@dstark - I don’t see why this is news to you. I thought this was quite, quite settled in the 90s. Just ask Paula Jones, Juanita Broderick, or Kathleen Willey. I expect much of the attention on this issue to evaporate come 2016 because (in the words of one of Mrs. Clinton’s closest allies in reference to one of the accusers) “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find”.
Of course, I also expect the heads of the current generation of college age activists to explode when all this gets dredged up again. But I suppose people are great at rationalizing anything they want to.
Totally agree that he showed a disrespect for women and that, in and of itself, should have warranted some degree of notice/education/discipline from the football team and by the college. But that is quite different from being a felon that should never get to play in the NFL. I find the way he behaved to the victim appalling, but I am not as sure that it is rape. And if it is not, he should be free to live his life as a person that was cleared of that charge, even though he behaved badly (and I hope if he didn’t do this, he learned something and can be a better person).
I would like the campus culture to change to the point where guys that treat women this way are judged for their behavior off the field, because even if it is not criminal it is immoral, mean and just plain not nice. It would help if some of the women woke up and realized that they should not put up with that kind of behavior just to be with a guy that is high in social value.
Mom2and, I agree on changing campus culture. I agree with your last paragraph.
Winston is free to play in the NFL whether it was rape or not. I won’t be rooting for him.
I am getting a little tired of professional football. It is kind of hard to root for many of the players.
After the outburst that led to his one game suspension, I don’t think Winston has learned much. Winston will be fine though.
Who said he is a felon that should never be allowed to play in the NFL? Nobody here. Some of us are saying that the case was shamefully mismanaged by the police and the FSU athletic department, such that we can have little idea whether a crime was committed.
Some of what I have read suggests it might be hard for him to get drafted with this hanging over his head, but I know little about football so have no knowledge there. If he had been convicted he would be a felon, no?
I have said numerous times that none of this means he is innocent. I thought the blood tests raised some issues for you CF. Do you think they were tampered with? That, and the involvement of family members as legal counsel for the young woman give me pause.
I don’t know if he is guilty; he certainly could be and the bad investigation doesn’t help. I don’t think the fact that he didn’t answer questions should be used against him, however, do you?
The drug tests were done with her urine, which is AFAIK standard protocol. I have no reason to believe they were tampered with, but I was wondering if they might be inaccurate. GHB is hard to test for, and it clears from the body very quickly: in [this study](GHB Urine Concentrations After Single-Dose Administration in Humans - PMC) all of the seven Caucasian subjects cleared their urine of GHB in six hours or less. I haven’t seen an alleged timeline of the event, and I don’t what dose of GHB would produce her alleged symptoms and how it would compare with the dose given in the experimental study, but if she had a drink spiked with GHB at 10 pm, that drug could be potentially be gone from her urine by the time the sample was given.
Northwesty speculated that the police might have put the case on the back burner when they got the tox screen results. Nah. The incident was on Dec. 6. The first tox screen results are dated Feb. 22. That case had already been on the back burner for months by then.
According to the documents given the prosecutors the males and the accuser claim they left the bar between 1:00 AM and 1:30 AM and they all claimed they arrived at the bar around 11:00 PM. The earliest any drug could have been slipped was sometime between after 11 PM and 1:00 AM according to just about everyone’s timeline. She was back home from Winston’s apartment before 2 AM…some reports say 1:30 some say alittle later.
I’d like to make a comment about something that has really been bothering me for a while but that I’ve only recently been able to articulate.
It’s the following - in reading about all these high publicity cases, I’m struck by the fact that in a large fraction of the cases the victim ends up dropping out of school. That seems to be what happened to the FSU girl. They’re clearly very traumatized by the incident and the scrutiny that comes with making a highly visible allegation, whether the report is made to the school or to the police and regardless of what actually may have happened. It makes me very sad.
I wonder if there have been any studies about the different paths forward for victims and what is best for their long term mental and physical health looking out 10 or 25 years? That has to be an important component in figuring out the right policy changes. Personally, I’m very worried that being part of a very public case like the ones we read about is extremely emotionally damaging for victims, and this damage may never go away. I think that’s why I’m so upset about the FSU girl’s identity being revealed (or the Columbia guy’s for that matter).
I do not think we really understand the long term consequences of the loss of privacy in the internet age.
When I was peripherally involved with this several years ago, a lot of the cases involved drunken sex between acquaintances or recently broken up couples. They could often be handled by mediation, and that’s how they mostly proceeded. I don’t recall that any of the students involved in mediation dropped out of school even if they were unhappy with the outcome. I wonder if the broader statistics bear this out, and if the attempt to move away from using mediation is good or not.
Regardless, we’ve got to do a better job of protecting people’s privacy and educating victims about the best way forward for them.
But what I’ve read is that a substantial fraction of the women who believe they were assaulted drop out anyway, whether they report or not. I’m not seeing that the publicity is the reason for them dropping out; they appear to have been traumatized by the assaults they believe they experienced.
CF - But here’s what I don’t get about that. Many people believe that the vast majority of rapes go unreported and that as many as 10 - 20% of women will be raped in college. But we clearly don’t have dropout rates that are that high (we can confine ourselves to traditional students at selective colleges since that prunes away other issues), nor do we have that kind of differential between dropout rates for men and women across the full spectrum of selective and non-selective colleges. Finances, having to balance school and work / home-life, and academic issues consistently show up as the main reasons for dropouts. So it doesn’t seem that what you’re saying can be the full story. My guess is that we simply don’t know because trustworthy studies haven’t been done.
I think she transferred…somewhere I read that she’s at another comparable university. Everything should be confidential, but the media has ways of sniffing out information and the media is not really honorable anymore. I think mediation should absolutely be the alternative for these unproven or unprovable cases.
I could see men and women who end up embroiled in these unprovable cases just wanted a fresh start at another university even if they were in the spotlight. Ms. Kinsman was pretty much under the radar until she did the advocacy film so it’s doubtful she’s still under the radar as of the last month.
I’ve mentioned several times, the internet trail is unfortunate as these young people enter the workforce.
@al2simon, we just don’t know. We don’t have a good handle on the number of sexual assaults now happening at residential college; we don’t know if the rate is going up, going down or remaining the same; we don’t know what was happening to assault victims 10, 20, 30 or 40 years ago on average; we don’t know what’s happening now. Drawing any conclusion from a few high-profile cases seems-- well, I don’t think we’ve got enough of them.
I suppose Kinsman is getting the usual death threats, rape threats and doxxing that controversial women always experience on the Internet.
I guess what they’re claiming are one, that the Athletic Department didn’t know whom Winston was accused of assaulting and two wasn’t obligated – either ethically or legally – to share whatever information they had with the administration or the Title IX office.
To me this reasoning is a bit weasel-y. The Athletic Department is, of course, part of the University and it’s a fairly serious event for a student to be accused of rape. I have to withhold judgment until I can read the actual response, but it sounds like a weak argument to me. I guess it will come down to who knew what when.
The University earlier said that Harding, the Title IX adjudicator, “heard from” Winston, but it’s unclear what exactly that might mean. I understand that in court Winston would have the right to take the Fifth, but he wasn’t in court. Did he talk to Harding or not? Did his lawyers answer Harding’s questions?
As I quoted a section earlier from the Dear Colleague letter it does not require that every employee must report a violation if they are aware of it. I think a director at the university should be a mandatory reporter, but if I read the Title IX actual Dear Colleague letter it does have wiggle room with that regard. Personally I don’t think it matters one wit of Winston talks to anybody at the school or not, the school had access to 200 pages of documentation from the prosecutor’s office and “talking” to him isn’t going to change anything or anybody’s story since it was now criminal record and public record. Now, it might have helped if Ms. Kinsman would have cooperated and explained the inconsistencies, etc. maybe, just maybe the university could have gotten to 00001%…but then they knew with certainty if they touched him, he’d probably file suit and there would be a huge stink since the documents were public. They were between a rock and a hard place which is why they probably hired the judge to handle the matter. The civil suit obviously will center on whether they violated any of their own procedures or perhaps the requirements of Title IX, so a whole 'nother ball of wax.
I had a similar thought - she probably had her last drink just before they left at 1 AM and she was in the hospital around 4:30 so there was 3.5 hours to sober up, but she was sober enough at 1:30 to ride on the back of a scooter so she probably never was “incapacitated” even though she’d had 3 hours to sober up. As far as drug screens again there could be 5 - 5.5 hours max if she was slipped a drug right away when she entered the bar at 11:00 PM but the tox screen came back no trace. She had no idea who the guy was until much later when she saw him in one of her classes is what her statements say, no one knew until much later when she identified him. Her friend(s) called the campus police and her parents according to the documents, she did not call the police or her parents. The campus police called the city police.
dStark the time should be embedded in the 258 pages. I don’t have time to check the hospital time until tonight. All I wanted to say was that I, too, wondered how much time she had to get alittle sober, but an incapacitated person probably couldn’t ride on the back of a scooter at 1:30 am - my son has one that he zips around his college campus, they aren’t big like a motorcycle so you need good balance which if she was incapacitated he would have had to tie her down to keep her on a scooter :-). Odds are against her with regard to the drugs frankly, a very small, tiny percent people might be able to clear in 6 hours a small amount of some drugs form a urine test if they flushed their system before the urine test l as opposed to a hair test which they could not obfuscate.
Anyway for inquiring minds, the colleges courts documents in response are embedded in the newspaper article:
