Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

I apologized for this and said I hoped I hadn’t wasted her time. “You have not wasted anyone’s time,” she replied. “In fact, Lieutenant Ford and I agree that you have taught us a lot about what happens to girls after something like this.” Happens to girls. Not what girls do.

noted that Taz had not also asked Julie, Why now. For him, maybe, it was not so long past. He might have understood how crisis endures.

these charges would have led to only misdemeanor convictions, whereas his office wanted to ensure institutional change. I thought that institutional change and misdemeanor convictions could coexist quite happily. I thought, in fact, that the latter might help effect the former.

We thought of you.” I was surprised by how this moved me. I wished I could go back decades and tell myself as a girl about the two detectives in Concord who would be waiting to listen when I was ready to talk.

My husband had been waiting for my question. “Love,” he said, “you want to know what I think?” I did. He held me and said, “Burn it all down.”

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. On balance, if this is a girl’s trajectory from dignity to disappearance, I say it is better to be a slut than to be silent. I believe, in fact, that the slur slut carries within it, Trojan-horse style, silence as its true intent. That the opposite of slut is not virtue but voice.

Here the children of the elite were trained not in right or wrong but in projections of belief.

Thank you to Detective Julie Curtin and Lieutenant Sean Ford of the Concord, New Hampshire, Police Department, whose honesty and consistent focus on victim-centered discourse were transformative. Almost alone among administrators and authorities who were involved with my case, they saw through bureaucratic obstacles, diversion, and obfuscation and worked to restore truth and integrity. Where there cannot be justice, there is sometimes clarity, and this is its own mercy. This book would not have a voice were it not for the leadership of Tarana Burke and the advocacy she has inspired, or for the example of fortitude and fierce care offered by Chessy Prout and the Prout family. Every survivor and witness of abuse at St. Paul’s School who spoke up, anonymously or otherwise, helped generate enough interest and anger to rouse an institution slumbering in its pride and reach those of us who had resigned ourselves to silence. Thank you. After this book was completed, the trustees of St. Paul’s voted to remove Bill Matthews’s name from the hockey center. This decision was made without consideration of how Matthews treated me and my family, but stemmed from his handling of more recent events. Archibald Cox Jr., as board chair, and Kathy Giles, current rector, presided over a decision that was, and remains, highly contentious among alumni and trustees. The symbolic removal of Matthews’s legacy bespeaks good intentions, but I find cause for hope only in the fact that current leadershi...