Rape in a Small Town

During her first weeks as the Providence Journal's reporter in the town of Burrillville (population: 16,000), Kate Bramson worked hard building connections and relationships with people there. "The way I like to do my work in the community is just to spend a lot of time there and talk to people," she said. Bramson's beat encompasses town government, schools, courts, crime and daily happenings in the community. If anything happens, she told people, let her know about it.

One day in October 2002, Bramson met with police to talk about improving her access to public records and information about investigations. At the end of the meeting, as the officers left the room, she was handed a press release which said that an 18-year-old man, Nicholas C. Plante, had been convicted of raping a 15-year-old girl.

The assault had taken place the previous December. Bramson had been working in the town for two months at that point, but this was the first time she heard about the case. "The whole thing happened with nobody breathing a word to me," Bramson said. "It was kept so quiet." Her sources in Burrillville, it seemed, had kept her updated about nearly everything happening in the town except this one story. "I later found out that many people were talking about it," she said. "But nobody mentioned it to me."

A week and a half before, Bramson had written a touching story about a boy who had been paralyzed in a motorcycle accident. She told of how the boy's friends had been helping him cope with his paralysis. She described how one particularly generous friend had built a ramp into his house, so that the boy could visit in his wheelchair. The friend's name: Nick Plante.

A graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Bramson, 33, had been a reporter in Paris, Budapest and Duluth, Minn., before joining the Journal. Anyplace else she had worked, Bramson said, "somebody would have called and said 'Did you know that that boy is going to trial on rape charges?'" But in Burrillville, she said, "nobody did."

* * * * * *

Three months later — January 14, 2003 — Bramson sat in a courtroom as Plante was sentenced.

Groups of girls and boys were teary-eyed at the hearing. "I thought at first that the girls that were there were probably there as friends of the victim," Bramson said. "It turned out that all of the crying teenagers that were there were probably there for Nick Plante."

In the story she filed that day, Bramson wrote: "(Superior Court Judge Edward C.) Clifton spoke of a divided community, where girls — particularly those who had prior dating relationships with Plante — have shunned the victim."

And Bramson watched the victim, Laura, read from her journal: "It's like I'm a walking dead girl," she said.

After the sentencing, Bramson knew her coverage wouldn't stop there.

"We immediately understood that there was something going on with these people, in this town, that needed to be told," said Mimi Burkhardt, Bramson's editor on "Rape in a Small Town."

Bramson spent the next week reading letters that had been sent to the court in support of Plante.

She asked to speak with both families, thinking the story would be about "two families sort of torn apart," she said. But the Plantes refused to speak about the rape or the trial. Laura's family, however, was willing to talk. "They really opened up and began to tell what this whole experience had been like," Bramson said. "I realized that I had an amazing opportunity to tell the story of a rape from a survivor's perspective." She realized she could write a story that would "really show what this crime does to a community."

That began five months of reporting for Bramson. "There were lots of ups and downs," she said. Throughout the process, she was busy covering her beat, writing a story a day about Burrillville (starting in May, she was given two days a week to work on Laura's story). As she worked, Bramson consulted regularly with Burkhardt. "Some days we just talked about it, and didn't even look at words," Burkhardt said.

Bramson spent a lot of time with family, getting to know them. "Every time I went, I was there for hours and hours and hours," she said. She showed them copies of past stories she had written. "We kind of renegotiated several times whether they were still willing to go forward," Bramson said.

After a while, she began to gain the family's trust. And gradually, through a series of interviews with Laura and her family, Bramson was able to reconstruct the scenes and events that allowed her to tell the story in gripping detail.

"We had conversations that no child should have to have in front of their parents," Bramson said.

* * * * * *

As she worked on the story, there was an ongoing discussion between Bramson and Burkhardt about how much graphic detail to include. "They told me much more than is in the story," Bramson said. Earlier drafts were more detailed, more graphic than the final story. "In the end we kind of pulled back a bit," she explained.

One of the most graphic details that remained in the published story is a description of the attacker's penis piercing. The sharp, pointed piece of metal was worn by the attacker during the rape, and was part of the court record. "We decided that it was pertinent and that it needed to be there because it was brutal and there was evidence that it was brutal," Bramson said. "If you leave that out, I think there's more room for doubt," she added. "I think it's easier, then, for people to say 'Maybe this didn't happen.'"

At one point in her reporting, when Bramson was having trouble deciding on a lead for the story, she told Laura's mom about the different options. "I had about four leads written at that time, and I wasn't sure which one to use," she said. "When I mentioned the one about the handcuffs, the mom put her coffee down and said 'Oh, I dreamed about that moment.'"

"That was sort of the moment in time that really defined what the whole rest of the story would be," Burkhardt said. From there, Burkhardt and Bramson said, the structure of the story came relatively easily.

In the final weeks before publication, it was time to decide how to identify Laura in the story. "There was a lot of discussion about her name," Bramson said. A final decision wasn't reached until about a week before publication. They had considered using "the girl," or a pseudonym, but settled on using her first name.

At the same time, the Journal team began holding meetings about how to illustrate the story. After several meetings, the photo assignment was given to photographer Bob Thayer, who has been with the Journal since 1978.

"We had a couple of meetings about what we should do," Thayer said. "In the end, it was sort of just left up to me to use my own judgment."

Thayer said he is used to working on stories that are difficult to illustrate. "I like a challenge," he said. His main concern was to find images that would help tell the story without making Laura identifiable in any way. Making the task more difficult, Thayer had access to the family for only one day.

When he arrived for the shoot, about two weeks before the story ran, Thayer said, "I talked with them for a couple of hours before taking any pictures." The family was "extremely receptive," he said. He credited the work Bramson had done during the previous months for creating a cooperative atmosphere. "They really trusted Kate," he said.

"My technique is just to take a lot of pictures, and after the first hundred or so they kind of get used to the camera," Thayer explained. He shot about 250 frames in all. Some he classified as more "journalistic" in nature: Laura's silhouette in a window; Laura wrapped in a blanket, watching TV. Others were more like portraits: Laura holding artwork or pottery. "I tried to get some portraits that would kind of get a sense of her personality," Thayer said.

Eventually, he had the idea of the mirror portrait that would end up as the lead photo. "Symbolically, that picture seemed to work," Thayer said. "I thought that it would possibly portray the fragmentation involved in rape, because it is such a fragmented image."

Later, the team decided not to use the silhouette photo or the couch photo, because there was a slight possibility that Laura could be identified from those images. "To play it absolutely safe, we decided not to use any of them," Thayer said.

* * * * * *

The story ran on page A-1, Sunday, June 8, 2003.

"I had 60 e-mails by the end of the day," Bramson said. "People were pouring out there souls to me." By the end of the week, she had received more than 100 positive e-mails in support of the story and of Laura. Only four of the e-mails, from close friends of Nick Plante, were negative.

Bramson said she was satisfied with the way the story turned out, and happy about the response. "I've never done anything like this," she said. "In small ways, yes, but this was so much bigger, and I had so much more time to work on this than anything before."

"Stories like this don't happen without the support of management," Burkhardt. "We fortunately have a newspaper that, as an organization, does support projects like this." Burkhardt said that deputy executive editor Carol Young, in particular, deserved credit for giving the project the green light early on in the process.

Ironically, perhaps, Bramson says writing the story that no one in Burrillville wanted to talk about has actually improved her relationships in the community.

"I thought that people in town wouldn't want to talk to me after this," Bramson said. "But it's amazing to me how many people pull me aside and say: 'That story was right on.'"