'Labrie's Life Is Also in Shambles': Vanity Fair Also Doesn't Know How to Cover Sexual Assault
LatestWhen Owen Labrie was an 18-year-old senior at the prestigious St. Paul’s School, he made plans via email to meet a 15-year-old freshman girl as part of the “Senior Salute,” a tradition that involves seniors attempting to sleep with as many underclassmen as possible. According to that freshman’s testimony, Labrie would force her to have sex in a closet, despite her repeated objections.
This past August, Labrie was found guilty of a few of the handful of charges set against him: one count of misdemeanor sexual assault, one count of endangering a child (also a misdemeanor), and of using a computer to lure a child (a felony). He has since been sentenced to a year in jail, five years of probation, and to register as a sex offender.
And on Tuesday, just a week after SB Nation posted and quickly deleted a tome that essentially erased the victims of former cop Daniel Holtzclaw, Vanity Fair published a 5,500 word article by St. Paul’s alumnus Todd S. Purdum that suggests because of one “encounter that turned sexual,” “two lives have been irreparably damaged.”
The piece leads with this description of Labrie and the unnamed freshman girl:
He was 18, a scholarship boy from a bitterly broken home, a star scholar-athlete—captain of the varsity soccer team—who had won full-ride admission to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Duke, Stanford, Middlebury, and the University of Virginia, and two days later would be the winner of the headmaster’s award for “selfless devotion to School activities.”
She was 15, a privileged second-generation preppy who had been raised in Asia and whose older sister had briefly dated the boy and advised her to steer clear of him; by all accounts a naïve and impressionable freshman both flattered and flummoxed by the insistent e-mail entreaties of one of the most popular boys at St. Paul’s School, in Concord, New Hampshire.
The lede echoes tropes from so many male-authored deep dives into rape investigations: he was the star, she was the confused child who ruined his life.
“Like a Rashomon episode of Showtime’s The Affair,” Purdum continues, “almost everything else depends on the protagonists’ divergent perspectives, dueling recollections, and diametrically opposed interpretations of intent.”