Verdict nears in prep school rape trial

Jury deliberations began and a verdict was finally near Thursday in a rape case that put the teen accuser under withering cross-examination, derailed the defendant's Harvard aspirations and threw a harsh spotlight on an illustrious, 159-year-old prep school.

The lawyer for defendant Owen Labrie,19, argued that the 16-year-old accuser lied when she said she was raped 15 months ago in a maintenance room at St. Paul's School, a private, $50,000-per-year high school set on 2,000 idyllic acres in Concord, N.H. Lawyer J.W. Carney called the case a "tragedy" for both the teens.
The prosecutor, however, dismissed Labrie's claims that intimate contact between the two was consensual and fell short of actual sex. Prosecutor Joseph Cherniske said Labrie literally refused to take "no" for an answer.
Labrie was 18 years old and three months from his first day at Harvard when both sides concur the teens got together as part of a "senior salute." The family rated version of the school tradition appears to be seniors spending time with underclassmen they want to kiss, date or just get to know better prior to heading out to their prestigious universities.
But it can go further. And Labrie, testifying Wednesday, was pressed to explain a message sent to school chums describing the tradition in part as "an eight-week exercise in debauchery, a probing exploration of the innermost meanings of the word sleaze bag."
Labrie, now 19, shrugged the message off as an attempt at humor that no longer seems funny. And he said he was exaggerating when he boasted to friends that he used "every trick in the book" to convince the girl to have sex.
Last week the victim, who was 15 when the alleged rape took place, testified that he lured her from the roof into the maintenance room. What started as kissing then turned into a sexual assault despite her saying "no" at least three times, she said.
The cross-examination focused on the girl's actions in the hours and days before and after the alleged assault. She denied having told a friend before the encounter that she might have oral sex with Labrie. She did admit that after the encounter she had told a nurse and others that the sex was consensual.
“I thought it was so much easier to say it was (consensual) at that point," she said.
She also dismissed seemingly agreeable texts she sent after the encounter, saying she did not want to be "dramatic."
She said she reported the encounter as a rape after seeing an undisclosed Facebook post a few days after the encounter.
The case has rattled the school, which boasts a list of distinguished alums that include Secretary of State John Kerry.
"We will move past this as a School community, stronger, united, and committed, as always, to ensuring our students' safety and wellbeing," school Rector Michael Hirschfeld said in a statement on the school's website. "Allegations about our culture are not emblematic of our school or our values, our rules, or the people that represent our student body, alumni, faculty, and staff."