Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. This
Speaker 1: episode contains descriptions of sexual assault listener discretion. Its advised
Speaker 1: our headmaster. The rector told us from the pulpit that
Speaker 1: ours was a goodly heritage. Senators, bishops, authors, barons, moguls, ambassadors,
Speaker 1: peerless curators of life of all kinds had preceded us schoolboys.
Speaker 1: Then we dragged our fingers along the letters of their
Speaker 1: names carved in paneled halls. Once during my time there,
Speaker 1: a man pushed through the double glass doors of the
Speaker 1: reading room in late morning. We looked up from books
Speaker 1: and peeked around red leather chairs. The man found the
Speaker 1: student he was looking for and bent to talk to him,
Speaker 1: and then he left. The room exploded appropriately, of course,
Speaker 1: which meant quietly enough in wrapt whispers. The man was
Speaker 1: George Climpton, and he had come to say something to
Speaker 1: his son, who was a student there. My point is
Speaker 1: that we were a room full of teenagers in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen nineties who knew George Plimpton on site. That
Speaker 1: was our job. His appearance on a weekday morning was
Speaker 1: like a pop quiz from the world. We were blessed
Speaker 1: with excellence and excellently blessed in our schoolwork and sports
Speaker 1: teams and choirs and clubs, and shoulders thrummed with the
Speaker 1: calvinist confidence that is actually a threat. If you do
Speaker 1: not become spectacular, it means you are not us. That's lazy. Crawford,
Speaker 1: reading a passage from her remarkable memoir, notes on a silencing.
Speaker 1: Lacy's story is about the utter failure of adults to
Speaker 1: protect the children in their charge, and the way that
Speaker 1: failure to protect can deepen the wounds of trauma. It's
Speaker 1: also a story of extraordinary tenacity, courage, and the profound
Speaker 1: shifts that can happen both to us and to society
Speaker 1: when the truth finally comes to light. I'm Danny Shapiro,
Speaker 1: and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept
Speaker 1: from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
Speaker 1: secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape
Speaker 1: of your childhood, where you grew up. I was the
Speaker 1: oldest child, or two oldest children. My brother and I
Speaker 1: were raised in a small and wealthy suburb of Chicago,
Speaker 1: on the North side of Chicago, and my parents were
Speaker 1: young when they had their family. They were to me
Speaker 1: at least very beautiful, a were full of ambition and
Speaker 1: had been very fortunate with their own educations, and they
Speaker 1: had real dreams and ambitions for themselves and for their children.
Speaker 1: I was simultaneously adored and expected to do remarkable things,
Speaker 1: and for as long as I can remember, I felt
Speaker 1: both of those. But the second of those cast a
Speaker 1: shadow on the first, and so I think I grew
Speaker 1: up with a sense that it was my job to
Speaker 1: help deliver on a certain promise that my whole family shared,
Speaker 1: and that was in the context of a small town
Speaker 1: and going to a small school in a small town,
Speaker 1: and then when I was fourteen years old, taking the
Speaker 1: leap to go to this elite New England boarding school
Speaker 1: in New Hampshire, which neither of my parents had gone to,
Speaker 1: and we didn't know too many people who had been there.
Speaker 1: But that seemed to be the thing that one would
Speaker 1: do if one was exceptional, and school came easily to me.
Speaker 1: I was very young, and I I was excited to go.
Speaker 1: I was excited to go myself. Was there a lead
Speaker 1: up to that in your childhood or middle school years
Speaker 1: where this idea of boarding school, an elite East Coast
Speaker 1: boarding school was something that started to feel like that
Speaker 1: was your future. It didn't. It wasn't a part of
Speaker 1: my childhood from very early on. Um certainly my schooling
Speaker 1: took on sort of a more fevered air as I
Speaker 1: got older. I was young for my class. I started
Speaker 1: kindergarten when I was just four, and I was reading
Speaker 1: I'm Told fluently when I was three. Though this might
Speaker 1: be mythology by now, but all of it was mythology
Speaker 1: that helped shape my sense of myself. So there was
Speaker 1: a kind of self aggrandizement that attached itself to my
Speaker 1: successes in school. I must have been insufferable to my
Speaker 1: classmates because I was young, and I was also quite small,
Speaker 1: and there were things that came easily to me, and
Speaker 1: I was happy to do them. So in my small
Speaker 1: town there was a very good public high Sto School,
Speaker 1: and there were a few private high schools that were
Speaker 1: with an easy driving distance. But I think there was
Speaker 1: a degree of social as well as educational aspiration in
Speaker 1: my parents sending me away. The New England boarding schools
Speaker 1: were associated with and are associated with, this grand New
Speaker 1: England tradition of WASP wealth and WASP you know, exclusivity,
Speaker 1: The Old Boys Network, the original Old Boys Network, you know,
Speaker 1: founded St. Paul's School in eighteen sixties three or whatever
Speaker 1: it was to train and educate these boys, and to
Speaker 1: do it from some reserve from all the other kids,
Speaker 1: because of course they were special and they needed to
Speaker 1: be taught in a certain special way. And that self
Speaker 1: importance that the school had is pretty enchanting when it's
Speaker 1: combined with the resources that these places have. And that
Speaker 1: self importance resonated, I think with the way my family
Speaker 1: you know, dreamed about ourselves. Um So it was both
Speaker 1: opportunity and expectation, and I was very lucky to be
Speaker 1: able to go there in some ways, of course. So
Speaker 1: the importance of that kind of education is that it's
Speaker 1: a doorway that opens onto the right path, the right spouse,
Speaker 1: the right job, the right people, the right future. It
Speaker 1: is a reflection of the self and society to have
Speaker 1: gone to one of these schools if you are the
Speaker 1: sort of person who believes in those communities, right, if
Speaker 1: you are the sort of person for whom that small
Speaker 1: culture appeals. And so yes, the rest of my world
Speaker 1: was supposed to open up because I had been to St.
Speaker 1: Paul's School, and it could have been exeter it could
Speaker 1: have been grotten, it could have been showed, it could
Speaker 1: have been hot, Kiff, It didn't have to be St. Paul's.
Speaker 1: But the idea of it was, you know, she's such
Speaker 1: a great student, and there's so many opportunities and resources
Speaker 1: at these schools that she can't possibly have here at
Speaker 1: home in our small suburb north of Chicago, And why
Speaker 1: not give her the world if we can? Right? Why not?
Speaker 1: So describe yourself, Lacy, when you got to St. Paul's,
Speaker 1: that girl sophomore in high school or fourth form as
Speaker 1: it was called, or as it is called in many
Speaker 1: of these schools, age fourteen. I was. I was fourteen,
Speaker 1: so again I was. I was a year young from
Speaker 1: my class. I had literally just had my gross spurt
Speaker 1: like that summer. You know, I was sort of lie
Speaker 1: awake with pains and my shins because I was growing
Speaker 1: so fast. So I was five ft seven now, and
Speaker 1: I think I weighed a hundred pounds, soaking wet, and
Speaker 1: I had had my period for six months seven months
Speaker 1: at that time. I was still surprised every time it happened.
Speaker 1: I hadn't had my braces off for very long. I
Speaker 1: was sort of launched into a world where students were,
Speaker 1: to my eyes at least fabulously sophisticated. And many of
Speaker 1: them had grown up in families where their fathers had
Speaker 1: gone to this boarding school or others before them, their
Speaker 1: grandfathers had, or all of their cousins or most of
Speaker 1: the people in their town, and they had grown up
Speaker 1: with a kind of social ease and style that I envied.
Speaker 1: They came in talented in sports. I had never heard of,
Speaker 1: you know what, what was crew? You know? I had
Speaker 1: seen squash courts, but I had never been on one,
Speaker 1: and they were gifted in a range of things. So
Speaker 1: I was wildly impressed and enchanted by the people I
Speaker 1: went to school. But I was also woefully unprepared for
Speaker 1: a lot of the social dynamics there, and it was
Speaker 1: a position of some danger that not a few of
Speaker 1: us found ourselves in. Yeah, I mean I was. I
Speaker 1: was struck by the fact that your mother, as you're
Speaker 1: getting ready to go to St. Paul's, feels that it
Speaker 1: would be helpful for you to have an additional middle name.
Speaker 1: That was really that was something I mean talk about
Speaker 1: an act of a kind of self invention there in
Speaker 1: a situation where no self invention was in fact necessary,
Speaker 1: but she was trying to give you this boost by
Speaker 1: giving you a famous and fancy middle name. That's right.
Speaker 1: So I was christened Lacey K. Hill Crawford, and that
Speaker 1: those were the initials, you know, on my blankets and
Speaker 1: on my sweaters and on my backpack. And and my
Speaker 1: mother maintains that we are related to the great Houston
Speaker 1: oil family and the Demino family through her great great
Speaker 1: aunts side I think, And she said she had wanted
Speaker 1: to give me that name when I was born, and
Speaker 1: my father wouldn't let her, and so why not add
Speaker 1: it now? And there were I should say, many kids
Speaker 1: at St. Paul School who had at least two middle names.
Speaker 1: And it was also very much the case that there
Speaker 1: were kids at school whose complete names bore no resemblance
Speaker 1: at all to what they were actually called in the world,
Speaker 1: you know. So there would be boys and girls who
Speaker 1: had names that I never ever saw written, because nobody
Speaker 1: ever wrote them down, because those weren't their actual baptismal names.
Speaker 1: So it was a bit of an act of self
Speaker 1: sort of. I mean, I don't want to say selfograndizement,
Speaker 1: because that's not fair, not even self invention. It was
Speaker 1: almost like tying an extra ribbon in my hair. It
Speaker 1: was if they're going to be this fancy, we can
Speaker 1: be this fancy too, and why not? Right, and why not?
Speaker 1: And a lot of kids were doing that at St. Paul's.
Speaker 1: They were finding ways to big themselves up and to
Speaker 1: demonstrate where they had come from and where they were going.
Speaker 1: I wasn't yet a master at that, and I didn't
Speaker 1: recognize that what I was seeing was a lot of
Speaker 1: hard work and ambition rather than the pure expression of
Speaker 1: a kind of privilege that I had never encountered before. Lacy,
Speaker 1: festooned with her new fancy middle name, enters a hothouse universe.
Speaker 1: Students from prominent families use nicknames like Buffy and Up.
Speaker 1: They don't wear their wealth, nor did they flash it.
Speaker 1: They're dropped off at school in beat up old wagons
Speaker 1: station cars. The kids who come from these backgrounds seemed
Speaker 1: to have an innate confidence. They never questioned whether they
Speaker 1: belong or whether they're enough. You had to learn to
Speaker 1: read the currents of wealth, and it took me some
Speaker 1: time to figure out what that was. But it was
Speaker 1: hearing about multiple houses, right, It was hearing about parents
Speaker 1: who didn't work and hadn't worked, and generations of parents
Speaker 1: hadn't worked because they didn't have to. There were all
Speaker 1: sorts of expressions of privilege, but it was almost like
Speaker 1: a code, and that code was part of the magic
Speaker 1: of the school was that you never really saw where
Speaker 1: the power was, but you knew that it was coursing
Speaker 1: beneath you everywhere. So I felt very much like I
Speaker 1: was sort of a little baby anthropologist, you know, who
Speaker 1: was always wearing the wrong clothes and was always running
Speaker 1: which you should have been walking. And you were also
Speaker 1: an athlete. I was. Yeah, I wasn't a particularly good athlete,
Speaker 1: but I had my father is a is an excellent athlete,
Speaker 1: and he had raised me with many sports, and he
Speaker 1: had coached my local A Y s oh soccer team
Speaker 1: when I was growing up. And then I had gotten
Speaker 1: fairly good at tennis a couple of years before I
Speaker 1: left for school. I really loved it and I committed
Speaker 1: myself to getting good at it, so I was good
Speaker 1: enough to play on the varsity teams there. And I
Speaker 1: also had been a skater, as kids in Chicago are
Speaker 1: because it's cold and dark all winter long, and we
Speaker 1: had a we had an outdoor rink in our town,
Speaker 1: so I was able to join the ice hockey team too.
Speaker 1: So I, like so many of my peers, did a
Speaker 1: hundred different things on campus, you know, the sports. I
Speaker 1: was a singer. I was in a few different choirs
Speaker 1: that were very very important to me, and I was
Speaker 1: always running from thing to thing. So your fourth four
Speaker 1: year you were pretty miserable. I mean, as many people
Speaker 1: are when they first go away at that age. You were,
Speaker 1: you know, calling home and saying, I don't like it here,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be here. I called home sobbing.
Speaker 1: I I cried so hard I couldn't breathe. And my parents,
Speaker 1: I feel for them, I'm a parent now. It must
Speaker 1: have been devastating. But they had flown me two and
Speaker 1: a half hours, you know, and driven the last hour
Speaker 1: to drop me off at this magical school. And I
Speaker 1: kept calling and begging to come home, and my dad said, no,
Speaker 1: you're going to give this one year. You're going to
Speaker 1: give it a year, and if you really don't like
Speaker 1: it after the year, then yes, you know, you can
Speaker 1: come home. But it was clear to me that that
Speaker 1: would have meant I had failed. That would have meant
Speaker 1: that I had gone to this fabulous school with all
Speaker 1: these fabulous kids, and I couldn't hack it somehow, and
Speaker 1: and part of it was homesickness, but I've been to
Speaker 1: summer camp. I wasn't that attached to my parents at
Speaker 1: that time. I think there was a coldness among the students.
Speaker 1: There were hazing rituals that astonished me with their sadism,
Speaker 1: and kids were cruel in particular ways that I think
Speaker 1: only fifteen year old can be, and with not a
Speaker 1: lot of awareness. So there were a lot of racist remarks,
Speaker 1: and sexism toward the girls was very real, and I
Speaker 1: was frightened. I was frightened of that kind of cruelty
Speaker 1: that was not something I understood. By the time Lacy
Speaker 1: finishes her fourth form year, she's made a group of
Speaker 1: friends and she's settling in. There's no question any longer
Speaker 1: of whether she'll return as a fifth former. She does
Speaker 1: well on the tennis team, makes the varsity soccer team,
Speaker 1: and even though she's not exactly happy, happiness isn't the point.
Speaker 1: She's no longer a nube, the term given to new
Speaker 1: students shortened from new boy. She now has the privileges
Speaker 1: accorded to upperclassmen. She's also in advanced mass with a
Speaker 1: lot of seniors and is being asked to help tutor
Speaker 1: a bunch of guys on the hockey team. So she's
Speaker 1: now kind of on the hockey team's radar. The hockey
Speaker 1: players date beautiful, confident girls, and Lacy definitely doesn't consider
Speaker 1: herself beautiful or confident. One evening, after hours, she's tucked
Speaker 1: into her dorm for the night and gets a phone
Speaker 1: call from Rick Banner, not his real name, the captain
Speaker 1: of the hockey team. I have to start there so
Speaker 1: that you can understand how wild this phone call was.
Speaker 1: Rick Banner was the star on the ice hockey team.
Speaker 1: He was about a foot taller than I was. He
Speaker 1: was a senior. He had a long term girlfriend. They
Speaker 1: were known as a couple. They were the sort of
Speaker 1: couple who when they walked down the hall younger students
Speaker 1: sort of parted the way fish do around a shark,
Speaker 1: you know, in the coral reef, and then they um.
Speaker 1: Everybody knew who they were. And he certainly wasn't known
Speaker 1: for his academic prowess, but he was a you know,
Speaker 1: a big man on campus. I think we would say,
Speaker 1: and yeah, he was in my math class, but I
Speaker 1: hadn't tutored him. He just sat a couple desks up
Speaker 1: for me, and I would watch him trying to fit
Speaker 1: his limbs into the desk because it was one of
Speaker 1: those desks that was attached to the chair by a
Speaker 1: metal arm, and he had to kind of fold himself up,
Speaker 1: you know, like some sort of contortionists to get in
Speaker 1: this chair. Anyway, the pay phone rang in our dorms.
Speaker 1: Then a younger student who was downstairs it was their
Speaker 1: job to answer the phone, came upstairs and knocked on
Speaker 1: my door and she said, the phones for you. And
Speaker 1: this this was totally strange, and I worried it was
Speaker 1: my parents. But if my parents needed me, they would
Speaker 1: have called my advisor. So I went downstairs. Must have
Speaker 1: been ten thirty or eleven at night. We had signed
Speaker 1: in for the night at ten pm. We were not
Speaker 1: allowed to leave our dorms until six the next morning.
Speaker 1: And it was Rick. It was Rick Banner on the
Speaker 1: phone and he said, I need your help, Lazy, I
Speaker 1: need your help. And I said, I don't know who
Speaker 1: is that. Who is this? And he told me who
Speaker 1: it was, and right in that moment, and this tells
Speaker 1: you so much about who I was at that time.
Speaker 1: I didn't think it was a hoax. I didn't think
Speaker 1: it was a you know, the wrong number. I thought, Oh,
Speaker 1: if he needs me, then it must be something real,
Speaker 1: because how strange is this, right, Like, how unusual is
Speaker 1: it that he would call me? So there must be
Speaker 1: a very specific reason that he's calling me. I said
Speaker 1: what is it? And he said I need your help tonight.
Speaker 1: And I thought maybe it was math, but that didn't
Speaker 1: make any sense. And then he said I need you
Speaker 1: to cruise. And that was the word we used to
Speaker 1: describe sneaking out of your dorm and going somewhere else
Speaker 1: after check in was cruising. There were two security guards
Speaker 1: who patrolled the campus in white jeeps. They saw everything.
Speaker 1: They caught people all the time, and kids would be
Speaker 1: suspended and sent home and it went on your record.
Speaker 1: So we had to be very very careful if we
Speaker 1: snuck out of our dorms. And it was not something
Speaker 1: that I had done. So he said I need you
Speaker 1: to cruise. I need you to come over, and I
Speaker 1: said I can't. You know, I get busted. I can't,
Speaker 1: I can't late, I can't come over. And said no,
Speaker 1: you're really smart and you can do it, please, I
Speaker 1: need you. And it sounded like he was crying or
Speaker 1: he was going to cry. And said, what is wrong?
Speaker 1: And he said, it's my mom and I'll tell you
Speaker 1: when you get here. It's a thing with my mom.
Speaker 1: And and I I was convinced. I believed somehow that
Speaker 1: he needed me and that I could offer something that
Speaker 1: no one else could offer. And I couldn't imagine what
Speaker 1: it was. But so much of that school was being
Speaker 1: presented with just an incomparable mystery and then discovering what
Speaker 1: my place in it would be. That was the whole
Speaker 1: experience I had at St. Paul's. So this was not entirely,
Speaker 1: you know, out of keeping with what it had been
Speaker 1: like there. Just yet another wild thing happens, and you
Speaker 1: find a way to figure out where you belong. So
Speaker 1: I said, you know what, Okay, okay, I'll be right there,
Speaker 1: and I snuck out. I raced behind tree to tree
Speaker 1: to avoid the street lights that were along the path,
Speaker 1: and I went the back way through the meadow and
Speaker 1: I ducked behind the rectory and I went to the
Speaker 1: edge of his dorm. I didn't know he had to
Speaker 1: tell me where he lived. I didn't know which room
Speaker 1: was his. So I heard him whispering my name, and
Speaker 1: that was how I knew which room was his. And
Speaker 1: then he reached down and pulled me up by putting
Speaker 1: his hands under my arms and lifted me up through
Speaker 1: the window and I landed directly on a mattress. He
Speaker 1: was there, and someone else was there, and the lights
Speaker 1: were off, and I said, what's wrong? And he said
Speaker 1: and pointed to what I guessed was the door to
Speaker 1: the room and said, you know the name of the
Speaker 1: teacher whose apartment in the dorm shared that wall. And
Speaker 1: he said, Mr w is right there. And I knew
Speaker 1: what that meant. What that meant is if he heard
Speaker 1: my voice through the wall, he would come in, he
Speaker 1: would flip on the lights, and I would be caught,
Speaker 1: you know, having cruised. And as my eyes adjusted, I
Speaker 1: saw that the other person in the room was another
Speaker 1: senior who I didn't know at all, and that they
Speaker 1: weren't wearing clothes. They were in only their boxer shorts.
Speaker 1: So there I was on a bed with the two
Speaker 1: of them. So I said, again, what's wrong? What happened?
Speaker 1: And one of them, I don't know which one started
Speaker 1: needing my breasts and I was wearing. I'm not large chested,
Speaker 1: and I was wearing, you know, like a turtleneck and
Speaker 1: a swinter sweater or something. It was laid October in
Speaker 1: New Hampshire at night, and blue jeans and socks and sneakers.
Speaker 1: That's what I was wearing. And I didn't understand what
Speaker 1: was going on, because this isn't something that had happened
Speaker 1: to me. I didn't get it. And the force of
Speaker 1: it pushed me back onto the bed so that I
Speaker 1: was lying on my back, and then the other one
Speaker 1: unzipped my jeans and stuck his hand down my down
Speaker 1: there and put a finger inside me, at which point
Speaker 1: I shot my hand down there and sort of cupted
Speaker 1: myself to to force his hand away. I was a virgin.
Speaker 1: The only thing I remember thinking is as long as
Speaker 1: they don't have sex with me, I won't die. And
Speaker 1: the thing behind that is just what I knew from
Speaker 1: my health class and from my upbringing, which is you
Speaker 1: don't have sex until you're married or almost married, and
Speaker 1: if you do, you will either get AIDS or you
Speaker 1: will get pregnant, and horrible things will happen to you
Speaker 1: in your life will be ruined. That was how I
Speaker 1: was raised, and so I said, just don't have sex
Speaker 1: with me. That's what I said, just don't have sex
Speaker 1: with me. So instead they took turns laying their hips
Speaker 1: across my face, and the one of them would hold
Speaker 1: me sort of still so that the other one could
Speaker 1: move over me. And it was very difficult to breathe,
Speaker 1: and I was crying quietly. I didn't make a sound.
Speaker 1: And then when they were done, they let me go,
Speaker 1: and I climbed out the window and walked home. At
Speaker 1: no time did it occur to Lacy to shout out
Speaker 1: or to scream. If Mr w came in from the
Speaker 1: other room, he would have seen a fifth form girl
Speaker 1: out of her room against the rules, on a bed
Speaker 1: with two boys. It would have gone on her record.
Speaker 1: Her parents would have found out. They never would have
Speaker 1: forgiven her if she got into trouble in the fall
Speaker 1: of her junior year, college applications are on the line.
Speaker 1: And then add to that, I was in a senior
Speaker 1: boys room and they weren't clothed. How do I explain
Speaker 1: that to my father? How do I explain that to
Speaker 1: the teacher when he flips on the light. What do
Speaker 1: I say I was expecting? What do I say, and
Speaker 1: why would they believe me? Because I was already there,
Speaker 1: and also in my weird girl logic, because I said,
Speaker 1: just don't have sex with me and they didn't, I thought, Oh,
Speaker 1: I guess then this is what will happen. It didn't
Speaker 1: occur to me that what they were doing to me
Speaker 1: was a different form of violence. I mean, of course
Speaker 1: it was violent, and my body was quaking and I
Speaker 1: was crying and it was difficult to breathe. But I
Speaker 1: didn't know that this wasn't normal. I know that sounds crazy.
Speaker 1: I know that sounds crazy, But I did not know
Speaker 1: that this was not a thing that happened. I just didn't.
Speaker 1: The terms I did have were the words I had
Speaker 1: used that were sort of Saint Paul's slang for what
Speaker 1: boys and girls did together, right, And and the term
Speaker 1: we used was scrumping. So any kind of sexual activity,
Speaker 1: you know, of any extent, from nothing to everything, was
Speaker 1: called scrumping. And both of these boys had girlfriends, They
Speaker 1: had serious girlfriends, and I knew I knew one of
Speaker 1: the girlfriends well. I played sports with her, I liked
Speaker 1: her a lot. She was my year. And the thing
Speaker 1: that terrified me most was the thought that these girls
Speaker 1: would find out, and then the whole school would find
Speaker 1: out that I had gone to their rooms, the boys room,
Speaker 1: and I had done this, I had scrumped with them.
Speaker 1: I didn't I didn't even have I certainly didn't use
Speaker 1: the word blowjob in my head I because that's not
Speaker 1: what that was. I was impaled. I was like a tool.
Speaker 1: I was like I was a vessel. I was not
Speaker 1: a person, and I was just terrified that they would
Speaker 1: find out and I would not be able to deny it.
Speaker 1: So what I kept doing was both playing prosecutor and
Speaker 1: defense attorney in my mind, over and over, and it is, well,
Speaker 1: isn't it true that you did that, Yes, but I
Speaker 1: didn't want to. Isn't it true that you were in
Speaker 1: their room? Yes, but I didn't think that's what it was.
Speaker 1: And I I did this around and around, and so
Speaker 1: I figured that the only only option was to make
Speaker 1: sure that nobody ever found out. And as long as
Speaker 1: nobody ever found out, then I would survive and I
Speaker 1: could just get through school and I could live my
Speaker 1: life and it would be okay. This is October. Lacy
Speaker 1: tells no one, not her parents, not her best friends.
Speaker 1: It's a matter of survival. No one can know this
Speaker 1: ever happened to her. Months go by, and in the meantime,
Speaker 1: Lacey's throat it starts hurting. So there are two things
Speaker 1: that happened very quickly. The first is that the boys,
Speaker 1: and they were both a teen, so sometimes I call
Speaker 1: them men, sometimes boys. They told a bunch of people
Speaker 1: starting the very next day what had happened, and I
Speaker 1: know they didn't describe it the way I just described it,
Speaker 1: but they told the same details. And so the first
Speaker 1: word I heard that described what went on in that
Speaker 1: room came from one of their ice hockey teammates the
Speaker 1: next day, who sort of hissed at me. Threesome. And
Speaker 1: the reason this is remarkable to me is because I
Speaker 1: had been a girl who didn't have a boyfriend, didn't
Speaker 1: do a whole lot, worked really hard, obviously wished she
Speaker 1: was cooler than she was, but had good friends, you know,
Speaker 1: and did well and was unremarkable. And suddenly it appears
Speaker 1: that I am behaving in a way that a completely
Speaker 1: out of character, and nobody thought to think, huh, is
Speaker 1: there something else? Is there something we don't know? Could
Speaker 1: it be true or not true in a way that
Speaker 1: we don't understand. So I started getting these kisces and
Speaker 1: the gossip and the side eyes and chapel and the
Speaker 1: whispers and the leers, which I then had to ignore
Speaker 1: everywhere I went. So I felt like my skin was
Speaker 1: on fire. And within about a week, my throat started
Speaker 1: to hurt and it didn't get better. So I I
Speaker 1: stood in front of the mirror in my dorm by myself,
Speaker 1: when everyone else was, you know, out of class or sports,
Speaker 1: and I opened my mouth as wide as I could,
Speaker 1: and I made the sound, and I looked and I looked,
Speaker 1: and there was nothing there. There was nothing to see.
Speaker 1: But my throat hurt so much that I first stopped
Speaker 1: being able to eat, and finally stopped being able to
Speaker 1: drink anything except ice water, or sometimes I would put
Speaker 1: a little bit of skim milk on my tongue and
Speaker 1: then tip my head back to had it run down,
Speaker 1: because if I swallowed, the act of swallowing would cause
Speaker 1: my throat to grind in a way that was excruciating.
Speaker 1: So I I figured I was being punished for what
Speaker 1: I had done, but I did not understand what form
Speaker 1: that punishment was taking. But I was raised in a
Speaker 1: family that was pious. We went to church every Sunday.
Speaker 1: I haven't mentioned yet that my mom was an episcopal priest.
Speaker 1: It was pretty clear to me that if I had
Speaker 1: done something as bad as what I had done, there
Speaker 1: would be some retaliation from, you know, the great gods
Speaker 1: of morality. So I went to the infirmary after chapel.
Speaker 1: One morning, I went up to our student health center
Speaker 1: and I said, my throat hurt so much, I can't eat.
Speaker 1: And she said, all right, you know, say oh, and
Speaker 1: she put the tongue depressed around my tongue and she said,
Speaker 1: there's nothing there. You're totally fine. Just got a little
Speaker 1: more sleep. She gave me a lozenge and sent me
Speaker 1: to class. And she was right. She couldn't see anything.
Speaker 1: There was nothing to see. And it wasn't until I
Speaker 1: went back to the infirmary a few days later, and
Speaker 1: I have all these medical records. Now. I had lost
Speaker 1: seven pounds by then because I couldn't eat and I
Speaker 1: had a high fever, and my throat was very swollen.
Speaker 1: My lymph nodes were very swollen. And again the infirmary
Speaker 1: couldn't see anything, but they sent me to an ear
Speaker 1: nose and throat doctor in town in Concord, New Hampshire,
Speaker 1: so off campus, an actual position off campus in town,
Speaker 1: and they diagnosed that I had contracted herpes in the
Speaker 1: hype of pharyngeal space, which is the space at the
Speaker 1: back of the throat more or less where the gag
Speaker 1: reflex lies. It's impossible to see on an ordinary exam,
Speaker 1: which is why nobody in the infirmary or I myself
Speaker 1: could see any of the sores. So they had to
Speaker 1: numb up my throat and use special mirrors and lights
Speaker 1: to see what was going on. But they communicated this
Speaker 1: information to the pediatrician at the infirmary at St. Paul's.
Speaker 1: They neglected to tell me or my parents or my
Speaker 1: doctors at home, who were very worried, because I had
Speaker 1: kept calling home and saying I'm really sick and I
Speaker 1: can't eat and something's wrong. This bears repeating the patient
Speaker 1: Lacey Crawford, the person to whom this has happened and
Speaker 1: who has this virus, is not told about it. Her
Speaker 1: parents are not told about it. Only her school is
Speaker 1: told about it. I got ahold of my medical records
Speaker 1: and the school's files in the last couple of years,
Speaker 1: and they confirmed everything that I remembered, which is this
Speaker 1: that I kept going to doctors and opening my mouth
Speaker 1: to show them how much pain I was in, which
Speaker 1: is an almost sort of over attenuated metaphor. It's like
Speaker 1: an it's an overdetermined metaphor for the fact that I
Speaker 1: was trying to say what had happened to me and
Speaker 1: I could not speak. I all but lost my voice,
Speaker 1: and they kept looking in my throat and saying, there's
Speaker 1: nothing there, there's nothing there. But when finally the e
Speaker 1: n t that ear nose and throat specialists and conquered
Speaker 1: does see that there are herpetic lesions in the hypo
Speaker 1: pharyngeal space and nowhere else, mind you, nowhere else. That
Speaker 1: information was communicated to the infirmary to the physician there
Speaker 1: who has since died. He since passed away, and he
Speaker 1: didn't tell me. So I was fifteen years old and
Speaker 1: I couldn't eat, and my parents knew I was staying
Speaker 1: in the infirmary. I had a high fever, I was
Speaker 1: losing weight, and my doctors at home, so the entire
Speaker 1: practice of the pediatricians in my small town, they were
Speaker 1: all trying to figure out what could be wrong with me,
Speaker 1: and I have I have their notes too. They had
Speaker 1: a differential diagnosis that included lupus, and that included leukemia
Speaker 1: and other autoimmune disorders that might cause sluffing of mucus membranes,
Speaker 1: And they were figuring out what blood work to order
Speaker 1: and making plans, frankly, to bring me home. And the
Speaker 1: doctor at St. Paul's was having these conversations with them
Speaker 1: and did not tell them what had been diagnosed. So
Speaker 1: this was the first time that I had encountered what
Speaker 1: would be a pattern of institutional silencing that is both
Speaker 1: breathtaking and I suspect horrifyingly common. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: The assault happened in October. Now it's spring. Lacy still
Speaker 1: hasn't told a soul. She's in sort of a relationship now,
Speaker 1: a nice, safe, asexual relationship with a classmate named Scotty.
Speaker 1: She's suffering, of course, both emotionally and physically, but she's
Speaker 1: remaining silent until one afternoon, in a ecologically really remarkable moment,
Speaker 1: a memory is triggered. While she's hanging out with Scotty.
Speaker 1: He's tracing a scar on her leg, a scar she
Speaker 1: got the year before when she had had her legs
Speaker 1: sliced open while diving into a pond at St. Paul's
Speaker 1: at the end of my junior year. I was sitting
Speaker 1: with the boy I called Scotti, and he was tracing
Speaker 1: his finger along the scar on my thigh that was
Speaker 1: at that point a year old, and he was saying, gosh,
Speaker 1: you know a lot of bad things happened to you, uh,
Speaker 1: And I was thinking, no, not really, but actually maybe so.
Speaker 1: And I remembered the boat docks, and I remember slicing
Speaker 1: my leg, and I remember coming up bleeding, and I
Speaker 1: remember everybody worrying about me, and how wonderful it had
Speaker 1: been that everyone had worried about me a year before,
Speaker 1: because now, you know, I felt like a pariah and
Speaker 1: I was in pain all the time, and nobody knew.
Speaker 1: And I remembered in a moment who it was who
Speaker 1: had put a towel around me and picked me up
Speaker 1: and carried me. And there really was only one person
Speaker 1: who was tall enough to pick me up and hold
Speaker 1: me the way he had, and that was Rick Banner.
Speaker 1: He had been down there with his buddies, you know,
Speaker 1: tossing around a lacrosse ball at the grassy edge of
Speaker 1: the pond, and he had come down and he had
Speaker 1: said I got her, I got her. I remembered him
Speaker 1: saying I got her, and in that moment, I thought,
Speaker 1: oh my god, if he if he carried me, if
Speaker 1: he held me. And then he turned around and he
Speaker 1: did what he did to me. And I'm still not
Speaker 1: sure that I understand the precise emotional, psychological logic of this,
Speaker 1: but I can say that I remembered the girl who
Speaker 1: had needed help. And if there's one thing I refused
Speaker 1: to let myself be the year after the assault, it
Speaker 1: was a girl who needed help. I thought I was
Speaker 1: a girl who had ruined her whole life. That's what
Speaker 1: I thought, you know. I didn't think that I deserved
Speaker 1: care at all. I thought I was guilty of a
Speaker 1: million things. And to remember a girl who had done
Speaker 1: nothing wrong and had been bleeding, and that he had
Speaker 1: scooped her up and taken her up the hill. And
Speaker 1: I thought, no, no, I have to say what happened.
Speaker 1: I have to say what happened to me. And it
Speaker 1: was that night that I called my mom from the
Speaker 1: very same pay phone. I was in the same dorm,
Speaker 1: and I told her. I told her what had happened.
Speaker 1: Your mom? She asks, you, if you were raped you say,
Speaker 1: only my mouth, and your mother responds by saying, when
Speaker 1: when was this and you tell her it was October,
Speaker 1: and then she says, oh, your throat, and she understands
Speaker 1: the whole thing in a flash, and she wants you
Speaker 1: to come home. You want to stay and finish your
Speaker 1: exams because you are on this path. You know, it's
Speaker 1: a path that's going to lead to Princeton, right, which
Speaker 1: is where your father went. That's where my father went
Speaker 1: and my grandfather before him. Yes, and this is the
Speaker 1: this is the path that you've already suffered a lot
Speaker 1: to be on. And you're going to finish those exams
Speaker 1: and say to shout the year, and then you'll come home.
Speaker 1: And your mother permits you to do that. The moment
Speaker 1: I left the boy's room, they had taken so much
Speaker 1: from me. I was only beginning to imagine how much
Speaker 1: they had taken from me, to understand how much they
Speaker 1: had taken from me, and I didn't want to give
Speaker 1: up one more thing. So I was busy, as you say,
Speaker 1: on the path that I had always imagined was mine
Speaker 1: and also the only path I could possibly imagine for myself,
Speaker 1: which was to achieve to follow my father's footsteps to Princeton.
Speaker 1: I wasn't sure what I would do after that. I
Speaker 1: was going to worry about it later. So that meant
Speaker 1: staying for my exams and not letting anybody know that
Speaker 1: I had gone home early and something untoward had happened.
Speaker 1: I didn't want any more gossip. I was just going
Speaker 1: to continue on as I had. But my mom called
Speaker 1: the school. She actually called the school's chaplain right after
Speaker 1: she hung up with me, because he was also an
Speaker 1: episcopal priest, and she cried to him, I now know,
Speaker 1: for two hours. This is in case notes about what
Speaker 1: had been done to me, and everything made sense to her,
Speaker 1: how sick I had been, that I couldn't eat, you know,
Speaker 1: that we couldn't see anything. Everything made sense. What the
Speaker 1: school then did was not called the police. They were
Speaker 1: mandated reporters. That was the law, was that they should
Speaker 1: call the police and report this event. They did not. Instead,
Speaker 1: they opened their own internal investigation into my allegations, and
Speaker 1: that investigation included helping themselves to my medical records. So
Speaker 1: they found out that yes, in fact, I had contracted
Speaker 1: herbies in the hypopharyngeal space away back in October. I
Speaker 1: imagine now as an adult. They also realized that they
Speaker 1: were in a whole lot of trouble. You know, if
Speaker 1: if my family chose to hire a lawyer because there
Speaker 1: was clinical evidence of what I was claiming, and they
Speaker 1: decided to do something really quite brilliant in its sadism,
Speaker 1: Which is this The coach, and I am not one
Speaker 1: sure which one it is, so I will not name someone,
Speaker 1: although I'm sure gathered up several of the athletes who
Speaker 1: were on the hockey and also across team the boys,
Speaker 1: and said to them, if any one of you has
Speaker 1: been intimate with Lacy Crawford, you need to go to
Speaker 1: the infirmary and get checked out for her piece. I
Speaker 1: didn't know that this had happened. I was there taking
Speaker 1: my exams. Nobody talked to me anyway. I had become
Speaker 1: very strange and very withdrawn. I finished my exams, I
Speaker 1: packed my bag a couple of days early, at my
Speaker 1: mom's request. I didn't stay for graduation or anything that year,
Speaker 1: and I flew home the very next morning. My mom
Speaker 1: brought me to my pediatrician in Chicago and Lake Forest, Illinois,
Speaker 1: and the pediatrician did a sexual assault exam, and she
Speaker 1: used the word sexual assault. I had never considered that term.
Speaker 1: That was the first time I had heard that word
Speaker 1: applied to what had happened to me. It didn't fit.
Speaker 1: It seemed to make it sound worse. It seemed to
Speaker 1: make it sound like everybody was going to be a
Speaker 1: part of this now, and that my life was spiraling
Speaker 1: so much more out of my control then I could imagine.
Speaker 1: And she swabbed my throat very deep. I gagged my eyes,
Speaker 1: ran and sent off the swab, and ten days later
Speaker 1: it came back positive. And she called and said, I'm
Speaker 1: so very sorry you've contracted genital herpies in your throat.
Speaker 1: But this is how we'll treat it, and this is
Speaker 1: how you'll stay healthy, and this is what we're going
Speaker 1: to do. And she was very nurturing and caring. But
Speaker 1: the school had already told my schoolmates that I had herpies,
Speaker 1: so my classmates found out before I did. I had
Speaker 1: sores all year. I could barely eat, I could barely sing.
Speaker 1: I was benched on the ice hockey team because the
Speaker 1: air and the rink was too cold for me to
Speaker 1: breathe without my throat sticking together. So I went untreated
Speaker 1: and my father after my physician called at home and
Speaker 1: like forest and said, we're so sorry, this is what
Speaker 1: you have. My father called the dean of students at
Speaker 1: school and told him. You know, my dad thought told
Speaker 1: him for the first time, right have called with this
Speaker 1: breaking news that his daughter had actually contracted an STD
Speaker 1: as a result of what had been done to her.
Speaker 1: And the Dean of students replied to my father, how
Speaker 1: do we know Lacy didn't give it to the boys.
Speaker 1: How do we know Lacy didn't give it to the boys.
Speaker 1: Right now we have the reason. It was impossible for
Speaker 1: Lacey to scream or fight back or make noise the
Speaker 1: night of the assault. As she writes in her memoir,
Speaker 1: a girl who is attacked will so often assume that
Speaker 1: the fault lies with her. But this isn't the girl.
Speaker 1: This is the dean of students, casting doubt and blame.
Speaker 1: How do we know Lacey didn't give it to the boys.
Speaker 1: This casting of doubt and blame is endemic to the institution.
Speaker 1: As Lacey packs up to leave St. Paul's after her exams,
Speaker 1: the school's chaplain pays a visit to her room. This
Speaker 1: was the chaplain who my mom had called actually and
Speaker 1: told him about what I had reported to her. I
Speaker 1: did not know that the chaplain knew that. I thought
Speaker 1: my mother had kept this a secret, and I had
Speaker 1: just made up some excuse for why I was leaving
Speaker 1: a couple of days early. He was also my religion teacher,
Speaker 1: and because I was the daughter of a priest and
Speaker 1: had grown up in the church and was very familiar
Speaker 1: with liturgy and scripture and loved books, I thought I
Speaker 1: was really good in religion class. I thought I had
Speaker 1: written an excellent paper, and so when he came to
Speaker 1: my room, I actually thought that he was going to
Speaker 1: tell me that I had won a prize. There was
Speaker 1: a very big prize for juniors. And that tells you
Speaker 1: again still how my ambition and naivete were clashing with
Speaker 1: the desperate need that I had to speak the truth
Speaker 1: and to be heard. I could not reconcile being a
Speaker 1: girl I was supposed to be with the girl I
Speaker 1: now was. I couldn't do it. I could not bring
Speaker 1: those two people together. So he came into my room
Speaker 1: and he was kind of moving things out of the
Speaker 1: way with his feet, and he was frustrated that it
Speaker 1: was taking me so long to pack up. And I
Speaker 1: had a Duffel bag on the bed. It was my
Speaker 1: initials on it, you know, like an l Obeam Duffel
Speaker 1: bag with my initials on it. And I I didn't
Speaker 1: want to open my underwear drawer and pull out my
Speaker 1: underwear and pack my underwear while the chaplain was standing
Speaker 1: in my single room and he glared at me. He
Speaker 1: glared at me, and I kept saying, I don't want
Speaker 1: to leave before the awards day. I don't want to
Speaker 1: leave with you before the awards day. And he said,
Speaker 1: you don't need to be here for the awards day.
Speaker 1: And I asked him again, and he repeated it again.
Speaker 1: And in that moment, I understood only that I wasn't
Speaker 1: going to be winning a prize. I did not understand
Speaker 1: what he was actually saying to me, which is, you
Speaker 1: need to get out of here. You've ruined everything that
Speaker 1: he had the day before been sitting in a meeting
Speaker 1: with senior deans and the headmaster of our school, whom
Speaker 1: we call a rector who was also a priest, and
Speaker 1: with the school's lawyer, and they had decided that I
Speaker 1: had gone to this boys these boys rooms consensually, and
Speaker 1: that I had done what I had done. I refused
Speaker 1: to use a flippant euphemism, that I had done what
Speaker 1: I had done to them, choked myself on their penises consensually,
Speaker 1: and that I was now claiming that it hadn't been consensual,
Speaker 1: and also I had gotten them sick, and this was
Speaker 1: a mess for the school. And he was looking at
Speaker 1: me with something like disgust in his eyes. But I
Speaker 1: did not know at the time that he knew what
Speaker 1: he knew. I only found that out much later. I
Speaker 1: simply knew that he was cold, and that he wasn't
Speaker 1: awarding me any prizes, and he was in a real
Speaker 1: hurry to get me to the taxi, to at me
Speaker 1: into the airport, to get me off campus. So once
Speaker 1: you're back home, and once it has been determined by
Speaker 1: your pediatrician that you had contracted her piece and in
Speaker 1: a place that I should add, it would be damn
Speaker 1: near impossible to contract her piece consensually, and or if
Speaker 1: you if you were to, and this is technical, but
Speaker 1: this is important to me. If it were a consensual act,
Speaker 1: I would have been exposed in other parts of my
Speaker 1: mouth and on my lips. Does that make sense, because
Speaker 1: it does, And there was nothing except at the very
Speaker 1: back of my throat. As she spends the summer between
Speaker 1: fifth form and sixth form, or in common parlance, junior
Speaker 1: and senior year back home in Lake Forest, Lacy fully
Speaker 1: intends to return to St. Paul's to finish her high
Speaker 1: school career. There she's on a path, the only one
Speaker 1: she knows, and she can't imagine any future other than
Speaker 1: sticking to it. And then the school does something diabolical
Speaker 1: and ingenious. If Lacey and her parents proceed with their confrontation,
Speaker 1: if they make it legal, if Lacey testifies against the
Speaker 1: two boys, the school will smear her reputation. I would
Speaker 1: have let all that go because the boys had graduated,
Speaker 1: and I wasn't about to give up St. Paul's and
Speaker 1: let them graduate. But not me. That wasn't gonna happen.
Speaker 1: I thought, fine, we know what I have. I'm taking medication.
Speaker 1: They're gone. Now I'm going to go back and we're
Speaker 1: just gonna get through this. We're just gonna put our
Speaker 1: heads down and get through this, because that's what I
Speaker 1: had been doing. But my pediatrician reported the assault to
Speaker 1: the State of New Hampshire, as she was mandated to do.
Speaker 1: That's the law, and the state of New Hampshire was
Speaker 1: very interested to hear this because not only was it
Speaker 1: a statutory assault, by which I mean even if I
Speaker 1: had given my consent, it was against the law because
Speaker 1: the two men were eighteen and I was fifteen, and
Speaker 1: that was against the law in the state of New Hampshire.
Speaker 1: The form of penetration that I suffered. Furthermore, I had
Speaker 1: gotten sick and there were medical records that confirmed, you know,
Speaker 1: that I had gotten sick. So it was a pretty
Speaker 1: open and closed case, and the police and conquered New
Speaker 1: Hampshire wanted to press charges against the two who had
Speaker 1: assaulted me. What this would have meant for most likely
Speaker 1: is that I would have testified against them, right that
Speaker 1: would have been part of a trial. So the school
Speaker 1: responded to this threat by calling my father. My dad
Speaker 1: and my mom went into my dad's office with a
Speaker 1: little pad of graph paper and my dad wrote down
Speaker 1: the things that the school said they would say, and
Speaker 1: they basically said, you need to understand that Lacy is
Speaker 1: not a good girl and she is not welcome back
Speaker 1: on our campus. And my dad, so, what are you
Speaker 1: what are you talking about? You know, she's she's a
Speaker 1: try vers athlete, she's in all the choir, she has
Speaker 1: almost perfect grades. What on earth could you mean? And
Speaker 1: they said, actually, you know, Mr Crawford, the following things
Speaker 1: are true about her. One, she is a drug dealer.
Speaker 1: This is laughable and laughable. To she routinely flout school
Speaker 1: rules and expectations, also laughable. Three that I was promiscuous. Well,
Speaker 1: I have a few things to say about that, essentially
Speaker 1: that I was a disaster and a danger to my peers.
Speaker 1: And they said to my father, if she is on
Speaker 1: the stand, this is what we are going to reveal
Speaker 1: about her. And it was understood that if I went
Speaker 1: forward with the state pressing charges against the boys and
Speaker 1: there was a trial. St. Pauls School would say this
Speaker 1: about me. So I would have been in the position
Speaker 1: of applying to college with my boarding school accusing me
Speaker 1: of being a drug dealer and promiscuous and someone who
Speaker 1: used alcohol all the time, and someone who was a
Speaker 1: danger to her peers. They would have ruined my life,
Speaker 1: or so it seemed. And my father and mother said,
Speaker 1: this is what they're going to say about you, and
Speaker 1: we all decided we couldn't do it. So I called
Speaker 1: the police department and conquered New Hampshire, and I gave
Speaker 1: a formal statement saying that I did not wish the
Speaker 1: police to press charges against the boys who assaulted me.
Speaker 1: It was recorded, you know, it was entered into my record,
Speaker 1: and the criminal file was closed. And once that happened, St.
Speaker 1: Paul School welcomed me back for my senior year. I
Speaker 1: suddenly wasn't a drug dealer anymore, and I wasn't a
Speaker 1: threat to other students anymore. But of course what I
Speaker 1: didn't know, and would shortly find out, is that everyone
Speaker 1: on campus knew that I had her pies, even though
Speaker 1: I had only found out myself a few weeks before
Speaker 1: and hadn't told us. Soul Lacy, what was that senior
Speaker 1: year like for you? I mean, one thing that struck
Speaker 1: me is that there was a gift in that gauntlet
Speaker 1: at some point during your sixth form year in the
Speaker 1: form of Mrs Radley. She taught religion too. She was
Speaker 1: also a priest and a music teacher. So Mrs Radley
Speaker 1: was a priest and a music teacher, and you were
Speaker 1: interested in doing an independent study and you wanted her
Speaker 1: to be your advisor, and it was specifically a study
Speaker 1: about depression and art depression and artists, and she took
Speaker 1: you under her wing. She made it very clear to you,
Speaker 1: very quickly that she she saw you. When I went
Speaker 1: to her and asked her if I could do an
Speaker 1: independent study with her, it was up in the little
Speaker 1: house that she lived in that was part of the
Speaker 1: campus housing, and she had a dog, and she was
Speaker 1: not married at that time, she was divorced, and she
Speaker 1: gestured to a bedroom in her house, a guest bedroom
Speaker 1: that I didn't know was there, and she said, if
Speaker 1: you ever need a safe place to sleep at night,
Speaker 1: you may come up here. The back door will be open,
Speaker 1: and you may sleep there, and I will vouch for you.
Speaker 1: And I had never told her what happened to me.
Speaker 1: I didn't have to. She knew that I was in danger.
Speaker 1: She had so many close relationships with students on campus
Speaker 1: that clearly she would have understood what the gossip meant,
Speaker 1: that I was in danger, and I knew that someone
Speaker 1: had my back. And I also understand that what she
Speaker 1: did was the only useful way to support me, because
Speaker 1: if she had gone to the administration, if she had
Speaker 1: tried to raise hell, they would have done to her
Speaker 1: what they did to me. They would have put her
Speaker 1: in danger. So she found a way to offer me safety,
Speaker 1: and she was really the only one who did so.
Speaker 1: I returned for my senior year with this odd understanding
Speaker 1: that as long as I didn't speak about the assault,
Speaker 1: or changed my mind about pressing charges or file a
Speaker 1: lawsuit against the school, you know, as long as I
Speaker 1: didn't do those things, the school would not interfere with
Speaker 1: my senior year or my college applications, and everything would
Speaker 1: be fine. Lacy keeps her head down, feels protected by
Speaker 1: Mrs Radley, and gets through senior year. She's admitted to Princeton,
Speaker 1: just as had been the plan. So she's escaped, right.
Speaker 1: The hideousness of what happened at St. Paul's is now
Speaker 1: behind her, not so much. As she goes through college
Speaker 1: and enters her early adult life, the stories follow her.
Speaker 1: They plague and shame her. She experiences crushing depression, she
Speaker 1: wants to die and thinks about it. She's unable to
Speaker 1: form real attachments with men and choose his boyfriends who
Speaker 1: are either mostly absent or unspeakably cruel. Lazy pretty much
Speaker 1: loses her twenties. As she writes, everything listened and nothing grew.
Speaker 1: I think the experience of being assaulted. For me was
Speaker 1: that the life I had lived came to an rupt
Speaker 1: end and a new one began, and I could not
Speaker 1: figure out how to get back to the girl I
Speaker 1: had been, or even whether it was worth trying, because
Speaker 1: she was the type of fool who got herself into
Speaker 1: that situation. So the guilt constantly. It wasn't until people
Speaker 1: believed me that I was able to reimagine, and I
Speaker 1: had a glimpse of it. I had a glimpse of
Speaker 1: it when I remembered Rick Banner picking me up and caring.
Speaker 1: Just a girl, just an ordinary girl, not a girl
Speaker 1: who gets herself into trouble or makes stupid choices, but
Speaker 1: an ordinary girl who deserved care. The person I had
Speaker 1: become was simply invisible, was simply not worth listening to.
Speaker 1: Was someone who was not a reliable witness to her
Speaker 1: own experience, who simply didn't understand what had happened and
Speaker 1: didn't understand how the world worked. And that dogged me
Speaker 1: everywhere I went. It dogged me in literal terms. So
Speaker 1: I got to Princeton. There were a lot of St.
Speaker 1: Paul's kids there and kids from other boarding schools, and
Speaker 1: the gossip about herpes beat me to campus. I I
Speaker 1: couldn't even start fresh, you know, in college, and I
Speaker 1: should have gone somewhere else. It followed me into the
Speaker 1: jobs that I held in my twenties because people knew
Speaker 1: people who knew people who knew people, and I didn't
Speaker 1: feel like I could go into a room and be
Speaker 1: new ever, but that nobody at the same time would
Speaker 1: have believed me if I had told them the truth.
Speaker 1: So the story preceded me, and there was nothing left
Speaker 1: for me to say. And that led me to feel
Speaker 1: that I couldn't build a life and didn't really deserve to.
Speaker 1: And yes, I did leave the door open for for
Speaker 1: the end of my life in a lot of different ways.
Speaker 1: And I made decisions that were reckless, and I was
Speaker 1: in an emotionally abusive relationship for the eight years of
Speaker 1: my twenties, and and it was self destructive in the extreme.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 1: As Lacey enters her thirties, her life starts to improve.
Speaker 1: She finds solid footing in a good relationship, Mary's becomes
Speaker 1: a mom. She finds satisfaction in her life as a writer.
Speaker 1: Lacy studiously avoids news about st Paul's school. They've finally
Speaker 1: stopped sending her the alumni newsletters. They've lost track of
Speaker 1: her or she's outrun them, but now it's and news
Speaker 1: from St. Paul's catches up with her. I knew nothing
Speaker 1: of the two thousand investigation, or so called investigation, which
Speaker 1: was actually about teachers assaulting students, because they didn't put
Speaker 1: out a call to alumni, so none of us ever
Speaker 1: heard about it. They buried it. But there was a
Speaker 1: freshman who was fifteen like I had been, who was
Speaker 1: sexually assaulted by an eighteen year old senior like I
Speaker 1: had been, Jessie Prout, in the year two thousand fourteen,
Speaker 1: and she told right away, she said, oh my god,
Speaker 1: this just happened to me. And she had bite marks
Speaker 1: on her breast. And she reported to her friends, and
Speaker 1: she reported to her counselor, and she went to the hospital,
Speaker 1: and she went to the police and her parents, her
Speaker 1: father had actually gone to St. Paul's, and her parents said,
Speaker 1: this will not stand. This will not stand. And they
Speaker 1: stood behind their girl absolutely right away. They didn't say,
Speaker 1: why did you go to meet up with him? What
Speaker 1: did you think would have And they didn't say any
Speaker 1: of those things. They stood by their girl, and what
Speaker 1: the school ended up doing, which is remarkable, is after
Speaker 1: her assailant had been convicted on multiple charges, her family
Speaker 1: filed a civil lawsuit against St. Paul's school for allowing
Speaker 1: the culture to persist, to exist and persist, this rape
Speaker 1: culture in which students were kept in such danger, and
Speaker 1: the school responded to that lawsuit by petitioning the Superior
Speaker 1: Court to release the name of the girl who was
Speaker 1: the victims, so nobody knew. Chessie Prott's name is certainly
Speaker 1: not in the public or the media because by universal convention,
Speaker 1: the names of the victims of sexual assault, especially when
Speaker 1: they're miners, are not released. They're redacted in court filings,
Speaker 1: and the media does not report on them. And St.
Speaker 1: Paul's school said they didn't think that was fair, so
Speaker 1: their lawyer, who happened to be the former Attorney General
Speaker 1: of the State of New Hampshire, filed that they should
Speaker 1: be able to force her name into the press, which
Speaker 1: is at the moment at which I tuned in. And
Speaker 1: I tuned in because my best friend, who's a lawyer
Speaker 1: who did not go to St. Paul's, called me and said,
Speaker 1: holy shit, have you seen this thing St. Paul's has done.
Speaker 1: It is the nastiest thing I've ever seen. And I
Speaker 1: pulled the filing down off the Court of the Superior
Speaker 1: Court website and I read it myself, and I burst
Speaker 1: into tears, because that is, in its way, exactly what
Speaker 1: they did to me. They shamed me publicly in order
Speaker 1: to make me shut up and go away. Now, chess
Speaker 1: Prouts said the hell you do, and she went on
Speaker 1: the Today Show and outed herself and said, yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: not ashamed. This is what was done to me. And
Speaker 1: I was so rocked by that that I I started
Speaker 1: to re engage with this thing that I would have
Speaker 1: sworn to you up and down. I had put behind
Speaker 1: me in every way, and of course it was right there.
Speaker 1: It hadn't left my side. It strikes me too that
Speaker 1: in the years between your assault and and Chessie Prouds,
Speaker 1: there was the beginning of rumblings of a kind of shift.
Speaker 1: That's right. I was assaulted in right, and so it
Speaker 1: was twenty five years and it was a generation, that's right.
Speaker 1: And I think me too had not yet become the
Speaker 1: force that it is now. But things were beginning to change,
Speaker 1: and Chessie's parents in many ways illustrated for me what
Speaker 1: it could look like when parents said, nah, not not
Speaker 1: our girl. You know, we don't care what you say
Speaker 1: about her on the stand, We don't care. You know
Speaker 1: this was wrong and you need to change. And I sobbed,
Speaker 1: I sobbed. I said to my husband, that's that's the
Speaker 1: other thing you can do, if you're a mom or
Speaker 1: a dad, as you can say, we don't care what
Speaker 1: you say about her. And easy for me to say,
Speaker 1: now you know it wasn't And I wanted to go
Speaker 1: back to school. When the new Attorney General met the
Speaker 1: State of New Hampshire opened a formal investigation into St.
Speaker 1: Paul's school because there had been so many accounts of
Speaker 1: assault and quote boundary violations and quote on campus, and
Speaker 1: we were invited the public was invited to come forward
Speaker 1: if they had any stories of having been victimized on campus,
Speaker 1: particularly if they could testify to the school having failed
Speaker 1: to report having obstructed justice or tampered with witnesses in
Speaker 1: any way. And I thought, yeah, I've got some stories
Speaker 1: about that. So very quietly I got in touch with
Speaker 1: the Attorney General's office and I got a call back
Speaker 1: from a detective almost immediately, who said he had pulled
Speaker 1: my case file from I didn't even realize there had
Speaker 1: been one. It was on microfiche. They printed it out
Speaker 1: and they wanted to interview me at my earliest convenience.
Speaker 1: So very quietly I participated in this investigation. They told me,
Speaker 1: I still, because of a few loopholes, could press charges
Speaker 1: against the men who assaulted me. One of them has
Speaker 1: been in and ount of jail for most of his
Speaker 1: adult life. The other one has had a difficult time,
Speaker 1: although not in that way. And I declined to press charges.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to fly away from my children, be
Speaker 1: on the other side of the country, and I didn't
Speaker 1: know what that would be for. I just said, I
Speaker 1: want you to know that this is what the school does,
Speaker 1: This is what they do to victims, this is what
Speaker 1: they do. And somehow the school found out that I
Speaker 1: was participating in that investor stigation, and I got a
Speaker 1: very terse email from their lawyers asking me to contact them.
Speaker 1: I forwarded that to the police and the police said
Speaker 1: it's go time, and they drove up to the campus
Speaker 1: that afternoon. It was August of two thousand seventeen, and
Speaker 1: got ahold of my student file which at that point
Speaker 1: was twenty five years old, and in my student file
Speaker 1: was documented evidence of everything I've just told you, including
Speaker 1: the lawyer advising the school to say that unless I
Speaker 1: dropped the charges, I could not return to campus, which
Speaker 1: is illegal. You can't do that, including the school admitting
Speaker 1: that they had not reported my assault and had no
Speaker 1: intention to. All of this was in there, and the
Speaker 1: police took photographs of every page, and they called me
Speaker 1: and said, we have it. You know, we have the
Speaker 1: smoking gun. We have two cases. Now we have the assault,
Speaker 1: you know, and it's cover up in and now we
Speaker 1: have this in two thousand seventeen. You have these documents.
Speaker 1: Here we are and they presented it all to the
Speaker 1: Attorney General as investigators, and the Attorney General said, we
Speaker 1: refused to admit this evidence. We are not interested in
Speaker 1: her case and we will not hear anything of her file.
Speaker 1: So they effectively meant to silence me again. The Old
Speaker 1: Boys network was at it again. These attorneys all ran
Speaker 1: in the same prominent New Hampshire legal circles and once
Speaker 1: again sought to protect themselves and the institution rather than
Speaker 1: the soul of a girl who had been crushed there.
Speaker 1: But now Lacy is no longer that crushed girl. She's
Speaker 1: a grown woman who understands and has lived with the
Speaker 1: price of silence. When I was following what the school
Speaker 1: was doing to try to shut down the civil case
Speaker 1: that Jesse Prout's family had brought, I did not feel
Speaker 1: yet safe to consider what had happened to me. I
Speaker 1: was still heartbroken and angry. But but yes, I was
Speaker 1: at that point, almost ten years into marriage to my husband,
Speaker 1: who is a man who is not unfamiliar with tragedy
Speaker 1: and loss in his own life and in his work,
Speaker 1: who is not surprised by um how common sexual assault is,
Speaker 1: and who has never made me feel ashamed or that
Speaker 1: I should be guilty, or that what happened to me
Speaker 1: is in any way remarkable, which is in fact a gift.
Speaker 1: And so I was able to speak with him so
Speaker 1: openly about what was coming up for me while I
Speaker 1: was watching the way Chessie and her family were navigating,
Speaker 1: the media onslaught and the school's reaction. When I then
Speaker 1: joined the case in two thousand seventeen and conquered, police
Speaker 1: were severed, and the detectives who had worked with me
Speaker 1: were wonderful and very victims centered and they made me
Speaker 1: feel that I was legitimate. They said this is a
Speaker 1: predatory act. They sent me the actual codes that these
Speaker 1: you know, the codes of the violation, that this is
Speaker 1: aggravated felonious sexual assault. And here's why they gave me
Speaker 1: the terms from the criminal justice system to explain to
Speaker 1: me what had been done. And after they were severed,
Speaker 1: and I could not believe that this was happening again,
Speaker 1: and presumably to protect the lawyer who had worked for St.
Speaker 1: Paul's School all those years ago, who wrote these plans
Speaker 1: for my silencing, and who is still very prominent in
Speaker 1: the state of New Hampshire and practicing my case was severed,
Speaker 1: and so I started getting ahold of my own records.
Speaker 1: I got ahold of my medical records from my little
Speaker 1: pediatrics office in Lake Forest, Illinois. I got a hold
Speaker 1: of records from the ear nose and throat doctor I
Speaker 1: had seen and conquered New Hampshire. That was how I
Speaker 1: saw for the first time that a vice rector of
Speaker 1: the school I had never talked to, I had never
Speaker 1: known him in any capacity, had called that doctor in
Speaker 1: Conquered New Hampshire to talk about me. And he had
Speaker 1: done it while I was home over the summer. This
Speaker 1: is how I was able to confirmed that the school
Speaker 1: had invaded my medical records. And all of these things
Speaker 1: put together on the page allowed me to see that girl,
Speaker 1: the girl sitting there on the paper covered table, who
Speaker 1: cannot eat, who has lost ten pounds, who is a
Speaker 1: thousand miles from home, can't tell you what has been
Speaker 1: done to her, and you know, you know that she's
Speaker 1: sick in her throat, and you don't tell her. And
Speaker 1: I saw her for the first time, and I thought,
Speaker 1: you're coming with me. I'm here now, and we're going
Speaker 1: to do this together. And I realized that I'm a writer,
Speaker 1: and looky here, I have the tools to tell what
Speaker 1: she couldn't and I've lived long enough to understand what
Speaker 1: she couldn't have understood at that age. And I am
Speaker 1: supported in all sorts of ways right now and lucky
Speaker 1: to be so. And god damn it, I'm not the
Speaker 1: only girl or boy this is done to. This happens
Speaker 1: all the time. I just got lucky enough to see
Speaker 1: my files. And when I looked at my files, I
Speaker 1: saw her. So I wrote that book with a kind
Speaker 1: of fever that I haven't known before. And may never
Speaker 1: know again. But I was very sure, for better or worse,
Speaker 1: that what I wrote is what I wanted to say.
Speaker 1: Lacy's book opens with an epigraph from the essays and
Speaker 1: poet Maggie Nelson. I told you I wanted to live
Speaker 1: in a world in which the antidote to shame is
Speaker 1: not honor but honesty. Here's Lacy reading one last passage
Speaker 1: of her story. It's only right that she should have
Speaker 1: the last word. It's so simple what happened at St. Paul's.
Speaker 1: It happens all the time. First they refused to believe me,
Speaker 1: Then they shamed me, Then they silenced me. On balance,
Speaker 1: if this is a girl's trajectory from dignity to disappearance,
Speaker 1: I say it is better to be a slut than
Speaker 1: to be silent. I believe, in fact, that the slur
Speaker 1: slut carries within it Trojan Horse style silence as its
Speaker 1: true intent. That the opposite of slut is not virtue
Speaker 1: but voice. So I've written what happened exactly as I remember.
Speaker 1: It is an effort of accompaniment as much as it
Speaker 1: is of witness. To go back to that girl leaving
Speaker 1: the boy's room on an October night, sneakers landing on
Speaker 1: the Sandy Path and walk with her all the way home.
Speaker 1: Family Secrets is an i Heeart Media production. Dylan Fagan
Speaker 1: is the supervising producer and Bethan Macaluso is the executive producer.
Speaker 1: We'd also like to give a special thanks to Tyler
Speaker 1: Klang and Tristan McNeil. If you have a family secret
Speaker 1: you'd like to share, leave us a voicemail and your
Speaker 1: story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is
Speaker 1: one eight eight secret zero. That's secret and then the
Speaker 1: number zero. You can also find us on Instagram at
Speaker 1: Danny Ryder and Facebook at facebook dot com slash Family
Speaker 1: Secrets Pod, and Twitter at fami Secrets Pod. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.