fed into the horrible events that hurt you. Know that I support and adore you from afar and that I am so so proud of you for speaking out about both your situation and the school. You are an inspiration for young girls everywhere.
I couldn’t believe she was saying this publicly. Inspiration? Me? I couldn’t associate those words with myself. I was just telling the truth. I hoped somebody would find comfort in this. And I hoped people would let me lean on them.
Throughout the day, Delaney sent me screenshots of people responding to the story.
Delaney: Just thought I’d share a few comments so you know how loved you are by the world
Me: Slowly seeing the human connection that is happening here, and becoming a little bit more comfortable. I am so inspired by the other people speaking out.
Delaney was right. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Our phones didn’t stop ringing, our inboxes were clogged with messages. Charles, one of the older guys who’d brought me onto the mock trial team, sent me a message on Snapchat.
Charles: I just saw the interview. You’re incredibly brave, and I’m so glad to know a person as strong as you. You’ll make an excellent attorney one day, and I know you’ll do an amazing job at mock trial this year. Make us proud.
The outpouring of support was like an infusion of oxygen. My family could breathe again; we felt hopeful. I wasn’t afraid to leave the house for lunch, so Mom and I grabbed burgers at Five Guys and then got manicures to unwind.
I glanced around at the other customers in the nail salon, wondering if they’d seen the Today show that morning. I felt proud to be sitting there in public after coming forward with my story. All the shame and blame I had carried around for the past two years fell away.
I was excited to tell Christianna how the campaign—the one she’d planted the seeds for—was being recognized around the world. The Prout girls were making a difference!
Christianna had wanted to stay home from school with me to watch the interview together as a family, but we needed to see it first and make sure it wasn’t too graphic or too upsetting for a fifth grader. As much as I trusted the team at NBC, media coverage of sexual assault can be done insensitively, even with the best intentions in mind.
When Christianna finally returned from a long day at school, she curled up next to me in the family room, back where Mom, Dad, and I had huddled in the morning.
I could feel Christianna’s heart beating. Two years of closed doors, whispered secrets, and hushed conversations were coming to an end. Now it was out there in the open for everyone to see.
I had been numb with fear when I watched it live in the morning. The second time, with Christianna clinging to me like a koala, I let the emotions wash over me. Tears made wavy tracks down my smooth cheeks as I watched myself recount the panic attacks.
“I lock myself in my closet because I don’t want my little sister to see-ee-ee me like that. And she comes into my room sometimes and she’ll—she’ll come into my closet when I’m rocking on the floor and punching my legs, trying to get myself to calm down, and she’ll try to give me the biggest hug and she’ll say, ‘Chessy, you’re okay, Chessy, you’re okay.’ ”
Christianna’s arms were already squeezing me tight when that part came on, and then she hugged me tighter. I started laughing and gestured to her cobra grip. “See!”
Christianna giggled and smiled. Then she nuzzled up to me and whispered in my ear, “I love you, Chessy.”
Dad and Christianna comforted me after we watched the Today show interview together.
TWENTY-TWO
Advocate
Here goes nothing, I thought as I pulled up to the CSN parking lot. I took a couple of deep breaths and wandered from the safety of my car into the jungle that is high school. I wondered whether anyone had seen the interview yesterday and if they’d even say anything to me.
I walked through the breezeway toward the senior lockers and thought about a party a few weeks earlier at the beginning of senior year. I had been sitting outside, squished between my friend Jeremy and the edge of the couch, eating a vegan pizza and snacking on chips.
I fiddled with the white CONSENT IS _________ bracelet that Angela had given me when we first met. I hadn’t filled in the blank yet—I wasn’t sure what to write—but I still liked wearing it. Jeremy noticed the bracelet and grabbed my hand.
“What’s this?” he asked.
I jerked my hand back and narrowed my eyes. I was afraid of Jeremy’s response and considered creating a distracti
on to end the conversation. But then I realized this was why I wore the bracelet in the first place. We needed to talk about these things, no matter how uncomfortable they may be.
“Oh, it’s this bracelet that this woman Angela gave me. She founded this organization called PAVE. I think I’m gonna start working with them. . . . It’s supposed to promote awareness of what consent means,” I rambled on.
“That’s really cool,” Jeremy replied earnestly. “I mean, I’d wear one if you had more.”
I stopped sinking into the couch and straightened my spine. I lifted my gaze from the floor to meet Jeremy’s eyes. He really meant it.
“Okay, I’ll get some to bring into school,” I said.
This could be the start of something big. It made me hopeful as I headed to class the day after the interview. In first-period math, Arielle hugged me and my ex-boyfriend Dean told me he was proud. One of my other guy friends acted a little awkward when he joined our cluster, but then we joked around like usual for the rest of class.
After first period, I grabbed some books from my locker. I hoisted my math textbook, which weighed about two hundred pounds, onto a shelf as Cory, a big goofy football player, approached me with a solemn smile.
He stopped short right in front of my locker. I’d been friends with Cory since middle school, and I knew he was a good kid. But I still wasn’t sure what to expect. Boys and girls who I thought were my close friends at St. Paul’s had deserted me after they found out about my assault.
I braced myself and imagined the silver knight figurine that Catherine gave me to hold on the witness stand. I turned to Cory with a smile.
“I don’t really know how to say something like this . . . but I just want you to know that I’m behind you one hundred percent,” Cory said. “I think it was really brave of you to go on TV. And if there’s anything I can do, you know, with the football team to help spread your message, just let me know. I want to do whatever I can to support your cause.”
Cory was the epitome of a scholar athlete—he was one of only two students in the world to get a perfect score on the AP Stats exam in the spring of 2015. He was the kind of star student who at St. Paul’s would have been too cocky, too self-important to care about anyone but himself.
But here, smack in the middle of conservative Florida, he was taking the time to talk to me, to listen to my words, and to enlist other athletes in this movement. I couldn’t believe it. He was nothing like the guys at St. Paul’s.
“You don’t know how much that means to me,” I said. “I’d love for you to get involved. I’m actually working with an organization called PAVE.”
And I realized: This is the way it’s supposed to go.
Later that day during theater class, a sophomore girl sidled up to me. I was talking to the theater teacher, who was also an ally at school, someone who was as pissed off about rape culture and victim shaming as me.
“I saw your interview,” the sophomore girl said to me. “That was so cool what you did, standing up for women’s rights. I’d like to help out in any way.”
Little by little that day, teachers and administrators came up and congratulated me, saying they’d love to join the initiative. Two graduates from CSN confided their own stories of assault at their new colleges. Text messages from old friends poured in. It was overwhelming and I know I missed responding to a few.
One weekend, a large box light as air arrived from Tokyo on our doorstep. I gently cut through the cardboard and lifted out giant white paper origami cranes signed by my old friends and teachers at Sacred Heart and Tokyo Union Church. I sobbed as I read the notes tucked inside the folds. I hadn’t talked to some of these people since the earthquake five years ago.
Mom, Dad, and I huddled around the low black lacquer table I used to dance on in Tokyo. Christianna held me as I tried to keep my tears of joy from dripping onto the delicate cranes. This community, the one I treasured most, the one who knew me best, was standing by my side after all these years. I could feel my heart glow.
I wondered whether coming forward would help my classmates at St. Paul’s to stand up to the sick culture there. I received messages from several old friends, including Dylan, Lilly, and Catie.
Catie: so so proud of you and im sure girls and women all over the world are thankful for someone like you chess
After months of silence, I even heard from Violet, my friend from Madhatters who had visited me in Naples. I’d learned since then that her mother supposedly called me a slut at a cocktail party and Mom took her to task. Violet, of course, didn’t mention that in her text.
Violet: Hey Chessy it’s Violet! I just wanted to let you know that even though I haven’t showed it, I have been thinking about you and I didn’t know how to express that since we had grown apart, but I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter because I really want you to hear what I have to say. I cannot believe how strong you’ve been these past two years and I am even more amazed at how you are now inspiring other girls and giving them hope. When I post things with the #spsfam I am doing it to let people know that anyone who went to sps is family and that family sticks up for each other no matter what. . . .
SPS family sticks up for each other no matter what? I wrote down some choice words, then deleted them. She didn’t deserve a second more of my time.
Mom and Dad were constantly on their phones, fielding messages from friends and loved ones and monitoring social media and news websites. Two days after my interview, the Concord Monitor wrote an editorial titled “A Brave Young Woman Stands Up.”
A few days later I was eating dinner in the kitchen when Mom showed me a page on Everipedia.com, a crowd-sourced encyclopedia, that featured a photo of me and listed my age and my occupation: activist, student.
I laid my fork on the table. I had been so consumed by the threats and slut narratives posted on shame sites that I’d never imagined a scenario in which supporters buried the trolls. Now I was labeled an activist and a survivor instead of a slut and a liar. Things really could change!
I was overcome with a new sense of freedom. It felt empowering to shatter my silence and try to make people more thoughtful about sexual assault survivors. I agreed to do an exclusive interview with the Boston Globe—it seemed like a good way to ensure that my message reached the cloistered New England prep school community.
After school one day, I sat down in the office at our house and talked to a reporter by phone, explaining what life had been like since coming forward. It was scary to be so publicly vulnerable, but I agreed to let a photographer come to Naples to shoot some pictures for the piece. I rushed home and drew up my own #IHAVETHERIGHTTO sign for the first time. As I put purple Sharpie to paper, I reflected on the past couple of months. I never thought I could get to this point.
Angela checked in daily to see how I was doing and to update us on the campaign. The feedback was exhilarating: in just ten days, #IHaveTheRightTo had nearly five million social media impressions. The numbers dazzled us even if we weren’t totally sure what they meant.
The outpouring of support was gratifying, but sometimes I felt tapped out. I still wanted to be a normal high school senior and spend as much time with my friends as I could. It was our last year together, and things were finally going really well. I was also chin-deep in schoolwork, with AP Econ tests, AP French, AP Lit exams—and, oh, that thing called getting into college. I was scrambling to finish my early decision application for Barnard. The pressure was intense.
One night in mid-September, I was hunched over my econ books, trying to memorize price elasticity formulas, when Mom came over to my study station in the dining room.
“Sweetie, Annie Kuster, a congresswoman from New Hampshire, talked about your case today on the floor of the House of Representatives. You’ve got to see this,” she said, placing her phone on top of my books so I could watch the video.
I shoved the phone away. I didn’t have the bandwidth to process it. I needed to focus on my schoolwork. If I ever was going to mak
e more of a difference in the world, I’d at least have to graduate high school. Plus, I wasn’t ready in that moment for the enormity of what Mom was saying.
Late that night when I was alone in bed, I searched online for Representative Kuster’s speech. I learned that she was a survivor of multiple sexual assaults who had stayed silent for decades. Representative Kuster had spoken publicly for the first time in June, inspired by Emily Doe’s letter to the judge in the Brock Turner case.
I pressed play on the C-SPAN clip I found on YouTube and watched the New Hampshire woman with short dark hair and glasses stand at a podium in the well of the House of Representatives.
“Speaking out against this painful ordeal Chessy went through took a huge amount of strength and courage,” Representative Kuster stated forcefully. “Like so many people, I am inspired by her actions, and I hope that they empower other survivors to come forward.”
It was hard for those words to sink in. I was just a kid trying to do the right thing. Representative Kuster was a rock star fighting for actual change, in my eyes. And now she was calling me her inspiration. This was a lot to process. I shut my laptop and passed out as soon as my head hit the pillow.
The next morning I knew an apology was in order.
“I’m sorry I snapped yesterday,” I said to Mom as we made breakfast together. “I watched the video last night and it was pretty amazing. Is there any way we can thank her?”
“Of course, Chess,” Mom said. “I know I need to share things with you in small doses. I realize you have a lot you’re dealing with.”
“I do want to hear about these things,” I said. “But I’m not always ready at the same time as you.”
“Can I share something from a St. Paul’s survivor who reached out and said the school’s lawyers bullied and shamed her into silence?” Mom asked. “She had some words of encouragement.”
