'Labrie's Life Is Also in Shambles': Vanity Fair Also Doesn't Know How to Cover Sexual Assault

The subject matter strikes us as decidedly outside the wheelhouse of Vanity Fair, which tends to excel at elevated features about celebrities, royals/America’s version of royals, and politics; this particular story we can posit interested them because it involves youth culture and a prep school. It is also seemingly new territory for Purdum, who is a political reporter.

But the author discloses that he has a stake in the game—he graduated from St. Paul in 1978, won the same award as Labrie, and was a visiting lecturer at the school while Labrie was a student. When the story broke, he emailed with the school rector, Michael Hirschfeld, about the school’s handling of the case.

“What I’ve learned has made me as sorry as if I were covering a crisis in my own family,” he writes, reaffirming his necessary lack of or potential desire for fairness, “which, in a sense, I am.”

Throughout the article, Purdum paints Labrie as a golden boy with a sexual dark side (“In the fall of 2013, Labrie wrote of a ‘lonely gynecologist’ sitting in a greasy-spoon diner in Michigan, ‘mulling over the undeniably miserable and miserably undeniable fact that his vast knowledge of the vagina had never, not even once, been of practical use,’”) and the survivor as a young girl burdened by various social and familial pressures.

For every secession he gives the survivor of sexual assault is one he affords one to Labrie. She was forced to change schools after St. Paul’s turned against her, but “Labrie’s life is also in shambles,” since his admission to Harvard was withdrawn, and he was eventually forced to register as a sex offender.

Ultimately, it seems that Purdum finds fault in a “rotating cadre of circle-the-wagons trustees and administrators who would defend the school’s reputation in the face of damning facts and obvious misconduct.” The Senior Salute continued not because of a global culture that rewards white, wealthy boys for having lots of sex, but instead because the administration alone allowed it to.

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. They shared stolen keys not just to the science-building mechanical room but to other private spaces on the grounds. They shared e-mail templates for inviting girls to a salute and passed around a papier-mâché “slay” mask that amounted to a kind of trophy. This all apparently came as a shock to faculty and administrators—including Hirschfeld, a onetime scholarship kid and athlete, who is said to have seen in Labrie something of himself, the very model of a St. Paul’s student, the kind of person that the school’s diploma would have called in my day a “juvenis optimae spei,” a youth of brightest hope.

The article is not wholly bad—the author devotes several paragraphs to how the St. Paul’s community abandoned the young woman—but much of it is off-putting, and, at times, alarming. Its tone reads as written by someone who does not understand sex crimes or the society we all live in that allows and encourages them, and like it was edited by individuals who, yet again, did not quite understand what they were getting themselves into. Purdum writes from the perspective (and with the acute privilege) of a St. Paul’s community member, one that is shocked at the behavior condoned by the administration, rather than by the culture that repeatedly encouraged it.

Perhaps the article boils down to the idea that this one woman’s tragedy is a pox on Purdum’s heritage—and even American status symbols at large—and he is sad about it.

Image via AP.