Owen Labrie, the young man that has been accused of raping a fellow 15 year old student at an elite prep school from Concord, New Hampshire declared that he is innocent.
Upon his arrest, the student was 18 years old. He is currently charged with multiple criminal offenses. According to prosecutors, Labrie raped a 15 year old girl two days before graduation in a building near Saint Paul’s School as part of a fraternity tradition part of the Senior Salute, in which graduating students need to have intercourse with underclassmen.
The testimonies of other students showed that what Labrie attempted this week was indeed part of the Senior Salute’s sexual contest of his fraternity, where students have to compete with each other to see how many girls they can sleep with before leaving the school. One friend claimed that Labrie told him that he didn’t have sex with the accuser, after initially telling all of his friends that he didn’t.
Investigators looked for Labrie everywhere and found him in a coffee shop alongside his mother, but they decided that it would be adequate to take the talk to the police station. The young man and his mother agreed and the interview lasted for about four hours.
The young man declared that after a moment of self restraint he stopped his actions and that the accusations are false. Labrie told one detective that he and the girl just had a playful encounter and that he could not even get her underwear off. Even though the defense insists that their sexual contact was consensual, the young girl who testified against Labrie stated twice that she had refused him in their encounter and that when the graduate turned aggressive she had frozen. The student is scheduled to testify this Wednesday.
The incident casts a critical shadow over Saint Paul’s School, which lauds itself with an entire generation of senators, ambassadors, Nobel laureates, Pulitzer winners as graduates.
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