RHODE ISLAND
Boston Globe
By Bella English GLOBE STAFF DECEMBER 14, 2015
Anne Scott entered St. George’s School as a 10th-grader in 1977, just a few years after the prestigious prep school first admitted girls at its campus in Middletown, R.I. She was a good student, and a three-sport athlete, from the suburbs of Wilmington, Del.
But a month after she arrived, a field hockey injury brought her into the orbit of the school’s longtime athletic trainer. He molested and raped her, and threatened to come after her if she told anyone.
For years, terrified and ashamed, she did not. Finally, in her mid-20s, her life a shambles of diagnoses and hospitalizations, she told her parents, who took her to see Eric MacLeish, an attorney who would later gain renown representing abuse victims of Catholic priests. It was his first sexual abuse case.
MacLeish filed a lawsuit seeking $10 million, but when the school pushed back aggressively, Scott backed off — and moved abroad to rebuild her life.
This year, almost 40 years after she first arrived at St. George’s, Anne Scott felt strong enough to pursue her unfinished business with St. George’s.
Reunited with MacLeish, she has sought not money but accountability from the school — an end to what she and her attorney call a pattern of coverup and denial concerning the alleged sexual assaults of multiple students at the school in the 1970s and 1980s. They have urged the school to launch an investigation, to inform alumni of its findings, and to set up a therapy fund for victims.
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