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7 Holton alums recently shared their experiences of sexual assault with Vanity Fair
“I WAS ASHAMED”: AFTER FORD’S ACCUSATION, A GENERATION OF HOLTON-ARMS ALUMNAE WRESTLE WITH THEIR OWN TRUTHS—TOGETHERhttps://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/09/holton-arms-alumnae-ford-accusations-kavanaugh
To many Holton students, Ford’s description of the party she attended in 1982 felt familiar. Beginning in middle school, there were parties with young men from surrounding schools like Georgetown Prep, Landon, and St. Albans every Friday and Saturday night, at big houses set back from winding, dimly lit streets. There was money to get alcohol. Parents were absent. The homes had pools and movie theaters and sweeping yards. They were teenagers in a candy store. “It was a highly professional culture of parents, many of whom self-selected those schools to be a big babysitter . . . a lot of them just parked the kids and left,” one 1980s Landon alum who socialized with Ford in high school told me. A woman who graduated from Holton in 1988, and lived down the street from Ford, recalled students from the boys’ schools pulling up to parties with duffel bags full of alcohol. “I never went to a party where there wasn’t alcohol; it was a drunk fest,” she said. “You’re living in a bubble where a lot of the families are exceedingly wealthy, a lot of parents are not tuned in to their kids, and a lot of times, parents were away, and the mice would play.”
In interviews with more than a dozen alumni from area schools who graduated between the mid-1970s and the early 2000s, I repeatedly heard stories of parties spiraling into debauchery, with drunken, unsupervised teenagers coupling off with various degrees of privacy. Because the students came from a handful of schools, it was not uncommon for the party’s host to be a stranger. Indeed, many of the people I spoke with said they couldn’t necessarily pinpoint a particular house or give an address. “I remember my parents would say, ‘Whose party are you going to?’ And I’d say, ‘I have no idea,’” the Holton alumni who graduated in ’88 told me. “You’d just drive there and look for all the cars.” Another Holton alum, who was on the cheerleading squad with Ford, told me that the squad’s captains warned them not to go anywhere without two other people, and that if they were alone and drunk with local boys, the boys would say something had happened, whether it did or not. “This was like an organized sport,” she recalled. “It was very clear that they would pick out a girl and start complimenting them.”
Many witnessed moments like the one Ford described, or heard about them, or experienced them firsthand. “When I first read the story on Sunday, I said, ‘Of course this happened,’” a woman who graduated from Holton in the early 2000s told me. “This happened so much that there was nothing difficult to believe about what she’s saying. How could anyone doubt this? It felt personal to a lot of us, because her story is so similar to a lot of ours, and so the attacks on her felt personal.” (Kavanaugh has repeatedly denied the claims against him. “I have never sexually assaulted anyone—not in high school, not ever,” he told Fox News on Monday. “I’ve always treated women with dignity and respect.”)
Less than a day after the Post published its interview with Ford, Sarah Wolfolds, another Holton alum, posted a link to a Google Doc in the Facebook group. It was an open letter in support of Ford, demanding a “thorough and independent investigation before the Senate can reasonably vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination,” and thanking Ford for coming forward. “Dr. Blasey Ford’s experience is all too consistent with stories we heard and lived while attending Holton,” it read. “Many of us are survivors ourselves.” A week later, more than 1,100 alumni had offered their signatures—more than half the total number of people who have graduated from Holton-Arms since Ford’s commencement. Along with the signatures, a handful of alums began to post their own stories of sexual assault. “I was date-raped at a New Year’s Eve party in college,” Julie Jakopic, an organizational strategist who grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, and graduated from Holton in 1978, wrote on her Facebook page last Monday, a day after Ford’s interview was published. “I was ashamed. We had friends in common. I told no one for a decade. Not until I was in training to become a sexual assault counselor. I learned in that training that my delay and most delay is normal. You blame yourself. Society blames you. Why tell anyone? Today, I remember the date because it was New Year’s Eve of my sophomore year. I remember the house because it was his fraternity house. I remember only his first name. I remember what I was wearing and never wore again. Do you believe me? Then you should believe Dr. Ford.”
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