Labrie’s lawyer offered these messages as proof that the victim had not just undergone a traumatic experience—and perhaps had not even had sex at all—while the prosecution explained them as the reverse: a textbook example of a date-rape victim’s efforts to placate and pacify her assailant. Her sister’s graduation was looming, her parents were in town, and the last thing she wanted, she testified, was to make any trouble or have the word get out. By Sunday morning, again at the urging of her friends, she was worried enough about a possible pregnancy that she went to the infirmary and asked for a “Plan B” contraception pill, but told the nurse on duty that she’d had consensual sex. Late Monday night, when a dorm master found her in tears, the teacher told her to call her mother, who drove to school the next morning.

It is, of course, impossible to reconstruct the girl’s precise state of mind in the aftermath of these events, but her family and law-enforcement officials say that the more she thought about the encounter the surer she became that she had been the victim of a crime. This, too, is far from unusual for victims of acquaintance rape. “I don’t think she saw this coming,” one law-enforcement official involved in the case told me. “She did say no. She held on to her underpants with both hands. She didn’t know how hard to press. Compliance began to look like consent.” As Judge Smukler noted at Labrie’s sentencing hearing, compliance and consent are not the same thing. Because the jury acquitted Labrie of forcible rape, Smukler said, “does not mean the victim consented to the sexual penetration, and indeed it is clear from the impact of this crime that she did not.”

In the fall 2014, the victim returned to school, after assurances from Hirschfeld that she would be safe. She re-entered the same dorm, with the same group of friends, most of whom now shunned her, according to her family. They say some of her volleyball teammates declined to eat with her the first night back and that members of the men’s hockey team stood up and pointed at her as she walked down the street. Finally, that December, she gave up and asked to go home. She is now in a private day school in the distant state where the family lives.

But the reverberations continue. At one point in the trial, the girl’s name was inadvertently broadcast, subjecting her and her family to Internet harassment and a smear campaign of the most vicious sort. In all these months, the victim’s father told me, the family has not received a single supportive phone call from another St. Paul’s parent.

The girl’s family is wealthy. Money is not the principal object of its potential lawsuit against the school, which has brought on Michael Delaney, a former New Hampshire attorney general, as its lawyer. The family has hired Steven Kelly, of Baltimore, a nationally known lawyer in sexual-assault and -abuse cases, to use the leverage of a suit to force the school to adopt changes in training and discipline for students and faculty. “This is going to be a soapbox issue for the rest of my life,” the father says.

The Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul. By Peter Finger.

V. Another Shoe

Owen Labrie’s life is also in shambles. His offer of admission to Harvard—and his full scholarship—was withdrawn in the wake of his arrest. He hired and fired three lawyers and, whether out of ignorance or arrogance or wishful thinking, rejected more than one proposed plea bargain that would have involved minimal jail time and no registration as a sex offender. He finally settled on J. W. Carney, a prominent Boston defense lawyer who has also represented the mobster Whitey Bulger, retaining his services with $100,000 raised from several St. Paul’s families. Labrie had solicited the defense fund in a letter that the prosecution contended violated the terms of his pre-trial release, which barred him from contacting the victim or her family or anyone associated with St. Paul’s, but since he was in the process of firing his lawyer at the time, prosecutors conceded he might not have been aware of the conditions.