I still thought my throat hurt because I was a bad person who had done a terrible thing. NOTES ON A SILENCINGA MemoirBy Lacy Crawford. The suspicion is that she has a sexually transmitted disease so deep in her throat it cannot be seen on a normal exam. She was beautiful. I sat up in bed, back to the frozen windows, and forced myself to swallow. I workedI still workto restore the boys humanity as a way of restoring mine: they were symptoms of a sick system, they were tools of the patriarchy, they were fooled by porn. Not then and not ever. The damage to me was done. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Child confessed this to mother last week. The verb confessed is useful, nestled in the pages of this caring cliniciannot that she thought I was guilty, but that she anticipated the guilt I was feeling. Judge Richard McNamara ruled that the act of compiling and releasing a report, based on what state law clearly establishes are secret proceedings, would defy precedent and jeopardize the privacy interests of sexual assault victims and those accused but never criminally charged. For 2023-24, tuition (inclusive of room and board) is $65,410, after three consecutive . Two women created space for her to tell it: a queer priest on campus and, later, an African American woman from a sexual assault crisis center. There she was, with two naked boys, out of her room after she had signed her name to check in for the night. At that time, the records could not be released because there was an open investigation, Osgood wrote in an email Wednesday. Believing in them is only a toxic embrace of self-protection. The school never said anything to me. View the profiles of people named Rick Banner. There was no higher form of rightness than righteousness. Theres no mention of a diagnostic process at all. The rector only said, Why didnt Lacy tell anyone? To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. When the boys did what they did to me, they denied the third person on that bed. Its no mistake these two women were the furthest people in Crawfords life from white masculine power structures. Only a fool walked into what I had walked into. He was not impulsive or hotheaded or easily swayed. A community where learning from and about each other never really ends as we each build purposeful lives in service to the greater good. 136 were here. But perhaps that is a necessary thing. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. What happened in the boys room seemed to me both monolithic and so obvious as to not require revelation, like a compound fracture or a dangling eyeball, the sort of thing that makes someone wince and say, Oh, shit, okay, dont move, Ill call someone right away.. St. Paul's, like a number of other private boarding schools, including Phillips Academy, Choate Rosemary Hall, Phillips Exeter Academy, the Hotchkiss School and St. George's School,. Would any notice be sent to the boys colleges? Even once I found out a few months later about the vice rectors bit of patriarchal counsel to his boys, I did not do the math to arrive at the realization made by a detective investigating the school more than 25 years after the fact: So the students knew about the herpes before you did.. Because now I was up against an institution that subsumes human beings and presents a slick wall of rhetoric and ice where there should be thought and feeling. I have talked with her a number of times about that, and I keep saying, Im right behind you, but Im not going to get in front of you. . They would, much later, inform other boys on campus about that condition of hersbut they never informed her. Oh my God, I said. She was very sorry. Through social media posts, court records, and other primary sources, author Kathleen Hale forensically reconstructs their lives before the crime, and the night they were killed. She was from a well-to-do Chicago family, her father an executive and her mother an Episcopal priest. Were all in agreement, the detective told her, that there seems to be some collusion or incestuous relations between attorneys here Its attorneys tipping off attorneys. The attorney general of New Hampshire settled all charges against St. Pauls. In her memoir, Notes on a Silencing,out Tuesday, Crawford focuses on the schools response to silence and discredit her, which inflicted a second trauma. All rights reserved. The attorney generals office, although appraised of the letter, took issue with how Concord police had obtained it. Crawfords memoir has gone to press but her story is still unfolding in New Hampshire. Ad Choices. Weve said it before: The greatest threat to democracy from the media isnt disinformation, its the paywall. She chafed at the constant use of the male pronoun in the Book of Common Prayer, and would loudly sing at the Doxology, Blessed is she who comes in the name of the Lord. Mom loved a classy lady, dignified and reserved: vintage Lagerfeld or Halston. And I think what we have with your case is the smoking gun, Curtin, who now works for the attorney generals office, said to Crawford. All of that. Youd be surprised what a clinician can miss. I am sure the school has not had the full and open reckoning it needs to have about all the ways we fail to see and talk about gender, race, class, wealth, privilege and legacy, Crawford said. var photocredit = "'' 'Lacy Crawfords yearbook entry at St. Paul\'s School in 1992'"; First, they refused to believe me. The Parallel Universe of Ivanka Trump, Americas Dissociated Princess No, I Am Not Okay: A Black Journalist Addresses His White Friends Why Bankrupt Hertz Is a Pandemic Zombie Scenes of Fury and Mourning at the Minneapolis Protests Civil Rights Advocate Brandi Collins-Dexter on Why Facebook Chooses Trump Over Democracy Democrats Blue-Texas Fever Dream May Finally Become a Reality From the Archive: Taking Stock of Melania Trump, the UnpreparedAnd LonelyFLOTUS. From Notes on a Silencing. The former attorney general of Massachusetts, Scott Harshbarger, led Casner & Edwardss team. If you are looking for a story about triumph, about justice, you will not find it here. This, our mutual disappointment, might have given us an opening to talk to each other. I evoke here a different meaning of the word than usually comes to mind, one based in its Greek etymology, , or witness. I probably thought of this secondary meaning because Bill Matthews, one of the primary men who brutally silenced Crawford, was one of my classics teachers (he taught me Latin in tenth grade). Where was I, at that moment? tag_id.innerHTML = ''; The lawyer for the school says that you are not welcome to return to campus., Well, they have a list of things here that they are prepared to say about you. If Id been so upset, why hadnt I alerted a teacher or advisor straight away? My parents stood side by side in front of me. It was warm, deep in my throat. Youd have to really work at it, I mean, to get that deep. Id have been at home in Lake Forest, taking my Zovirax. The school had failed this first test. More interesting to Crawford is the silence over the decades that followed the attack and the power structures in place that kept her a 15-year-old girl from speaking her truth and seeking help. I kept living, and then a few months later I went and told my parents about the sexual assault. Concord Monitor Report For America Education, Concord Monitor Report For America Health, Support the Herpes was an STD, and STDs were acquired through sex, and I had not had sex. Four, Lacy is a promiscuous girl who has had intercourse with a number of boys on campus, including the accused. Certainly not at the infirmary. I was hung up on that word. And here before you is one of them, this girl, a thousand miles from home, who cannot eat. Crawfords telling is beautifully rendered. Crawford certainly does not present herself as one. He would have hoisted his trophy high over his head in front of them all. She tries to run by him, and he sticks his tongue down her throat. No one was going to help. A sexual assault at a New England boarding school. She also details for readers her experiences as a victim in New Hampshires criminal justice process. var photocredit = photocredit.toUpperCase(); Titles: Middle School Science Teacher Departments: Middle School SP . In July, a call came in. In the end, Notes on a Silencing is about mens care for power, and their brutalization of everything else. Well, of course. There is a powerful lesson in this: We dont need to know more to understand what happened. I did not think I deserved to get better, but I was a girl with a firm sense of doom. My throat was hard against the threat of vomit, which would have burned terribly. var sellablestring = "MONITOR STAFF"; My father was polite but cold. That was all just fine with the school. Matthews went on. Years later, in 2015-2016, the local police in Concord, New Hampshire, began investigating a new rape case at St. Pauls that led them back to the rape of Lacy Crawford in 1991. They let the boys graduate. They had not previously been on a first-name basis. It happens all the time, everywhere. I dont remember, for example, how it felt to greet my mother when I came home. Because she lives on campusand, like all of her peers, is not allowed to leave without written consent from her advisoryou can be reasonably sure that she contracted it from another student (or, I suppose, from a faculty member or an administrator). The argument of Notes on a Silencing is not that with exploration came truth. In her new memoir, Lacy Crawford names the educators who, she says, knowingly hid her rape from the police and engaged in witness tampering: Bill Matthews, John Buxton, Cliff Gillespie, and Kelly Clark, teachers and administrators at the school. What happened to me at St. Pauls happens everywhere, Crawford, now 45, said in an interview with the Monitor. Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford is out Tuesday. For a time, Crawford was cautiously hopeful that the state-led investigation would give her some sense of closure. Mink in winter. Disposable, flimsy. I could not get past Prozac. But thats all the notes show. In 2017, during the New Hampshire state investigation into St. Pauls, I got hold of my records from the ear-nose-and-throat clinic in Concord. Chapters loop backward and forward in time. But then the school went and did the same thing, denying my humanity, rewriting the character of a girl. Dad lowered the page and aimed his eyes at me, querulous and hard, with my mother beside him avoiding my face. Kathy Giles, who last year became the first woman rector, oversaw the removal of Matthewss name from the hockey center. if (photocredit.indexOf(sellablestring) > -1) { }, Lacy Crawford and her brother at St. Paul's School in Concord in the early 1990s. They held her down. I was welcomed back. In fact, I murdered details by the thousand that spring and summer. And some of those lessons are ones that Crawford herself never teaches. //LBtag_id.innerHTML = ''; Unless you were willing to access a girls medical records without her consent and share what you found there with the administration (and all of her schoolmates). St. Paul Schools serves students in grades Pre-K throug It is an effort of accompaniment as much as it is of witness: to go back to that girl leaving the boys room on an October night, sneakers landing on the sandy path, and walk with her all the way home. About 40% of SPS families receive financial aid each year, and our grants meet full demonstrated financial need with no gaps. I have files a few inches thick, each off-center page reproduced from the scanned originals, that record my passage from place to place, each time opening my mouth in the hope that someone would see. Courtesy You are the smoking gun.. You might think this was an opportunity for her to escape by drawing attention to what was happening. A ball of spiders, a cup of maggots. The rector. A damsel, a whore. Theres something really wrong with my throat, I said. var tag_id = document.getElementById('buylinkCrawford-CM-070520,ph2'); var currentheadline = document.getElementById("headline").innerText; What interests me is not what happened. Because the Concord Police Department must continue to investigate past and future crimes at the School, we have concluded the conflict cannot be resolved.. We have 532 students and 113 faculty, with students from 37 states and 24 countries, and 40% receive financial aid. Then the blood ran free. The terrified 15-year-old Lacy Crawford knew well what many of us are still unwilling to admit to ourselves. The school officials illegally accessed her medical information and failed to inform her of her own sexually transmitted illness. The following is a list of alumni of St. Paul's School. You know, what they did. She gripped her throat to demonstrate. Wool boucl in spring. Here was the contract, as I understood it: I would not speak of the assault, and they would not do anything to interfere with my applications to college or my progress toward graduation. Would like to speak with you about [a patient], reads the message. Christina Norton, Administrative Assistant of Religious Education, please call (860) 828-1934 ext 125. Christ is the reason for St. Paul Catholic High School. By Crawfords account, his work was a successfor the school. Teacher-Coach at St Paul's School for Girls . var photocredit = "'Courtesy' 'Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford is out Tuesday. I really went for it. When Elisabeth Finch met Jennifer Beyer in 2019, the two women forged a fiercely loyal friendship, and eventually got married. The Idaho Murders, Part 1: How 4 College Kids Lived and Loved. Lightning strikes caused a 2-hour, 19 minute delay in Saturday's girls lacrosse battle between Darien (CT) and St. Paul's School for Girls at US Lacrosse Stadium. Before we all left campus that spring, a vice rector sat down with members of the boys varsity lacrosse team and told them that he didnt want to ask any questions, but if any of them had ever been intimate with Lacy Crawford, he should go to the infirmary right away to get checked out. Hes been waiting ten years to go after St. Pauls. She said MacDonald may have intended to provide clarity but, from her perspective, the letter makes the situation worse. //var LBtag_id = document.getElementById('buylinkLBCrawford-CM-070520,ph04'); There was never anything to see. The moment when he might have laughed at that drug-dealing bit had passed. Crawford enrolled at St. Pauls School in the fall of 1989, graduating in 1992. According to the physicians report, the clinician in Concord was able to numb my throat and look past my tonsils to see that the hypopharyngeal space, where the esophagus meets the trachea, was badly abscessed. Lets have a look.. We had always been churchgoers, every Sunday at 9 a.m., unless you were actively vomiting. MacDonald wrote to Crawfords editor on June 26 that Little, Brown and Companys failure to call his office about the accuracy of the detectives statements is irresponsible, if not reckless.. In 1991, St. Pauls School, along with the law firm of Orr & Reno, threatened to destroy his daughter, a 15-year-old student who had been raped by two 18-year-old students. I was not invited into the library for the call, so I stayed upstairs in my room, with my door closed, and stared out the window over our driveway. In her 11th-grade year, Crawford was raped by two seniors. To which Id reply: Youd be surprised what a kid can find it unimaginable to say. He did not test me for any diseases, sexually transmitted or otherwise. Help would not be there for her, it was there for power. Not the school. Her narrative lacks all sentimentality, yet somehow isnt cold. Please, become a member, or make a one-time donation, today. The head of school is the rector, and for a century and a half almost all of the school's rectors had been ordained priests. The most she could muster in response to these men was, Just dont have sex with me.. The culture from my throat had tested positive for Herpes Simplex Virus.
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