She went to Princeton, volunteered as a rape crisis counselor, wrote her master’s thesis on the use of rape testimony in legal cases, and worked as a high school teacher and environmental campaigner, among other jobs. But so far, the quality of our discourse makes me hopeful.”įor years, Crawford kept her story private. “I said thank you, and I thought that that and my Starbucks card could get me a latte. “She apologized six different ways to Wednesday,” Crawford said. The two had lunch in California last winter. “If there’s anything we’ve learned, it’s that we have to receive the stories and respect the experience and then take what steps we need to address the hurt and pain.”Īfter Giles read an advance copy of the book, she requested a meeting with Crawford. “Who would want that experience for anyone - for Lacy, for her family, for her friends?” she said. The school is committed to doing better by its students, she added. “There’s a truth to her experience that’s powerful and important.” “We respect Lacy’s courage and we admire her voice,” Giles said. Paul’s rector, as the principal is called, said in an interview that the school did not dispute Crawford’s account. A spokesman for the attorney general’s office said her participation had helped provide the basis for “what we continue to believe is an unprecedented settlement with the school.” Crawford was interviewed as part of the attorney general’s investigation. In 2018, the school reached a settlement with the New Hampshire attorney general that put the institution under the state’s oversight for five years - and installed a compliance officer on campus - to ensure that it followed basic protocols about protecting students and investigating complaints. Paul’s found substantiated abuse reports by faculty members of students stretching back as far as 1948. George’s School, has in recent years had to face up to and answer for decades of sexual abuse and misconduct. Paul’s, like a number of other private boarding schools, including Phillips Academy, Choate Rosemary Hall, Phillips Exeter Academy, the Hotchkiss School and St. “I was diseased I was disgraced I was alone.” She made herself “as silent and slender as I could,” she writes. Her friends drifted away other students whispered about her someone threw things at her from a dorm window as she walked by. She returned to school, graduating in 1992, but she felt like a ghost of a person, shrouded in private misery, rendered voiceless even as her throat healed. The boys who attacked her weren’t accused of wrongdoing, and Crawford doesn’t name them in her book. Paul’s was concerned, the issue was then closed. “Trust me,” one official told her father. They never asked Lacy for her own account, she writes, and they made it clear that unless she dropped the matter she would not be able to return to school. The school’s story - at least the story officials told Crawford’s devastated parents - was that the encounter was consensual, that their daughter brought it on herself, that she was promiscuous and hardly a victim. It turned out that she had been infected with herpes. The attack left her feverish and with a chronically raw, bleeding throat that made talking and eating painful, she writes. The details are horrible to repeat and horrible to read: how two senior boys pinned Crawford down, grabbed her breasts, unzipped her jeans and penetrated her with their fingers how they jammed their penises deep into her mouth how they bragged about it afterward. Lacy Crawford’s book “Notes on a Silencing” comes out on July 7. “The way they came to their own conclusions about what happened,” Crawford, now 45, said by phone from Southern California, where she lives with her husband and three sons, “that was breathtaking to me and remains breathtaking to me.” Paul’s response only compounded the attack, piling a second trauma on top of the first. But her memoir, “Notes on a Silencing,” out next Tuesday from Little, Brown, focuses much more on what came afterward. Mine is one of just a dime a dozen.”Ĭrawford has had 30 years to grapple with what happened that day. “There are so many stories of abuse and assault. She speaks deliberately, calmly, as if observing her feelings at a remove. “This may sound disingenuous, but I don’t think my assault is particularly interesting,” she said in an interview earlier this month. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, but one of the most upsetting is how commonplace she believes it was. There are so many upsetting things about the assault Lacy Crawford suffered in 1990, when she was 15 and a junior at St.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |