“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.
14September 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.”
So my story vanished. Was finished. Went cold.
It was hockey I thought of when I read about the agreement. I pictured two teams of young men scraping and slamming on the bright new ice, and how we imagine they are rivals when really they’re kings. This is their game. So the school scrimmaged the state, and delivered the outcome. I was never going to have my chance.
How many experiences like mine have been similarly secreted away? Detective Kinney had said there were dozens and dozens of incidences of
