Old Boys’ Club

names carved in paneled halls. Once during my time there, a man pushed through the double glass doors of the reading room in late morning. We looked up from books and peeked around red leather chairs. The man found the student he was looking for and bent to talk to him, and then he left. The room exploded appropriately, of course, which meant quietly enough in wrapt whispers. The man was George Climpton, and he had come to say something to

his son, who was a student there. My point is that we were a room full of teenagers in the early nineteen nineties who knew George Plimpton on site. That was our job. His appearance on a weekday morning was like a pop quiz from the world. We were blessed with excellence and excellently blessed in our schoolwork and sports teams and choirs and clubs, and shoulders thrummed with the calvinist confidence that is actually a threat. If you do

not become spectacular, it means you are not us. That's lazy. Crawford, reading a passage from her remarkable memoir, notes on a silencing. Lacy's story is about the utter failure of adults to protect the children in their charge, and the way that failure to protect can deepen the wounds of trauma. It's also a story of extraordinary tenacity, courage, and the profound shifts that can happen both to us and to society

when the truth finally comes to light. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood, where you grew up. I was the oldest child, or two oldest children. My brother and I were raised in a small and wealthy suburb of Chicago, on the North side of Chicago, and my parents were

young when they had their family. They were to me at least very beautiful, a were full of ambition and had been very fortunate with their own educations, and they had real dreams and ambitions for themselves and for their children. I was simultaneously adored and expected to do remarkable things, and for as long as I can remember, I felt

both of those. But the second of those cast a shadow on the first, and so I think I grew up with a sense that it was my job to help deliver on a certain promise that my whole family shared, and that was in the context of a small town and going to a small school in a small town, and then when I was fourteen years old, taking the leap to go to this elite New England boarding school in New Hampshire, which neither of my parents had gone to, and we didn't know too many people who had been there.

But that seemed to be the thing that one would do if one was exceptional, and school came easily to me. I was very young, and I I was excited to go. I was excited to go myself. Was there a lead up to that in your childhood or middle school years where this idea of boarding school, an elite East Coast boarding school was something that started to feel like that was your future. It didn't. It wasn't a part of

my childhood from very early on. Um certainly my schooling took on sort of a more fevered air as I got older. I was young for my class. I started kindergarten when I was just four, and I was reading I'm Told fluently when I was three. Though this might be mythology by now, but all of it was mythology that helped shape my sense of myself. So there was a kind of self aggrandizement that attached itself to my

successes in school. I must have been insufferable to my classmates because I was young, and I was also quite small, and there were things that came easily to me, and I was happy to do them. So in my small town there was a very good public high Sto School, and there were a few private high schools that were with an easy driving distance. But I think there was a degree of social as well as educational aspiration in

my parents sending me away. The New England boarding schools were associated with and are associated with, this grand New England tradition of WASP wealth and WASP you know, exclusivity, The Old Boys Network, the original Old Boys Network, you know, founded St. Paul's School in eighteen sixties three or whatever it was to train and educate these boys, and to do it from some reserve from all the other kids, because of course they were special and they needed to

be taught in a certain special way. And that self importance that the school had is pretty enchanting when it's combined with the resources that these places have. And that self importance resonated, I think with the way my family you know, dreamed about ourselves. Um So it was both opportunity and expectation, and I was very lucky to be able to go there in some ways, of course. So the importance of that kind of education is that it's a doorway that opens onto the right path, the right spouse,

the right job, the right people, the right future. It is a reflection of the self and society to have gone to one of these schools if you are the sort of person who believes in those communities, right, if you are the sort of person for whom that small

culture appeals. And so yes, the rest of my world was supposed to open up because I had been to St. Paul's School, and it could have been exeter it could have been grotten, it could have been showed, it could have been hot, Kiff, It didn't have to be St. Paul's. But the idea of it was, you know, she's such a great student, and there's so many opportunities and resources at these schools that she can't possibly have here at home in our small suburb north of Chicago, And why

not give her the world if we can? Right? Why not? So describe yourself, Lacy, when you got to St. Paul's, that girl sophomore in high school or fourth form as it was called, or as it is called in many of these schools, age fourteen. I was. I was fourteen, so again I was. I was a year young from my class. I had literally just had my gross spurt like that summer. You know, I was sort of lie awake with pains and my shins because I was growing

so fast. So I was five ft seven now, and I think I weighed a hundred pounds, soaking wet, and I had had my period for six months seven months at that time. I was still surprised every time it happened. I hadn't had my braces off for very long. I was sort of launched into a world where students were,

to my eyes at least fabulously sophisticated. And many of them had grown up in families where their fathers had gone to this boarding school or others before them, their grandfathers had, or all of their cousins or most of the people in their town, and they had grown up with a kind of social ease and style that I envied. They came in talented in sports. I had never heard of, you know what, what was crew? You know? I had seen squash courts, but I had never been on one,

and they were gifted in a range of things. So I was wildly impressed and enchanted by the people I went to school. But I was also woefully unprepared for a lot of the social dynamics there, and it was a position of some danger that not a few of us found ourselves in. Yeah, I mean I was. I was struck by the fact that your mother, as you're getting ready to go to St. Paul's, feels that it would be helpful for you to have an additional middle name.

That was really that was something I mean talk about an act of a kind of self invention there in a situation where no self invention was in fact necessary, but she was trying to give you this boost by giving you a famous and fancy middle name. That's right. So I was christened Lacey K. Hill Crawford, and that those were the initials, you know, on my blankets and

on my sweaters and on my backpack. And and my mother maintains that we are related to the great Houston oil family and the Demino family through her great great aunts side I think, And she said she had wanted to give me that name when I was born, and my father wouldn't let her, and so why not add it now? And there were I should say, many kids at St. Paul School who had at least two middle names.

And it was also very much the case that there were kids at school whose complete names bore no resemblance at all to what they were actually called in the world, you know. So there would be boys and girls who had names that I never ever saw written, because nobody ever wrote them down, because those weren't their actual baptismal names. So it was a bit of an act of self sort of. I mean, I don't want to say selfograndizement, because that's not fair, not even self invention. It was

almost like tying an extra ribbon in my hair. It was if they're going to be this fancy, we can be this fancy too, and why not? Right, and why not? And a lot of kids were doing that at St. Paul's. They were finding ways to big themselves up and to demonstrate where they had come from and where they were going. I wasn't yet a master at that, and I didn't recognize that what I was seeing was a lot of hard work and ambition rather than the pure expression of

a kind of privilege that I had never encountered before. Lacy, festooned with her new fancy middle name, enters a hothouse universe. Students from prominent families use nicknames like Buffy and Up. They don't wear their wealth, nor did they flash it. They're dropped off at school in beat up old wagons station cars. The kids who come from these backgrounds seemed to have an innate confidence. They never questioned whether they

belong or whether they're enough. You had to learn to read the currents of wealth, and it took me some time to figure out what that was. But it was hearing about multiple houses, right, It was hearing about parents who didn't work and hadn't worked, and generations of parents

hadn't worked because they didn't have to. There were all sorts of expressions of privilege, but it was almost like a code, and that code was part of the magic of the school was that you never really saw where the power was, but you knew that it was coursing beneath you everywhere. So I felt very much like I was sort of a little baby anthropologist, you know, who was always wearing the wrong clothes and was always running which you should have been walking. And you were also

an athlete. I was. Yeah, I wasn't a particularly good athlete, but I had my father is a is an excellent athlete, and he had raised me with many sports, and he had coached my local A Y s oh soccer team when I was growing up. And then I had gotten fairly good at tennis a couple of years before I left for school. I really loved it and I committed myself to getting good at it, so I was good

enough to play on the varsity teams there. And I also had been a skater, as kids in Chicago are because it's cold and dark all winter long, and we had a we had an outdoor rink in our town, so I was able to join the ice hockey team too. So I, like so many of my peers, did a hundred different things on campus, you know, the sports. I was a singer. I was in a few different choirs that were very very important to me, and I was always running from thing to thing. So your fourth four

year you were pretty miserable. I mean, as many people are when they first go away at that age. You were, you know, calling home and saying, I don't like it here, I don't want to be here. I called home sobbing. I I cried so hard I couldn't breathe. And my parents, I feel for them, I'm a parent now. It must have been devastating. But they had flown me two and a half hours, you know, and driven the last hour

to drop me off at this magical school. And I kept calling and begging to come home, and my dad said, no, you're going to give this one year. You're going to give it a year, and if you really don't like it after the year, then yes, you know, you can come home. But it was clear to me that that

would have meant I had failed. That would have meant that I had gone to this fabulous school with all these fabulous kids, and I couldn't hack it somehow, and and part of it was homesickness, but I've been to summer camp. I wasn't that attached to my parents at that time. I think there was a coldness among the students. There were hazing rituals that astonished me with their sadism, and kids were cruel in particular ways that I think only fifteen year old can be, and with not a

lot of awareness. So there were a lot of racist remarks, and sexism toward the girls was very real, and I was frightened. I was frightened of that kind of cruelty that was not something I understood. By the time Lacy finishes her fourth form year, she's made a group of friends and she's settling in. There's no question any longer

of whether she'll return as a fifth former. She does well on the tennis team, makes the varsity soccer team, and even though she's not exactly happy, happiness isn't the point. She's no longer a nube, the term given to new students shortened from new boy. She now has the privileges accorded to upperclassmen. She's also in advanced mass with a lot of seniors and is being asked to help tutor a bunch of guys on the hockey team. So she's

now kind of on the hockey team's radar. The hockey players date beautiful, confident girls, and Lacy definitely doesn't consider herself beautiful or confident. One evening, after hours, she's tucked into her dorm for the night and gets a phone call from Rick Banner, not his real name, the captain of the hockey team. I have to start there so that you can understand how wild this phone call was. Rick Banner was the star on the ice hockey team. He was about a foot taller than I was. He

was a senior. He had a long term girlfriend. They were known as a couple. They were the sort of couple who when they walked down the hall younger students sort of parted the way fish do around a shark, you know, in the coral reef, and then they um. Everybody knew who they were. And he certainly wasn't known for his academic prowess, but he was a you know, a big man on campus. I think we would say, and yeah, he was in my math class, but I

hadn't tutored him. He just sat a couple desks up for me, and I would watch him trying to fit his limbs into the desk because it was one of those desks that was attached to the chair by a metal arm, and he had to kind of fold himself up, you know, like some sort of contortionists to get in this chair. Anyway, the pay phone rang in our dorms. Then a younger student who was downstairs it was their job to answer the phone, came upstairs and knocked on

my door and she said, the phones for you. And this this was totally strange, and I worried it was my parents. But if my parents needed me, they would have called my advisor. So I went downstairs. Must have been ten thirty or eleven at night. We had signed in for the night at ten pm. We were not allowed to leave our dorms until six the next morning. And it was Rick. It was Rick Banner on the phone and he said, I need your help, Lazy, I need your help. And I said, I don't know who

is that. Who is this? And he told me who it was, and right in that moment, and this tells you so much about who I was at that time. I didn't think it was a hoax. I didn't think it was a you know, the wrong number. I thought, Oh, if he needs me, then it must be something real, because how strange is this, right, Like, how unusual is it that he would call me? So there must be a very specific reason that he's calling me. I said what is it? And he said I need your help tonight.

And I thought maybe it was math, but that didn't make any sense. And then he said I need you to cruise. And that was the word we used to describe sneaking out of your dorm and going somewhere else after check in was cruising. There were two security guards who patrolled the campus in white jeeps. They saw everything. They caught people all the time, and kids would be suspended and sent home and it went on your record. So we had to be very very careful if we

snuck out of our dorms. And it was not something that I had done. So he said I need you to cruise. I need you to come over, and I said I can't. You know, I get busted. I can't, I can't late, I can't come over. And said no, you're really smart and you can do it, please, I need you. And it sounded like he was crying or he was going to cry. And said, what is wrong? And he said, it's my mom and I'll tell you when you get here. It's a thing with my mom.

And and I I was convinced. I believed somehow that he needed me and that I could offer something that no one else could offer. And I couldn't imagine what it was. But so much of that school was being presented with just an incomparable mystery and then discovering what my place in it would be. That was the whole experience I had at St. Paul's. So this was not entirely, you know, out of keeping with what it had been like there. Just yet another wild thing happens, and you

find a way to figure out where you belong. So I said, you know what, Okay, okay, I'll be right there, and I snuck out. I raced behind tree to tree to avoid the street lights that were along the path, and I went the back way through the meadow and I ducked behind the rectory and I went to the edge of his dorm. I didn't know he had to tell me where he lived. I didn't know which room was his. So I heard him whispering my name, and

that was how I knew which room was his. And then he reached down and pulled me up by putting his hands under my arms and lifted me up through the window and I landed directly on a mattress. He was there, and someone else was there, and the lights were off, and I said, what's wrong? And he said and pointed to what I guessed was the door to the room and said, you know the name of the teacher whose apartment in the dorm shared that wall. And he said, Mr w is right there. And I knew

what that meant. What that meant is if he heard my voice through the wall, he would come in, he would flip on the lights, and I would be caught, you know, having cruised. And as my eyes adjusted, I saw that the other person in the room was another senior who I didn't know at all, and that they weren't wearing clothes. They were in only their boxer shorts. So there I was on a bed with the two of them. So I said, again, what's wrong? What happened? And one of them, I don't know which one started

needing my breasts and I was wearing. I'm not large chested, and I was wearing, you know, like a turtleneck and a swinter sweater or something. It was laid October in New Hampshire at night, and blue jeans and socks and sneakers. That's what I was wearing. And I didn't understand what was going on, because this isn't something that had happened

to me. I didn't get it. And the force of it pushed me back onto the bed so that I was lying on my back, and then the other one unzipped my jeans and stuck his hand down my down there and put a finger inside me, at which point I shot my hand down there and sort of cupted myself to to force his hand away. I was a virgin. The only thing I remember thinking is as long as

they don't have sex with me, I won't die. And the thing behind that is just what I knew from my health class and from my upbringing, which is you don't have sex until you're married or almost married, and if you do, you will either get AIDS or you will get pregnant, and horrible things will happen to you in your life will be ruined. That was how I was raised, and so I said, just don't have sex with me. That's what I said, just don't have sex

with me. So instead they took turns laying their hips across my face, and the one of them would hold me sort of still so that the other one could move over me. And it was very difficult to breathe, and I was crying quietly. I didn't make a sound. And then when they were done, they let me go, and I climbed out the window and walked home. At no time did it occur to Lacy to shout out

or to scream. If Mr w came in from the other room, he would have seen a fifth form girl out of her room against the rules, on a bed with two boys. It would have gone on her record. Her parents would have found out. They never would have forgiven her if she got into trouble in the fall of her junior year, college applications are on the line. And then add to that, I was in a senior boys room and they weren't clothed. How do I explain that to my father? How do I explain that to

the teacher when he flips on the light. What do I say I was expecting? What do I say, and why would they believe me? Because I was already there, and also in my weird girl logic, because I said, just don't have sex with me and they didn't, I thought, Oh, I guess then this is what will happen. It didn't occur to me that what they were doing to me was a different form of violence. I mean, of course it was violent, and my body was quaking and I was crying and it was difficult to breathe. But I

didn't know that this wasn't normal. I know that sounds crazy. I know that sounds crazy, But I did not know that this was not a thing that happened. I just didn't. The terms I did have were the words I had used that were sort of Saint Paul's slang for what boys and girls did together, right, And and the term we used was scrumping. So any kind of sexual activity, you know, of any extent, from nothing to everything, was

called scrumping. And both of these boys had girlfriends, They had serious girlfriends, and I knew I knew one of the girlfriends well. I played sports with her, I liked her a lot. She was my year. And the thing that terrified me most was the thought that these girls would find out, and then the whole school would find out that I had gone to their rooms, the boys room, and I had done this, I had scrumped with them.

I didn't I didn't even have I certainly didn't use the word blowjob in my head I because that's not what that was. I was impaled. I was like a tool. I was like I was a vessel. I was not a person, and I was just terrified that they would find out and I would not be able to deny it. So what I kept doing was both playing prosecutor and defense attorney in my mind, over and over, and it is, well, isn't it true that you did that, Yes, but I didn't want to. Isn't it true that you were in

their room? Yes, but I didn't think that's what it was. And I I did this around and around, and so I figured that the only only option was to make sure that nobody ever found out. And as long as nobody ever found out, then I would survive and I could just get through school and I could live my life and it would be okay. This is October. Lacy tells no one, not her parents, not her best friends. It's a matter of survival. No one can know this

ever happened to her. Months go by, and in the meantime, Lacey's throat it starts hurting. So there are two things that happened very quickly. The first is that the boys, and they were both a teen, so sometimes I call them men, sometimes boys. They told a bunch of people starting the very next day what had happened, and I know they didn't describe it the way I just described it,

but they told the same details. And so the first word I heard that described what went on in that room came from one of their ice hockey teammates the next day, who sort of hissed at me. Threesome. And the reason this is remarkable to me is because I had been a girl who didn't have a boyfriend, didn't do a whole lot, worked really hard, obviously wished she was cooler than she was, but had good friends, you know,

and did well and was unremarkable. And suddenly it appears that I am behaving in a way that a completely out of character, and nobody thought to think, huh, is there something else? Is there something we don't know? Could it be true or not true in a way that we don't understand. So I started getting these kisces and the gossip and the side eyes and chapel and the whispers and the leers, which I then had to ignore everywhere I went. So I felt like my skin was

on fire. And within about a week, my throat started to hurt and it didn't get better. So I I stood in front of the mirror in my dorm by myself, when everyone else was, you know, out of class or sports, and I opened my mouth as wide as I could, and I made the sound, and I looked and I looked, and there was nothing there. There was nothing to see.

But my throat hurt so much that I first stopped being able to eat, and finally stopped being able to drink anything except ice water, or sometimes I would put a little bit of skim milk on my tongue and then tip my head back to had it run down, because if I swallowed, the act of swallowing would cause my throat to grind in a way that was excruciating. So I I figured I was being punished for what I had done, but I did not understand what form that punishment was taking. But I was raised in a

family that was pious. We went to church every Sunday. I haven't mentioned yet that my mom was an episcopal priest. It was pretty clear to me that if I had done something as bad as what I had done, there would be some retaliation from, you know, the great gods of morality. So I went to the infirmary after chapel. One morning, I went up to our student health center and I said, my throat hurt so much, I can't eat.

And she said, all right, you know, say oh, and she put the tongue depressed around my tongue and she said, there's nothing there. You're totally fine. Just got a little more sleep. She gave me a lozenge and sent me to class. And she was right. She couldn't see anything. There was nothing to see. And it wasn't until I went back to the infirmary a few days later, and

I have all these medical records. Now. I had lost seven pounds by then because I couldn't eat and I had a high fever, and my throat was very swollen.

My lymph nodes were very swollen. And again the infirmary couldn't see anything, but they sent me to an ear nose and throat doctor in town in Concord, New Hampshire, so off campus, an actual position off campus in town, and they diagnosed that I had contracted herpes in the hype of pharyngeal space, which is the space at the back of the throat more or less where the gag reflex lies. It's impossible to see on an ordinary exam, which is why nobody in the infirmary or I myself

could see any of the sores. So they had to numb up my throat and use special mirrors and lights to see what was going on. But they communicated this information to the pediatrician at the infirmary at St. Paul's. They neglected to tell me or my parents or my doctors at home, who were very worried, because I had kept calling home and saying I'm really sick and I can't eat and something's wrong. This bears repeating the patient Lacey Crawford, the person to whom this has happened and

who has this virus, is not told about it. Her parents are not told about it. Only her school is told about it. I got ahold of my medical records and the school's files in the last couple of years, and they confirmed everything that I remembered, which is this that I kept going to doctors and opening my mouth to show them how much pain I was in, which

is an almost sort of over attenuated metaphor. It's like an it's an overdetermined metaphor for the fact that I was trying to say what had happened to me and I could not speak. I all but lost my voice, and they kept looking in my throat and saying, there's nothing there, there's nothing there. But when finally the e n t that ear nose and throat specialists and conquered does see that there are herpetic lesions in the hypo

pharyngeal space and nowhere else, mind you, nowhere else. That information was communicated to the infirmary to the physician there who has since died. He since passed away, and he didn't tell me. So I was fifteen years old and I couldn't eat, and my parents knew I was staying in the infirmary. I had a high fever, I was losing weight, and my doctors at home, so the entire practice of the pediatricians in my small town, they were all trying to figure out what could be wrong with me,

and I have I have their notes too. They had a differential diagnosis that included lupus, and that included leukemia and other autoimmune disorders that might cause sluffing of mucus membranes, And they were figuring out what blood work to order and making plans, frankly, to bring me home. And the doctor at St. Paul's was having these conversations with them

and did not tell them what had been diagnosed. So this was the first time that I had encountered what would be a pattern of institutional silencing that is both breathtaking and I suspect horrifyingly common. We'll be right back. The assault happened in October. Now it's spring. Lacy still hasn't told a soul. She's in sort of a relationship now, a nice, safe, asexual relationship with a classmate named Scotty.

She's suffering, of course, both emotionally and physically, but she's remaining silent until one afternoon, in a ecologically really remarkable moment, a memory is triggered. While she's hanging out with Scotty. He's tracing a scar on her leg, a scar she got the year before when she had had her legs sliced open while diving into a pond at St. Paul's

at the end of my junior year. I was sitting with the boy I called Scotti, and he was tracing his finger along the scar on my thigh that was at that point a year old, and he was saying, gosh, you know a lot of bad things happened to you, uh, And I was thinking, no, not really, but actually maybe so.

And I remembered the boat docks, and I remember slicing my leg, and I remember coming up bleeding, and I remember everybody worrying about me, and how wonderful it had been that everyone had worried about me a year before, because now, you know, I felt like a pariah and I was in pain all the time, and nobody knew. And I remembered in a moment who it was who had put a towel around me and picked me up

and carried me. And there really was only one person who was tall enough to pick me up and hold me the way he had, and that was Rick Banner. He had been down there with his buddies, you know, tossing around a lacrosse ball at the grassy edge of the pond, and he had come down and he had said I got her, I got her. I remembered him saying I got her, and in that moment, I thought, oh my god, if he if he carried me, if he held me. And then he turned around and he

did what he did to me. And I'm still not sure that I understand the precise emotional, psychological logic of this, but I can say that I remembered the girl who had needed help. And if there's one thing I refused to let myself be the year after the assault, it was a girl who needed help. I thought I was a girl who had ruined her whole life. That's what I thought, you know. I didn't think that I deserved care at all. I thought I was guilty of a

million things. And to remember a girl who had done nothing wrong and had been bleeding, and that he had scooped her up and taken her up the hill. And I thought, no, no, I have to say what happened. I have to say what happened to me. And it was that night that I called my mom from the very same pay phone. I was in the same dorm, and I told her. I told her what had happened.

Your mom? She asks, you, if you were raped you say, only my mouth, and your mother responds by saying, when when was this and you tell her it was October, and then she says, oh, your throat, and she understands the whole thing in a flash, and she wants you to come home. You want to stay and finish your exams because you are on this path. You know, it's a path that's going to lead to Princeton, right, which is where your father went. That's where my father went

and my grandfather before him. Yes, and this is the this is the path that you've already suffered a lot to be on. And you're going to finish those exams and say to shout the year, and then you'll come home. And your mother permits you to do that. The moment I left the boy's room, they had taken so much from me. I was only beginning to imagine how much they had taken from me, to understand how much they had taken from me, and I didn't want to give

up one more thing. So I was busy, as you say, on the path that I had always imagined was mine and also the only path I could possibly imagine for myself, which was to achieve to follow my father's footsteps to Princeton. I wasn't sure what I would do after that. I was going to worry about it later. So that meant staying for my exams and not letting anybody know that I had gone home early and something untoward had happened. I didn't want any more gossip. I was just going

to continue on as I had. But my mom called the school. She actually called the school's chaplain right after she hung up with me, because he was also an episcopal priest, and she cried to him, I now know, for two hours. This is in case notes about what had been done to me, and everything made sense to her, how sick I had been, that I couldn't eat, you know, that we couldn't see anything. Everything made sense. What the school then did was not called the police. They were

mandated reporters. That was the law, was that they should call the police and report this event. They did not. Instead, they opened their own internal investigation into my allegations, and that investigation included helping themselves to my medical records. So they found out that yes, in fact, I had contracted herbies in the hypopharyngeal space away back in October. I imagine now as an adult. They also realized that they

were in a whole lot of trouble. You know, if if my family chose to hire a lawyer because there was clinical evidence of what I was claiming, and they decided to do something really quite brilliant in its sadism, Which is this The coach, and I am not one sure which one it is, so I will not name someone, although I'm sure gathered up several of the athletes who were on the hockey and also across team the boys, and said to them, if any one of you has

been intimate with Lacy Crawford, you need to go to the infirmary and get checked out for her piece. I didn't know that this had happened. I was there taking my exams. Nobody talked to me anyway. I had become very strange and very withdrawn. I finished my exams, I packed my bag a couple of days early, at my mom's request. I didn't stay for graduation or anything that year,

and I flew home the very next morning. My mom brought me to my pediatrician in Chicago and Lake Forest, Illinois, and the pediatrician did a sexual assault exam, and she used the word sexual assault. I had never considered that term. That was the first time I had heard that word applied to what had happened to me. It didn't fit.

It seemed to make it sound worse. It seemed to make it sound like everybody was going to be a part of this now, and that my life was spiraling so much more out of my control then I could imagine. And she swabbed my throat very deep. I gagged my eyes, ran and sent off the swab, and ten days later it came back positive. And she called and said, I'm so very sorry you've contracted genital herpies in your throat.

But this is how we'll treat it, and this is how you'll stay healthy, and this is what we're going to do. And she was very nurturing and caring. But the school had already told my schoolmates that I had herpies, so my classmates found out before I did. I had sores all year. I could barely eat, I could barely sing. I was benched on the ice hockey team because the air and the rink was too cold for me to

breathe without my throat sticking together. So I went untreated and my father after my physician called at home and like forest and said, we're so sorry, this is what you have. My father called the dean of students at school and told him. You know, my dad thought told him for the first time, right have called with this breaking news that his daughter had actually contracted an STD as a result of what had been done to her.

And the Dean of students replied to my father, how do we know Lacy didn't give it to the boys. How do we know Lacy didn't give it to the boys. Right now we have the reason. It was impossible for Lacey to scream or fight back or make noise the night of the assault. As she writes in her memoir, a girl who is attacked will so often assume that the fault lies with her. But this isn't the girl. This is the dean of students, casting doubt and blame. How do we know Lacey didn't give it to the boys.

This casting of doubt and blame is endemic to the institution. As Lacey packs up to leave St. Paul's after her exams, the school's chaplain pays a visit to her room. This was the chaplain who my mom had called actually and told him about what I had reported to her. I did not know that the chaplain knew that. I thought my mother had kept this a secret, and I had just made up some excuse for why I was leaving

a couple of days early. He was also my religion teacher, and because I was the daughter of a priest and had grown up in the church and was very familiar with liturgy and scripture and loved books, I thought I was really good in religion class. I thought I had written an excellent paper, and so when he came to my room, I actually thought that he was going to tell me that I had won a prize. There was

a very big prize for juniors. And that tells you again still how my ambition and naivete were clashing with the desperate need that I had to speak the truth and to be heard. I could not reconcile being a girl I was supposed to be with the girl I now was. I couldn't do it. I could not bring those two people together. So he came into my room and he was kind of moving things out of the way with his feet, and he was frustrated that it was taking me so long to pack up. And I

had a Duffel bag on the bed. It was my initials on it, you know, like an l Obeam Duffel bag with my initials on it. And I I didn't want to open my underwear drawer and pull out my underwear and pack my underwear while the chaplain was standing in my single room and he glared at me. He glared at me, and I kept saying, I don't want to leave before the awards day. I don't want to leave with you before the awards day. And he said, you don't need to be here for the awards day.

And I asked him again, and he repeated it again. And in that moment, I understood only that I wasn't going to be winning a prize. I did not understand what he was actually saying to me, which is, you

need to get out of here. You've ruined everything that he had the day before been sitting in a meeting with senior deans and the headmaster of our school, whom we call a rector who was also a priest, and with the school's lawyer, and they had decided that I had gone to this boys these boys rooms consensually, and

that I had done what I had done. I refused to use a flippant euphemism, that I had done what I had done to them, choked myself on their penises consensually, and that I was now claiming that it hadn't been consensual, and also I had gotten them sick, and this was a mess for the school. And he was looking at me with something like disgust in his eyes. But I did not know at the time that he knew what

he knew. I only found that out much later. I simply knew that he was cold, and that he wasn't awarding me any prizes, and he was in a real hurry to get me to the taxi, to at me into the airport, to get me off campus. So once you're back home, and once it has been determined by your pediatrician that you had contracted her piece and in a place that I should add, it would be damn near impossible to contract her piece consensually, and or if you if you were to, and this is technical, but

this is important to me. If it were a consensual act, I would have been exposed in other parts of my mouth and on my lips. Does that make sense, because it does, And there was nothing except at the very back of my throat. As she spends the summer between fifth form and sixth form, or in common parlance, junior and senior year back home in Lake Forest, Lacy fully intends to return to St. Paul's to finish her high

school career. There she's on a path, the only one she knows, and she can't imagine any future other than sticking to it. And then the school does something diabolical and ingenious. If Lacey and her parents proceed with their confrontation, if they make it legal, if Lacey testifies against the two boys, the school will smear her reputation. I would have let all that go because the boys had graduated, and I wasn't about to give up St. Paul's and

let them graduate. But not me. That wasn't gonna happen. I thought, fine, we know what I have. I'm taking medication. They're gone. Now I'm going to go back and we're just gonna get through this. We're just gonna put our heads down and get through this, because that's what I had been doing. But my pediatrician reported the assault to the State of New Hampshire, as she was mandated to do.

That's the law, and the state of New Hampshire was very interested to hear this because not only was it a statutory assault, by which I mean even if I had given my consent, it was against the law because the two men were eighteen and I was fifteen, and that was against the law in the state of New Hampshire. The form of penetration that I suffered. Furthermore, I had gotten sick and there were medical records that confirmed, you know,

that I had gotten sick. So it was a pretty open and closed case, and the police and conquered New Hampshire wanted to press charges against the two who had assaulted me. What this would have meant for most likely is that I would have testified against them, right that would have been part of a trial. So the school

responded to this threat by calling my father. My dad and my mom went into my dad's office with a little pad of graph paper and my dad wrote down the things that the school said they would say, and they basically said, you need to understand that Lacy is not a good girl and she is not welcome back on our campus. And my dad, so, what are you what are you talking about? You know, she's she's a try vers athlete, she's in all the choir, she has

almost perfect grades. What on earth could you mean? And they said, actually, you know, Mr Crawford, the following things are true about her. One, she is a drug dealer. This is laughable and laughable. To she routinely flout school rules and expectations, also laughable. Three that I was promiscuous. Well, I have a few things to say about that, essentially that I was a disaster and a danger to my peers. And they said to my father, if she is on the stand, this is what we are going to reveal

about her. And it was understood that if I went forward with the state pressing charges against the boys and there was a trial. St. Pauls School would say this about me. So I would have been in the position of applying to college with my boarding school accusing me of being a drug dealer and promiscuous and someone who used alcohol all the time, and someone who was a danger to her peers. They would have ruined my life,

or so it seemed. And my father and mother said, this is what they're going to say about you, and we all decided we couldn't do it. So I called the police department and conquered New Hampshire, and I gave a formal statement saying that I did not wish the police to press charges against the boys who assaulted me. It was recorded, you know, it was entered into my record, and the criminal file was closed. And once that happened, St.

Paul School welcomed me back for my senior year. I suddenly wasn't a drug dealer anymore, and I wasn't a threat to other students anymore. But of course what I didn't know, and would shortly find out, is that everyone on campus knew that I had her pies, even though I had only found out myself a few weeks before and hadn't told us. Soul Lacy, what was that senior

year like for you? I mean, one thing that struck me is that there was a gift in that gauntlet at some point during your sixth form year in the form of Mrs Radley. She taught religion too. She was also a priest and a music teacher. So Mrs Radley was a priest and a music teacher, and you were interested in doing an independent study and you wanted her to be your advisor, and it was specifically a study about depression and art depression and artists, and she took

you under her wing. She made it very clear to you, very quickly that she she saw you. When I went to her and asked her if I could do an independent study with her, it was up in the little house that she lived in that was part of the campus housing, and she had a dog, and she was not married at that time, she was divorced, and she gestured to a bedroom in her house, a guest bedroom that I didn't know was there, and she said, if you ever need a safe place to sleep at night,

you may come up here. The back door will be open, and you may sleep there, and I will vouch for you. And I had never told her what happened to me. I didn't have to. She knew that I was in danger. She had so many close relationships with students on campus that clearly she would have understood what the gossip meant, that I was in danger, and I knew that someone

had my back. And I also understand that what she did was the only useful way to support me, because if she had gone to the administration, if she had tried to raise hell, they would have done to her what they did to me. They would have put her in danger. So she found a way to offer me safety, and she was really the only one who did so.

I returned for my senior year with this odd understanding that as long as I didn't speak about the assault, or changed my mind about pressing charges or file a lawsuit against the school, you know, as long as I didn't do those things, the school would not interfere with my senior year or my college applications, and everything would be fine. Lacy keeps her head down, feels protected by Mrs Radley, and gets through senior year. She's admitted to Princeton,

just as had been the plan. So she's escaped, right. The hideousness of what happened at St. Paul's is now behind her, not so much. As she goes through college and enters her early adult life, the stories follow her. They plague and shame her. She experiences crushing depression, she wants to die and thinks about it. She's unable to form real attachments with men and choose his boyfriends who are either mostly absent or unspeakably cruel. Lazy pretty much

loses her twenties. As she writes, everything listened and nothing grew. I think the experience of being assaulted. For me was that the life I had lived came to an rupt end and a new one began, and I could not figure out how to get back to the girl I had been, or even whether it was worth trying, because she was the type of fool who got herself into that situation. So the guilt constantly. It wasn't until people believed me that I was able to reimagine, and I

had a glimpse of it. I had a glimpse of it when I remembered Rick Banner picking me up and caring. Just a girl, just an ordinary girl, not a girl who gets herself into trouble or makes stupid choices, but an ordinary girl who deserved care. The person I had become was simply invisible, was simply not worth listening to. Was someone who was not a reliable witness to her own experience, who simply didn't understand what had happened and didn't understand how the world worked. And that dogged me

everywhere I went. It dogged me in literal terms. So I got to Princeton. There were a lot of St. Paul's kids there and kids from other boarding schools, and the gossip about herpes beat me to campus. I I couldn't even start fresh, you know, in college, and I

should have gone somewhere else. It followed me into the jobs that I held in my twenties because people knew people who knew people who knew people, and I didn't feel like I could go into a room and be new ever, but that nobody at the same time would have believed me if I had told them the truth. So the story preceded me, and there was nothing left for me to say. And that led me to feel that I couldn't build a life and didn't really deserve to.

And yes, I did leave the door open for for the end of my life in a lot of different ways. And I made decisions that were reckless, and I was in an emotionally abusive relationship for the eight years of my twenties, and and it was self destructive in the extreme. We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. As Lacey enters her thirties, her life starts to improve. She finds solid footing in a good relationship, Mary's becomes a mom. She finds satisfaction in her life as a writer.

Lacy studiously avoids news about st Paul's school. They've finally stopped sending her the alumni newsletters. They've lost track of her or she's outrun them, but now it's and news from St. Paul's catches up with her. I knew nothing of the two thousand investigation, or so called investigation, which was actually about teachers assaulting students, because they didn't put out a call to alumni, so none of us ever

heard about it. They buried it. But there was a freshman who was fifteen like I had been, who was sexually assaulted by an eighteen year old senior like I had been, Jessie Prout, in the year two thousand fourteen, and she told right away, she said, oh my god, this just happened to me. And she had bite marks

on her breast. And she reported to her friends, and she reported to her counselor, and she went to the hospital, and she went to the police and her parents, her father had actually gone to St. Paul's, and her parents said, this will not stand. This will not stand. And they stood behind their girl absolutely right away. They didn't say, why did you go to meet up with him? What did you think would have And they didn't say any

of those things. They stood by their girl, and what the school ended up doing, which is remarkable, is after her assailant had been convicted on multiple charges, her family filed a civil lawsuit against St. Paul's school for allowing the culture to persist, to exist and persist, this rape culture in which students were kept in such danger, and the school responded to that lawsuit by petitioning the Superior Court to release the name of the girl who was

the victims, so nobody knew. Chessie Prott's name is certainly not in the public or the media because by universal convention, the names of the victims of sexual assault, especially when they're miners, are not released. They're redacted in court filings,

and the media does not report on them. And St. Paul's school said they didn't think that was fair, so their lawyer, who happened to be the former Attorney General of the State of New Hampshire, filed that they should be able to force her name into the press, which is at the moment at which I tuned in. And I tuned in because my best friend, who's a lawyer who did not go to St. Paul's, called me and said, holy shit, have you seen this thing St. Paul's has done.

It is the nastiest thing I've ever seen. And I pulled the filing down off the Court of the Superior Court website and I read it myself, and I burst into tears, because that is, in its way, exactly what they did to me. They shamed me publicly in order to make me shut up and go away. Now, chess Prouts said the hell you do, and she went on the Today Show and outed herself and said, yeah, I'm

not ashamed. This is what was done to me. And I was so rocked by that that I I started to re engage with this thing that I would have sworn to you up and down. I had put behind me in every way, and of course it was right there. It hadn't left my side. It strikes me too that in the years between your assault and and Chessie Prouds, there was the beginning of rumblings of a kind of shift. That's right. I was assaulted in right, and so it was twenty five years and it was a generation, that's right.

And I think me too had not yet become the force that it is now. But things were beginning to change, and Chessie's parents in many ways illustrated for me what it could look like when parents said, nah, not not our girl. You know, we don't care what you say about her on the stand, We don't care. You know this was wrong and you need to change. And I sobbed, I sobbed. I said to my husband, that's that's the other thing you can do, if you're a mom or a dad, as you can say, we don't care what

you say about her. And easy for me to say, now you know it wasn't And I wanted to go

back to school. When the new Attorney General met the State of New Hampshire opened a formal investigation into St. Paul's school because there had been so many accounts of assault and quote boundary violations and quote on campus, and we were invited the public was invited to come forward if they had any stories of having been victimized on campus, particularly if they could testify to the school having failed to report having obstructed justice or tampered with witnesses in

any way. And I thought, yeah, I've got some stories about that. So very quietly I got in touch with the Attorney General's office and I got a call back from a detective almost immediately, who said he had pulled my case file from I didn't even realize there had been one. It was on microfiche. They printed it out and they wanted to interview me at my earliest convenience. So very quietly I participated in this investigation. They told me, I still, because of a few loopholes, could press charges

against the men who assaulted me. One of them has been in and ount of jail for most of his adult life. The other one has had a difficult time, although not in that way. And I declined to press charges. I didn't want to fly away from my children, be on the other side of the country, and I didn't know what that would be for. I just said, I want you to know that this is what the school does, This is what they do to victims, this is what

they do. And somehow the school found out that I was participating in that investor stigation, and I got a very terse email from their lawyers asking me to contact them. I forwarded that to the police and the police said it's go time, and they drove up to the campus

that afternoon. It was August of two thousand seventeen, and got ahold of my student file which at that point was twenty five years old, and in my student file was documented evidence of everything I've just told you, including the lawyer advising the school to say that unless I dropped the charges, I could not return to campus, which is illegal. You can't do that, including the school admitting that they had not reported my assault and had no

intention to. All of this was in there, and the police took photographs of every page, and they called me and said, we have it. You know, we have the smoking gun. We have two cases. Now we have the assault, you know, and it's cover up in and now we have this in two thousand seventeen. You have these documents. Here we are and they presented it all to the Attorney General as investigators, and the Attorney General said, we

refused to admit this evidence. We are not interested in her case and we will not hear anything of her file. So they effectively meant to silence me again. The Old Boys network was at it again. These attorneys all ran in the same prominent New Hampshire legal circles and once again sought to protect themselves and the institution rather than the soul of a girl who had been crushed there. But now Lacy is no longer that crushed girl. She's a grown woman who understands and has lived with the

price of silence. When I was following what the school was doing to try to shut down the civil case that Jesse Prout's family had brought, I did not feel yet safe to consider what had happened to me. I

was still heartbroken and angry. But but yes, I was at that point, almost ten years into marriage to my husband, who is a man who is not unfamiliar with tragedy and loss in his own life and in his work, who is not surprised by um how common sexual assault is, and who has never made me feel ashamed or that I should be guilty, or that what happened to me is in any way remarkable, which is in fact a gift.

And so I was able to speak with him so openly about what was coming up for me while I was watching the way Chessie and her family were navigating, the media onslaught and the school's reaction. When I then joined the case in two thousand seventeen and conquered, police were severed, and the detectives who had worked with me were wonderful and very victims centered and they made me feel that I was legitimate. They said this is a

predatory act. They sent me the actual codes that these you know, the codes of the violation, that this is aggravated felonious sexual assault. And here's why they gave me the terms from the criminal justice system to explain to

me what had been done. And after they were severed, and I could not believe that this was happening again, and presumably to protect the lawyer who had worked for St. Paul's School all those years ago, who wrote these plans for my silencing, and who is still very prominent in the state of New Hampshire and practicing my case was severed, and so I started getting ahold of my own records. I got ahold of my medical records from my little

pediatrics office in Lake Forest, Illinois. I got a hold of records from the ear nose and throat doctor I had seen and conquered New Hampshire. That was how I saw for the first time that a vice rector of the school I had never talked to, I had never known him in any capacity, had called that doctor in Conquered New Hampshire to talk about me. And he had done it while I was home over the summer. This is how I was able to confirmed that the school

had invaded my medical records. And all of these things put together on the page allowed me to see that girl, the girl sitting there on the paper covered table, who cannot eat, who has lost ten pounds, who is a thousand miles from home, can't tell you what has been done to her, and you know, you know that she's sick in her throat, and you don't tell her. And I saw her for the first time, and I thought, you're coming with me. I'm here now, and we're going

to do this together. And I realized that I'm a writer, and looky here, I have the tools to tell what she couldn't and I've lived long enough to understand what she couldn't have understood at that age. And I am supported in all sorts of ways right now and lucky to be so. And god damn it, I'm not the only girl or boy this is done to. This happens all the time. I just got lucky enough to see my files. And when I looked at my files, I saw her. So I wrote that book with a kind

of fever that I haven't known before. And may never know again. But I was very sure, for better or worse, that what I wrote is what I wanted to say. Lacy's book opens with an epigraph from the essays and poet Maggie Nelson. I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor but honesty. Here's Lacy reading one last passage of her story. It's only right that she should have the last word. It's so simple what happened at St. Paul's.

It happens all the time. First they refused to believe me, Then they shamed me, Then they silenced me. On balance, if this is a girl's trajectory from dignity to disappearance, I say it is better to be a slut than to be silent. I believe, in fact, that the slur slut carries within it Trojan Horse style silence as its true intent. That the opposite of slut is not virtue but voice. So I've written what happened exactly as I remember. It is an effort of accompaniment as much as it

is of witness. To go back to that girl leaving the boy's room on an October night, sneakers landing on the Sandy Path and walk with her all the way home. Family Secrets is an i Heeart Media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer and Bethan Macaluso is the executive producer. We'd also like to give a special thanks to Tyler Klang and Tristan McNeil. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is

one eight eight secret zero. That's secret and then the number zero. You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder and Facebook at facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at fami Secrets Pod. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.