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
