I Have the Right To

by Chessy Prout

  I soon realized that I wasn’t the only one triggered by this election. In the wake of Trump’s comments, I heard about the author Kelly Oxford asking women to tweet about their experiences of sexual assault. I was astounded by the thousands of women coming together to acknowledge how sexual violence had touched their own lives. For once, the online community was building up survivors, not tearing them down.

  On election night, I came home and found Mom hosting a barbecue with my college counselor and her husband, my friend Jackie, Zach and his mom, Aunt Carol, Uncle Pete, Christianna’s friend and her mother. Basically all the Democrats in Naples.

  I ate a burger by the grill with Mom and her friends while Christianna smuggled empanadas upstairs to her bedroom. Our neighbors who brought champagne talked anxiously about how they’d always remember this night.

  We congregated in the family room to watch the news coverage, staring in disbelief as the map turned red, signifying states that Trump had won. The champagne stayed corked.

  Everyone was dumbstruck. I kept wondering how people could vote for this man. Did anyone care about survivors of assault and what this election would do to perpetuate rape culture?

  Eventually people started to leave around eleven p.m. It was a school night, but we couldn’t tear Christianna away from the screen. I fell asleep at one a.m., still holding out hope.

  Mom rustled me awake at two forty-five a.m.

  “She lost, honey,” she whispered, kneeling by my side. “We lost.”

  I rolled over without responding. I refused to accept that my fellow Americans had elected Donald Trump as president. This was just a nightmare. Reason would rise with the sun in the morning.

  I lay in bed the next day in a self-imposed exile.

  I had no clue how far off the rails things would get under Trump. But I knew, in those dark days of mourning after the election, that fighting for women’s rights was more urgent than ever.

  I made my first #IHaveTheRightTo poster for an interview with the Boston Globe (second image, above). After the Today show interview aired in August 2016, I received messages and gifts from all over the world, including origami cranes made by old friends in Tokyo (above). I was invited that fall to speak at events organized by Together for Girls (third image) and Georgetown Day School (first image).

  I appreciated meeting St. Paul’s survivor Charlie Pillsbury, who invited me to speak at Yale.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Rocking the Boat

  I was supposed to hear back from Barnard College about my early decision application sometime between November and December. By December 13, I was hitting the refresh button on my browser every few minutes.

  I tried to temper my expectations—something I’d become an expert in during the last two years. But I really wanted this, more than I’d wanted anything in a long time. My entire future depended on getting into Barnard.

  Barnard had everything I valued: female empowerment, great access to the arts, a campus in the middle of a city, and a stellar leadership program where I could take classes in speech writing and gender studies. The campus was plastered with signs and graphics about consent and sexual assault. When I brought my family to visit the school, the posters on the walls spoke to me: THERE’S NOTHING A BARNARD WOMAN CAN’T DO! This was the place for me.

  But my interview back in June was a disaster, possibly enough to ruin my chances. I was flustered, sweating, and almost late because my cabdriver misunderstood the address and took me to 160th Street instead of 116th Street.

  I didn’t even catch the name of the woman interviewing me as we introduced ourselves. She looked like the famous writer Cheryl Strayed and told me she was a former prosecutor for the city of New York.

  I talked about my background growing up in Japan and explained where I had gone to school, gradually building up to my assault, the trial, and my plans moving forward.

  “I want to study law to help spread awareness of this terrible crime and fight for other victims and survivors,” I said, my voice rising with passion. “I want to be at Barnard, where they value women’s strength.”

  I worried that I sounded too emotional, too outraged, too unstable. I took a couple of breaths to calm down. A few days earlier, a college consultant for a New York City firm had told me that I didn’t have to talk about my assault during my interviews if I didn’t want to.

  “But it seems hard to avoid when I have to explain why I switched schools and my grades slipped,” I pointed out to the consultant.

  “Just stay positive and focus on the future, not the past,” he advised. “And don’t sound bitter.”

  Whoa. I didn’t go there to have some man tell me how to act. But his words reverberated in my head. I tried to regain my footing during the last few minutes of the Barnard interview, but I walked out feeling like I blew it. Eventually I tracked down the name of my interviewer and sent a thank-you note.

  Back home on the living room couch, my finger was starting to cramp up from hitting the refresh button. I had just put my world history textbook away, giving up on the studying I was supposed to be doing for my exam the next day.

  Christianna hung around my neck as I glared at the computer screen.

  “Did you get an email from Barnard? Did you get in? Did you get in?” she repeated like a parrot. “Did you? Did you?”

  I swatted her away.

  Suddenly I noticed my computer screen change. There was now a “View Update” option on the Barnard portal highlighted in yellow. I squeezed my eyes shut and said a little prayer as I clicked on it.

  Dear Ms. Prout, Congratulations!

  There it was—in black and white—I was in!

  Mom rushed over and hugged me as I skipped across the living room.

  I exhaled, a huge weight sliding off my shoulders. I kept my history textbook closed and danced around the house with Mom and Christianna for the rest of the night.

  Dad was still commuting to his job in New York, and when he came home that weekend, he had a tote bag filled with Barnard swag. It looked as if he had cleared out the school store. Christianna rummaged through the mugs, T-shirts, notebooks, and sweatpants, trying to call dibs on whatever she could.

  “Can I have this one?” she asked as she pulled out a gray T-shirt with BARNARD printed across the chest.

  “Sure.” I giggled. Maybe it would inspire her one day to be a Barnard woman too.

  I went on a news diet after the election. Everything sounded the same as Trump alienated the world—friends and foes—before stepping foot in the Oval Office. As word spread of women planning demonstrations across the country, I started paying attention.

  Lucy was attending the Women’s March in Washington, DC, the perfect send-off before starting her semester abroad studying human rights in New York, Nepal, Jordan, and Chile. The program looked fascinating, with opportunities to learn from activists, feminist leaders, refugees, and grassroots organizers around the world.

  Mom wanted to join Lucy in Washington, DC, so the Prouts decided to divide and conquer. Dad would take me and Christianna to the demonstration in downtown Naples while Mom and Lucy marched in the capital.

  On January 21, 2017, I woke up and threw my covers off the bed. I put on my white PAVE tank top and pulled my hair back into a ponytail. I had considered buying one of those pink pussyhats that women were wearing in response to Trump’s crude comments, but it seemed too hot for wool in Florida.

  Before heading out, we gathered around the dining room table with purple markers and each designed posters. Dad, who could never have enough hashtags, wrote: #IHAVETHERIGHTTO SUPPORT SURVIVORS #SHATTER THE SILENCE

  I finished next: #IHAVETHERIGHTTO USE MY VOICE & BE HEARD

  Christianna flicked the marker between her pointer and middle fingers as she debated what to put down. I beamed with pride when she settled on: #IHAVETHERIGHTTO GROW UP SAFE AND EQUAL

  We stuck the signs in our trunk and picked up Aunt Carol, her eighty-year-old friend, and my college counselor, who�
��d been at our house on election night. As we drove along Route 41, I worried we’d be the only ones protesting. But when we arrived downtown, hundreds of people were streaming in from all directions under splaying palm trees: there were babies in strollers, people in wheelchairs, and men and women waving American flags.

  The sidewalks filled with shades of pink as women and girls thrust signs in the air: WE MARCH AS ONE, WE ARE CREATED EQUAL, WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS.

  So many protesters showed up—roughly 2,500 in total—that we took over the streets. March organizers hollered into megaphones, “Women united, we’ll never be divided!” and “This is what a feminist looks like!”

  We tried FaceTiming Mom and Lucy during the march, but the call dropped as wireless networks in DC caved under the demand of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators there.

  I filled up my lungs with dewy air as the sun roasted my shoulders. I loved the sound of my sneakers pounding the pavement, equal rights chants piercing the morning calm. I got goose bumps along my arms as we shouted together: “Whatever we wear, wherever we go, yes means yes and no means no! Hey, hey, ho, ho, sexual violence has got to go!”

  I wiped tears from my eyes and grabbed Christianna’s hand. I looked around and realized that there really was a community out in the world that was ready to support survivors, no matter where you were. When a jerk stuck up his middle finger as he drove by in a red convertible, top down, I stood taller, held my sign higher, and yelled louder. Because I had the right to.

  I took a break from advocacy events for a couple of months to focus on school, but I came back with a vengeance in the new year. Representative Kuster of New Hampshire had invited me, Delaney, and Julia to participate in a panel discussion at the US Capitol about sexual assault at the beginning of February.

  I’d met Representative Kuster briefly in the fall when I was in DC for the consent summit at Georgetown Day School. I’d learned that her father and many other family members had attended St. Paul’s, and she even served as an assistant clerk for the St. Paul’s board of trustees in the 1990s when school leaders were grappling with hazing problems. Representative Kuster suggested that we work together to increase public awareness about sexual violence. I was floored that she wanted to join forces. I felt as if I was starting to live in the light at the end of the tunnel.

  It all came together perfectly, with Angela taking on the role of moderator. I wished Lucy could be there to see how far I’d come. She was wrapping up her human rights courses in New York before heading off to Nepal. Before she left, she wrote a sweet note, her most candid thoughts yet on the journey we’d taken.

  Dear Chessy,

  It is Tuesday afternoon, 2:5O on a snowy day in New York in the fashion district. We had a class session earlier today with the Community Voices Heard organization (ooh you just texted me—telepathy) and I just wanted to bring you there into the folds of the conversation. YOU are bringing the change, Chess. I’ve had a hard time dealing with this—the personal nature of the work bc of your experience—and grappled w/the discomfort of the emotional toll. And I’ve tried/wanted to distance myself from it. This trip is really helping me come to terms with the emotional, personal, exhausting, vulnerable side of s.a. work.

  Change does not happen unless you demand it. And no one will demand it until it personally affects them. It is the role of the oppressed to demand humanity—and this is a painful process to liberation. (Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed—it’s awesome)

  I am so proud of you for engaging w/the painful + standing up to share your story. Your story has and is continuing to change so much/liberate. You are forcing the world to confront the human + feel uncomfortable. Fuck those who are standing in your way—they are either in the past or will soon be left behind. Good Luck Wednesday, I know you will inspire + liberate many.

  Love you, XO

  Lucy

  I walked through the underground tunnels of the Capitol, my heels click-clacking on the marble floor. In the elevator, I recognized Congressman John Lewis; I had seen a clip of the fiery speech he delivered during the Women’s March on Washington. I was too intimidated to speak.

  Oh. My. God. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr. I locked eyes with Mom.

  We eventually arrived in Emancipation Hall for a reception hosted by Representative Kuster. She was announcing the launch of a bipartisan task force to end sexual violence. The group was committed to raising awareness and providing solutions to the challenges posed by sexual assault in the military, on campus, and elsewhere.

  At the gathering, a younger redhead quietly introduced himself to me as Congressman Joe Kennedy. He spoke so softly I strained to hear. He mentioned how his old private school struggled to deal with these issues and that he had family who had attended St. Paul’s.

  Representative Kennedy said he used to work as an assistant district attorney and knew how difficult these court cases could be. I nodded and recounted a little bit of my own experience at St. Paul’s.

  After he left, I turned around and exclaimed, “Jeez, that’s a Kennedy!”

  I was too nervous to eat the cubes of cheese and slices of fruit set out on the reception table. I bear-hugged Delaney this time when she showed up. Some of the representatives shared their own stories of sexual assault and urged me to run for office when I turned twenty-five, the youngest age when you can serve in the House of Representatives. Yikes. I was just focused on getting through senior year of high school.

  “We are all Emily Does,” Representative Kuster said, kicking off the night’s main event in Emancipation Hall.

  She told the audience that reading Emily Doe’s letter from the Brock Turner case with other members of Congress in June 2016 forced her to confront the secrets she’d been keeping for more than forty years.

  Representative Kuster was an eighteen-year-old freshman at Dartmouth College in 1974 when a guy assaulted her at a fraternity party while others cheered him on. She ran home alone, blamed herself, and never told anyone else. She had been assaulted two more times since college—by a famous surgeon who stuck his hand under her skirt at a work lunch and by a stranger as she walked home from Capitol Hill.

  She described the lasting effects of the attacks: she’s sixty years old and can’t be alone. Sometimes she wakes up screaming from nightmares.

  She said her silence—and society’s collective silence—is part of the reason we haven’t made more of a dent in preventing sexual violence. Representative Kuster refused to be complicit any longer: “If I don’t speak up, how can I expect young women to?”

  When it was my turn to speak, I looked around the room filled with influential lawmakers and young legislative aides. There I was, talking in public about the most uncomfortable moment of my life, and for the first time, I didn’t dissolve into tears.

  “I feel like my job right now is to make the world a better place for my younger sister, who is growing up in a world that is dangerous and hard to go through as a young woman,” I said. “To be here in a place where that seems to be the goal of everyone is pretty inspiring and pretty empowering.”

  I listened intently to Julia Dixon as she described how survivorship and healing is not linear. It goes up and down like a mountain range. Some days you have the emotional bandwidth to heal and feel positive, she said, and other days you don’t.

  That really resonated with me. People always talk about moving on. When a member of the board of trustees called Dad after the Today show interview, he said, “We’d like to put this behind us.”

  “I can understand you and the school wanting to move past this,” Dad responded, “but unfortunately for Chessy and my family, we’re going to have to live with this for the rest of our lives.”

  You don’t just move on from a sexual assault. What happened doesn’t just go away with time. As Buzz, my counselor at St. Paul’s, liked to say, it moves through you, like grief. It changes shapes and sizes and directions. Some days it’s angry devils staging a riot on my rib cage,
pricking me with their burning pitchforks. Other times, my assault is cold ice running through my veins, numbing me from head to toe so I can’t feel my skin. On better days, like at the US Capitol, my assault is a powerful gust of wind, lifting my heart and my mind to places they’ve never been.

  When the panel discussion returned to me, I talked about the importance of not forgetting us kids. So much attention in recent years has focused on preventing sexual assault on college campuses. But the only way to do that is to start the conversation earlier—and that’s why I was speaking out. Kids of all ages need to learn that it’s not acceptable to “show a girl you like her” by poking her with a pencil, grabbing her on the playground, or snapping her bra. High school students and middle schoolers need to talk about consent, entitlement, and healthy relationships. By the time they get to college, it’s too late.

  Angela ended the evening with a Margaret Mead quote—the same one that Buzz had hung on the wall of her office: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

  When we met Representative Kuster for coffee in fall 2016, she suggested that we work together and then invited me to participate in a panel in Washington, DC. I spoke with members of Congress at a reception before the event (first image, above). Angela and I also attended the launch of a bipartisan task force to end sexual violence (second image).

  It was empowering to join the Women’s March in Naples in January 2017 (first image, above) and then speak the next month at the US Capitol with fellow survivors Angela, Julia Dixon, Representative Kuster, and Delaney (above).

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Reclaiming Concord

  I had to look at my phone twice before believing what I read. Tabitha texted that she wanted to do a photo shoot for #IHaveTheRightTo at St. Paul’s. Tabitha said she was inspired to be stronger and speak up more after attending the Women’s March in Concord.