Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  Julie finally explained. When she had driven up to the school to request my file, the documents the rector handed her contained, right near the top, a letter written in the summer of 1991—the summer I was accused of being a drug dealer and so on. In this letter, the school’s attorney laid out for then-rector Kelly Clark his formal advice for how Reverend Clark should handle “any further communications” with my family.

  “I don’t want to read it to you,” said Julie, “because it will make you crazy.”

  I appreciated her concern, but crazy was not a useful barometer at this point.

  The lawyer made three points in his letter, and Julie, with Lieutenant Ford listening, read them to me.

  One: Rector Clark was advised to say that from the beginning, the school had acted in concert with legal counsel, which Julie interpreted for me as potentially providing cover for the school’s failure to report.

  Two: Clark should be sure to say that the school “stood behind” my family. (“I really didn’t want to make you listen to that one,” said Julie wryly.)

  Three: But that “it would be very difficult to admit Lacy to reenter the school” for sixth form “under current circumstances.”

  “‘The Crawfords,’” read Detective Curtin slowly, “‘first must resolve the charge of a cover-up which they communicated to the State of New Hampshire.’”

  I copied down these words as quickly as I could. Then I read my handwriting.

  “That’s what I told you,” I said to the detectives. “They would not let me come back unless I agreed to drop the charges.”

  “In writing,” said Julie. “We think that’s witness tampering.”

  “Only if we can use it,” said Lieutenant Ford. “And they’re arguing that we didn’t come by those pages correctly, because the school’s attorneys, if they had known they were in your file, never would have given them to us.”

  “But the rector gave them to Julie!”

  “Exactly,” said Julie. “And I had the proper consent. But the AG’s office was very unhappy we had it, and severed our case. They did not want us to use those pages.”

  “So that’s it?” I asked. We had found proof, and in the same conversation I was being told it could not be allowed to do its work?

  “We’d like to act on it,” said Ford. “We’d like to do right by you. By all of the many victims of the school. But they have severed us.”

  “From my case.”

  “Yes.”

  “My case alone.”

  A pause. “Yes.”

  The Crawford Curse.

  “Why? Why?”

  Well. The detectives didn’t like to guess. They hated to speculate. But the attorney who wrote the letter in my file was still alive and kicking. “Don’t Google him,” said Julie (the thought hadn’t occurred to me). She knew I would find that he was a prominent and respected lawyer.

  I still didn’t get it. “So?”

  “So he wrote the letter,” the one she’d just read to me, the one she felt reflected “counseling failure to report and witness tampering in the investigation of the statutory sexual assault of a fifteen-year-old girl.”

  I asked if they thought my case had been severed in order to prevent this letter from coming to light, in order to protect the lawyer who wrote it all those years ago.

  “We can’t say why,” they told me, carefully. They were not privy to those conversations in the attorney general’s office. “We’re disgusted with the politics of this,” said Lieutenant Ford.

  It seemed unimaginable that we had finally found incontrovertible proof of at least the nature of the wall of men who had worked to silence me when I was a teenager, and we could do nothing with it. I asked if I could do something myself. Specifically, I asked if I could run screaming down Main Street, shouting it to the void.

  “Oh, please don’t do that,” said Julie.

  I’d been kidding. She was not. I said, “Why not?”

  “Because victims of St. Paul’s are still coming forward.” And if something happened to damage their impression of the integrity of the investigation, “they won’t keep coming forward.”

  #MeToo had six weeks prior to this conversation begun to sweep social media. Tarana Burke’s movement using new media to publicly align voices against shame was a phenomenon now. Here, tell—we believe you. All over the world, victims were being encouraged to share their stories in an effort to embolden other victims. I was being asked to keep quiet about mine so as not to discourage them.

  So many people demanded my silence. The list begins with my own denial. But of all the manipulation, slander, and failure, this reasonable request from a kind investigator devastated me most of all.

  I got hold of my records from the ear-nose-and-throat clinic in Concord. The outpatient report of my herpes diagnosis—the one the pediatrician at school had referred to—was not among them. It has vanished entirely. The records that remain of my visit appear woefully incomplete.

  But what was there struck a note so sharp I could hear it, a chip of ice so cold it must be the hard center. It’s small, not much. Just a phone message taken in the middle of the summer in 1991. This was a few weeks after the school lawyer issued his letter of guidance for the rector. I’d have been taking my Zovirax and writing letters to Scotty, driving myself around Midwestern roads with failed desire and a still-healing hand. John Buxton, the vice rector of St. Paul’s School, had called this doctor in Concord to talk about me.

  “Would like to speak with you about a patient,” reads the message. He got his wish. “Returned call,” noted someone else. “Sensitive matter.”

  John Buxton, the vice rector with whom I had never had a conversation and never would, had known that I had visited this clinician in town and had called him directly to discuss my private medical records.

  And as I would hear later, from records Julie read to me, the 1991 police file reflects that the school’s lawyer informed the Concord Police that the clinic in Concord had diagnosed canker sores. It wasn’t herpes, this lawyer told the police the summer I was sixteen.

  There could not have been a clearer instance of the ravenous paternalistic entitlement of this school, to help itself to my doctor and my privacy even in my absence. The boys fucked my throat, and then another guy went down there too, just to tidy things up.

  In the last days of 2017, Detective Jim Kinney from the New Hampshire attorney general’s office scheduled a time to interview me.

  He did not ask me to repeat my testimony about the assault. Instead, he asked about the school’s response: whom I told and what was done. Because he didn’t have my file, he hadn’t seen any of the medical records or read the reports. But as I talked, Kinney was doing the math ahead of me: “So the students knew about the herpes before you did,” he said at one point.

  Yes, they did. And now I could prove this. The administration had gone through my medical records. They had revealed private details to my peers. They had failed to report. They had invited their lawyer’s advice on how to silence me, and they had followed it. They had threatened to call me a drug dealer. They had said that unless we told the police nothing had happened, I could not come back. I talked for two hours.

  “I don’t mean to hurt your feelings,” said Detective Kinney when I was finished. “I don’t mean to undermine what you’ve gone through. But your piece is one of hundreds of pieces. This goes back to the nineteen-forties. I don’t even see the end of this investigation.”

  I felt him deflecting, and I did not want to let this deflection proceed. “What is sad,” I said, “is to hear about everyone else.”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s why when the detectives in Concord tell me they have a letter that documents the school tampering with a witness and failing to report, it seems important to include that. It’s exactly what this investigation purports to be looking for if you are going to be able to bring charges against the school.”

  “Yes,” he told me. “I hear that. But
we have to do things properly. Even though I don’t like it, it’s the right thing to do for the case.”

  “I know the letter exists,” I said.

  “I do too.”

  “Is it true that it’s being suppressed to protect the attorney who wrote it? That the lawyers in the state office are too close to the lawyers for the school?”

  “The bloodlines do cross over,” he said.

  “So that’s it? Silence again?”

  “I can’t introduce it into the investigation without going through the proper channels.”

  “Which are?”

  A grand jury had been empaneled, he explained. Subpoenas were being issued. He could not tell me this yet, but in a few months the investigation would lead to the arrest of a teacher who had initiated a sexual relationship with a student and then suborned her to perjury when they were found out. I read about this in the news. After they caught this teacher sleeping with his student, but before the police found out, St. Paul’s School ensured his safe landing at another private school in New Hampshire. Rector Bill Matthews wrote the abuser a stellar recommendation. The firm of Casner & Edwards reported this itself.

  I would also read the statement given by the state’s deputy attorney general, Jane Young, later that summer, expressing her frustration that Casner & Edwards had continued to contact survivors and witnesses during the state’s investigation. “It was well-known by the school and their attorneys that this criminal investigation was ongoing,” she told a reporter for the Concord Monitor, “so the fact that they were speaking to witnesses, interviewing witnesses…is baffling and quite frankly disturbing.”

  Detective Kinney assured me that his job was to protect the investigation by doing things by the book. That’s what was happening now, he said, and it was the only reason detectives in Concord had been severed from my case. We had to do things properly. I sent him the records I had gathered myself—the medical reports, the phone message proving the vice rector had called my private physician. The grand jury would hear about me, Detective Kinney assured me. I chose to believe him.

  13

  Summer 2018

  It took some time, but Detective Curtin managed to interview both boys. She wrote to me to say so and suggested we speak.

  “I can’t tell you much,” she told me, over the phone. “How much do you want to hear?”

  I had thought about this. I was shaking, moved by a core-born shiver that you could hear in my voice. “Enough so I don’t imagine something worse than what it actually was.”

  Julie spoke carefully and gave few details. One of the boys, she revealed, had been calm and almost conciliatory. The other was ferocious. I had predicted this—I had, foolishly, I suppose, advised her to take a man with her if she interviewed Rick in person. I was worried for her safety.

  “In fact, I made a note of that in my report,” said Julie. “That you said what they’d be like.”

  The enormous kindness of a small affirmation like this. I was not crazy. I described things the way they were.

  Then she said, “Neither of them denied it.”

  I let this sit. I waited for it to grow, like a bit of kindling trying to catch.

  “They didn’t deny it?”

  “Oh, they said it was consensual. You know, we were all teenagers, and you were a willing party.” (It was a party!) “But no one disputed what happened.”

  I felt a powerful alignment. The revelation that they had not denied the assault was more important to me in this moment than my own memory. I thought it would sound undignified to say, “Wow.”

  “But isn’t that an admission to a crime? A statutory crime?”

  “Yes,” said Julie.

  “He was pretty angry,” Julie added, of Rick Banner. She did not give his name, but I knew which one she meant. “You know: ‘That was 1990, this is 2018. Why now?’”

  A typically defensive question, and I could dismiss it for its insinuation that I had some underhanded motive whose tell was my delay in availing myself of the criminal justice system. I’m not sure what motive that would have been—I wasn’t suing, wasn’t pressing charges. But that wasn’t the point of the question. The question tries to portray the victim as the predator, the one with a clever plan. It aims to throw the whole circumstance on its head.

  “Sure, sure,” I replied to Julie. “Why now.”

  Of course, I’d talked about the assault back in 1991 too, and had been assured that if I did so in the context of a criminal investigation, I would be expelled from school and slandered up and down the Eastern Seaboard. I wished Julie had said this to him, but that was not her job.

  I thanked her. Because she was not preparing my case for charges, we would have no reason to speak again. It was strange to think of hanging up after having told her as much as I had. Over the last year, I’d told her everything. I apologized for this and said I hoped I hadn’t wasted her time.

  “You have not wasted anyone’s time,” she replied. “In fact, Lieutenant Ford and I agree that you have taught us a lot about what happens to girls after something like this.”

  Happens to girls. Not what girls do.

  I thanked her again, quickly. I did not want her to hear me cry.

  Julie said she’d write up the case report to relate the new information she’d gathered in the last year. The report would have to be thoroughly redacted before it could be released, and though I understood that this document was born of and belonged to the legal system, I found it incredible that it should be combed for inappropriate revelations before I could see it.

  My story was mine, but the law’s version of it was not.

  I had already made my formal requests for this police file and the original from 1991. There was space for these documents in the white box with my medical records and conversation notes.

  But I was sure this was not the end. I imagined I would meet Detective Curtin in Concord when I flew to New Hampshire at Jim Kinney’s request, to testify before the grand jury. How could I not be summoned, especially now? The boys had not denied my account of the assault. No one at the school or in the AG’s office could say it hadn’t happened. There was no she said, they said. Mine was a textbook case, mine the smoking gun. I looked forward to meeting Julie, though I didn’t say this out loud.

  While I waited, I searched online for the boys again. I was emboldened by Julie’s conversations with them. Their admissions made me brave.

  Pretty quickly, Taz’s mug shot appeared.

  More than one mug shot appeared.

  His arrest record was not short and included jail time. I read that he had first been arrested six months after he graduated from St. Paul’s, for carrying a handgun.

  I thought, So there’s the gun.

  But in his mug shots was the boy turned to misery. I’d never really looked at him at school—not in the face, not before, and not after. We had never spoken. But there he was. And what did I know of the world he’d returned to after St. Paul’s? What did I know of what he was handling while he was still at school?

  When St. Paul’s let Taz graduate without a word after he’d assaulted me, it was not only me they failed.

  I noted that Taz had not also asked Julie, Why now. For him, maybe, it was not so long past. He might have understood how crisis endures.

  I calmed myself by thinking about the answer to Rick Banner’s query. Why now is a bullshit question, but I found power in thinking about it anyway. I was going to give the grand jury my answer. I’d be ready for it. Why now? Well, because the state launched an investigation into the school, of course. But also I would tell them how at least one of the young people in the room that night had spent half a life entangled in the criminal justice system. I would tell them about my own years of arrest—not that I had broken any laws, but that it had taken me almost two decades to begin to live. I would tell them how it had felt to read the unabashed statements of the Prout family, followed by news of the school’s efforts to shame their girl. I would tell them about
the chain of custody of my nascent feminism, which began with the queer female priest who showed me the spare room where I could safely sleep and the black woman counselor who urged me to take seriously my loss. I would describe Mrs. Weinberg setting tea in my hand and books on the table when I was too frightened of upsetting my own mother to dare to talk to her. I was going to read to them Professor Susan Brison’s words about what happens to a survivor when you refuse to believe her. I was going to elevate every single person whose words, clarity, and courage had elevated me.

  I prepared for what would happen next.

  14

  September 2018

  Detective Kinney did not call.

  Instead I received a mass email from the president of the St. Paul’s School board of trustees—who happened to be Archibald Cox Jr., the son of Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox Sr.—writing with that year’s interim rector to communicate to the entire St. Paul’s community how “pleased” they were that the school had reached an agreement with the New Hampshire attorney general’s office: the investigation would end. No charges would be filed. The school had agreed to install for “up to” five years a compliance officer on campus to ensure that the school leadership obeyed reporting laws for sexual assault and other crimes.

  The attorney general gave a press conference to explain that while the state had enough evidence to bring charges of child endangerment against the school leadership, these charges would have led to only misdemeanor convictions, whereas his office wanted to ensure institutional change.

  I thought that institutional change and misdemeanor convictions could coexist quite happily. I thought, in fact, that the latter might help effect the former.

  Archie Cox Jr. told the media he didn’t believe the school had acted criminally. But, he said, “we’re not going to debate that point. It’s in the interest of both parties that this thing get settled.”