BOSTON A girl who was the focus of a high-profile criminal trial previous year after accusing a fellow student of sexual assault has said their elite New Hampshire prep school did not take the incident seriously.
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Chessy Prout, who was 15 at the time of the assault-for which Labrie was sentenced to a year in jail-voluntarily revealed her identity in an interview with the Today show’s Savannah Guthrie.
“It’s been two years now since the whole ordeal, and I feel ready to stand up and own what happened to me”, she said.
Daily Mail Online does not normally identify the victims of sexual assault, but Prout has now spoken publicly about the case.
She returned to the St. Paul’s School in Concord after the incident but said she was given the cold shoulder and subjected to jokes by male students.
The case shone a harsh light on the culture of St. Paul’s, which Prout’s family said turned a blind eye to an unofficial tradition known as the “senior salute”, in which graduating students sought out younger students for sex. The callous and objectifying attitudes that those words suggest create a climate that condones sexual violence, they say.
Last August, Labrie was convicted of a felony charge of using a computer to lure a minor into a sexual encounter, three misdemeanor sexual assault charges, and one misdemeanor child endangerment charge, but acquitted of the higher charge of felony rape.
Labrie, now 20, is currently free on bail pending his appeal.
St. Paul’s “categorically denied” that the school had a culture of sexual assault in a statement to the Today show.
In the interview, Prout said she sometimes gets panic attacks and hides in her closet and rocks on the floor. “And the fact that he was still able to pull the wool over a group of people’s eyes bothered me a lot”.
“I hope he gets help”, she said.
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‘They said that they didnt believe that he did it knowingly and that frustrated me a lot because he definitely did do it knowingly, ‘ she said. “I said to myself, ‘That’s it, I don’t have to deal this anymore, ‘” Prout said. “None of my old friends that were boys would even talk to me”. ‘And nobody was talking about the issue itself, they weren’t trying to prevent it from happening to anyone else’. Earlier this summer Alexander and Susan filed a civil suit against the New Hampshire boarding school for “fostering, permitting, and condoning a tradition of ritualized statutory rape”, seeking at least $75,000 in damages. Because if he doesn’t learn, he will do it to another young woman. “I want other people to feel empowered, and strong enough to be able to say, ‘I have the right to my body, I have the right to say no.’ And I wanted to bring this initiative that would be a hashtag, #IHaveTheRightTo, and to have people contribute to it”.
