Lara St. John was only two when she started playing the violin. By the time she was in Grade 6, the London, Ont.-born violinist was touring some of Europe's most prestigious concert halls.

But the life of a child prodigy, while impressive, is often quite isolating. In an interview with Q's Tom Power, St. John recalls lying to her school friends about what she was doing when she was actually on tour, being forbidden from playing basketball in case she sprained a finger, and spending countless hours practicing "a crapload of scales and etudes."

Her young age also made her extremely vulnerable. In 1986, when she was 14, St. John was sexually assaulted and raped by her 78-year-old instructor at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia — a traumatic experience that almost derailed her career in music.

At the time, she and a few friends reported the abuse to the school's dean, asking him to give her a different instructor, but her concerns were brushed aside.

"He just kind of mocked me and said, 'Oh, I'm sorry, you don't change teachers here at Curtis, that doesn't happen,'" St. John remembers. "And then my friend, one of them said, 'Well, then we're going to go to the police!' And he laughed. I remember him laughing and saying, 'Who do you think they'd believe? Some kid or somebody who's been with this institution for decades?'"

Eventually, the school did manage to get her a new teacher, but encouraged her not to tell anyone else what had happened to her. Over the years, St. John went back to the school's administration several times urging them to do something to protect their students from predators.

"My rapist died in 1997, but there were still no precautions taken from the school," she says. "Finally, this dean in 2013, [who] fancied himself to be some sort of essay writer or something, wrote on a blog how he was such a protector of children. At that point, I went crazy. I was livid."

St. John then wrote a letter to Roberto Díaz, the director of the Curtis Institute, and told him to share her story with the board of the school. In response, the school commissioned an internal report.

Feeling disregarded yet again, St. John decided she'd have to go public with her story. In 2019, she spoke with the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Curtis Institute immediately went into crisis management. "It was like a textbook on how not to handle this kind of thing," St. John recalls. "They apologized to everyone except me."

In an open letter, St. John called for the school to commission an external report that would be available to the public. The report, conducted by a reputable law firm, was released in 2020.

"It found that Curtis was an absolutely horrific place," St. John says. "They found more people that had been abused by my teacher, by many other teachers. And finally, at that point, they were like, 'We're sorry.'"

After the piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer was published, St. John received hundreds of messages from other women who had also suffered sexual assault and harassment in the classical music world. That inspired her to make a documentary about their stories, which will be released later this year.

"I find it to be incredibly moving because so many of these people trusted me with their stories," she says. "Misery doesn't love company in this respect, but at the same time, I then knew that I had so many sisters in arms…. In a way, we're kind of now a big global family of women who have just said, 'We don't want this to happen to the next generation, basically. We want to put an end to this and this has to stop."

St. John says one of the most heartbreaking consequences of sexual abuse is that it's led many victims to completely give up their instrument.

"A lot of women have been abused out of music," she says. "I would say at least half of the hundreds that I heard from no longer play their instrument. Some of them don't listen to music anymore."

Despite sticking with classical music, St. John feels like she wasn't able to truly enjoy her success because she was so focused on survival.

"At 14, it was like the beginning of the rest of my life," she says. "I was so excited about so many things … and by the time I was 15, I mean, it took me a year and a half to pick myself back up really. By then it was about survival. And in the end, I left Curtis after three years because that person was still there."

When it comes to her upcoming documentary, St. John says her aim is to shine a light on these stories and bring them into the public eye. "I hope it creates awareness that these institutions are extremely complicit and they need to create transparency," she says. "We've had enough."