What is perhaps most depressing from the trial testimony, and documents submitted by the prosecution at the time of Labrie's sentencing, is that the rite in which Labrie participated was not the province of disaffected or marginalized students who were known rule breakers. Instead it involved some acknowledged leaders of the school: the captain of the soccer team; editors of the newspaper; a class officer of the grade behind Labrie.
Hardly alone among teenagers, Labrie presented a radically different persona to adults than he did to his fellow students. A father of a recent graduate, who questioned his son about the prosecution's evidence that Labrie had kept a list of girls he wanted to"slay," told me that his son had reported,"Dad, if this guy was going to do it, he was the type that would make a list.
What she got was something else: a physical encounter that, she testified, quickly escalated beyond her comfort. She acknowledged being excited as she and Labrie kissed in the dark against a wall, then sank to the floor. She lifted her hips to help him slip off her shorts. But when he tried to remove her bra and underwear, she testified, she stopped him and said"no" three times. She said he bit her breasts through the bra, hard enough to hurt her.
Labrie's lawyer offered these messages as proof that the victim had not just undergone a traumatic experience—and perhaps had not even had sex at all—while the prosecution explained them as the reverse: a textbook example of a date-rape victim's efforts to placate and pacify her assailant. Her sister's graduation was looming, her parents were in town, and the last thing she wanted, she testified, was to make any trouble or have the word get out.
The girl's family is wealthy. Money is not the principal object of its potential lawsuit against the school, which has brought on Michael Delaney, a former New Hampshire attorney general, as its lawyer. The family has hired Steven Kelly, of Baltimore, a nationally known lawyer in sexual-assault and -abuse cases, to use the leverage of a suit to force the school to adopt changes in training and discipline for students and faculty.
For its part, the school has been hamstrung by legal constraints and fears of the victim's lawsuit. Its statements about the case have been so heavily lawyered as to lack proper nouns, action verbs, even palpable sadness.Hirschfeld acknowledged that"the last 19 months have been heartbreaking for the School community, no more so than for the survivor and her family," and outlined various initiatives that St.
Why women and girls often don’t report rapes. You are out through hell again and often the rapist gets little or no time because the judge ‘doesn’t want to ruin his life’.