I’m told - I can’t prove this - that a trustee of St. We weren’t very public about putting it into the world. Many of them are in very senior positions in just about every industry and cultural space you can imagine. Were you worried about going up against the school?Īs a student, you learn pretty quickly the lists of illustrious names that are literally carved on the wall. So people were not able to be forthcoming about things that were painful or challenging. I think a lot of proving it is demonstrating that you have no vulnerability and no needs. And a lot of people work like hell to try to prove that they do belong. Paul’s, if your dad or grandfather or half of your town didn’t go there, and you show up, you feel as if you don’t belong. So if you did not grow up hearing about St. ![]() So of course they now accept girls and students of color, and some people would say that represents progress, but I’m not sure the school’s character has evolved. It’s a school that was founded by and for rich white boys of a certain heritage. Paul’s, how would you describe its power? I wasn’t able to imagine myself with any compassion previously. I think it was almost encased - a paperweight of Gothic misery. There were things I remembered when I was writing that I hadn’t remembered since then. I haven’t been rehearsing these memories. And after I graduated, I tried everything I could to put it behind me. ![]() I did not permit those words to enter my head. I wasn’t able to tell myself what was happening at the time. You write in such detail about your high school years. But I joined the state investigation and we discovered what we discovered and they buried it again, and I thought, “The hell you do.” I couldn’t be silenced twice. By the time I dug myself out and was married and started having children, I never would have written about this. The experience of what the administration did to me was, in so many ways, worse than the physical violation itself. I was in a bad way for many years, because I had been completely torn apart in high school. How would this story have been different had it been published 20 years ago?Īt the time, I couldn’t tell the story in a way that was satisfactory to me or the few people I showed it to. From her home in Rancho Santa Fe, Crawford, now 45, spoke to The Times earlier this week. Nearly 20 years later, Crawford’s memoir is being published. “I don’t think I can sell this,” Crawford said she was told. In “Notes on a Silencing,” out this week, Crawford describes being held down on a bed by the seniors as their genitals “penetrated her throat past the pharynx.” As a result of the assault - which the young men boasted about to peers - she contracted oral herpes. They were too young for Crawford to explain that she was working on a memoir about how, when she was 15, two senior boys summoned her to a dorm room and sexually assaulted her. ![]() Her children asked what was wrong, and she told them she had the stomach flu. Paul’s, the elite New Hampshire boarding school she attended as a teenager.īut when she started to probe her memory for details of what transpired on the 2,000-acre campus in the fall of 1990, she vomited. She had put both physical and emotional distance between herself and St. She was in her 40s, married, with three young boys. She lived on the other side of the country now, in a home near San Diego with palm trees outside her bedroom window. Decades had passed since Lacy Crawford really thought about the night it happened.
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