#Chessy prout cross examination trial#

Labrie was acquitted of felony rape, but convicted of three counts of misdemeanor sexual assault for penetrating a minor and a felony charge of using a computer to lure a minor, a verdict that required him to register as a sex offender. Paul’s community was turning against me.” Paul’s parents for donations, an appeal that made Prout feel as if “the entire St. Carney Jr., a hard-driving defense attorney who had represented Whitey Bulger.Ī friend’s father helped pay Carney’s legal bills and e-mailed other St.

#Chessy prout cross examination trial#

Paul’s culture does not condone or tolerate sexual assault or harassment of any kind.”Īfter Prout was assaulted by Labrie, she writes that she was abandoned by friends and endured a grueling trial in which she was subjected to a withering cross-examination by J.W. Try to ignore it and don’t participate.” Sure enough, a freshman hockey player snuck up from behind Prout at the dance, and slipped his hands under her shorts. The adults, she indicates, seemed aware of some of the culture, warning the girls before a dance called the “Nash Bash,” that, “Boys will try to touch you. “The level of affluence and one-upsmanship was astounding,” she writes.Īnd the “hook-up culture,” she writes, was so pervasive that the student newspaper printed a “Scoring Dictionary” that defined terms such as “Senior Salute.” Students, she writes, got to know one another by asking, “Do you summer in the Hamptons or Martha’s Vineyard? Ski in Vail or the French Alps?” And instead of saying “good,” students said “gucci,” as in “Sounds gucci!” Paul’s alum, she writes that she was initially shocked by the enormous privilege she encountered at the 162-year-old Episcopal school in Concord, N.H., where the Astors, Kennedys, and Vanderbilts have sent their children to be educated. Though Prout’s father worked as a CEO and was a St. And so that’s what I wanted to show through writing this book - show my vulnerability, show my weaknesses, and be able to say, you can be strong through those.” But, at the same time, we are human, we make mistakes, and we’re not perfect. pull us apart, tear us apart, tear us down, try to poke holes in our stories. “I want to emphasize that there is no such thing as a perfect victim,” Prout, now 19 and preparing to enter Barnard College, said Monday on the “Today” show. She writes that she felt guilty for not listening to her older sister’s warnings to avoid Labrie, and blamed herself for going to a secluded place with a senior she barely knew. She unflinchingly recalls the confusion she felt after the assault, when she replied to Labrie’s e-mail calling her “an angel” by writing back, “you’re quite an angel yourself but would you mind keeping the sequence of events to yourself for now?” Prout says she hopes the book, written with Jenn Abelson, a Boston Globe reporter, will help other teenagers who have felt shame and humiliation after being sexually assaulted. The school has no tradition or culture that would ever allow or condone what happened to Chessy.” “It was never a tradition and was not about assault or coercion.

“Students understood senior salute to refer to a range of consensual behavior,” St.