I Have the Right To

by Chessy Prout

  “Sure,” I said with exasperation. I didn’t like going to school with a heavy heart.

  “She wanted you to know that there is life after this,” Mom said. “Now she is married to a wonderful man, has three small boys, a career, and a life in which she goes weeks at a time without thinking about high school. Can I read you this one part?”

  “Okay,” I sighed, and closed my eyes.

  “ ‘It has shaped me, but it no longer shapes my days. Please tell her that she will have a rich, full, beautiful life in which she does not need to explain this or anticipate its presence in every room she walks into. She may choose to make of herself an advocate, but she can also choose to return to privacy, and it will be okay.’ ”

  I was glad that this woman had found happiness, but marriage and kids seemed so far away. I didn’t know how I’d ever get to that point and make new relationships when I felt like I couldn’t trust people anymore.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said softly, slipping my school bag onto my shoulder. “I’ve got to get to class now. I love you.”

  I’d been invited to appear on a panel in Washington, DC, organized by Together for Girls, a global organization dedicated to ending sexual violence against girls. This was my first opportunity to speak to a live crowd, and it was being held on October 11, known as International Day of the Girl.

  I was jittery sitting next to incredibly accomplished leaders who’d spent their careers fighting for women’s rights. My stomach had been turning since I woke up that morning. I hadn’t even finished high school yet and here I was about to address a crowd of activists and human rights leaders. I didn’t think I really deserved to be up there with them.

  I wore a blue blazer and gray skirt and sat near the end of the stage, gripping my white notepad and pen. There was so much to learn. I looked down at the program and saw my name listed as Chessy Prout, PAVE ambassador. I knew Delaney would be proud.

  I spoke last, haltingly at times, and shifted my gaze between the panelists and the audience. I wasn’t sure where to look because I’d never shared my experience with so many people at once. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lucy nodding in approval.

  “In a situation where I had lost complete control, I wanted to take it back and I want to help other young women realize that they can take it back too,” I explained.

  My voice steadied, and I let go of my notebook and began talking with my hands. I gestured toward the side room, where Christianna was listening to an e-book, and gave my little sister credit for the #IHaveTheRightTo campaign.

  “With her generation growing up, and my generation growing up, I want this to be a sort of baseline idea that we have the right to our bodies and that we have the right to say no and to have our bodies be respected and have our words be respected as well.”

  I shakily stood up from my chair and wobbled off the platform, my joints slowly regaining strength. But I walked away feeling invigorated. It was electrifying to sit onstage as an advocate and share my experience. People wanted to listen to me. It made me feel more confident about speaking out. This was where I belonged.

  Later that afternoon Lucy and I ventured out to the roof deck of our Airbnb apartment one block from the White House. Lucy was in a good mood, enthusiastically sharing how the panel resonated with the justice and peace studies courses she was taking at Georgetown. We talked about the impressive people we had met at the event. Lucy mentioned she was thinking about doing a study abroad program in the spring that focused on human rights.

  Together we imagined a White House under the first female president sparking new opportunities to empower women across the nation. I was hugely inspired by It’s On Us, the campaign to end campus sexual assault launched by President Obama and Vice President Biden. Lucy and I discussed expanding it to high schools. I fell asleep on the roof-deck couch, marveling at the view of the White House, the Washington Monument, and an American flag waving in the wind. Instead of dwelling on the past, Lucy and I were planning a better future for ourselves and girls everywhere.

  I cherished the title of advocate. But in the beginning, I didn’t fully grasp how challenging this work would be. I cried whenever I described my assault or the bullying I’d endured. I nearly had a panic attack in October at Yale Law School, where Mr. Pillsbury, the St. Paul’s survivor who graduated in 1965, and a Yale colleague had invited me and my family to speak.

  I had flashbacks to Concord while we walked through Yale’s campus, passing Gothic buildings and redbrick paths as snowflakes stuck in my hair. I knew Yale was teeming with prep-school graduates, and I worried that my talk would be a battleground. Maybe these kids admired defense attorneys like Carney. Maybe they were just coming to see me weep.

  Listening to other survivors share their stories also took a toll. One survivor, Ally Heyman, a teenager from Ohio, sat next to me at a PAVE event organized by Angela in the fall of my senior year.

  Ally was a figure skater who had been abused for months by her personal trainer. She reported him to the police, and on the day of his sentencing, the trainer never showed up. Hours later the police issued a warrant for his arrest and found her abuser dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his chest. He killed himself on August 30, 2016.

  Chills ran down my spine. That was the day my interview aired on the Today show. Ally’s parents had seen a clip of my interview on the news later that night and a friend got in touch with the Today show the next day.

  “I think it was meant to be,” Ally’s mom said, looking over at me.

  I grabbed some tissues before passing them to Ally, who was also in tears.

  “The reason I came to speak out is because I never had the chance to have a voice, to feel in control,” Ally said.

  This was the first time Ally and I were both speaking to high school students our own age. The entire girls’ basketball team at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, stopped by and shook our hands. I was relieved that Mom and Dad were sitting with me up at the front of the room, but I was drooping by the time I finished sharing my story.

  I should have scheduled some time to decompress. But I made a rookie advocacy mistake and agreed to back-to-back events. I had committed to participate the next day in a summit on sexual assault and consent at Georgetown Day School.

  I tried to keep it together for the opening panel. I broke down at one point and took thirteen seconds and a lot of deep breaths to regain my composure. I was so spent, and the setup was intimidating. Students and adults were staring down at me from ascending rows that curved around. I felt like I was surrounded on all sides.

  I thought the most important advice I could give to these teenagers was how not to act like students at St. Paul’s. Georgetown Day School was light-years ahead by the mere fact that dozens of private-school students turned out for a sexual assault summit on a Saturday. But I wanted to make sure these kids understood how to be there for a survivor.

  “When somebody does come forward in your community, as hard as this is, know how to stand by each other, how to talk about it, make people more comfortable to come out and say, ‘This happened to me,’ ” I said.

  I looked out at the vacant stares and wondered whether these people believed what I was saying and if I was truly making a difference. When the opening panel ended, I stepped backward away from the crowd and into the comfort of Mom and Dad. I thought I’d done a terrible job, unable to formulate real sentences or say anything meaningful.

  I watched as Ally, another survivor named Julia Dixon, and Angela hugged and listened to the kids who approached them. I was too awkward and felt like I could barely take care of myself, much less help other people.

  I told Mom and Dad to let Angela know that I’d meet up with the rest of them later. Lucy followed me upstairs to the room reserved for speakers. I walked quickly to the corner of the glass-walled room to hide the despair inching across my face. My stockings had torn before the day even started, I’d done a crappy job speaking, and I couldn’t even be th
ere for the kids who needed it. Why had I even volunteered to show up if I couldn’t be useful?

  I felt so selfish minding my trail of fat tears when I was supposed to be there as an inspiration. I didn’t want Ally to see me like this either. I was supposed to offer her hope for the future—that things got better. But of course, that’s not how trauma works. There are good days and bad days, and unfortunately, you never know until you wake up.

  An administrator entered the room as Lucy was swaddling me, trying to calm me down, like she did during the trial. The administrator let us sit in her office, which was a little more private, and I cried with my head in Lucy’s lap for the next hour. We missed the morning workshops on gender politics, Title IX, and campus sexual assault. Lucy had been really excited for one on criminology, but she stayed with me, stroking my hair and telling me that everything was going to be okay.

  I knew I had to resurface. I dried my eyes and drifted over to the room where Angela, Ally, and her mom were sitting. Angela, sensing my Zen was off, led our small group in a quick meditation. She told us all to close our eyes and put our feet flat on the floor. We held hands and took deep breaths together. Angela was a huge proponent of self-care, always reminding me to exercise, take a soothing bath, walk outside, or meditate.

  “This work is difficult,” Angela said. “You need to be good to yourself every single day.”

  I realized then that going public didn’t mean my healing journey was over. It was just the beginning. Each day I was learning how to be a survivor and an advocate for change. My energy rebounded steadily as I listened to Bobby Asher, dean of students at Georgetown Day School, who led a session on the neuroscience of trauma and its impact on the brain. He talked about the body’s three biological responses to frightening or scary encounters: fight, flight, or freeze.

  In the afternoon, Ally and I helped run a breakout session and then fielded questions from students.

  “What do you think about rape jokes?” one boy asked.

  My blood curdled. I pursed my lips and looked him straight in the eyes.

  “It hurts.” I grimaced. “It’s very, very offensive.”

  I wanted to scream out loud that there is nothing funny about rape. There is no joke, no one-liner, no wisecrack, no prank, no trick, no nothing about rape that is anything but repulsive. These types of jokes are awful for everyone, but especially for those who have experienced sexual trauma. And because you can’t see the scars on our skin, you don’t know who we are. We could be your daughter or son, your cousin, your friend, your mother or father, your classmate.

  I wanted to say more but knew we had to move on. We outlined concrete steps students could take in their own lives to support victims, such as starting PAVE chapters at their schools, launching CONSENT IS ________ bracelet campaigns, and sending survivor care packages.

  Before the session ended, we handed out paper so students could make their own #IHAVETHERIGHTTO signs. A hush came over the room. All I could hear was the sound of markers squeaking on paper. I thought about that day in my backyard months earlier, when we’d sat at the wood table outside, eating Popsicles and watching the ripples in the pool join together.

  I looked over at Mom in the back of the room. She was all in—and at age fifty-two, busy writing down her rights. One by one, the kids got up and showed us their signs. After the session ended, I noticed students in other rooms filling out their own #IHAVETHERIGHTTO signs.

  I was so touched that they were using the hashtag my sisters and I made to claim their own rights. By the time they were done, CONSENT IS _________ and #IHAVETHERIGHTTO covered the walls by the area I had spoken in that morning. Finally my lips curled into my first real smile of the day.

  After listening to the closing speech by Soraya Chemaly, director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project, I had the chance to actually speak one-on-one with students from Georgetown Day School. It turned out, they were just as nervous to talk to me as I was to them. I got to be myself around them, and left that day with new friends who believed in the same things I do.

  As I navigated this new role of advocate, I needed to find a balance between fighting for what I believed in and living my life to the fullest, which included allowing myself to be a teenager, a sister, a daughter, a friend. At the end of the day, I knew I was doing the right thing by speaking out. I just wondered if doing the right thing would ever get easier.

  The 2016 presidential election was stressing me out big-time. Everywhere I drove in Naples, I saw Trump bumper stickers plastered on the back of pickup trucks and yard signs sticking out of perfectly manicured lawns. These weren’t just strangers: these were my neighbors, my classmates, my friends, their parents.

  Long before the video leaked where Donald Trump bragged of grabbing women by the pussy, I had read that Trump’s ex-wife, Ivana, had, in a sworn divorce deposition, stated that he had raped her in a fit of rage. I equated Donald Trump with Owen Labrie. They were entitled, arrogant sexual predators who believed the rules didn’t apply to them. It was “deny until you die” all the way. What would it mean if Trump became our president—that men could get away with anything?

  Politics was a polarizing topic at school, and I was totally outnumbered. One girl in particular, Fiona, liked to provoke confrontations with me on an almost daily basis.

  If there was a lull in conversation, Fiona would pull out her favorite line, “Let’s talk about politics!” The rest of us would groan, knowing where this was going.

  “Why don’t you want Trump to win?” she would whine at me during our free period. “You’re rich. Don’t you want to protect your parents’ money from higher taxes?”

  I was shocked at her brazen reference to my family’s economic status but put that to the side.

  “You’re willing to overlook all these other human rights issues because you don’t want your parents to pay more taxes?” I asked. “We’ve got enough to share. Don’t you care about the rights of other human beings?”

  She didn’t have any other points. It was all about money. I held my tongue and got back to my homework.

  “But why not?” Fiona barked back.

  “I’m not fighting with you, Fiona,” I said.

  Two of my friends left the room, fleeing at the first sign of conflict. Arielle refused to get involved in politics. Others sat quietly.

  I’d always be thankful that the community at CSN embraced me when I came back from St. Paul’s and supported me again when I went public as a survivor. But I was frustrated by my friends who couldn’t understand that voting for Trump meant turning a blind eye to sexual assault and all the rights I was fighting so hard to safeguard.

  I was transported back to St. Paul’s, where protecting one’s privilege eclipsed everything else, where standing up for your basic rights meant being disloyal. It also angered me that two of my friends who supported Hillary Clinton refused to speak up. Why did I always have to be the one?

  The election managed to infect everything—even our class T-shirts. Every year, students picked a T-shirt design to wear on the last day of homecoming. They usually featured benign phrases; last year our student council chose “Stay Classy.”

  During a meeting in early October, some seniors proposed poaching Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” and designing T-shirts with the words “Make CSN Great Again.”

  Wisdom prevailed and by the end of the meeting, the seniors settled on a different motto. Everyone seemed to be on board, but later that day, I caught wind that our class representatives had decided to ignore the decision and go with “Make CSN Great Again.”

  I found my ex-boyfriend Dean in the hallway. He was one of the guys backing the dumb slogan.

  “Hey, I thought we agreed on another T-shirt. What happened?” I asked.

  “We’re not changing it back,” Dean said.

  He wasn’t getting it.

  “Dean, I’ve said this to you guys before, and I know there are other kids in our class that feel the same,
but I’m not putting a T-shirt anywhere near my body that has a slogan on it that supports a misogynistic rapist.”

  “That’s not even—” Dean said before I cut him off.

  “Whatever, I guess I just won’t come to school that day if that’s our T-shirt,” I said, then pivoted on the balls of my feet.

  Another senior class representative tried to “calm me down” in the hallway. I didn’t need calming, I needed to be listened to! This was ridiculous. How could they not understand why I would be so upset?

  I bolted to the parking lot and slammed the car door shut. I drove straight home and told Mom that I refused to go to homecoming. She was okay with it, but she challenged me: Did you speak up? Then I began drafting an email to my high school principal, Mr. Miles, informing him of the T-shirt debacle:

  Dear Mr. Miles,

  . . . Donald Trump’s ideology goes against everything I’ve fought for for the last two years, and completely goes against what I am fighting for now, and I was especially hurt when my classmates couldn’t take that into consideration. I have decided that since that is the t-shirt slogan that will be representing my senior class, I will not be going to school on Friday the 28th, nor will I make a big deal of it, I just wanted to let you know that this is how some of us feel in the senior class.

  Thank you,

  Chessy Prout

  A couple of days later Mr. Miles pulled me aside during our morning break and promised that CSN would not allow class T-shirts to feature political messages—for either side.

  Later that evening, all anyone could talk about was the Access Hollywood tape. Billy Bush’s conversation with Donald Trump on the set had leaked out. There he was, the Republican presidential candidate, admitting to sexually assaulting women.

  Trump: I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

  Bush: Whatever you want.

  Trump: Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

  This was who my friends wanted to lead our country. I put my head in my hands as Mom flipped through the news channels, watching wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s vile remarks.