High school sexual assault survivor speaks out, reclaiming her narrative for young women everywhere
Student advocate Chessy Prout recalls growing up in Asia, her legal battle for justice and why she decided to tell her own story
In the spring of 2014, Alex Prout was working as an investment manager in Hong Kong. The previous year, the American father of three girls had moved to the Asian city with his wife, Susan, and their youngest daughter, Christianna, who was seven. His two eldest, Lucy and Chessy, were at St Paul’s School, the elite preparatory facility in Concord, New Hampshire, he himself had attended.
Prout, 54, had gone to St Paul’s in 1979 on a scholarship. He had loved it so much that when he went back for his 10-year reunion, he had taken Susan along to show her the beauties of its 800-hectare campus. They had just become engaged, having met on a flight between Tokyo and New York, and hoped to have children. “Do you think we could send our kids here?” he had asked her.
His fiancée, who didn’t have a prep-school background and was inclined to believe that boarding schools were a form of punishment, replied, “Maybe.”
You may imagine, therefore, Alex Prout’s delight when Lucy and Chessy were accepted by the school, whose prestigious alumni list includes former US secretary of state John Kerry and FBI director Robert Mueller. Later in the spring of 2014, Lucy, the elder sister, would leave St Paul’s and go to college. It was her transition from a beloved haven into an unsafe world that was on her father’s mind as he read a New York Times article about the rate of sexual assault on American university campuses. Prout turned to a colleague in the Hong Kong office and said, “I have three daughters. Statistically, this is going to happen to our family.”
As he spoke, Lucy was his concern, but when the phone call came, a few months later, it was Chessy, aged 15, who had become a statistic.
