Fox News host Megyn Kelly went after Amherst College for the third night in a row Wednesday over its mishandling of a campus sexual assault accusation.
The accused student was by all accounts “blacked out” when the accuser performed oral sex on him and then nearly two years later accused him of sexual assault. The accused student was expelled without due process, and after hiring a lawyer discovered text messages from the accuser that strongly suggested there was no sexual assault. Upon presenting Amherst with the evidence, the school refused to reopen his case.
Kelly brought on Max Stern, the attorney of the accused student, to discuss the case. Stern suggested that even with the evidence and admissions that the Amherst hearing panel overseeing the case had, they should have determined that the accuser was the one responsible for sexual assault.
“It became clear that, in fact, she was really the moving force behind the sex for the entire event,” Stern said.
Kelly also explained that it was the former friends of the accuser who brought the text messages to the attention of the accused student because they knew the accuser was lying. The accused student’s ex-girlfriend — who was the accuser’s roommate at the time — claims she told the hearing panel about the texts but that Amherst did not follow up.
“There was no fair procedure here,” Stern said when asked by Kelly about the lawsuit. “He was told on Nov. 1, [2013] that he had been charged with an offense that occurred almost two years before. And within six weeks there was a hearing, he was expelled, he was labeled a sex offender, his future was in ruins.”
Stern also said his client couldn’t have investigated the accusation even if he wanted to because he was instructed not to talk to anyone about the case.
One of the biggest questions in cases of wrongful accusation is why accused students don’t sue their accusers. Stern was asked this question, and said the goal was to clear his client’s name.
“We are not interested in prosecuting [the accuser], we are simply interested in getting relief for this man,” Stern said, adding that his client was a good student and a “first-generation citizen of the United States.”
Kelly then brought on fellow Fox News Host Howard Kurtz to talk about the lack of national media attention to this story.
“I haven’t seen a major media report except in the home-state Boston Globe,” Kurtz said.
Kurtz added: “Here’s the thing, Megyn, male college students don’t make sympathetic victims in the eyes of the media. That’s a designation reserved for women — especially in these disputed sexual assault cases where the assumption is, you know, men are pigs and they only want one thing and the man was probably the aggressor.”
Kelly asked why the recent unraveling of the Rolling Stone gang-rape story didn’t alert the media to the fact that there is another side to campus sexual assault accusations. “Not every allegation is true,” she said.
Kurtz didn’t have an answer as to why the media haven’t woken up to tell the other side of the story.
