Hanover
The 59-year-old Kuster, who has extensive family and professional ties to Dartmouth, took to the floor of the U.S. House on Tuesday night and said she had been assaulted three times as a young woman, including once 40 years ago “on a cold winter night at a prestigious college campus.”
Although Kuster didn’t name the college in her speech, other than to place it on the East Coast, she was a member of the class of 1978 at Dartmouth, the third class to include women. Her spokeswoman, Rosie Hilmer, confirmed that the assault, which Kuster told the Concord Monitor was a physical assault with sexual connotations, took place at a Dartmouth fraternity.
“I was an 18-year-old student. I was going to a dance. The dance was at a fraternity, and I intended to enjoy the evening with my friends,” Kuster said in her speech, which expressed solidary with “Emily Doe,” the 23-year-old victim in a high-profile rape case involving former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner.
Kuster said she and her friends ”enjoyed the party until one young man assaulted me in a crude and insulting way, and I ran alone into the cold, dark night. I have never forgotten that night. I was filled with shame, regret, humiliation while he was egged on by everyone at that party standing by.”
The other two assaults Kuster recounted occurred when she was 23 and working as a Congressional aide in Washington, D.C.
Asked for comment about Kuster’s revelations, Dartmouth spokeswoman Diana Lawrence said via email, “We were deeply distressed to learn about Representative Annie Kuster’s experiences, but we applaud her courage. Sexual assault is a notoriously underreported crime. At Dartmouth, we want to see the number of reported incidents go up and the prevalence of incidents go down. Although the growing climate of reporting is encouraging, even one sexual assault is too many. It is revelations like Representative Kuster’s that demonstrate why we must continue to expand our efforts in prevention, response, and accountability.”
At Dartmouth, Kuster majored in environmental policy and was a member of the ski team. Among her classmates and friends was Rob Portman, now a Republican senator from Ohio.
Before entering politics, Kuster worked as an adoption lawyer and lobbyist in New Hampshire, including representing Dartmouth on some matters in Concord. Her family ties to the college encompass at least four generations.
Her paternal grandfather was a Dartmouth College trustee, and her maternal grandfather, Lloyd Neidlinger, was an all-America football player at Dartmouth in the 1920s, and later served as dean of the college, according to his 1978 obituary in the New York Times.
Her late father, Malcolm McLane, was captain of the Dartmouth men’s ski team, and went on to become Concord mayor and a member of the Executive Council.
Both of Kuster’s sons also attended Dartmouth, and the McLane Hall dorm on the west side of campus, built about a decade ago, was funded largely by her cousin, P. Andrews McLane, a major private equity investor in Massachusetts.
Asked whether Kuster had previously discussed the assaults publicly, Hilmer, her spokeswoman, said via email: “While she has not publicly discussed any of the incidences she mentioned in her House floor speech until (Tuesday) night, the congresswoman has been extremely active in the fight to ensure campuses are treating the issue of sexual assault seriously, and she has worked to make the difficult conversations happen.”
Hilmer said that Kuster in August 2014 convened a roundtable discussion that included administrators and students from a number of New Hampshire schools, including Dartmouth, “to create an open dialogue about the need to address these issues.”
She also sponsored legislation, the Campus Safety and Accountability Act, that would require colleges to strengthen prevention, education, and reporting requirements regarding assault on campus, Hilmer said.
In April 2014, Kuster had also taken to the House floor to decry the fact that “by the time women graduate from college, one in five will be a victim of sexual assault.”
In that speech, Kuster credited Dartmouth President Phil Hanlon, who graduated from Dartmouth a year before she did, for his work “to address unsafe and inappropriate behavior on the Dartmouth campus” and also applauded the University of New Hampshire initiatives it was taking to “reduce sexual violence on campus.”
“We must continue to address these issues head-on and ensure a safe and secure environment for learning for all college students, men and women,” Kuster said.
News staff writer John P. Gregg can be reached at jgregg@vnews.com.