Concord
“It’s been two years now since the whole ordeal, and I feel ready to stand up and own what happened to me and make sure other people, other girls and boys, don’t need to be ashamed, either,” Chessy Prout, now 17, told Today in an exclusive interview.
As part of her fight for change, Prout has launched a new social media campaign under the hashtag #IHaveTheRightTo. The nonprofit organization Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment, or PAVE, is working with Prout and has a website dedicated to the cause.
More than two years have passed since Prout said she was raped by Labrie in a mechanical room at St. Paul’s. After a high-profile trial that included three days of Prout’s testimony, a jury convicted Labrie of statutory rape, but cleared him of the most serious felony sexual assault charges.
Labrie, of Tunbridge, also was found guilty of endangering the welfare of a child and using a computer to lure Prout into their encounter, a felony that requires him to register as a sex offender for life. He is out of jail pending appeal.
When the Today show’s Savannah Guthrie asked Prout if she ever thinks about Labrie’s future, she said no.
“I hope he learns,” Prout said. “I hope he gets help. And that’s all I can ever hope for in any sort of process like this. Because if he doesn’t learn, he will do it to another young woman.”
The jury’s verdict of acquittal on the felony sexual assault counts upset her, she said.
“They said that they didn’t believe that he did it knowingly, and that frustrated me a lot because he definitely did do it knowingly,” she said. “And the fact that he was still able to pull the wool over a group of people’s eyes bothered me a lot and just disgusted me in some ways.”
Prout’s decision to reveal her identity came less than a month after St. Paul’s objected to her family’s use of pseudonyms in a civil lawsuit. The school called for Prout and her parents to be named if the case they brought against the school reaches trial in U.S. District Court in Concord.
Her parents first filed the lawsuit in June under the names John and Jane Doe.
However, just hours before the family’s Today show appearance, an amended complaint with the parents’ real names, Alex and Susan Prout, was filed.
The Prouts argue the school’s objection to their use of pseudonyms is part of a larger effort by St. Paul’s to undermine a survivor’s credibility. For two years, they said, the school “controlled the public narrative” of the sexual assault and, further, stood by when money poured in to aid Labrie.
St. Paul’s has denied any liability, saying it could not have prevented the sexual assault in May 2014.
The school also denies allegations that Labrie and other upperclassmen openly targeted freshman girls and competed in games of sexual conquest, including the now-infamous “senior salute.”
Susan Prout told Today that her family once loved the school, as both her husband and their first daughter had great experiences there.
“If ever there was a family to work with, it would have been our family,” she said.
But, she added, “It seems like the school’s reputation became more important, rather than supporting our daughter.”
The school has accused Susan and Alex Prout of pursuing a media campaign against it.
The parents, though, argue it was St. Paul’s that spent millions to hire a public relations team tasked with twisting the facts to paint the school in a positive light.
In an emailed statement on Tuesday, St. Paul’s said “the school admires (Chessy Prout’s) courage and condemns unkind behavior toward her. We feel deeply for her and her family.”
“We have always placed the safety and well-being of our students first and are confident that the environment and culture of the school have supported that. We categorically deny that there ever existed at the school a culture or tradition of sexual assault. However, there’s no denying the survivor’s experience caused us to look anew at the culture and environment.”
Prout said she quickly realized after Labrie’s trial that St. Paul’s wasn’t a place where she could continue her education. Other students weren’t accepting of her decision to come forward and made jokes to her face about sexual consent.
“I tried my best to go back to my school and try to have a normal life again,” she said. “But if they’re going to treat this topic as a joke, this is not a place I want to be.”