I did not spend time reading news reports about the girls who were suspended from school in an ugly hazing scandal in the early 2000s or the one who was sexually assaulted on a rooftop just a few days before the end of her third-form year, in 2014. There was an element of self-protection to my disinterest, of course—not just that I did not wish to revisit old feelings, but also that I knew there was nothing I could do about any of it. To risk the rise of indignation or even sympathy would be to experience all over again the powerlessness of the girl who was told that the lawyers were ready to destroy her.
But it was not my choice to be uninformed about the dogged group of alumni from the 1970s who submitted to the school in the year 2000 a list of shared accusations of sexual harassment and assault by faculty members, with a request for investigation and response. The school handled their request silently, so nobody knew about it except a lawyer at the venerable Boston firm of Ropes & Gray, whom the school tasked with addressing the alumni request. The firm declined to investigate all but three accounts. No action was taken on any of those three cases. Subsequently the rector, the vice rector, and the chairman of the board of trustees together concluded that “an explicit confession of past sins…would be unjustifiably destructive to the interests of the School.”
One of the faculty members Ropes & Gray declined to investigate was Mr. Katzenbach, who had taught me Modern Novel. He died five years after I graduated. In those five years, at least three substantial allegations of sexual misconduct were made against him. Over the long course of his employment at the school he had not only grabbed a student’s breast but exposed himself to other girls, propositioned them for weekends away, and consummated at least one relationship with a student. I had known he made wildly inappropriate comments, but I knew nothing of his predatory behavior. After I graduated, a female vice rector had brought witness accounts, along with her concerns, to the rector and the board of trustees, and argued to remove Katzenbach from the school community. The school responded by firing her.
Mr. Katzenbach ultimately resigned of his own volition, citing health reasons. Mr. Gillespie—The Rock—wrote him “glowing” recommendations so that he might teach to the end of his life at another school, in Virginia.
All I ever learned during these years is that poor Mr. Katzenbach had died.
Meanwhile St. Paul’s wrapped up its investigation with form letters of apology to the alumni who had sought it. “The Trustees are satisfied that the School has acted swiftly, fairly, decisively and appropriately,” they wrote.
This group of alumni pushed back, requesting an open call for accounts from anyone who had been victimized at the school. They were refused.
How might my life have been different if that call had gone out when I was still a very young adult?
I was devastated during those early years of adulthood, but it was as if I were still gagged. Three weeks into my first year in college, the underclass dorms were alive with talk of the “face-book party,” an upperclass event held off campus to which freshman girls received invitations, slid under their doors, issued on the sole basis of the hotness of their photographs in the student directory. I’d heard it said that Princeton was a men’s college that admitted women, and this felt right to me—I relished saying it—but when a sleepy-eyed blond classmate approached me that fall, beer in hand, and said, “I’ve heard you think women are not equal here. Why is that?” I could not answer her. The girl who asked me this question was dating one of the men who hosted the face-book party. I had been invited, too, and I’d gone. It had seemed a triumph. I felt grateful to these college men I didn’t even know for overlooking the gossip about my herpes. I was still smarting about high school face-book ratings. With what clarity, what empathy, could I explain to the drunk girlfriend that this was not what equality looked like?
My education should have helped, and to some extent it did. I read Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and found language for the vice rector’s choice to tell a group of boys that I might have gotten them sick. Sontag writes, “Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.” But the culture on Princeton’s campus—or at least the culture whose validation I longed for—did not emerge from the scholarship I approached in class. Rather it seemed to repudiate it. I wrote about Sontag and then went to dine in an eating club, newly coed, where men in formal wear raised glasses of whiskey to roast a young woman in absentia for having had a yeast infection. I was disgusted, yes, with their words, but more than that I was grateful they weren’t roasting me.
My sophomore year, by grace and proximity, I met a philosophy professor, Susan Brison, who was completing a fellowship. Brison is a survivor of rape and attempted murder. At Princeton she was working on philosophical expressions of the catastrophe experienced by victims of trauma when they report what has happened to them and are not believed. I told her a bit about St. Paul’s, though not much. What had happened to me paled beside her attack—and in any case I did not yet understand how the school’s silencing of me had been, in its way, the greater crisis. But Susan must have, because she gave me a copy of a paper she’d written about the importance of being heard. It was due for publication in a major journal. She gave it to me in manuscript form, and those paper-clipped pages felt to me like a secret.
“The denial by the listener inflicts…the ultimately
