Owen Labrie's parents should sue St. Paul's for allowing a school environment that turned their scholarship kid into a dumb jock wannabe.

I have every sympathy for Chessy Prout, but it couldn't be more clear that she has had a life of privilege and that her family had the resources and the clout to pursue a conviction and to make the school accountable.

The band of male friends whom he was trying to impress with his conquest have had no consequences, correct?

I guarantee that poor girls all over the United States are still being raped by rich guys who know there's nothing their victims can do.

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I'm sorry, no.  Let him out of jail.  It's enough that he is registered as a sex offender, is infamous, and is living in hell.


Quote:


"In the aftermath of their encounter, they exchanged tender e-mails referring to each other as angels—and anxious Facebook messages about her lost earring, and whether he’d used a condom."



Article:


https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/03/st-pauls-owen-labrie-rape-trial



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There are poor and minority women being gang-raped in planned, and even filmed, assaults all over the country, all over the world, whose assailants are high-fived and protected by their schools, their coaches, their parents, and the same media which has spent years watching me and other women in bathrooms and showers in Massachusetts.

I don't dispute Chessy Prout's painful experience and her confusion.  I don't want to minimize the emotional trauma of the way that she was treated at school by some of her classmates.  I hope that she will continue her education about women's issues and am not at all interested in discouraging her attempts to educate others.  However, it is important to recognize that the media has chosen her as emblematic of a perfect victim; a young, blonde virgin from an influential family, sullied by someone who, while not destitute, never had her advantages.

The idea of youthful indiscretion has been shamefully, and successfully, exploited time and again to protect vicious predators, but that doesn't eradicate the fact that youth is youth and people make mistakes when they are young.  If the language that Mr. Labrie used in private with his friends to talk about women is shocking to people decades older than he is, then what those people need to do is to place what he and his friends said to each other in the context of what the world is turning into.

It's not for nothing that I have railed against the lack of educational requirements for the American entertainment industry, which has exploited the right of free speech so horribly and for so many years that it has made its own employees sign agreements specifying that they can't object to the most disgusting things being said in their work environments under the guise of "creative process."  Unlike at places such as St. Paul's, where the higher intellectual and behavioral standards set by education and social progress are at war with traditions of misogyny and their modern reincarnations, the American entertainment industry is a wasteland of abject stupidity in every sector. 

The entertainment industry's idea of equal rights is for women to behave as badly as abusive men. 

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Quote:

While evidence suggests that the term “senior salute”—in which 12th-grade students of either gender in their last months at school reached out to younger students of the opposite sex—had not existed for more than two or three years, the practice of “scoring,” or “secret scoring,” in which students kept track of their romantic or sexual conquests, had existed for much longer, as had the ritual of upper-class boys’ “ranking” younger girls’ attractiveness as the boys sat in a common room outside the main dining hall after meals.

Article:


https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/03/st-pauls-owen-labrie-rape-trial


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Quote:

Faculty, alumni, and parents with whom I have talked reported that the ritual of “senior salute” could involve everything from holding hands to a walk to the school boat docks to sexual intercourse, while the definition of “scoring” was said to be similarly vague. But there is no disputing that school officials were aware of a “scoring wall” behind a washing machine in an upper-class dormitory, where an interlocking diagram of hookups had been logged for years. The school kept painting over it, only to have the list repeatedly reappear. The rise of social media has exacerbated the situation and driven such behavior underground to adult-free cyberspace.


Article:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/03/st-pauls-owen-labrie-rape-trial


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Quote:

What is perhaps most depressing from the trial testimony, and documents submitted by the prosecution at the time of Labrie’s sentencing, is that the rite in which Labrie participated was not the province of disaffected or marginalized students who were known rule breakers. Instead it involved some acknowledged leaders of the school: the captain of the soccer team; editors of the newspaper; a class officer of the grade behind Labrie. 


Article:


https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/03/st-pauls-owen-labrie-rape-trial


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Locking up the less affluent defendant is not going to change the culture of the school; it's providing a scapegoat, a necessary character in the ritual that never changes.