A storage shed purportedly lined with condoms and nicknamed the “Mars Hotel.” A website for tracking the sexual conquests of peers. A contingent of student leaders so unbridled and emboldened that even the rector’s wife became a target for illicit romantic behavior.
St. Paul’s School, once a safe haven for gifted young students and the wealthy elite, has collapsed over the past half decade into a hotbed of sexual predation and unchecked promiscuity, according to a long-anticipated federal lawsuit filed Wednesday in Concord.
The suit, submitted pseudonymously by the family of the former freshman lured into sex by 2014 graduate Owen Labrie, claims life at the New Hampshire boarding school has become dangerously unhealthy, particularly with the advent of the now-infamous “senior salute,” in which upperclassmen solicit intimate encounters from younger pupils, and an unwillingness by administrators to curtail it.
“Owen Labrie was far from a lone bad apple who failed to accustom himself to SPS culture and abide by school norms,” the complaint says, using an abbreviation for the school. “Rather, Labrie embodied the warped culture of sexual misconduct and deviant moral norms at SPS.”
The complaint, a copy of which was obtained by the Monitor, essentially picks up where Labrie’s defense left off at trial last summer, claiming the school failed to “meet its most basic obligations to protect the children entrusted to its care.” Top officials, it insists, knew about the “salute” and other troubling student behavior but did nothing to stop it, even in the face of new warning signs before the sexual assault in May 2014.
Specifically, the complaint says the school learned that spring that Labrie had been overly aggressive with another female student during an earlier sexual encounter, biting her and pulling her hair, but took no “significant action to investigate.” And it alleges that Rector Michael Hirschfeld got emails from employees days before graduation describing “numerous instances of senior men ‘seeking out’ underage girls in an ‘inappropriate manner’ in or near the girls’ dorms.”
“Although he indicated that he would address the issue at a meeting of the heads of house, Hirschfeld also indicated that he was ‘looking forward to graduation,’ suggesting that his true hope was that the problem, for that year anyway, would simply go away,” the complaint states.
The 34-page suit, submitted late Wednesday, demands a jury trial on grounds including negligence and breach of fiduciary duty. It says damages exceed $75,000.
In a statement Wednesday, St. Paul’s said it will “vigorously defend” itself.
“We categorically reject any allegations that St. Paul’s School has an unhealthy culture,” it said. “The safety of our students has been and will continue to be the highest priority for our school.”
St. Paul’s and many of its supporters have previously insisted that what happened in the Labrie case is not indicative of the broader culture at the school. In prepared remarks after Labrie’s conviction in August of misdemeanor statutory rape, among other charges, Hirschfeld praised the victim for having stepped forward and vowed to “continue to focus on teaching our students our core values – that they live honorably, respectfully, and never forget to be kind.”
“The entire St. Paul’s School community has been deeply affected by this incident,” he said. “It is our responsibility to ensure that our students live and learn together in a community that is built on respect, caring, and support for one another.”
But according to the complaint, administrators have failed for years to enact even simple reforms, like stepping up nighttime supervision as recommended by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. A committee for the association found in 2007 that St. Paul’s should, among other things, “re-examine the balance between student freedom and institutional responsibility to ensure that supervision and safety are not compromised by idealism,” the complaint says.
By 2014, however, students including Labrie had easy access to several unauthorized locations on campus, including the upstairs mechanical room where the encounter with his victim took place, and an outdoor storage shed where he and others reportedly placed a sofa for sex, the suit states.
The shed, dubbed the “Mars Hotel,” was purportedly “lined with discarded condoms,” according to reports from students, the complaint said.
There were other examples of the system failing, the complaint said. By 2014, sexual predation at St. Paul’s had become so ingrained that male seniors would lounge on couches at the entrance to the dining hall “ogling” and making “catcalls” at underage girls as they passed, according to the complaint. Two years earlier, it said, a male student created a website called “scoreboard” to track specific sexual encounters among peers. While the administration forced him to take it down, it pursued no other disciplinary or investigative action, the complaint alleges.
In 2013, it says, a male student “brazenly propositioned Liesbeth Hirschfeld – Rector Michael Hirschfeld’s wife (emphasis theirs) – to engage in the Senior Salute,” the name for the springtime ritual, “erasing any doubt that top SPS administrators were aware of this nefarious tradition.”
While St. Paul’s has previously declined to discuss the Labrie case or its implications on campus, it has posted on its website some specific reforms aimed at curbing the school’s “hook-up” culture.
In 2014, Hirschfeld told parents that the school had banned sexual solicitation and competition, and would be bringing in anti-bullying specialists to work with staff and students on related issues. He also said the school planned to implement a new bystander training program, and outlined a student research project on the sexual culture on campus. The school has previously declined to share the results of that research.
(Jeremy Blackman can be reached at 369-3319, jblackman@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @JBlackmanCM.)