“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.
13Summer 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
