A 16-year-old girl who attends an elite New Hampshire prep school testified that a popular older student turned a secret rooftop meeting last spring into a rape, biting her breasts as she froze in confusion and fear.
“I felt so scared. I had no idea what was going on. I’d never been put in that situation before,” said the student, who was a 15-year-old freshman when she accepted the boy’s invitation as part of a long unofficial tradition called a “senior salute”– a ritual in which older students request sexual contact from younger ones – at St Paul’s, a bucolic school in Concord, New Hampshire.
The girl, a tall student athlete with long brown hair, told jurors that she went to the roof with the defendant, Owen Labrie, then 18, thinking they might kiss.
Labrie put down a blanket and quickly took off the girl’s shorts, she said, and she found herself battling him to keep her underwear on. She said she never screamed or kicked him, and said she laughed nervously when he ignored her distress.
“I tried to focus on the noises around me because I thought this will be over soon. Just wait it out ... I didn’t want to come off as an inexperienced little girl. I did not want him to laugh at me. I didn’t want to offend him. I didn’t want to make him feel angry,” she testified.
“I had never done any of this stuff before. I didn’t know what was going on,” said the alleged victim, who was raised in Tokyo, where her father worked, until the family returned to the US when she was 12.
Labrie, 19, who is from Vermont, faces charges of rape, child endangerment and assault. He sat quietly in court, sometimes scribbling notes.
His defense claims he never raped the girl and they engaged only in “petting” and kissing. His attorney has told jurors he will testify.
The alleged victim told jurors she initially rejected Labrie’s so-called “senior salute”. He asked her in a “pretentious” email to climb with him up a set of forbidden stairs and bask in a prized view of the campus.
She said she thought the message was a form letter he sent to many girls in an effort to score in a game of conquests some boys played.
She relented after Labrie called her rejection “sassy” and another boy convinced her she could trust Labrie to behave.
“He managed to convince me it was innocent ... Owen wouldn’t do anything against my will. I was thinking: wouldn’t it be cool to see such a cool place?”
The girl testified that she never tried to leave during the alleged assault and felt like she was “outside of my body”.
“I didn’t want to cause a conflict. I didn’t want to come off as bitchy. I didn’t want to cause any trouble. I didn’t want to have that reputation,” she said.
She later told friends: “I think I just had sex with Owen Labrie.”
She said she blamed herself during the incident for agreeing to meet him.
“I’m thinking how naive ... how I never should have left my room that night. I never should have gone. If I had just been able to kick, or yell at him ... If I had been able to get the point across ... I could have stopped it,” she said.
