Letters: ‘Forgive and Forget, Why Don’t You?’
I Believe Her
When Caitlin Flanagan was in high school, she faced her own Brett Kavanaugh. If Christine Blasey Ford’s story is true, Flanagan wrote last week, “we’ll have to decide whether you get to attack a girl, show no remorse, and eventually become a Supreme Court justice. My own inclination is: No.”
Caitlin Flanagan’s story resonates so strongly with my own high-school experience that I feel I must write to you.
My four years in high school and the preceding two in grammar school were the most miserable of my life. In my small, Catholic grammar school, there was a group of boys who routinely trapped me in the back coat closet and tried to grope me. The experience was terrifying and humiliating; what made it worse was that the girls in my class laid the blame for the boys’ behavior at my door. I insisted to my parents that I would not go on to attend the Catholic high school, although they never knew the reason I was so adamant. I wanted a fresh start at the public high school.
Once in high school, a new group of boys would harass me in the halls and in the lunch room. After witnessing a boy trying to untie my halter top and expose my breasts, the lunch monitor (a dean of the school) called me aside and suggested that I not dress so provocatively. She did not speak to the boy. (This, by the way,
