In September 2021, when he returned to school as a junior, he was nonetheless elected president of Dickinson House, one of the residential houses where the school’s boarding students live. That appears to have increased animosity among some of his classmates and caused the rumor to spread further, his parents said.
A few days after the election, the unfounded rape accusation was posted anonymously to a nationwide, student-run app popular with boarding-school students, Jack’s parents said.
The bullying spread quickly online, his parents said, and at Christmastime, during a secret Santa gift exchange among Lawrenceville classmates, Jack received a rape whistle and a book about how to make friends.
Mr. Reid recalled that his son was hurt deeply, and that when Jack came home for Christmas he seemed withdrawn. “Dad, will this ever go away?” he said his son asked him, “Will it ever get off the website?”
Mr. Reid noted that the in-person bullying at school combined with the power of the internet posting compounded the rumor’s impact.
“We think bullying, with the 1,000 times echo chamber of the internet and everybody knowing, is much more devastating to kids and, in Jack’s case, produced a very impulsive act,” he said. “He had to escape the pain from the humiliation he was feeling.”
Early on, with support from his parents, Jack approached school officials and asked them to intervene, leading to a school-led investigation surrounding the bullying and the sexual assault allegation.
Source link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/30/nyregion/lawrenceville-school-suicide.html