On March 12, 1986, readers of the New York Post got a glimpse of Brown University they might not have expected.
The article, entitled "School for Scandal," told the nation about a story a few Brown students thought was too salacious for readers of The Herald to know: The Providence Police Department had arrested two Brown students at their off-campus apartments on charges of prostitution.
The Herald had printed the news the day before, but a student stole 2,000 copies of the March 11 press run as soon as they were delivered to campus locations.
The furor that ensued over the Herald's coverage had something to do with the crime and everything to do with the accused students' right to anonymity. Coupled with the arrival on campus of a cadre of "Playboy" photographers looking for Ivy League women to pose, a new debate emerged in which privacy, legality and sexual freedom battled for the spotlight.
The investigation into the alleged ring began in September 1985 when an anonymous female Brown student contacted an administrator about being "coerced into prostitution," said then Providence Police chief Anthony Mancuso.
No arrests were made until March 6 of the following year, when Dana E. Smith '87 and '86 were formally charged with "loitering for prostitution." police report alleged the student had arranged to have sex with a PPD undercover policeman, who then arrested her, The Herald reported at the time.
The next day, Providence police raided the Benefit Street home of insurance agent Stanley Henshaw III, the son of Stanley Henshaw Jr. '35, finding small amounts of cocaine and marijuana - as well as some 46 pictures of nude and partially nude women, some of whom were minors, and eight of whom were Brown students, Mancuso said at a press conference.
"It was the most newsworthy story of the year because it was so unusual, and the charges were very inflammatory," said Tracy Breton, a Providence Journal reporter who covered Henshaw's December 1987 trial for the Providence Journal and is now also a visiting professor of English at Brown.
So inflammatory, in fact, that the news almost didn't make it to the Brown campus. When the first Herald article about the arrests appeared on March 11, some 2,000 copies from the Herald's press run were stolen by a boyfriend of one of the accused girls, said then-Herald Editor-in-Chief Jill Zuckman '87.
She said she did her best to keep her cool when the papers got stolen, and ordered the printer to run off more copies after the first run was stolen.
After the arrests, Mancuso accused Smith and of placing a personal ad in "The Eagle," a local weekly, advertising their services as "Ivy-League blondes." Smith and vehemently denied the presence of such an ad.
But Mancuso had also alleged that college prostitution "went well beyond the Brown community," and was operating out of every college in the state, with Brown at the forefront.
That statement in particular infuriated Zuckman, who saw Mancuso as blowing an already controversial story out of proportion.
"(Mancuso) was saying this really pretty wild stuff, and he offered no evidence to back that up," she said.
Wild tales of Ivy League prostitutes had student reporters salivating for a story, but unable to penetrate Mancuso's initial statements.
"At one point, one of our reporters camped out at the Providence police station all day long one day just in the hopes of collaring the police chief to ask him what he was talking about," Zuckman said.
Members of the Brown community were far more concerned with whether the identity of the girls should have been made public by the local media. Letters to The Herald focused on nothing else.
David Rosenberg '86 suggested The Herald had betrayed a "self-supporting community ethic" and set a precedent for national media outlets in its disclosure. Other letters called for the disclosure of the girls' clients to eliminate the stigma of the sexual double standard.
In a March 17 editorial, Herald ombudsman Kurt Hirsch '87 defended the Herald's decision to print the names, emphasizing the difference between campus crimes, whose reports are confidential, and crimes involving the municipal police, who are required to disclose the personal information of those involved. Zuckman, too, defended the decision, saying she wouldn't do anything differently. Local and national newspapers and television stations also publicized the girls' identities.
"I definitely remember getting a lot of pressure not to deal with the story," she said, "and it was crazy because it was huge. It wasn't like we were the only source covering it," she said citing CBS and the Providence Journal among competing media outlets. Nor would she apologize for printing the girls' names.
"It was a crime, and they were arrested," she said.
The "School for Scandal" went out of session as quickly as it had come in. In April 1986 the State Attorney General's office announced it had dropped charges against Smith and in conjunction with the case. First , then Smith agreed to testify in the case against Henshaw in return for being named as "unindicted co-conspirators."
Breton said the state probably needed the women to testify in order to have a chance of convicting Henshaw.
"To me, it was obvious from their testifying that this was not something they wanted to do," Breton said.
Henshaw was indicted on 21 counts related to the prostitution case. With five of those charges dropped, he stood trial in December 1987. His defense team consisted of the late John Sheehan, later a Rhode Island Supreme Court justice, and a young Brown graduate fresh out of law school, David Cicilline '83, who had yet to turn his eye to politics.
Seven of Henshaw's remaining counts were dropped during pretrial negotiations, the Journal reported, because the women to which they referred could not be located to testify. The trial became a small-scale media frenzy with a camera ban in effect for the two Brown students, who told presiding judge Joseph F. Rodgers Jr. that photographs would cause irrevocable damage to their personal lives.
At the time, Breton noted, Smith was a graduate student studying abroad. The Providence Journal reported that , who graduated magna cum laude, was working in the publishing business in New York.
On Dec. 10, Henshaw, then 45, was acquitted of seven sex-for-hire charges after two days of deliberation in which jurors became deadlocked over the definition of "committing oral sex" with regards to Henshaw. Foreshadowing the Starr Report of the late 1990s, Cicilline argued that in order to convict Henshaw of committing oral sex, the state would have to prove that penetration was involved, regardless of what the women had said on the stand, the Journal reported.
"We played the story big down here because Henshaw was a prominent person in the community, and it was very unusual to have Brown coeds charged with sex offenses or to have them testifying against a prominent person charged with such offenses, Breton said.
"It was obviously an embarrassment to them once it became a police case," she added. "The jury obviously believed (the women) were participating willingly."
Henshaw served 90 days in jail on drug charges, despite Cicilline's impassioned argument that Henshaw had been merely holding the drugs for one of his co-conspirators. He now lives in Warwick and could not be reached for comment.
As for Henshaw's hotshot young lawyer, Cicilline has been holding some press conferences of his own recently - he was elected mayor of Providence in 2002. Smith graduated in 1994 from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. Neither she nor could be reached for comment. Zuckman is now the chief Congressional correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.
"It was a crazy, crazy, really intense time," Zuckman said. "It was a fast-moving story that put us all (at The Herald) to the test."
Even for Breton, a seasoned reporter of 30 years, it was a story of a lifetime.
"I can't remember anything else like this making the news in all the time I've been in Rhode Island," Breton said.
