A little ridiculous, student banned from parts of campus for looking like a rapist

Parents Forum
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In the CU Boulder case the cash pay out was not significant part of the settlement. According the Andrew Miltenberg, whose firm represented John Doe, the objective of these cases is not so much monetary gain but rather to clear the student’s name so that he can get on with his life.

The settlement wasn’t entirely favorable to John Doe in that the investigation and its decision were not expunged from his record.

John Doe “won” in that the college is prohibited from revealing the details of his sexual misconduct case investigation and decision unless John Doe issues a waiver allowing them to do so. The suspension will not show up on his transcript. If asked, the college will say that John Doe would be welcome back (though he’s agreed to withdraw). If asked about his disciplinary record CU will say “In fall 2013, John Doe was subject to a student conduct investigation and was found to have violated two code provisions.”

Since John Doe will not appear to have been suspended or expelled, the person asking the question would logically conclude that the code violations were not serious.

I think this resolution puts the college in an weasel-y position. They can’t have it both ways: either he’s responsible for a code violation involving non-consensual sex and that information should be shared or he’s not responsible and his record should indicate that he was cleared.

John Clune, a lawyer who specializes in Title IX cases calls this a “don’t ask, don’t tell” process: “If you’re a rape victim or a victim’s family at the subsequent school, it’s pretty infuriating to learn that another school had that information but didn’t provide it.”

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I am obviously aware of the source. I read the entire complaint. I found it worthy of note that some of the statements attributed to her had quotation marks around them. That would indicated that they were direct quotations from some source, most likely, the police report or the university report or her testimony.

But what code violations did they find him guilty OF? An underage alcohol violation and non-consensual sex based on the fact that she had been drinking so her consent was invalid? I think that is the most likely. And neither of those things is in fact inconsistent with what he says happened. He doesn’t have to be a liar or an actual rapist for them to find him guilty of two code violations. They certainly can’t believe that she was “forced” to stay with him, and the fact that she asked him to go out with her a few nights later and didn’t become angry and make the accusation until after he turned her down would argue that she was not unhappy with their encounter until then. To me, this looks like an angry young woman who played the retroactive “but I was drinking” card to get back at him because of perceived rejection, and had it eagerly seized upon by campus activists, somewhat to her dismay. I think it went much farther than she intended it to. She apparently would have been happy to have the police visit him and scare him for her.

I see this and other cases as muddying the waters regarding sexual assault by a) excessively broadening the definition of what it is, and b) infantilizing females by endowing them with no agency or personal responsibility at all. We are all horrified by rape. We all agree that a guy who has sexual contact with a female who is unconscious or incapacitated by drugs or alcohol has done something very wrong, even if she voluntarily consumed the substances, even more so if she was drugged by him or another person. This kind of case simply distracts from addressing genuine assault.

At least, that’s how it looks to me.

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Getting back to the OP, has anyone figured out if the description of that case (you know, the title of the thread) is legit or not?

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His own statement says she wasn’t “drunk or intoxicated.” Even he is not claiming that she was drunk but not so drunk as to be unable to consent. That’s why I am dubious that they determined that she was too drunk to be able to consent. But we don’t know the other side of the story, and your hypothesis could well be correct.

His statement doesn’t tell us what they accused him of doing-- it asserts that they determined he had sex without consent when in fact she did consent, but it doesn’t tell us why they say she didn’t consent. I find it hard to evaluate CU’s decision with only the obviously slanted story before me. The business about her saying she clinched her legs together really tight suggests that she is saying that she never consented to this sex, but was intimidated and forced, rather than that she was so drunk she agreed to sex that she wouldn’t have agreed to when sober.

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Dfbdfb, :slight_smile:

No.

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I agree that it is impossible to figure out what actually happened.

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@Consolation, the CU John Doe case is unsatisfactory as far as having a nice argument about CU’s sexual assault policy, and its application of the policy in this case, because we know so little. Possibly the college screwed up his due process rights, and if they did, that’s wrong, but it’s so uninteresting as a policy argument. Nobody is defending colleges screwing up the process. You’ll say the college should have allowed him have an advocate, and see the statements against him, and so forth, and I’ll say, yep, they should have, they certainly screwed up there, and that’s an end to it.

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There is no way this story is true. If it is I’m finding my way onto the first ship to Mars, because I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.

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This article is just absurd. It’s as ridiculous as my mom being a president of the Milky Way galaxy.
I seriously doubt that the college is stupid enough to suspend someone on the basis ‘looks-like’.

Also, if she gets trauma from someone who looks LIKE the rapist, then it’s her problem. It’s not his fault that he looks similar

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He wasn’t suspended, he was restricted from certain areas of campus. He was allowed to continue at the school. Given this article was written by a well respected legal scholar, I highly doubt she made the whole thing up.

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I’m sure she didn’t make it up. As I said earlier in the thread she had many more easily verifiable examples that would have supported her premise.

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CU charged John Doe with four policy violations: non-consensual sexual intercourse, non-consensual sexual contact, violating the discrimination and harassment policy and procedures, and possessing or using alcohol. (Interestingly, Jane Doe was not charged with possessing or using alcohol.)

According to the Colorado Daily, he was “found guilty of non-consensual sexual intercourse and non-consensual sexual contact in violation of the CU Student Code of Conduct.”
http://www.coloradodaily.com/cu-boulder/ci_27566071/cu-boulder-paying-john-doe-15k-settle-title

As such, he was given a three semester suspension.

I don’t know if John Doe is guilty or not. His claims are persuasive, but Jane Doe hasn’t made any countering statements that I’m aware of. The college says they decided in Jane’s favor because she was more credible than John. (0.1%?)

They’ve doubled down on their decision that John Doe committed non-consensual intercourse, which by many definitions means rape. The college did not “reverse its findings against the student, expunge his disciplinary record and destroy any record of the sexual misconduct investigation” as John Doe’s complaint requested.

However, CU has agreed not to punish this “rapist.” His three month suspension was suspended and disappeared from his permanent record. Since he agreed to withdraw from the university, they’ve agreed to state (untruthfully) that he’d be welcome back to campus. They’ve agreed not to pass on the specifics of the charges to any inquiring colleges or employers unless John Doe authorizes them to do so, implying that the charges are not serious.

But still . . .the decision that he had committed non-consensual sexual intercourse was not reversed or expunged. Therefore he is still “guilty” of non-consensual intercourse (i.e., rape) but not sentenced! How does that make sense?

This is a very confused outcome and a lose-lose situation for both parties, an equivocation which sets a terrible precedent for all Johns and Janes in all Title IX sexual assault cases. John Doe has no further recourse, but I bet we’ll be hearing from the accuser, victim advocates and the OCR.

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Wow. I went through and read through a great deal of the thread along with the accompanying articles. This thread devolved into nonsense. Half the thread was one guy (“T” word censored? Fine, he was being intentionally provacative) until he got banned and the other half was people too dumb to not respond to him. Then there was some pointless discussion of whether or not these stories were true or who was guilty. We don’t know anything more than what was presented to us. If you are skeptical of the story, note that as your position then move on. No need to start theorizing about what actually happened. The only relevant discussion we could possibly have is what the implications of these stories would be if they are true.

My opinions:

Look-Alike Case: The school has absolutely no right to punish, restrict, or invade the privacy of an accused student unless they have reasonable evidence to do so. Innocent until proven guilty: It’s the LAW. The fact that the restrictions weren’t removed after he was shown to be innocent is not the only or even main issue here, it just makes the situation even more terrible.

Occidental Case: This sounds like prime example of where the “don’t blame the victim” and “the women is always the victim” mentalities go too far. Law and any institution with law-like authority needs to be unbiased, objective, fair, etc. In sexual assault cases where either there is no physical/witness evidence or the evidence of the sex taking place isn’t relevant to the decision and the only thing that matters is whether or not the sex was consensual, how can you possibly come to a conclusion that meets the aforementioned criteria of objectivity and fairness? The only thing you have to go by is literal he-said/she-said. If the act took place in a private setting, you have no way to confirm either person’s account as truthful. If this is the case then the ONLY decision is one based on the bias of the authority. Also, in this case, based on the account described, even if intoxication invalidates consent, BOTH of them were drunk. Why are they not both responsible for their actions? Only punishing the man makes it pretty explicit that our system thinks that sexual assault is an unequal crime that can only be perpetrated by a brutish man on an innocent, helpless woman. If the man had claimed rape, I doubt the accusation would have been taken seriously.

More generally: While I don’t approve of any violence, sexual violence included, I think we need to be really careful and think a bit more on how to achieve the noble goals of deterrence and justice without compromising individual rights. This is a really complicated issue, because the crime is unrelated to the act itself but rather the context of the act. Sex is not a crime. It only becomes a crime when one party labels it as such. You want the person who was legitimately wronged to feel comfortable enough to peruse justice and you want the courts to not be dismissive. However, you have to make sure that any systematic changes you make to give the accuser their day in court doesn’t unduly infringe upon another person’s rights or presume the accused’s guilt. I also think that in a weird way, a lot of the rhetoric around supporting female accusers/victims seems counter-feminist to me. It usually revolves around ideas about protecting women and absolving them of responsibility for anything that happens to them. Instead it is the responsibility of men and society to stick up for them. These ideas treat women like passive objects or children who lack agency, which is something I thought we were supposed to be moving away from.

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No it’s not weird. There are plenty of women, myself included, who feel that way and think all of this could have led to protectionism based on gender if let go unchecked.

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This makes no sense as a description of the Occidental case. There’s no dispute about what happened there! It’s not a matter of he said/she said. The issue is entirely about whether someone who is extremely drunk, vomiting, staggering, is capable of consent, even when they seem to consent (as, it is undisputed, the woman did). This is not a factual matter, because the facts are not in dispute. It’s a normative matter.

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Yeah, there I kind of mixed my points into a paragraph where it didn’t belong. I guess when I wrote it, the overall point I was trying to make was the unfairness of deciding a case based on a bias toward one party. In this case the bias was in unequal punishment of a mutual crime, but in other cases where there isn’t clear evidence, this bias results in assuming one person’s account is true and the other’s is false. I probably should have moved that part to a separate paragraph or as part of the general paragraph. I didn’t really write the post that coherently, but I hope I least got my general thoughts across.

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To use as an example in the article cited if they are both drunk and run the next morning to the Title IX officer slapping their accusations down at the same time - who is the accused and who is the accuser? If it’s always the woman, that’s protectionism and that is where the he said/she said cases totally fall apart and should be handled through counseling and mediation of BOTH parties not trying to figure out who was one/one hundredth more responsible for abuse especially if one of the two is unwilling to file criminal charges and withstand the scrutiny of a criminal investigation.

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Why is this even a tiny bit difficult? Anyone who can count to two realizes that two different accusations means two different accusers. Where is the example of the university getting simultaneous accusations, accepting the woman’s accusation and ignoring the man’s accusation, other than your imagination?

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What I do not understand is the breadth of the university’s power under Title IX. In the John Doe case, they were both students, and Jane lived on campus, but all the interaction took place off university property. The ‘party house’ was not university property (fraternity house or not, fraternities at CU are not student organizations. John’s apartment was not university property. Does any student have the right, under Title IX, to request the university take over for any action committed off campus? If Jane and JOhn were neighbors and John’s music was loud and annoying, interrupting Jane’s studying, could she ask the university to step in the the city police refused? If they had a dispute over a dog barking or stealing things back and forth? If she just felt threatened by him living near her?

In this case, the ‘charged’ John with drinking. Off campus drinking. Yes, this might be a crime but the Boulder police didn’t charge him. How far does the jurisdiction go? If he was drinking with his parents? In another state? Does the school have to be consistent with the punishments, as I’m pretty sure all the other kids who are ticketed with drinking ON campus aren’t suspended for 3 semesters (the campus would be empty).

None of the information states which infractions John was actually found to have committed, but I can’t see where the university should have jurisdiction over any of them. And I’m sure I don’t want the university to have the power to control all off campus actions, even between two students.

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Stanford threw the guy out for an incident that happened in Alaska. Colleges can have codes of conduct for their students that include off-campus behavior. Don’t you think that Michigan ought to have some words with those fraternity vandals?