NEW YORK (NY)
New York Post
March 10, 2018
By Raquel Laneri
One day in February 2016, Chessy Prout, then 17, picked up an issue of Vanity Fair. The magazine had published a story about her rape case, in which she claimed an 18-year-old senior at her former high school, the elite New England academy St. Paul’s, had sexually assaulted her two years prior. But as she read, Prout grew furious.
Her assailant, Owen Labrie — who the previous year was acquitted of felony sexual assault but convicted on three misdemeanor counts of statutory rape and using a computer to lure a minor for sex — was described as a golden boy: handsome, suntanned, captain of the varsity soccer team and “a winner of the headmaster’s award for selfless devotion to school activities” whose Ivy League admission was rescinded after his arrest.
Prout, unnamed in the story, felt she was portrayed as a “blank nothing . . . privileged, preppy, naive, impressionable, flummoxed.”
“I’m tired of being an anonymous victim while my attacker is this superstar scholar-athlete,” she told her mother. “I want . . . the people who write about me to . . . see I’m a person.”
So she decided to come forward and not be an anonymous victim anymore. Now, Prout, 19, has co-written a memoir, “I Have the Right To: A High School Survivor’s Story of Sexual Assault, Justice, and Hope” (Margaret K. McElderry Books, out now).
The case was a lightning rod, attracting attention for its sensational details and setting off controversy about the prep-school world of privilege and elitism — especially as some members of the St. Paul’s community felt that their traditions were being threatened. (Alumni of the school include John Kerry and former New York City mayor John Lindsay.)
Right now, it’s particularly potent in the #MeToo era, when women — and men — are going public with their tales of harassment and assault.
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