NEW HAMPSHIRE
The New York Times
By JESS BIDGOOD
AUG. 19, 2015
CONCORD, N.H. — The 16-year-old girl sat on the witness stand here, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She tried to speak steadily as she told a jury about the night when a ritual at St. Paul’s — one of the country’s elite boarding schools — turned into what she described as a shocking sexual assault.
It had been days away from graduation last year, the season of a campus rite called the “senior salute,” when older students ask younger ones to join them for a walk, a kiss, or more. The girl, 15 and a freshman at the time, had agreed to follow a suitor, Owen Labrie, then 18, to the rooftop of a campus building to which he had a key.
Then, she said, he took her into a dark maintenance room. When they kissed, she did not object. But soon he began to grope her; he bit her chest too, she said, and tried more than once to remove her underwear.
“I said, ‘No, no, no, keep it up here,’ ” said the girl, signaling above her waist. “I tried to be as polite as possible.”
She described Mr. Labrie “scraping” the inside of her body with his hands. “When he got deeper and deeper I felt a lot of pressure. But other than that I tried to block out the feeling as much as I could,” the girl said. She said Mr. Labrie then penetrated her, with his hands on her shoulders. “It had to be his penis,” said the girl.
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