A teenage survivor of sexual assault said St. Paul’s School did nothing to support her after she reported her assault on the school’s Concord campus.
“In no way was I treated or cared for as a survivor of sexual assault. I was a 15-year-old rape victim looking for help, longing for support, and instead was treated like a publicity problem that needed to be managed,” Chessy Prout, now 18, said in a statement Tuesday to the Monitor.
Prout’s remarks come a day after St. Paul’s administrators acknowledged a long-standing history of sexual misconduct at the prep school. While the school said it has taken steps to improve student safety, the Prout family said the school has for too long turned a blind eye to a systemic problem, caring more about its public reputation than its students.
Conclusions drawn from an independent investigation into sexual abuse at St. Paul’s mirror some of the claims the Prout family made in a pending civil lawsuit filed against the school last year.
The new independent report – commissioned by the elite boarding school and carried out by a former Massachusetts attorney general – substantiates claims against at least 13 faculty members between 1948 and 1988. The report, released Monday, focuses solely on claims of sexual abuse students made against faculty and staff during that time.
Chessy Prout’s parents, Alex and Susan Prout, claim in their lawsuit that life at the boarding school had become dangerously unhealthy, particularly with the advent of the now-infamous “Senior Salute,” a game of sexual conquest in which upperclassmen solicit intimate encounters from younger pupils.
Chessy Prout was sexually assaulted as a freshman by 2014 graduate Owen Labrie, who is now appealing his conviction to the New Hampshire Supreme Court.
“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 findings in the independent report conflict with previous statements made by the school in response to the Prouts’ lawsuit, which was filed in spring 2016.
“We categorically reject any allegations that St. Paul’s School has an unhealthy culture,” the school said in a statement last summer. “The safety of our students has been and will continue to be the highest priority for our school.”
But officials acknowledged Monday that the school failed its former students by not adequately investigating reports made to St. Paul’s leadership about sexual abuse by faculty.
That included in 2000, when a group of St. Paul’s graduates got together after a reunion to submit narratives to the school of their teachers’ sexual misconduct in the 1970s. School officials commissioned an attorney to investigate, but not on behalf of the victims or the truth, according to the report. The school was concerned primarily with protecting its reputation and sought to keep the issue out of the public eye, the report concludes.
“The objectives set forth in that plan were to: protect the reputation of SPS; minimize media coverage; compartmentalize the issue as much as possible; and protect individuals’ reputations,” the report states.
In a joint statement Monday, St. Paul’s Rector Michael Hirschfeld and Board of Trustees President Archibald Cox Jr. said, “The school failed to protect students from sexual abuse and sexual misconduct done to them by adults entrusted with their care.”
Their statement uses some of the exact same words the Prouts used as part of the lawsuit filed in spring 2016. Alex and Susan Prout accused the school of fostering a rape culture among students and of failing to “meet its most basic obligations to protect the children entrusted to its care.”
The school continues to deny any liability in the case involving Labrie, as it simultaneously takes responsibility for decades-old sexual abuse of students by faculty members.
“Sadly, Mike Hirschfeld, Archibald Cox Jr. and the Board of Trustees failed to extend to our daughter Chessy any of the support they claim victims deserve,” Alex and Susan Prout said in a statement Tuesday. “Our family will not stand on the sidelines while more children are victimized by an institution that values secrecy more than safety, and who prides itself on circling the institutional wagons as a way of protecting those the school supposedly seeks to serve.”
Hirschfeld and Cox said in a letter to the St. Paul’s community Monday that the school’s failure to adequately investigate allegations of sexual abuse by faculty years ago resulted in “damaged trust.” Officials did not discuss the “Senior Salute” or more recent allegations of sexual misconduct involving students.
Asked whether students have learned that people in positions of power won’t be held responsible for misbehavior, Hirschfeld said Monday, “I don’t think that’s true of our current students because, again, we don’t have stories of this happening in the recent past.”
He added, “We haven’t heard of this kind of behavior on the adult side for sure.”
Concord police Lt. Sean Ford said he is skeptical of the silence after 1988, and questions whether the school has done a full vetting of what’s happened between years 1988 and 2017.
“I look at it with some hesitation,” Ford said. “I’m very curious as to what our records will say, and we haven’t even started looking at that because we’re focused on what’s in the report right now.”
Hirschfeld said Monday that six staff members had been fired for personal boundary violations since 2000. He could not be reached for further comment Tuesday.
School administrators said they’ve tried to turn a corner by committing to boundary training for everyone in the school’s community, by clearly articulating a faculty code of conduct, by reporting inappropriate behaviors to police, and by enforcing a “zero tolerance” policy for adults who use their power to harm or manipulate children.
But advocates say officials have stopped short of drawing the connection between the abuse of past decades and the present problems of sexual misconduct among students at St. Paul’s.
“It’s short-sighted to say these crimes haven’t had an affect on student behavior,” said Amanda Grady Sexton, director of public affairs for the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence. “When you’ve had this type of activity – from inappropriate touching, to sexual assault, to rape – spanning half a century, it’s impossible to say that it’s not a continuation of deep-seated problems. It’s clearly embedded in the culture of the community.”
Meanwhile, the investigators who looked into years of past sexual assault allegations at St. Paul’s commended the school’s alumni and leadership for commissioning the report and making it public.
“Each person we have encountered, from alumni/ae to former SPS Board members to the current leadership, has impressed us with his or her commitment to uncovering this history and to repairing the impact of the harm done to individuals by a full investigation, and by renewing a commitment to ensure that systems are in place to keep SPS students safe now and in the future,” the report states.
(Staff writer Nick Reid contributed to this report. Alyssa Dandrea can be reached at 369-3319, adandrea@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @_ADandrea.)