One of the more damaging and lasting effects of the Rolling Stone gang-rape debacle was that allegations of brutal campus sexual assaults would be less likely to be believed.
The accuser in that story, Jackie, painted a picture of an assault so brutal as to challenge the imagination. She claimed she had been gang-raped on broken glass and punched in the face, and that the experience left her covered in blood and bruises and cuts.
Given her own description, it was difficult to believe that anyone who saw her in such a state would have suggested she not report such a hideous and obvious crime. It became impossible to believe that a man responsible for orchestrating such an attack would shortly afterward say he had a “good time.”
The same issues plagued Emma Sulkowicz at Columbia University, who claimed that during an otherwise consensual sexual encounter, a man who had never before shown violent tendencies suddenly punched her, choked her and raped her as she fought back. The accused student, Paul Nungesser, invited Sulkowicz to a party two days after this alleged attack — hinting that if the allegations are true, he must be a real sociopath.
In both cases, allegedly brutal attacks that would have left obvious injuries were not reported until months later and no witnesses ever confirmed the injuries. Sulkowicz didn’t provide a witness at her hearing that confirmed they saw her with bruises around her neck or any facial injury.
Worse still, the accusations suggest that the men involved — fellow university students — fail to grasp the seriousness of punching, choking or otherwise violently injuring a woman in the course of sex as she screams and fights back. How else could they, days later, resume their friendships with those women as if nothing brutal had ever taken place.
The problem here is that these two frightening stories of brutal rape are not what they appear to be. In the case of Jackie, no evidence exists she even had sex the night of her alleged attack, or that her alleged attacker ever existed. For Sulkowicz, the sex actually occurred, but there is no evidence to suggest it was the violent encounter she described.
The idea that a woman would wait months after an obvious, brutal attack, and that her friends wouldn’t notice or care about her injuries, strains credulity.
And now another accusation appears to follow suit. A woman using the pseudonym Jane Doe is suing Virginia Wesleyan College for allegedly failing to prevent her rape or respond properly to her report after the fact.
Doe’s account alleges she was given a spiked drink at a party, and was followed from the party by the student she would accused of sexual assault as she assisted her other drugged friends’ return to their dorms. Doe claims that she “assisted her female friends to their dorm room” and then began walking to her own dorm room.
It was at this time the accused student allegedly grabbed Doe and “began fondling and kissing her,” then dragged her back to his dorm room. Doe claims she “was unable to fight back because she had been drugged.” The accused student then “brutally raped, sodomized and forced plaintiff to orally copulate him until she vomited, for approximately five hours ” and “forced his arm into Jane’s mouth to silence her screams.”
In a statement included in legal documents, Doe claimed her “body was shredded … the sex was so rough that I was covered in blood.”
When Doe finally left the room, her white shorts “were now crimson with her own blood.” Doe alleges she passed a campus security guard who offered no assistance despite her clear injuries.
An awful story, made worse by the fact that this all occurred on the third day of Doe’s freshman year. But Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes that there is more to this story than Doe’s lawsuit alleges.
Doe originally told the college’s hearing board that she wasn’t dragged back to the accused student’s room. She shook her head “no” when she was asked if she wanted to go back to his room but added: “I mean, it’s not like he dragged me.” Later in the hearing she said going back to his room was a mutual decision.
Doe says she asked the accused student to stop during the encounter. “I said, ‘This really hurts; can you please stop?'” Doe told the hearing board.
The accused student of course disputes the nonconsensual nature of the allegations.
Doe also never provided proof that her drink was drugged. She said she was told by others that the whole bottle of vodka was drugged, yet only she and her friends appeared to get the spiked liquid. Also, the accused student didn’t pour the drinks.
The accused student was found responsible by the school and expelled. Doe then filed a police report, allegedly remembering “more details of the assault” after she began counseling (Where have we heard that before?).
The police could have arrested the accused student, but the prosecutor declined since there wasn’t enough evidence to win at trial.
Outrage over this story began earlier this week, when news broke that VWC wanted the names of Doe’s sexual partners. The reason they wanted this was not to shame Doe for being “unchaste,” but because the university is challenging Doe’s claim in her $10 million lawsuit against it that she was too traumatized by the experience to have sex afterward. She had told the hearing board that she had sex just 10 days after the alleged rape.
Further, during the hearing, the accused student was asked about his sexual history to “establish your pattern of…” before the interviewer changed the tone of the question.
Regardless of the merits and outcome of this story, Nolan Brown says it “embodies everything that’s wrong” with campus adjudication of sexual assault felonies.
“[W]e have someone accused of assault whom, if innocent, was wrongly kicked out of school and branded a rapist without ever having the chance to mount a real defense and, if guilty, was merely kicked out of school and not subject to punishment, a criminal record or any measures that may limit his ability to commit future assaults,” Nolan Brown wrote. (Emphasis original.)
It again strains credulity that a woman who was as injured as Doe claims she could find no one concerned. For example, she visited a nurse two weeks after the incident, complaining of difficulty using the restroom (this was also after her second sexual encounter). It is a lot easier to believe that this nurse was unaware of any assault and did not perceive any evidence of one, than that she was unconcerned about it and neither reported it nor suggested that Doe do so.
Brutal attacks really do happen — and they even happen on college campuses. But not every accusation is true, and it doesn’t help the credibility of even a true accusation to embellish details of exactly how violent it was.
