I Spent the Night in a Hentai Porn Theater at Canada’s Biggest Anime Convention

All photos by Luis Mora

I stumbled in through the right side of the door after flashing my ID to show I'm over 18 and immediately tripped over an overstuffed messenger bag. I wedged myself in between the wall and a garbage can—one of the only spots left to stand in the mid-sized conference room with aged, patterned red carpeting and two massive glass chandeliers. As I placed my hands on my shoulders in an attempt to squeeze myself into the crowd, a guy from across the room boisterously yelled, "Get that pussy wet!" right as I noticed the first flesh-colored pixelation in the center of the screen. His demand provoked a roar of excited screaming from the crowd of about 100.

The hentai screening room at Anime North, Canada's biggest anime convention by attendance, is the stuff of anime nerd fables. Well, for some fandoms at least. I wasn't even sure it was real until I saw it for myself. For years, anime fans I met at raves would regale me with tales of how they stayed in the hotel-conference-room-turned-anime-porn-theater overnight at the convention when they couldn't afford a proper hotel room, while others said it was the perfect place to come down after a night of raving at Anime North's legendary dance parties.

This year, at 11 PM when the Paris Room in the International Plaza Hotel nearby Toronto Pearson Airport switched its programming from all-ages anime to anime porn, the curator had chosen one of the OG hentais to screen: Cream Lemon. The series premiered in 1984 as one of the first video hentais ever and is known for its bizarre storylines.The episodes are standalone, and the content ranges from sci-fi to incestuous romance to coming-of-age tales.

Travis, who was curating the hentai screening this year, and is a comic artist and serious anime fan, told me, "They always have late-night hentai, and in previous years I found it was like censored or just not really good or interesting. A lot of people were disappointed with what was being aired; they want it more raunchy." So this year, Travis decided to take on the responsibility of choosing what hentai would be shown.

As I watched one of the first episodes of the night, in which a group of rebels overtakes a desert town and fucks women in it, Ben, the volunteer helping to watch over the room yells, "Hand check!" as he walks down the center row of chairs and flips a switch to turn on the the lights in the room. Each person in the crowd promptly raises both their hands as giggles erupt throughout.

I was pretty confused about how serious the hand checks were, a confusion which only increased as Ben called for them roughly every 20 minutes, so I had to ask a vet of the hentai room what the fuck the intermittent monitoring actually meant. I ran into a dude I knew from my raving days at the con (surprise, surprise), Darcy Epikuro, who was headlining the indoor dance party at the con that evening. After his DJ set, he had come to the screening room—as he has for years to decompress from partying—with his girlfriend Kitty, who sat on his lap while they watched hentai together.

Stopping every so often to make lewd comments about the current episode of Cream Lemon that was screening ("Don't Do It Mako! Mako Sexy Symphony Part I"), he explained to me that though the hand checks are generally a joke, over his many years at Anime North, he's seen some incidents of note: "There's just various dudes jerking off and getting caught... People have seriously tried to jerk off in this room. It is half joke, half real—but the one time someone doesn't raise their hands, you've got to be worried."

As the night went on, around 2 AM, I felt like my brain had hit some previously unknown capacity to deal with the obscureness of hentai with all its sparkle-covered genitals, the seemingly identical perfectly round breasts of every female character, and the level of screaming from the audience who sounded like jocks at a sports bar during playoffs. By this point, my friend who had vowed to stay with me all night had abandoned the room to go sleep in my car because of the permeating stench of feet. The audience, unsurprisingly, was heavily male, and as one of the few females who were there for more than one episode, I felt like I was peeking into a boys' clubhouse where anything goes. (I still can't get the now-familiar chanting of "Fuck her!" out of my head that punctuated everything from a simple kiss to full-on penetration.)

I found Tom, who was in the hentai room for much of the night with a massive crew, standing up dabbing in the front row during a particularly raunchy scene when two female characters started sucking each other's nipples and, as one of the more visibly and audibly excited members of the audience, I had to ask him why he was there.

"As shitty as it sounds, I mostly come to the hentai room ironically. The hentai room is a big joke where you just clap at an orgasm." A eight-year veteran of the con, Tom had once again found himself in the room while looking for a party. "Usually it's very obviously not serious, but then you'll always see an old dude by himself—but then again, that could be me eventually if I'm here like 20 years from now and don't have any friends anymore."

There were a few guys who were alone and sat silently throughout the entire night seemingly glued to their chairs, but the majority of the audience was of the same school of thought as Tom and appeared to be in the room to have fun and scream shit like "Tag team her!" and (during a particular unfortunately themed episode) "Fuck the Nazi out of her!"

"I try to tell people not to yell out too much because it distracts from what you're actually supposed to be watching, and then the joke becomes about what was said instead of what you're seeing," Travis told me. "You can't do anything once it gets to a certain point, controlling the crowd."

When the usual new wave of people flowed into the room as a new episode started early on in the night, I met a young couple, Michael and Erica, who were standing behind me because of the lack of seats. "This is my first time watching hentai, and boy is it a good time!" Erica told me in-between outbursts of screaming from the crowd. "Look at the shining light of the vagina!" Though her boyfriend Michael said he'd watched hentai before, he explained that many people who are into anime (like himself) aren't necessarily into anime of the pornographic variety. "In it's a lot less sexual for most here, and a lot more just 'What the fuck's going to happen next.'"

As it neared 3 AM, the only thing keeping me sane was clutching my Neon Genesis Evangelion-themed body pillow as the night got insurmountably weirder. A sci-fi episode of Cream Lemon came on, aptly named "Star Trap," and I thought my long wait for the first tentacle porn of the night was over. But then, just as the monster had two youthful female characters in his lair and had contained them in an egg, he magically caused one of the females in question to shift gender and grow a penis instead so they could have hetero sex. Typical.

Adam, a man I spoke to who has been to this particular screening room at Anime North "many times" and has been coming to Anime North for five years told me he's a fan of hentai because, "One, they go a lot more raunchier, they push a lot of boundaries... It's also anime, so you've got that great sense of humor too."

Around 4 AM, right after I had developed a headache from lack of sleep and being out in the sun for most of the day at the con, I was subjected to Nazi porn for the second time in my life. (The first was in a friend's dead uncle's basement in Edmonton when we found the motherload of French Canadian porn he'd left behind, but I digress.) Around this time, there was a group of bros cosplaying as Marines from One Piece in the back of the screening room doing trust falls.

After the Nazi porn, I had definitely hit my personal saturation point, and as the crowd had thinned out a bit since it was late, I put three of the metal-and-scratchy-red-fabric chairs together and tried to sleep. But sleep would not take me. I suddenly realized how strange the music in Cream Lemon was, like some sort of deranged carnivalesque symphony. Giving up on rest, I resumed to people-watching and noticed nearly half of the 15 or so people left in the room had fallen asleep. Bastards. One dude who'd been making out with a woman next to him earlier in front of me, though he was sitting straight up, had his Pikachu fitted-topped head crooked back on his seat and was passed the fuck out.

By 5 AM, Travis announced that after about 17 episodes, the rest of the Cream Lemon files he had were corrupted, so this was the end of the night. I was finally free and stumbled out of the room after my six hours of hentai, squinting my eyes as I walked through the fully lit hotel lobby and saw people sleeping on various couches and chairs. As I left the hotel and walked toward the parking lot across the street, I heard the menacing sound of birds chirping—the effective toll of death for the night. On what was one of the strangest walks of shame in my life, I saw cosplayers passed out on sidewalks, pieces of costumes littering the ground, and people who seemed to be waiting in front of the main building for Sunday's convention activities to start.

Though the hentai room was a bit depraved and taught me a bit too much about how men behave when they're primarily in the company of other men, after watching so much of Cream Lemon, I can't help but agree with how the curator of the room described how he feels about hentai: "I think it's art—that's why I like animation and comics and anime is to see the art, and then also sexy art... I like it as a sci-fi or fantasy story, not as something to masturbate to.

"But if people are into that, whatever—you can masturbate to anything."

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Financial Experts Told Us Just How Bad a Deal Trump University Was for Students

Photo via Flickr user Mike Poresky

Were Donald Trump just a real estate developer turned reality TV star with a habit of getting himself embroiled in lawsuits, news that his get-rich-quick seminar business was being sued in multiple courts for allegedly being a thinly veiled scam wouldn't have been major national news. But now that Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee for president, every detail of what could have been a relatively routine legal fight over Trump University is now under scrutiny.

Former Trump students have already been featured in campaign ads accusing the candidate of defrauding ordinary people, and when a judge's order earlier this week led to hundreds of pages of court documents being released—including damning testimony from Trump U employees—Hillary Clinton and other Trump foes jumped on the chance to portray the would-be president as a sleazy con man.

Maybe more important than the employee testimony is the Trump University 2010 "playbook," which reveals the high-pressure sales tactics the University's employees used to lure students, and a preview of the kind of financial advice offered newbie investors. The guide tells salesmen that students should be encouraged to use credit cards to pay for the courses themselves—the most expensive of which cost $35,000—and also told things like, "If a seller will take $10,000 down on a fixer-upper that you expect to make $20,000 on, why not use credit cards?" and "Check with a tax attorney to see how you might borrow from your own retirement account to finance real estate investments."

Is using credit cards and retirement money to buy property really a sound investment strategy? How badly does this sort of sales pitch mislead customers? To help figure this out, VICE spoke to several finance experts, who said, first of all, that the basic premise of Trump U—that real estate can make people rich—isn't off-base.

"If properly analyzed, real estate investing is one of the most common ways normal people can build long-term wealth," Sam Dogen, a 13-year finance veteran, real estate enthusiast, and popular blogger, told VICE. "The reason is because real estate rides the wave of inflation, and real estate is a part of the inflation component along with food and energy prices. Inflation is one of the most powerful economic forces that almost always goes up and to the right."

"A lot of people have built successful careers in real estate by starting small and collecting a property here or there," added Douglas Abbey, who teaches residential real estate investment at Stanford's business school. "You do not have to be rich to invest in real estate. Inherently it is not a bad idea, and it is not inherently risky unless you over-leverage, unless you borrow too much."

The problem is, it seems as if Trump U salespeople were encouraging people to undertake just that sort of risky borrowing—any investment you go into credit card debt to make is going to have to pay off massively to be worth it.

"The average credit card interest rate is roughly fifteen percent, which is more than the average annual return of the illustrious Warren Buffet," explained Dogan. "Further, even if you put down a healthy twenty percent, you are still leveraged five to one. A ten percent decline in the value of the property means a fifty percent decline in your cash downpayment."

The Trump U manual also suggested that people who hem and haw too much be belittled for pussyfooting. It also said that people in bad financial situations should be told that the course offered a quick fix to their woes. "Urgency is proportional to pain," the playbook reads. "Problems are like health. The more a problem hurts now, the more the need for a solution now. And the more it hurts, the more they'll be prepared to pay for a speedy solution. It's got to hurt enough!"

But Abbey, the Stanford professor, said that way of looking at real estate investment is wrong-headed. "Anybody buying real estate should not be looking for a quick buck," he told VICE. "It's just not a business that's well suited to that."

Dogan said a similarly successful strategy for getting rich quick would be to "go to Vegas and bet it all on black."

Perhaps worst of all is the way Trump U salespeople were advised to get students to think of credit card debt as as OPM––other people's money. Nick Clements, a former credit card executive at Barclays, called that "horribly misleading."

"Debt can be used––and has been used by Donald Trump––to make you rich," he told VICE. "But that is a very different type of debt, and it is just wrong to create equivalencies."

He gave the example of someone who borrows $100 to buy a building at a 2 percent interest rate. If you collect $5 in rent, you are making a $3 profit. You're borrowing money to make it, in other words. So long as prices keep going up and the markets don't take a turn, you're golden.

"But in this case, people would be borrowing at high credit card rates to purchase a Trump University education with a low value," Clements said. "That is a 'bad deal,' to use the Donald's language."

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Criminals Are Flooding Vermont to Trade Guns for Heroin

This article was originally published by The Trace.

Vermont has an opioid epidemic and relatively lax gun laws. Across the southern border, Massachusetts has a glut of cheap heroin and strict gun regulations.

A kind of black market efficiency has resulted from this supply and demand matchup: Dealers from Massachusetts are driving north to Vermont with loads of heroin to exchange for guns, which they then bring home to sell in Boston, according to officials.

"Heroin is coming up here and guns are going back there," Miro Weinberger, the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, told The Trace.

The flow of guns on a stretch of Interstate 91 running from western Massachusetts north to Vermont has become such a well-known trafficking route that officials have dubbed it "the iron pipeline." Police routinely find drugs, or guns, or both during traffic stops.

In February, police in Northampton, Massachusetts discovered $20,000 worth of heroin and two stolen guns during an early morning stop. A month later, a few miles up I-91, police found 230 baggies of heroin in a car headed to New Hampshire. Many local officials say inconsistent gun laws are fueling the trade.

Most northeastern states have enacted laws that extend background check requirements for gun purchases to include firearms sold at gun shows and unlicensed dealers. But Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine do not require such checks on private sales, making it easier for people with criminal records to buy guns in those states, and move them around New England.

"We have good gun laws in Massachusetts, but our problem is most of the guns that seem to be coming in and being used in crimes are coming from other states," Boston Police Commissioner William Evans told The Trace. "It's hard for us when so many come from our border states that have lax laws."

The opioid crisis is the latest challenge for law enforcement officials struggling to get a handle on gun trafficking. Enterprising dealers are exploiting a sharp price disparity between Boston, where a small bag of heroin can be had for as little as $4, and places like Burlington, where the street markup can be 10 times as high, police say.

The intersection of the gun and drug trade is fueling violence, officials said. Weinberger said that a rare fatal shooting in his city in 2015 was the result of a drug deal gone awry.

Other drugs are often in the mix. In 2014, a Massachusetts man murdered a woman with a 9mm Glock that he bought in Brattleboro, Vermont, in exchange for crack cocaine, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

Frustrated with the failure of Congress to enact a universal background check requirement, and alarmed by the spiking opioid epidemic, elected officials and police chiefs across New England began holding a series of regional gun violence summits organized by Boston Mayor Marty Walsh in 2014. "We need a coordinated approach," Walsh said.

Northeastern officials were alsoheavily represented at a gathering of state and local officials, who visited Washington last week to discuss what they're doing without help from the federal government. "Because Congress can't get the job done, a lot of the work is going to have to done on the local and state level," Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy said in a press conference outside the White House.

The guns-for-drugs trade in New England is just one facet of the East Coast's gun trafficking problem. Even if Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont were to immediately tighten restrictions on private gun sales, guns would still flow north from Georgia, Florida and other states with lenient laws.

States like California, where the state Assembly just passed several new gun regulations, may be large enough to influence regional practices. But smaller states, and even large municipalities such as New York City, complain that they're like islands, and have little power to address the illegal weapons washing ashore.

In Boston, officials cite a report published last year by Rutgers and Harvard researchers that tracked the origin of 1,813 of the 3,202 guns seized by police between 2007 and 2013. (The rest could not be traced.) Just 16 percent of the guns were found in possession of the person who first bought them. Guns trafficked from states like Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida made up almost a quarter of guns seized in Boston. Roughly a fifth came from New Hampshire and Maine.

Officials say they are brainstorming solutions to the problem of the free flow of guns across borders. The regional summits have included 80 cities from around New England over the past two years. Boston, Hartford, and a few other cities also plan to work with a nonprofit, Arms with Ethics, in a pilot program in which they will develop standardized gun-violence action plans they hope can be copied more widely.

But specific steps to minimize gun trafficking have yet to emerge. "It's clearly a regional challenge," Weinberger said. "If we're all working on it, our ability to really get our arms around it and address it is greater."

This article was originally published by the Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America. Sign up for the newsletter, or follow The Trace on Facebook or Twitter.

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Comics: 'Ralphie and Jeanie in Alien Abduction,' Today's Comic by Alabaster Pizzo

Check out Alabaster Pizzo's website, Tumblr, and Twitter.

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Elon Musk Wants to Die in an Ultra-Democratic Society on Mars, Apparently

Elon Musk in 2014. Photo via Tesla Club Belgium

Elon Musk, the tech mogul who aims to reinvent the way humans get around the planet with his company Tesla and one day colonize other planets with his other company SpaceX, tends to sound like a sci-fi character whenever he opens his mouth. So when he took the stage at Vox Media's Code Conference on Wednesday to be interviewed by tech journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, he naturally threw out some big ideas. For one thing, he said we're probably living inside a simulated reality whose purpose we have no hope of understanding. But while that's cool and fine and whatever, the really otherworldly stuff he discussed was, well, actually otherworldly.

Musk has made no secret of his dream to get the hell off of Earth, which makes sense, because most of the time this planet is too hot or too cold and the good stuff, like TV, isn't even that good. His dream is to be born on Earth (check) but to die on Mars—"If you're going to choose a place to die, then Mars is probably not a bad choice," he said at the Code Conference—and talks about his colonization plans with the casualness of an 18-year-old chatting about his college choices.

His plan is to send a rocket to Mars by 2018 (yes, SpaceX is apparently serious about this), and to get humans on the red planet in 2025. He demurred when asked if he'd be one of the first colonists, and when Swisher pressed him about whether he'd go to space before shooting off to Mars, he shrugged and replied, "I'll go at some point."

It's easy to respond to Musk's low-key arrogance with disbelief. Is Tesla really going to, for instance, jump to building 500,000 cars a year by 2018? If you give SpaceX $62 million, will it really send your stuff to Mars? And how feasible are actual Mars colonies, considering that the much-ballyhooed Mars One scheme—which would use a SpaceX rocket to send humans to live on Mars, paying for the mission with revenues from a reality show about the effort—seems like a lot of bluster without much behind it?

On the other hand, Tesla is really building a "gigafactory" to manufacture batteries (which Musk said at the Code Conference has the biggest footprint of any building on the planet), and SpaceX is really landing rockets on barges, after a few failures.

So why not skip ahead and get to the important stuff, like how will Martian colonies govern themselves?

When that question was asked by an audience member, Musk didn't skip a beat, envisioning a system where people would vote on laws directly. Specifically, Musk mused about a system "where it's slightly harder to put laws in place than to take them away and where laws don't automatically just live forever."

Having everyone vote on everything, even renewing old statutes, seems crazy, as Vox's Ezra Klein pointed out. Life on Mars is going to be hard enough already without entrusting power to ordinary Martians, who probably aren't going to be any more rational and level-headed than ordinary Earthlings. What happens if the only guy on Mars who thought to bring a gun tried to seize power? What's to stop the very nice people at SpaceX, who would presumably control the distribution of supplies to the colony, from turning it into a company town? And you wouldn't have a fancy telecom infrastructure on Mars to start off, so people couldn't vote on stuff via their iPhones—do you, like, get everyone together for a town hall meeting to decide what crops to plant and whether to ask for mining equipment or Night Court DVDs in the next shipment from Earth?

In the past, Musk has said that a one-way ticket to Mars would cost $500,000, which actually doesn't seem that high, all things considered, but presumably people outside of the 1 percent will have a hard time scrounging up that kind of bread (I'm guessing no bank is going to lend anyone money so they can leave the planet forever). If a crew of millionaires want to ditch the planet for a Martian colony where they're going to have to agree on a set of laws or else perish amid the desolate red rocks—well, I don't think anyone is going to have a problem with that.

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We Watched That New Porn Reality Show ‘Sex Factor’ So You Don’t Have to

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A Lawsuit Could Expose a Culture of Sexual Violence at an Elite Prep School

Part two in the dramatic legal battle surrounding an elite American prep school and its allegedly "warped culture of sexual misconduct" has begun.

The criminal case against Owen Labrie, the former student at St. Paul's prep in New Hampshire who was convicted of misdemeanor statutory rape last year—along with a felony of using a computer to lure a child—is still tied up in an already bizarre appeals process.

But the victim's family is now suing the school itself.

Late Wednesday afternoon, family attorneys filed their complaint, which they say shows how Labrie's crime took place as a direct result of the school "fostering, permitting and condoning a tradition of ritualized statutory rape."

The complaint describes a school storage shed dubbed the "Mars Hotel" that was littered with old condoms, alleges the school refusal to acknowledge a systemic problem even after the rector's own wife was solicited for a "Senior Salute"—the moniker for a campus hookup ritual—and cites a report that administrators ignored a prior warning about Labrie's aggressive sexual advances.

Attorneys also claim school administrators failed to report the rape after the victim first described the incident to a faculty member, and did nothing to protect her after she returned to the school and was openly mocked.

The school has already been rocked by the sensational material unearthed in last summer's criminal trial, including explicit emails sent between senior male students apparently tallying sexual conquests. They were also shown to share strategies for seducing younger students, or "prepubescent bum," which included Labrie's professed method: "feign intimacy... then stab them in the back."

But Steven Kelly, an attorney for the victim's family, says the details released thus far have just been the "tip of the iceberg," and that new information about the school's refusal to address student misconduct will be exposed as part of an extensive discovery process.

"This is devastating damage to this family financially and emotionally," Kelly tells VICE.

The complaint also details how the victim's name was released by some media outlets, and says she was threatened by online commenters. "i know my ivy frat bros are putting a target on her, she is gonna get used and abused," one apparently wrote.

The girl's home address was also released online.

While a specific cash figure is not specified in this complaint, Kelly points to the Erin Andrews case, in which the sports reporter was awarded $55 million in damages from the owner of the hotel where she was video-taped while undressing.

"We fully expect this verdict would be on the high side of the verdicts around the country," Kelly says.

In a statement released Wednesday, the school said the lawsuit is "without merit."

"We categorically reject any allegations that St. Paul's School has an unhealthy culture," the statement reads. "The safety of our students has been and will continue to be the highest priority for our school."

According to the Wall Street Journal, after the trial verdict, in an email to the school community, St. Paul's Rector Michael Hirschfeld wrote that officials first heard about the Salute in spring of 2013. The rector elaborated about his knowledge of students using the word "slay" and "slayer" in a speech to students: "While these words made me uneasy, I did nothing as the head of the School to address their use nor, to my knowledge, did anyone else," he said, according to Vanity Fair.

The rector's remarks have since been removed from the school website.

According to the complaint, Hirschfeld had additional knowledge about the practice of scoring sexual encounters at the school since he oversaw the work of a student who conducted an independent report on school norms called, "The Real Student Handbook: The Little Red Book." (A request for comment from Hirschfeld was met by a reference from the school to its initial statement.)

The civil suit is the latest development in a more than two-year saga that began when the State of New Hampshire pressed charges on behalf of the then 15-year-old victim in 2014. Prosecutors were quick to hone in on the Salute, a practice where upperclassmen reach out to younger students for an intimate encounter–ranging anywhere from hand-holding to sex. Hook-ups between students were tallied on a campus wall.

In Labrie's case, he invited the victim to the roof of a campus building to take part in a Salute via email. The new civil suit alleges he sent out nearly identical emails to several other students. (In his criminal trial, Labrie was found to have had sex with the girl, who was too young to consent, in a mechanical room.)

Labrie was sentenced to a year in county jail and at least 15 years on the sex offender registry last October. He was then released on bail pending a decision on his appeal—that is, until I ran into him on a train going from Boston to Cambridge on the afternoon of February 29. He told me he was visiting his girlfriend, and my impromptu interview—and tweets about it—sparked an investigation in which prosecutors revealed he broke the terms of his curfew on numerous occasions. Labrie's bail was revoked for about two months, at which point the judge, on suggestion from the state Supreme Court, decided he had learned his lesson.

Now Labrie is back out on bail, albeit this time with an ankle bracelet.

The "Mars Hotel," as described by the plaintiffs. Photo courtesy Steven Kelly

Meanwhile, Labrie's attorney, Jaye Rancourt, had continued filing appeals. In one effort to reinstate his bail, she released a letter from a professor who had been mentoring him on a master thesis on the french philosopher Simone Weil, in an attempt to get into a Ph.D program at Oxford.

In the letter, the unnamed professor compared Labrie to Joan of Arc.

"It's so amazing to me how much God loves you — because God doesn't usually bother to wizen up ordinary kids who get involved in teen-age sex play," the professor wrote. "But, obviously, God intends something more from you than a 'staged normal life.' God intends that you (like Joan of Arc and Simone Weil) take on a higher task."

In another motion, Rancourt broached an allegation Labrie's previous attorney, J. Carney made during a sidebar at trial: That one of the witnesses against the accused, his former roommate Andrew Thomson, had also been accused of having sex with an underaged girl, and that the school handled that matter internally.

Thomson is the son of Lucy Hodder, who was once legal counsel for New Hampshire Governor Maggie Hassan, and Carney implied Labrie was being charged criminally while more connected students at the school were given a pass. Rancourt alleged this information was barred from the court, but Judge Larry Smuckler later claimed that the issue was not barred, and that Carney simply did not pursue the angle at trial.

Smuckler recently dismissed Rancourt from the case, however, agreeing with the prosecution's argument that she cannot effectively argue Labrie's defense team was ineffective since she herself was part of that team.

Meanwhile, what the school did or did not know about Thomson and Labrie's other friends at St. Paul, who formed a not-so-secret group called the "Slaymakers, according to the civil suit, is sure to be scrutinized at a new level in months ahead.

Kelly, the family attorney, says witnesses could also include the sons of the school's trustees.

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