New Hampshire Prep School Rape Sentence: Owen Labrie To Serve 1 Year In State Jail

Owen Labrie was sentenced Thursday to one year in jail and probation during a hearing at a New Hampshire court. Labrie, 20, was found guilty of three misdemeanor charges in August in a case that revealed the lurid details of a practice at the elite St. Paul’s School known as “the senior salute,” where senior students would take underclassmen on dates and often try to engage in sexual activities.

When Labrie was an 18-year-old senior at the prep school in Concord, New Hampshire, in 2014, he was accused of raping a 15-year-old student. He was cleared of the felony rape charge, but the misdemeanor charges that he was found guilty of included endangering the welfare of a child, having sex with a minor and using a computer to lure a minor. Labrie will be required to register as a sex offender. He had faced a sentence of up to 11 years, but prosecutors asked for a sentence of 3.5 to 7 years along with participation in a sex offender program.

In a videotaped statement played in court Thursday, the teenager said she lived with "almost constant" fear since the day of the alleged attack and felt unsafe when she returned to campus in the fall with the entire boys' hockey team pointing and staring at her as she walked alone.

Labrie had been accepted to Harvard University’s Divinity School. His full scholarship was rescinded, the Guardian reported. Labrie’s mother, Denise Holland, wrote to the judge in the case describing how her son was having suicidal thoughts.

“He expressed to more than one person that these detectives said they were going to take away ‘everything he had worked his whole life for,’ and that he ‘just wanted to die,’” she wrote, according to the Associated Press.

In messages read by prosecutors in court, Labrie said his style with women was to "“feign intimacy... then stab them in the back...THROW EM IN THE DUMPSTER,” the Boston Globe reported.