Rape in a Small Town

By Kate Bramson, with Bob Thayer (photos) and Mimi Burkhardt (editor)

The click-click of the handcuffs echoed in the courtroom as they clamped around the teenager's wrists.

The girl who had once been his friend turned to her mother and whispered, "How many years is he going to be gone?"

Four years, her mother replied.

"That's not enough," Laura said.

Laura's mother likes to fix things, make them right. She couldn't fix what had happened to her daughter, but she had dreamed of the moment when the handcuffs would snap shut.

Then people would finally believe Laura, she had thought. Then, her family could begin the journey back to normal.

But the moment didn't measure up at all. Not by a long shot.

December 2001

Laura's parents had rules about boys. She couldn't go to a boy's house unless his parents were home. She couldn't be in a car alone with a boy unless they knew him.

They knew Nicholas Plante.

Everybody knows Nick, many in the Burrillville High School community say.

Handsome and charming, he was a popular senior from a well-known family. He was a gifted artist who sculpted and painted — dragons were a big theme — and even created chess sets of glass and ceramic.

Nick and Laura, a sophomore, had become friends the year before, when he was dating a friend of hers. They had many friends in common and shared an interest in art. Nick dated several of Laura's friends.

When Nick offered her a ride home from school on Dec. 5, Laura said sure.

On the way to Laura's, Nick said he wanted to make a quick stop at his house so she could help him carry some of his art projects inside. It never occurred to Laura to ask if his mother was home because they would only be there for a minute.

They took his stuff into the house, and he said he'd drive her home after he used the bathroom. Laura asked about one of his earlier art projects. Nick said he had hung it in his room.

She went to take a look.

Laura had been in the Plantes' house before, but never in Nick's basement bedroom.

When Nick came downstairs, they started talking about Laura's breakup with her boyfriend two days earlier. Nick had told her the boy was cheating on her, so she had ended the relationship. She was upset, and felt comfortable confiding in Nick.

She thought he "was just being a friend" when he hugged her.

Then he pulled her down on his bed. When she tried to get up, he "bear-hugged" her and pulled her back down.

He started to kiss her neck.

She said she didn't want to have sex. She said she didn't want to do anything with him — she didn't like him "like that."

"And he was like, 'Well, I'll have to rape you then,' " she later told a grand jury.

She thought maybe she could talk him out of it. You have a girlfriend, she protested.

"I was saying no and I was like — I was pushing him — I was trying to push him and I kept scratching his arms and stuff," she testified.

When it was over, Laura wrapped herself in the sheets on Nick's bed and cried. He threw her underwear and jeans to her and said, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I knew you were vulnerable," she told the grand jury.

"He's like, 'Just forget it, it was — it was just a dream.' "

He said it wasn't rape. She didn't know what to think.

Then he drove her home.

* * * * * *

Arriving home from work that day, Laura's mother stepped into the living room to find Laura on the tan sofa, wrapped in a blanket. Huddled with her knees to her chest and her arms around her shins, she sat listlessly, half dozing, half mindlessly watching TV.

Laura looked really, really tired. Her mother could tell she had been crying.

And then she said, "Hi, mommy."

Oh, something's wrong here, her mother thought.

But like many mothers of 15-year-olds, she didn't want to pry. That might make it worse.

She'll tell me when she's ready, Laura's mother thought. She always does.

Laura was a zombie for the rest of the day, definitely not her typical bubbly self, her mother remembers.

But she did mention that Nick had driven her home from school. Knowing Laura had broken up with her boyfriend because Nick had told her he was cheating, Laura's mother asked if Nick was interested in her.

Laura spat out: "He's a pig, and he doesn't even know what love is. He's disgusting."

That's an odd way to describe the friend who just drove her home, her mother remembers thinking.

* * * * * *

Laura's mother was replaying those words in her mind the next morning after the high school social worker called and said Laura needed her.

Laura had gone to bed early the night before. She had dressed quickly that morning and slipped out of the house before her mother even saw her. Her mother figured she'd learn what was wrong that afternoon.

But the social worker called her at work about 10:30.

"Is she all right?" her mother asked.

The social worker didn't really answer, Laura's mother recalls. She said something vague about an assault and then told her, "I think you need to come in."

Laura's mother connected the pieces as she drove. By the time she got to the high school, she had a pretty good idea what had happened.

Laura had told a few friends that morning. Then she went to see the school social worker, a woman she knew fairly well. The social worker wasn't in.

As Laura stood crying outside her office, a friend saw her in tears. He walked her to the school nurse's office.

After 30 years as a nurse, Marilyn Kelley knows a fresh bruise when she sees one. Right away, she noticed a big one on the back of Laura's upper arm. It looked like someone had grabbed her.

Why don't you lie down for a little while, Kelley suggested. After giving Laura a few minutes alone, she went back to talk with her.

Laura told the nurse Nick Plante had raped her — words she hadn't been able to say until that morning.

"I couldn't separate the rapist from the friend," Laura would say later.

As Laura's mother learned the details, red blotches emerged on her face and she began to shake.

Oh my gosh, she thought. There's no way to fix this.

* * * * * *

At Hasbro Children's Hospital that afternoon, Dr. Amy P. Goldberg paused while examining Laura. Deliberately making eye contact, she asked: Were any objects used?

Would a piercing count as an object? Laura asked.

Goldberg asked what she meant.

Nick wore a piercing in his penis, Laura said.

Goldberg would later testify that a silver-colored metal piercing with sharp arrows on both ends, introduced as evidence at Nick's trial, could have caused the cuts she found on Laura.

Laura's mother remembers the doctor turning to her in the examining room.

"And she says, 'This is just the beginning.' And I remember saying, 'Oh, I know.' "

But she didn't know. "There were no words to tell me."

* * * * * *

Laura and her mother had asked the school nurse to call Laura's father at the state prison, where he works as a correctional officer, and tell him to meet them at the hospital. They had worried about how he would react if he found out at school and then saw Nick.

"When I learned what happened, they weren't very nice, my thoughts," her father says. "They were the same as any father of a little girl would have."

* * * * * *

Burrillville police Detective Wayne M. Richardson also got a call from Marilyn Kelley that afternoon. He went to the school and took her statement. Then he called the hospital and spoke with Laura's parents.

Late that evening, Laura and her parents came to the police station and filed a complaint.

Richardson arrested Nick the next morning, Dec. 7. Nick, who was 17, was arraigned in Family Court in Providence, then taken to the state Training School.

Four days later, in separate interviews, two Burrillville High School students told Richardson that Nick had raped them in November.

Laura and the other two young women, an 18-year-old senior and a 16-year-old sophomore, testified separately before a grand jury during February school break.

Each told the grand jury that Nick had given her a ride home or to work after school, but stopped at his house first. Each said Nick had raped her in his bedroom, despite her protest that she didn't want to have sex with him. Each spoke of Nick's penis piercing.

The grand jury indicted Nick on seven felony counts of sexual assault, four of them involving Laura.

By then, Nick had been waived out of Family Court to face charges as an adult. He spent the rest of his senior year at home on strict bail conditions, unable to attend school and allowed to leave the house only for religious, medical or court-related reasons.

Winter 2002

Laura used to love school.

She loved going to basketball, hockey, and football games. She loved the dances and spirit week activities. She made the honor roll every quarter, and she felt as if she were friends with everybody.

But those days were over now.

Many students believed Nick couldn't have raped anyone. The boy they knew wasn't capable of such a crime. And they told Laura so.

You wanted it, they told her. You liked it.

Laura stayed at home, crying on the couch. People said she cried too much.

She tried to stay involved in activities. People said she couldn't have been raped if she was playing soccer and attending basketball games.

After a while, Laura stopped caring what people thought about her. She also stopped caring about schoolwork, and fell behind.

The dozens of honor roll certificates her mother used to tuck away were replaced by a stack of counseling receipts.

Thoughts of the rape consumed the family.

Day after day, Laura would come home from school, curl up in a ball on the sofa and sob.

She was afraid to be alone, so her father would leave work early, using his vacation and sick time so he could be home after school.

She would wake up in the middle of the night, sobbing, and her mother would get up and go lie down next to her, comforting her until she could sleep.

"Sobbing. Sobbing for hours," her father says. "People don't see that part of it."

* * * * * *

Richard Trogisch, the principal of Burrillville High School, has never seen a school community so polarized in his 20 years as an administrator.

When he heard about students harassing Laura, he spoke to them immediately.

"You can't do this," he would say. "You're hurting Laura. You don't know what the facts are. I don't know the facts. Please stop."

Sometimes Nick's friends protested, saying they hadn't said anything directly to her face.

"Then they got into the point where 'she deserves this,' blah, blah, blah," Trogisch says. "And I said, 'We're not going there. You are not allowed to harass this girl. It's up to the judicial system to decide."

Kelley, the school nurse, says she talked frequently with Laura and the other two young women who had accused Nick. Laura also spoke openly with other students.

"She didn't keep it a secret because she wanted to educate other girls, to protect them, too," Kelley says. "But, you see, it was a hard thing because when your family is right up there in town — you couldn't say 'Boo' about this young man."

Kelley thinks many in the school community, and beyond, need to be educated about what rape victims go through. They'll have flashbacks. They'll have guilt. They may have trouble sleeping. They become hypervigilant. They may question their own sexuality. Some just give up. Some move away from their hometown.

And they'll wonder if they led the attacker to do this.

"No," Kelley says. "If you said no, no means no."

People need to know, she says, about what victims experience "so they don't have this skewed belief that it's the girl's fault."

* * * * * *

Laura's family began to feel like they had a disease.

The way her father sees it, people don't want to think this kind of thing actually happens. So if they avoid it, they can tell themselves it will never happen to them.

Laura's family had moved to Burrillville — "a nice bedroom community," her father thought — in 1994 and worked to settle in.

Her parents encouraged Laura and her two brothers to get to know people and to be part of the community. They played sports, and their father coached football. Their mother attended games and talked with other parents.

Now, on bad days, they would shop for groceries in a neighboring town just so they wouldn't have to run into people they knew, or overhear comments in the local IGA about "that Laura girl."

We just haven't been here long enough, her parents say. What would have been enough? they wonder.

Many residents say you're considered a newcomer unless you were born here. Like the Plante family, whose roots in Burrillville run deep.

At least two of Nick's great-grandparents were born here and died here when Nick was a child. His maternal grandfather, born and raised in Burrillville, owned an auto dealership in town for 34 years. Generations of local families bought their cars from him. Nick's paternal grandparents raised six children who grew up spending summers at the family camp on Pascoag Reservoir.

Nick counts many cousins as his closest friends. Some members of his extended family have also been his teachers and coaches.

Laura began to beg her parents to move away from Burrillville, a place she had grown to hate.

Spring and Summer 2002

Sometimes it was difficult to tell which twists and turns in their lives were connected to the rape and which weren't.

But no one had ever shattered bottles outside their home before.

It went on for weeks — always at night, in the dark. Laura's family awoke day after day to find jagged pieces of glass in their driveway.

They took turns cleaning up, and Laura's mother remembers her younger son's offhanded comment one day: "I cleaned up the glass out of the driveway."

Like it was just another chore.

They remember the first time the glass-breakers were "brave" enough to drive by in the daylight.

Laura was in her bedroom, her mother at the kitchen sink and her father in the side yard.

They heard the glass smash and a car driving away.

And they each rushed toward the noise — Laura to her window, her mother to the front door and her father toward the road. Each thought maybe they'd be the one to find out who it was.

Laura's father, already outside, got the best view.

He recognized the car. He looked into the eyes of the teenage boys, and he knew those faces.

He memorized the license plate. And then he ran a check on it, to be sure.

That was the last time glass shattered in their driveway.

When her father recounts the story months later, Laura and her mother are incredulous.

"Why didn't you tell me who it was?" Laura demands.

"It doesn't matter," he replies. They didn't need to know.

* * * * * *

Laura's parents came to realize that the daughter they had known was gone.

"I actually mourned for her like she was dead," her mother says. "And then learned to accept the new Laura."

But she always hoped the "old Laura" would come back.

The old Laura had so many dreams and plans — the possibilities seemed endless.

She thought about being a teacher, doing art, maybe becoming an art teacher, getting married, being a foster mom, having "tons of kids" and a big house.

"And a big wedding," her mother remembers with a sigh.

Now Laura had lost sight of her future. She no longer had a clue what the world held for her.

The old Laura was "blindly trusting," her father remembers, and a loyal friend who would stick up for you no matter what.

But no one does that for her any more. So why should she do it for them?

Fall 2002

School began before Labor Day, and Laura recalls that students were excited about going back.

They weren't really talking much about Nick Plante's approaching trial. But Laura couldn't concentrate on schoolwork.

It seemed to her mother that she was saving her energy "and getting ready for the fight." Laura began to panic and have anxiety attacks. About a week before the trial, she stopped going to school.

"I didn't want her to crack right before, and that's what it felt like was happening," her mother says.

The family focused inward. It's just their style, her parents say.

"You circle the wagons and you pull back into the center of the family group," Laura's father explains. "And you rely on each other."

* * * * * *

The first day of the trial, Oct. 2, charges against Nick were dismissed in the cases of the other two young women. Court records do not indicate why, and Deputy Atty. Gen. Gerald J. Coyne declined to give a reason.

Burrillville Police Lt. Kevin S. San Antonio said he thinks the charges were dropped because the young women didn't want to go through a trial.

Nick still faced the four charges in Laura's case: three counts of first-degree and one of second-degree sexual assault.

On that first day, Laura's mother was the only one in the family there for the proceedings. Her father couldn't be there because he was a potential witness. Her parents had decided that the trial was something her brothers didn't need to experience. And Laura waited in the office the attorney general maintains in the courthouse.

When Laura's mother walked into the courtroom, it was packed. The only seat she could get was in the back, where it was difficult to see.

Who are all these people? she thought.

Then she realized they were Nick's supporters, including friends from school.

"So the next day, we came back and we brought some family and we got there early," her mother says. "We didn't want to sit in the back row."

* * * * * *

After a five-day trial, the jury convicted Nick on all four charges.

"A lot of his own words did it," juror Anthony Rufo, a Central Falls auto mechanic, recalled in an interview. "Just the way he looked at us when he would give out a statement. He would look up like he was trying to recall and put something together quick. That's what caught him."

Rufo said the jury weighed all the evidence. That included the clothes Laura had worn, which she described exactly and which Nick described in conflicting ways. It also included the doctor's description of the abrasions on Laura and the penis piercings that he remembers were passed among the jurors.

"They looked like they could cause some pretty nasty scratches," Rufo said.

Under questioning by the prosecutor, Nick got "tripped up over his own words," Rufo said. "He changed a few of the statements a few times. He would say one thing, and then when he got cross-examined, it changed."

Laura's testimony at the trial remained consistent, Rufo said.

"And once we found out all the facts and got the statements from the witnesses and put them all together, this girl did actually get sexually assaulted. . . . From what we heard in those last two days, we didn't think it was consensual."

* * * * * *

"The symbol of justice for me was guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty," Laura says.

Now people would believe Nick had raped her, her family thought.

"Now you can go to school," her mother told her.

Laura went back the next day. But it was worse than ever.

Girls who had been her friends said Nick had never raped them, so he couldn't have raped her.

They and others she didn't even know called her names behind her back and to her face.

Slut. Bitch. Whore.

They told Laura she had ruined the best year of Nick's life — his senior year in high school.

Laura's parents stopped by the school that morning after going out for breakfast together.

"The whole school was in an uproar," her mother says. "You could feel it."

Not all the adults in the school were sympathetic to Laura, but most were, says Kelley, the school nurse.

"We tried to hold her up as much as possible," Kelley says. "Just what she had to deal with — the harassment and the bullying — it was brutal."

Laura didn't make it through the next day of school. And she didn't go back.

She started sleeping a lot. Her mother would come home on her lunch breaks to try to wake her but sometimes even after a full day's work, she'd come home to find Laura still hadn't gotten out of bed.

A doctor diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.

Once her parents realized she wasn't going back to school, the school sent a tutor to work with Laura at home.

Laura couldn't shake the feeling that she was always being noticed, talked about, judged. Whenever people looked at her, she felt they were thinking, There's the girl who was raped.

And now, Laura's younger brother became a target at school.

Boys on his basketball team stepped just around the corner, out of his sight.

"Bitch!" they screamed.

"Your sister's a slut!"

* * * * * *

Right after the trial, Nick's parents started knocking on doors. They visited local businesses. They went to the high school. They called friends and acquaintances.

Kevin and Janice Plante were asking for a public display of support, and that's what they got — 119 people wrote letters to Superior Court Judge Edward C. Clifton extolling Nick's character and praising his family.

Thirteen writers asked the judge to grant Nick a new trial, a motion Clifton denied on Oct. 25; dozens asked for leniency in sentencing.

About half of the writers specifically said they thought Nick was not guilty or there was not enough evidence to convict him.

In the 10 years she has known him, his friend Marissa Rodzen wrote, "he has always been very responsible, and respectful. There is no doubt in my mind that he is innocent. He has never been in trouble with the law before this."

An aunt, Beth Plante, wrote: "Nick does not have a violent bone in his body. My understanding of rape is that it is a crime of violence and control over another person. Why then were there no signs of violence?"

Some writers insisted that what had happened in Nick's room that day was consensual sex. Some offered opinions on how Laura had behaved, had not behaved, or should have behaved.

"If the town's people or high school students were to pass judgment on this case, than surely Nicholas Plante would be found innocent," wrote Donna Scotland of Harrisville. ". . . If the old saying, 'you can't rape the willing' held any truth, perhaps this trial would never have been."

An aunt and uncle of Nick's who said their daughter had been raped as a teen questioned the verdict and asked the judge for "maximum leniency and mercy."

"We know what our daughter suffered," they wrote. "Remarkably the plaintiff seemed absent of the symptoms associated with a rape. To us, this is a case of remorse following underage mutually consensual sex with someone other than one's boyfriend."

Reading the letters months later, Laura and her parents are stunned to see names of people her mother used to sit with at soccer games and acquaintances who in recent days had asked how the family was doing. But while making mental notes of those they won't talk about this with anymore, they are also shocked by how many of the letter-writers are strangers to them.

"I don't even know his aunts and uncles," Laura says. "How would anybody know anything about me?"

Her father reads aloud from a letter by Timothy P. Marcoux of Chepachet:

"Nick is not a cold-blooded killer; he has not beaten anyone or robbed anyone. I find it really hard to believe that he is the monster that he would have to be to get the verdict that he did."

His voice rising, Laura's father draws each word out for emphasis as he lets his anger out.

"They don't even see this as a crime," he says. "They don't see this as a crime. First of all, he did rob somebody of something. He robbed somebody of something that nobody, no money can take care of . . .

"He robbed somebody of who they were, who they were going to become."

January 14, 2003

Close to 40 people filled the small courtroom for Nick's sentencing. His parents and older sister sat in the front row, separated from Laura and her parents by one other observer.

Some of Laura's relatives who had traveled two hours that morning sat in the second row, along with four or five young men who were friends of Nick's. A half-dozen teary-eyed young women were there on Nick's behalf, prepared to testify, if the judge would let them. They planned to say they had seen Laura at school functions and playing soccer.

With her back to the courtroom and prosecutor Denise Choquette by her side, Laura faced Judge Clifton.

She said she had chosen excerpts from her journal to speak for her, and read them to the court.

"Everything in my mind is jumbled," she read. "I'm walking around this cold, empty place with a blindfold on looking for a needle in a haystack. It's like I'm a walking dead girl. I think of the times I loved myself, better yet, liked myself."

Choquette requested a 25-year sentence, with 15 years to serve.

"This is a young girl who at 15 was sexually assaulted by someone she considered to be her friend, someone she trusted," Choquette said. "She went to his house and was raped. There's no other word for it, your honor."

Nick's lawyer, former Burrillville town solicitor Oleg Nikolyszyn, asked the judge to impose a long sentence of community service for an "event" that he said was "without brutality, without violence, without drugs."

Just because the jury believed Laura, that didn't make the verdict "sacred," Nikolyszyn said.

Clifton rejected several attempts by Nikolyszyn to present evidence or witnesses that the lawyer said would show Laura had not become "a shell" of her former self. At one point, prosecutor Choquette objected to the lawyer's comments as "a character assassination."

Nikolyszyn then asserted that Burrillville students who know both Nick and Laura well are privy to knowledge the court does not have.

"Were any of them present on Dec. 5, 2001, in the basement of Nicholas Plante?" Clifton said. "So what difference does it make if the popularity contest at Burrillville High School says one person wins out?"

* * * * * *

Nick stood to address the court.

"I can never admit to something I didn't do," he said. "And although the jury found me guilty, I still say I did not do this, although I will accept any punishment that you do decide to give me."

He said he was sorry his friends and family "had to go through this."

"Whatever I have to do to get through this, I will," he said. "I will go on with my life."

Audible sobs came from his friends, who sat sniffling and catching their breath.

The judge spoke of a community "splintered" over whether a crime had been committed.

"Undoubtedly, this is the worst nightmare for the parents of Laura . . . and Nicholas Plante," Clifton said.

He told Nick he hoped the sentence would send a message "not only to you but to the Nicholas Plantes of the world" that sexual assault will not be tolerated.

"You continue to maintain that the act was a consensual act," he said. ". . . I cannot glean any true expression of remorse . . .

"You said: 'I didn't do anything wrong.' 'I feel bad about the situation we put everybody in.' 'I've never had trouble finding girls who like me.' "

Clifton sentenced Nick to 10 years for each of the three counts of first-degree sexual assault, with six years suspended on each, and five years on the one count of second-degree sexual assault, with three years suspended, all to be served concurrently.

As his friends sobbed and wiped their tear-streaked faces, the handcuffs closed around Nick's wrists. He turned and mouthed the words "I love you" to his family.

Then he was taken to the Adult Correctional Institutions to serve four years.

* * * * * *

Laura's mother had dreamed of the handcuffs. Her father's symbol of justice was a moment he wanted to witness but knew he couldn't. He had written long ago to inform his supervisors that he could not and did not want to have any contact with Nick at the ACI.

He would have loved to be there when the handcuffs came off and the door to the prison cell slammed behind Nick.

"It's a very eerie sound," he says. "It's steel slamming against steel. It's a very distinctive sound, and it gives a whole reality to it. There's no more denial now."

Winter 2003

Laura's parents thought she would never go back to high school.

She'd finish the work, they thought. She'd go to college, they thought.

But the social challenges at Burrillville High School were just too much.

Laura just wants to be normal, but she doesn't really know what that is.

"It's hard to explain," she says. "I don't even really think. You know how people think and there's a certain level that a person feels on, thinks on? And I'm just not there. I'm kind of just empty."

She has considered transferring schools, but she scratches one local school after another off her list. Hate e-mail has streamed in from Nick's friends and supporters.

It seems they're everywhere.

Ponaganset. Smithfield. North Smithfield.

* * * * * *

Laura and her family no longer think about the rape every second. That change came gradually, her mother says. Over time, it became every single minute, then every single hour, then every single day.

Her father's thoughts center on failure.

"In a certain sense, I failed to protect my family in the way a father should," he says. "I wasn't there to protect her."

Her mother thinks about preparation, haunted that maybe she could have done more.

She thinks of the time they talked about Laura and her friends looking for streams and ponds where they could swim.

She remembers saying, Make sure you're not alone. Make sure there are other girls around.

She remembers telling Laura, Just because the boys are being nice to you doesn't mean they're your friends.

She remembers thinking that her daughter "wasn't getting it."

"It's sad, because I used to say, 'You're too trusting,' " Laura's mother says. "And it's hard because I feel like those words came back — in a bad way."

* * * * * *

By February, Laura was meeting her tutor at the school, after school hours. It was a way to get her up and dressed and out of the house, her mother explains.

Her parents were convinced Laura couldn't just stay home, but they didn't want to push her, either.

"We were talking about that for weeks, and then finally we just said, 'Something's got to be done,' " her father says. "She needs to be forced to get up and go — to do something."

Laura says she was "just unmotivated."

"So I was just like, 'Mom, you have to decide for me.' "

In early March, her mother arranged a meeting with school administrators and teachers.

Before Laura knew it, the meeting was over and those around her had decided she'd start back at school the next day — the week of her 17th birthday.

"Mom, I gotta go buy new clothes," Laura said.

That first morning back, she changed outfits over and over.

Get out the door, her mother thought as Laura fretted about what to wear. Please, go to school.

* * * * * *

In some ways, Burrillville High School is a different place than it was a year ago.

A six-week-long "healthy relationships" class was begun in direct response to the charges brought against Nick. About 70 students signed up.

Sometimes kids will be fooling around in school and one will say something about rape. Then, they'll look at Laura and apologize, she says.

But in other ways, it's the same place Laura fled after the trial.

Some students still cast nasty looks her way and walk around the corner and say, "Skank!"

Nick's friends tell her she ruined his life. They blame her for taking him away from them.

The difference is Laura's reaction. She still retreats to the sofa at home, in tears — but not as much. And she thinks she understands what motivates Nick's friends.

"They can't handle the fact that someone they knew, someone so close, could do something wrong, so I'm just the easiest person to hate," she says. "They're not going to hate themselves. They're not going to hate him. So they might as well hate me."

She knows, too, that no girl wants to think this could have happened to her — particularly not the girls who had spent time alone with Nick.

"So it's just easier to think that I'm lying," she says.

* * * * * *

Principal Trogisch didn't think twice when two girls asked him if they could paint a dragon mural on the stage in the school cafeteria. They were outstanding art students, and he's always encouraging students to do what they do well.

The girls worked four days on the mural, and when it was done, it was beautiful, Trogisch says. The greens, reds, and yellows were bright. The face jumped right out at you.

First thing the next morning, a janitor met Trogisch as he walked in.

The girls had apparently come back after school, at night, and put one finishing touch on their artwork: a dedication to Nick Plante.

Trogisch had the janitor paint over that immediately, before any students came into the building.

Later, he called the girls into his office.

"They started going into this whole thing about Nick, and I said it's not important. He was judged by a jury of his peers to be found guilty. We are not going to put any kind of a memorial in terms of a criminal in this building." He gave them two choices: Paint over the mural yourselves or I'll have someone do it for you.

They wouldn't do it. So the janitor did.

It hadn't occurred to Trogisch that dragons had been a theme in Nick's artwork.

"I didn't even think of the symbol — of what it symbolized — until they wrote that thing on it," he says. "I said, Oh you've got to be kidding me."

No one in their right mind would let that dragon stay.

"It's a no-brainer for me," he says. "It's like having a statue of Stalin in the courtyard or some other infamous character in history. He has not brought any kind of pride or positive recognition to this school."

April 2003

Laura's busy now. So busy that she says she doesn't have time alone at home to think about the rape.

She's hanging out with friends after school.

She's applying to a program at CCRI that would allow her to spend her senior year on campus and earn both high school and college credits next year. If she gets in, it's her ticket out of Burrillville High School.

She has an after-school job.

Neither Laura nor her parents had thought life would be this good again.

"The decision to get back to school was the springboard," her father says.

It's like someone in the family had an illness, her parents say. But the whole family is on the road to recovery now.

"Is it all the same? No," her father says. "Will it all be the same? Nope. But will it be close? Yep."

Laura knows it, too, says her mother after a recent conversation.

"She said, 'I'm getting better, aren't I, mom?' "

* * * * * *

She has dreams for the future again — less detailed, but dreams nonetheless.

"I just want to have a career, get married, be a mom and live in a house," she says. "That's it. It's simple, but I like it."

She's interested in law, but being a lawyer takes a lot of work.

Maybe an investigator, because of Detective Richardson, her mother suggests.

Richardson has become like a second dad to Laura, her family says. And Marilyn Kelley and the school social worker are like her moms at school.

"That's OK," Laura's mother says. "I like that we share her. . . . It's like we're a group. I trust them. They're like practically all the ones I trust that's not family."

"I don't trust anyone," Laura says.

May 2003

Laura has retreated to the sofa again.

She's fuming. She's angry with people at school, injustice, absolutely everything.

One hot evening in late April, she drove with two girlfriends to the Lincoln Mall — a popular place for Burrillville teenagers to hang out.

She let her guard down and left her beloved red Pontiac Sunfire in the lot with the windows down. It was that hot.

When they came back after eating at Papa Gino's with some other friends, the back seat was drenched with milk. Puddled on the floor, the cloth seats, the seat back.

Laura heard that some Burrillville students, friends of Nick's, had been in a nearby Stop & Shop that evening. All they bought was milk.

She filed a police report, but nothing has come of it. Her car still smells — "like vomit."

Plus, one of Nick's friends has been following her lately. The girl calls Laura a slut, asks if she wants to fight, tells her she didn't get raped and she ruined Nick's life.

Then the girl got "wicked pissed" when Laura confronted her.

"I was like, 'What the heck is your name?' " Laura says. "I was like, 'You don't mean anything to me. You mean this much.' "

And Laura holds her thumb and forefinger a hair's width apart.

What's it going to take for them to leave her alone, she wonders aloud.

You'd have to leave, says her mother, who is just as frustrated as Laura is.

But Laura — the girl who was begging to move a year ago — doesn't like that answer.

Why not?

"Because they don't win," she says. "It doesn't work like that. I don't have to fight any more fights. I won. I'm done."

June 2003

Just a few days left, and she's done with Burrillville High School. Laura's going to CCRI next year for the high school-college program. She has already registered for classes, including a law and evidence class.

She has one goal that the old Laura didn't have.

"I'm going to write a book," she says, with an air of defiance.

But that's a lot of work.

For now, she wants to have fun — "a schoolgirl summer," her father says.

What her parents want for Laura is that she will be strong and able to confront everything that comes her way.

They hope she will find the kind of loving relationship that they have.

Most of all, they want her to be able to take care of herself.

To Our Readers

In October 2002, Nicholas C. Plante, of Burrillville, was convicted of sexually assaulting a fellow high school student the year before, when he was 17 and she was 15.

Reporter Kate Bramson covered Plante's sentencing, at which Superior Court Judge Edward C. Clifton called the case a nightmare for both families. The judge also noted that it had "splintered" the community.

Bramson met the young woman and her parents at the sentencing and interviewed them briefly. Later, they agreed to extensive interviews and debated about whether they wanted to be identified in the newspaper with their full names. (The Journal's policy is to not identify victims of first-degree sexual assault.)

In the end, they agreed that Laura would be identified by her first name and that her parents' names would not be used, to protect her from identification by inference.

They are aware that many in the community know who they are. However, they felt this agreement would allow them to maintain a degree of privacy.

Nicholas Plante declined to be interviewed. During a two-hour interview, his parents declined to talk about Laura or their son's trial.

Sources

What follows is a summary of Bramson's reporting organized by subject:

Sentencing on Jan. 14, 2003: Bramson attended the sentencing. Laura and her parents' reactions and thoughts about that day were discussed in extensive personal interviews; observations about that day also provided in an interview with school nurse Marilyn Kelley.

Laura's parents' rules about boys: from an interview with her family.

Descriptions of how well Plante was known in the school community, his art work and his friendship with Laura: interviews with five friends of the Plante family, an acquaintance and a local businessman who wrote letters to the court on the family's or Plante's behalf; the 120 letters submitted to the court on Plante's behalf, which were written by 119 people and categorized by Bramson for trends and themes; interview with school nurse Marilyn Kelley; interviews with Laura and her family.

The rape scene: Taken almost entirely from Laura's grand jury testimony in February 2002, which Bramson acquired from the Superior Court, Providence. The only exceptions, from interview with Laura: that it hadn't occurred to her to ask if Plante's mother was home; the reason she broke up with her ex-boyfriend; and that she felt comfortable confiding in Plante because he was her friend.

Laura's mother arriving home the day of the rape: from interviews with Laura's family.

Laura's mother arriving at the high school: interviews with Laura's family; school nurse Kelley also spoke of the phone call to Laura's mother; high school social worker declined to comment for this story after consulting with the superintendent of schools, who she said advised her not to talk because the assault had not taken place on school grounds.

Description of Laura's actions at home and school the morning after the assault and her conversations with friends and Kelley about the rape: from Laura's grand jury testimony. Several details are from interviews with Laura, her parents, and Kelley.

Hasbro Children's Hospital: from Dr. Amy P. Goldberg's grand jury testimony; description that the penis piercing is Bramson's after examining it in the evidence box in Superior Court; Laura's mother's comments in examining room are from interview with Laura and her parents. Bramson also confirmed two points with Goldberg in a brief phone interview.

Description of Laura's father being called at work: from interviews with Laura's family and Kelley.

Description of Laura filing police complaint, Plante's arrest, charges from two other women and their accounts, description of Plante moving through the judicial system: from grand jury testimony by Det. Wayne M. Richardson, Laura, the other two young women; from District Court and Superior Court records; interview with Al Bucci, assistant to the director of the Adult Correctional Institutions. Plante's arrest report was not on file in District Court; Burrillville police refused to release Plante's arrest report or any narratives that accompany that report.

Winter 2002: from interviews with Laura's family, Kelley and Burrillville High School principal Richard Trogisch; 1994 real-estate transactions listed in The Providence Journal to corroborate family's recollections; examination of the stack of honor-roll certificates and report cards that Laura's mother has kept since kindergarten.

"Many residents say you're considered a newcomer unless you were born here": interviews with multiple residents, employees in town hall, school department employees, high school students and their parents from August 2002, when Bramson began covering Burrillville, until the present.

"At least two of Nick's great-grandparents were born here and died here when Nick was a child": from multiple Providence Journal obituaries that name the surviving relatives of deceased individuals, including the names of their children, which match names of people who wrote letters to the court identifying themselves as Plante's grandparents.

Description of Plante family's place in the community: interviews with eight letter-writers; letters written to the court by Plante's grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends from school, friends of the family, friends of a cousin, teachers and guidance counselors who work or worked at Burrillville High School and local business owners; interview with Plante's parents and sister.

Spring and summer 2002: multiple interviews with Laura and her parents and interview with her brothers.

Fall 2002: interviews with Laura's family, Kelley, Deputy Atty. Gen. Gerald J. Coyne, Burrillville Police Lt. Kevin S. San Antonio, juror Anthony Rufo and principal Richard Trogisch.

Trial: Court records and assistance from court personnel; interview with San Antonio, Coyne, prosecutor Denise Choquette, Attorney General's public information officer Michael J. Healey, interviews with jurors.

Winter 2003: interviews with Laura's family; prosecutor Choquette told Judge Clifton at the sentencing hearing that Laura had received e-mails about freeing Nick Plante; Trogisch spoke also of the meeting just before Laura came back to school; interviews with Burrillville guidance counselor Mary Russo, Trogisch and Sojourner House's Sloan Rielly about "healthy relationships" class; interview with Kelley; dragon mural from Trogisch and Kelley.

April 2003: interviews with Laura's family, Trogisch and Kelley.

May 2003: interviews with Laura's family; incident report about the milk from Lincoln Police Department.

June 2003: interviews with Laura's family.

Dart Award Acceptance Speech

No one breathed a word to me about his upcoming trial during my first two months on the job. No one even called me after a story I wrote included the boy's name as one of several friends who had built ramps into their homes so a recently paralyzed friend could visit. His trial would start less than a week after that story ran. In every other community where I've worked, at least one neighbor, elderly resident or busy body would have called and said, "Don't you know that the boy you wrote about today is facing rape charges?"

Only after he had been convicted on four counts of sexual assault did the police hand me a short press release — saying that a jury had found the boy guilty of raping a 15-year-old girl the year before.

At the sentencing, the courtroom was packed. I assumed the crying girls in the back row were there to support the victim, but I soon learned they were advocates for the boy.

Listening to the judge, I thought this would become the story of two families torn apart by this crime. Two families had lost the children they had known — one to prison and one to post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares and flashbacks. I asked both families to talk to me the day of the sentencing, but only the girl's family agreed. Her father's words echoed in my head for weeks: "We were treated like we had a disease."

Eventually, I met with the boy's parents and his sister, but they declined to talk about the case. The story evolved into a tale of survival, Laura's story.

That meant building trust with Laura and her family. That had already begun with my story on the sentencing — before we ever sat down for an in-depth interview. Laura's mother often referred to the balance and objectivity she saw in that story. I also brought Laura's family past articles of mine so they could get a sense of how I tell the stories of people's lives.

We talked at length about how the family would be identified in the paper. Although the Providence Journal 's policy is not to name victims of sexual assault, if Laura had wanted to be identified fully, we told her that was a decision for her and her family to make. My editor on the project, Mimi Burkhardt, and I talked often about the name debate and all of my reporting. Our deputy executive editor, Carol Young, shared clips with us from over the years on the debate to name or not to name rape survivors. I shared those with Laura's family. It helped her and her parents continue with the interviews when they heard from me that editors at the paper were committed to this story and had given me time to work on it away from my daily routine.

Some days, Laura was strong and proud that she had spoken out about the rape — and she wanted her full name in the paper. But she was just 17 when the story would run, and her father had strong reservations. He had always been careful about protecting his family, and he worried about his daughter's life becoming so public in such a small state. Laura's parents asked if we could use a pseudonym. But in the end, her mother thought it just wouldn't sound right if we gave her daughter a different name. She had spoken in depth about how she mourned the loss of the old Laura. She hadn't mourned the old Mary or the old Susan.

On bad days, Laura questioned whether to proceed with more interviews at all. She and her parents persevered because they truly believed that they could help others by telling their story. Laura had spoken up initially because she didn't want other girls to face what she had gone through.

Mimi and I met with a photo editor who selected Bob Thayer for the job — because of his sensitivity, award-winning photography skills and the rapport he easily develops with sources. I brought samples of Bob's work to the family first, so they could get a sense of how it's possible for a photographer to capture emotion without revealing someone's identity.

When Bob and I went together to Laura's home, his gentle nature put the family at ease. Back in the newsroom, editors debated with us which photos to run, ever mindful of not identifying Laura but of helping tell the story with the photos. In the end, the lead photo became the mirror portrait of Laura. It was Bob's idea for Laura to hold the small mirror and gaze into it as a way to portray the fragmentation of a rape.

I don't think any of us were prepared for the outpouring of support that Laura and her family got from the moment people read the story. Within two weeks, 150 rape survivors, parents, children and people who said they knew nothing about rape had e-mailed me. Survivors poured out their souls to me, and nearly everyone asked me to forward their comments to Laura. From a community that had so protected the rapist, I only got six negative e-mails, from the boy's closest friends.

A few days before the story ran, Laura's mother had told me she didn't know what they would have done if I hadn't arrived, asking to hear their story and listening to what they had to share. After the story ran, Laura's father said he felt as if the cancer inside him were gone, as if a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

It is for those reasons that I am grateful to the Dart Center for recognizing news coverage of victims of violence. It can be too easy in the daily news business to report on a trial, a sentencing or a violent crime and then move on, not finding the time to delve into the effects that crime has on its victims. Such recognition by the Dart Center gives us all time to pause and to thank the Lauras of the world for sharing their lives with us. I personally want to thank Laura and her parents for their bravery in speaking out. They have helped many to understand the effects of this crime and community reaction to it.

On behalf of Mimi and Bob and the entire Providence Journal, I thank the Dart Center for its continuous work to improve news coverage of trauma, conflict and tragedy. We are honored to be the recipient of this year's Dart Award, and we look forward to tonight's debate about the use of violent images in the media.

Thank you.

Reporting 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.'"

2004 Dart Award Final Judges

David T. Cullen is a free-lance journalist. He has contributed work to The New York Times, National Public Radio and the online publications Salon.com and Slate.com. Cullen covered the school shootings in Littleton, Colorado, as well as the trials of the murderers of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. A former lieutenant in the U.S. Army, he taught creative writing at the University of Colorado in the mid-1990s, and was a Dart Fellow in 2002. Cullen is the recipient of a GLAAD Media Award, a Society of Professional Journalists Award and several Best of Salon Awards.

Michelle Guido is the Women’s Issues reporter on the Race and Demographics team at the San Jose Mercury News. In her 14 years at the paper, she has covered education, city and county government, police, courts and youth issues. She spent 1999 reporting on domestic violence, and revisited the issue in 2002 with a first-person piece after her friend, Mercury News photographer Luci Williams Houston, was murdered by her husband. Guido has taught journalism classes at San Francisco State University and helps run Mosaic, a summer urban journalism program for minority high school students. Her national awards include a 2002 Associated Press News Executives Council Award for “A Victim’s Hidden Struggle”; an EdPress National Award for Excellence for both features and breaking news in 1992; and a (team) Pulitzer Prize for spot news coverage of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake.

Saed Hindash is a photojournalist at the Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s largest newspaper. In 2002 he won the Dart Award, along with reporter Matt Reilly, for a story about a Siberian orphan who was beaten and froze to death in the custody of his adoptive parents in central New Jersey. Before joining the Star-Ledger, Hindash worked for newspapers in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and in Everett, WA.

Lori S. Robinson is the author of I Will Survive: The African-American Guide to Healing from Sexual Assault and Abuse (2003). She is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, Essence, The Crisis and The Source, among other publications. Robinson lectures and conducts workshops around the country on sexual violence. She recently taught media at Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador. A former editor at Emerge: Black America’s Newsmagazine, her honors include National Association of Black Journalists awards, Unity Award in Media prizes, and the International Black Women’s Congress Inspirational Award. Robinson earned a master’s degree in journalism from New York University in 1994.

Barbara Rothbaum is president-elect of the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) and associate editor of The Journal of Traumatic Stress. She is currently a tenured associate professor in psychiatry at the Emory School of Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and director of the Trauma and Anxiety Recovery Program at Emory. She has won both state and national awards for her research. She writes scientific papers and chapters and has published two books on the treatment of PTSD. She received the Diplomate in Behavioral Psychology from the American Board of Professional Psychology. Dr. Rothbaum is also a pioneer in the application of virtual reality to the treatment of psychological disorders.