“It’s so simple, what happened at St. Paul’s. It happens all the time. First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me.
The IT Lacy Crawford discloses in her memoir of sexual assault at one of the nation’s most prestigious boarding schools was so ruthlessly coordinated that the lingering physical and emotional trauma would plague her for the rest of her life. As I listened to her account of the attack in the opening scene of the audiobook, I seriously considered returning the title because I did not know if I had the fortitude to continue.
Consider the facts: a naive fifteen-year-old girl is lured to the room of two upper-class adults and forced to perform oral sex. As a result, she contracts herpes—a diagnosis the school learns of, shields from her, and shares with its male athletes out of an abundance of “caution”.
Crawford’s writing is so compelling that I kept with the story even as her nightmare stretched into years of shame, shunning, and dysfunction so intense that I felt physically ill. There’s a reason beyond the shockwaves that shaking her alma mater in the Me Too Movement that this story made Time Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2020.
To watch a brief video of Crawford summarizing her experience and her reasons for recounting it, click here.