“It’s such a dick move,” she said.
Is the term itself a cheap shot? A generalization, certainly. We let it stand.
The girl, Chessy Prout, outmaneuvered St. Paul’s. Composed, articulate, she went on television and “outed” herself.
I recognized the school’s act, of course. Its precise cruelty, the fanged transformation of private pain into public shame, turned a key in me. I sent a note to the Prout family’s lawyer. When he called me, I asked him to please tell Chessy that they had done something just like this to me. I asked him to tell her she was not alone.
Then in July 2017, the State of New Hampshire announced that it was opening a criminal investigation into St. Paul’s School. The investigation would consider first whether the school had ever engaged in conduct endangering the welfare of a child—putting or keeping us in harm’s way—and second whether it had obstructed the course of justice by failing to report crimes or by interfering with the investigation of those crimes in order to protect its own reputation.
I read this and thought, Hmm.
Anyone with information regarding criminal conduct at the school was urged to contact the attorney general’s office. I sent an email without thinking what might follow, as though intention were nothing but reflex, and then all but forgot I’d done it. So practiced was I, still, at banishing the assault from my mind that I was puzzled for an instant when the attorney general’s office called me. A detective with a voice like a granite shore told me they’d pulled my criminal case file from 1991, and would I be willing to talk with investigators?
The measure of how young I was in 1991 is that I’d had no idea a case file existed. The measure of how close I still was to that girl in 2017 is that I was shocked to hear there was a case file now. If I’d not had a two-year-old clinging to my knees when the call came in, I might not have believed myself in the world.
I gave a recorded interview to the female detective in Concord assigned to my case. Julie Curtin had been working sexual assault cases at St. Paul’s School for a dozen years. “It’s not all she does,” joked her supervisor, Lieutenant Sean Ford, on speakerphone, “but it seems like it is.” I told Detective Curtin what I remembered. When I hung up I was shaking, and it was difficult to place my finger over the correct button on the phone to end the call. The linking of memory to memory felt violently interior, as though I were making a chain of my own internal organs. Everything tethered to the same ugly gut hook, my own small history.
On the call I had stressed that I had no wish to speak about the assault in public or to press charges, having learned the hard way decades before that speaking up only made things worse. My intention was simply to bear witness to the way the school had treated me. Detective Curtin was quiet for a while. I thought I knew why. I’d given her—this careful, victim-centered professional—the story of a crime, then asked her to do nothing about it.
At the very least, she said, she would work up my case and add it to the list of offenses being considered by the attorney general’s office. The AG had brought out of retirement a seasoned detective whose last project had led to the exposure and dismantling of the institutional harboring of child sexual abusers in the Catholic Diocese of Manchester. He would be the one to try to act on everything Detective Curtin and Lieutenant Ford were able to pull together on my case.
Detective Curtin—I began to call her Julie—interviewed my parents and attempted to get hold of my red file from the murdered psychoanalyst’s estate. I told her I was quite sure the school had failed to report the assault. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “We got that.” But failure to report is a civil not criminal crime, and the statute of limitations is only two years. Still, the attorney general’s office could certainly use my case to help argue a pattern of behavior on the part of the school.
That sounded fine, I told her. That sounded good. I admitted to Julie that I sometimes fantasized about knocking on Bill Matthews’s door. He had since retired from the school, after the celebration of his leadership and of the opening of his eponymous hockey center. I imagined approaching his house, wherever he lived now. In my fantasy it was springtime and I stood boldly on a front stoop to knock. When he appeared at his door I would ask him, on behalf of the girl he had slandered, “Why did you hate me?”
But I had no desire to turn over rocks. Any case I initiated would be tried in New Hampshire. I pictured myself kissing my little boys goodbye and flying across the country. The motel room I’d stay in, the testimony I’d be required to give. The way defense attorneys would seek to discredit me, and how I’d have to protect my memory of the girl I had been from their assertion that they knew her better than I did.
The child I had been was gone. I had my own children now, who needed to be raised, and to stay with them seemed the better remedy.
In a later conversation, Detective Curtin and Lieutenant Ford discussed the ways the school had worked to shut down my testifying about my assault. I told them about the unspoken contract that if I asked the district attorney not to press charges, St. Paul’s School would let me return for my sixth-form year. Did I have that in writing anywhere? they wanted to know. Because that would be huge for the attorney general’s investigation—a smoking gun.
Of course I didn’t. I could never prove a thing.
Julie had gone carefully through the criminal-case file from 1991, which I still
