RHODE ISLAND
Washington Post
[Video: Victims speak out about abuse at Rhode Island prep school]
By Sarah Kaplan
January 6
Harry Groome was just 14, a newcomer from a small Pennsylvania town, eager to fit in at his tony New England boarding school. His tormentors were seniors, one was even a prefect. They had superior social standing, not to mention numbers and size. So when they told him to keep quiet, he did.
Not that his silence stopped the whole school from knowing what happened to him: the teenage Groome was forced to stand atop a trashcan, he told the Boston Globe, pull down his pants and underwear, and bend over while an assailant raped him with a broomstick.
Attacks like the one on Groome were something of an open secret at St. George’s School, the alma mater of Astors and Vanderbilts, the poet Ogden Nash and Sen. Claiborne Pell, where dozens of alumni say they were sexually abused. According to the Globe, a 1979 yearbook includes a photo of Groome in a trashcan, a hockey stick beside him. The caption reads, “It’s better than a broomstick!”
The perpetrators were never punished, and Groome carried the trauma of his abuse through three years of high school and the following two decades. When, in the early 2000s, he finally reached out to school officials, telling them what had happened, he says he was not taken seriously.
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