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Prep School Rape Accuser Cries When Confronted With Inconsistencies
By Jon Schuppe
[with video] A girl who says she was raped at an elite New England prep school broke down on the witness stand Thursday when her alleged attacker's lawyer pointed out inconsistencies in how she described the circumstances surrounding her encounter with the older student. The outburst happened as defense attorney Jay Carney pressed the 16-year-old girl on why some of her recollections at the trial differed from those she outlined in a police interview five days after the alleged May 2014 attack in a secluded room at the top of a campus building at the St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. The girl said her mind had been "cloudy" when she spoke to a detective. "Why were you cloudy?" Carney asked. "I was raped," the girl said, crying suddenly. "I was violated in so many ways. Of course I was traumatized. I was cloudy because I was traumatized." Carney offered to allow her time to compose herself, but the girl declined, and the questioning continued. She seemed defiant at times, and at other moments struggled to explain her earlier characterizations about how excited she was in the hours before a secret date with the defendant, Owen Labrie, and what she expected to happen. She has described the meeting as part of a "senior salute," a campus tradition in which graduating students seek out liaisons with younger ones. The girl acknowledged under Carney's questioning that she helped him partially undress her. And she briefly broke down again when Carney brought up her allegation that Labrie bit her breast while they lay on a blanket. "You didn't tell him to stop because it wasn't a pleasurable feeling to you?" Carney said. "I didn't," the girl said, crying again. Earlier in her testimony, under questioning from a prosecutor, the girl recalled saying no to Labrie and blocking him from lowering her underwear later in the encounter. But she also expressed regret for not trying harder to stop sex acts from continuing. She said Labrie, 19, forced her into sex. Labrie, a housing dorm prefect who had planned to study divinity at Harvard, has told police they did not have intercourse, and that their encounter was consensual. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of aggravated felony sex assault, misdemeanor sex assault, endangering the welfare of a child and using a computer to lure her to meet him via email and Facebook. Carney's cross examination ended more than two days of grueling testimony by the girl. It ended with Carney suggesting she bent the truth to fit the allegation. "If it's necessary to protect yourself to tell a lie, that justifies it, doesn't it?" Carney said. "No, it does not," the girl said. Carney stopped there, and the girl left the stand.
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