Emma Sulkowicz's Alleged Attacker speaks again in new article

Parents Forum
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I am confused by dstark’s post, too. In a criminal court, where due process for the accused is a constitutional requirement, the victim has no due process rights at all. Recent state laws provide some protections for her dignity, but she doesn’t have a right to be represented by counsel, she doesn’t have a right to present evidence or to cross-examine witnesses, and in most jurisdictions her consent isn’t necessary to reach a plea bargain, or even to dismiss the case. Victims have tons more rights in university proceedings than they do in court (unless they file a civil suit and pay for it themselves). It’s the accused whose due process protections are radically less in the university setting.

Also, talk about a cheap shot, that line about how getting beaten and choked isn’t brutal. Of course it’s brutal. But it has not been established that it actually happened. One person said it did, the other said it didn’t, and of course neither had any other evidence to offer on that issue. Even the other complaints against the guy didn’t allege anything like that, so if anything they should have undercut Sulkowicz’s position on that question.

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Of course, this point goes both ways. It’s virtually impossible to prove that something didn’t happen.

What we don’t know–and probably can’t know–is what percentage of unprovable cases are unprovable because, although the crime really happened, there is insufficient evidence and what percentage are unprovable because they are false accusations.

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@KKRSCG Thank you for that article. It is probably one of the most honest and even handed I have read on this issue since our D started attending college. Within one week at her university they had rape accusation where the accused was arrested and jailed and another where the complainant claimed sexual assault then two days later recanted her story. The second concerned me because they initially indicated the alleged perpetrator was still at large and my D lived near the location the event allegedly took place. She was walking home that evening and saw the police at the sight of the event. To later find out that it had been made up both relieved and angered me. I’ve known of women who have been abused sexually and otherwise. I also know women who have lied to get men in trouble (and visa versa) or to gain something they believed they couldn’t on it’s own merits. I don’t know the answer to the problem but I do know that each assault makes it difficult for women to live their lives without fear and each lie makes it more difficult for true victims to be believed far out of proportion to the number of lies.

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JHS, did Emma receive due process? I am not asking whether she was required to have due process, did she get it? Was she allowed to present her case? How did her appeal go? How did that work?

I don’t know what you are talking about in your last paragrapgh. I did not say it was established that "it"happened. A poster said getting … in the tush was not a brutal rape. I was responding to that comment.
Of course it is. We both know it is.

I don’t know if “it happened”. I have an opinion. :slight_smile:

Your last sentence makes no sense to
me. Emma never said the other accusers were assaulted the way she was. A guy can assault people in different ways. How does a guy who is accused by two other people of sexual assault in different ways than Emma, make what Emma said less likely?

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Well, she called him a serial rapist. If he isn’t even accused of raping the other two, that seems wrong.

dstark, I don’t want to pick on you, but I do want to point out that you seem to be strongly influenced by certain details in accusers’ stories, such as the claim that this woman was strangled, or that a different accuser was crying. Details like that are suspect, especially if they are first communicated to anybody long after the events in question. They are almost impossible to disprove, but they tend to inflame the jury if it is permitted to hear them. They might be admissible in a court case, where a judge is there to instruct the jury on what weight to give evidence of this kind, but I worry about how they can be misused by untrained factfinders. As with everything else involved in this topic, there’s a flip side–which is how to interpret evidence that seems to be exculpatory, like the e-mails after the incident in the Columbia case. To some people it is “obvious” what they mean, while others argue that they don’t mean much at all. You need a really strong process to sift this kind of evidence.

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Hunt, you can pick on me.

The schools are not a court of law. I am not saying the Columbia guy should be convicted. He should not be convicted. There isn’t enough evidence to convict him in a court of law.

I am not talking about the “legal” system.

You are talking about courts of law. I am not. I am talking about how schools should handle these situations.

These “details” are suspect because they were not brought up immediately? I strongly disagree with you. If you listen to victims or psychologists, the delays are not out of the norm.

Are these details hard to prove in a court room? Of course they are.

An expulsion is not a conviction. Expulsions and suspensions are very serious but they aren’t convictions.

I said a long time ago the he said she said cases are very difficult to resolve.

We should go after the low hanging fruit. We should change the culture so fewer assaults occur in the first place.

One thing about the hearing in the Columbia case… The accused talked about a video that would help support his arguments.

The parents of Emma said the video showed nothing that would support his arguments. The parents said the video was not allowed to be played at the hearing.

So, if true, why wasn’t the video allowed to be played?

When I am reading these cases, both sides complain they weren’t allowed to present their cases. Why is this happening?

On a positive note, I think there is improvement slowly occuring.

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DStark: you explicitly stated that those on this forum that were worried about due process for men really weren’t worried about due process (but only to protect men) and this case shows that, implying that Columbia denied her of those rights. Yet, you have not shown how Columbia violated her right to present her case (regardless of whether a victim is afforded those rights). Are you now saying Columbia should have expelled him, even with the lack of evidence, on her word alone? My guess is that the video was not allowed because it was irrelevant to whether this event happened.

The weird part of the parent’s letter is their version of how Emma’s advocate acted and how that may have raised suspicion on her veracity. I would not be happy about that either, but that is their perspective and perhaps there is more to why the advocate left the room with Emma. However, nowhere does the letter say that Emma had evidence that was not allowed to be entered into the record, except that she thought the video would have helped show he was lying.

Bottom line is that this was a difficult case because there was no evidence to back up her statements. If things happened as she said they did, then she was wronged and rightfully angry.

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He was allowed a lawyer; she was instructed not to hire a lawyer.

He was allowed to present evidence, such as repeated claims about a video she made and why it would have caused her to have manufactured her claims. She was not allowed to refute the claims he made, for example by showing the video.

She says he lied about the events and she was not allowed to refute his lies. She says she was not allowed to explain the timing of her reporting.

I do not say Columbia should have expelled him. I doubt that there was enough evidence no matter what happened. But I do say that their procedures, which have since been changed, were flawed. Flawed procedures in themselves are injurious, even when they don’t make a difference in the eventual outcome of the procedure.

There’s ample evidence that the way people are treated when they make a claim about an adverse event makes an enormous difference. For example, if you look at malpractice claims, the severity of the adverse event doesn’t have much of a predictive effect on whether someone sues. People sue when they feel like their complaints have not been listened to and they haven’t been taken seriously. In this case, clearly Sulkowicz doesn’t feel she was treated fairly by Columbia.

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Mom2and…Look…we both read the parents’ letter.

If true…I have a problem…doesn’t look like a fair hearing or appeals process.

The parents are biased. There are also verifiable facts here.

http://columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2014/10/02/open-letter-president-bollinger-and-board-trustees

Should the guy have been expelled on her word alone? I would like that video to have been played. If the guy lied, I might kick him out for that.

It is hard to expel on he said she said. I like the idea of the guy studying abroad.

However, I would look at the three accusations, not just Emma’s. The odds are if there are accusations from three independent people, the guy being not guilty on all of them is very low. I would get rid of him.

However, were these accusations really independent of each other? That is where a little investigation is in order.

Would I ignore three accusations? No way.

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As JHS pointed out above, no one in case is entitled to ‘due process.’ Due process is required to be given to a citizen BY tHE GOVERNMENT, not by Columbia university, not TO Emma, not to the other accusers/ The police or DA did not feel there was enough evidence to bring charges and that standard is not 51%, but beyond a reasonable doubt for a criminal trial. There just is not enough evidence to convict, especially since Paul would be entitled to due process and most of the evidence allowed at the Columbia hearings wouldn’t have been allowed at all in a criminal court.

"The constitutional guarantee of due process of law, found in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, prohibits all levels of government from arbitrarily or unfairly depriving individuals of their basic constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property. The due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1791, asserts that no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This amendment restricts the powers of the federal government and applies only to actions by it. "

I think what you are all taking about is fairness. Are Columbia’s (a non-government entity so no due process) rules and the process for one student accusing another fair? Should the penalty be that, no matter what the evidence shows, that if a student accuses another of a bad act, the accused student is expelled? It really does seem that no matter what Paul had to say, the fact that three women accused him of anything is enough to believe Emma.

Personally, I think she’s the one who is failing to move on. I’m not saying she wasn’t hurt, mentally and physically, by his actions, but now she is only hurting herself. She’s having a miserable college experience because she hasn’t moved on. She can accept the decision, she could try to change the process, she could leave and go to a school where she feels safer. She brought her grievance, both at the school and through the police, and she didn’t get the relief she wanted. Believe her or not, she didn’t win and the only thing that will make her happy is to win and have Paul removed from the school. Is that fair to him, that he does everything to prove his side, he does, and she still gets the outcome she wants, which is his removal? Do we want to give anyone that power, to just accuse and have the power to determine the punishment whether the facts support the accusation or not?

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This is factually incorrect. Courts have found that students have a property right in their education, and they can’t be deprived of that property without due process. The question, however, is what that due process must consist of. The beginning of this article gives some legal cites about how the courts have addressed the issue of college discipline:

http://learn.uvm.edu/downloads/legal/Questions_and_Answers_due_process_MAGNA_.pdf

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Some of these due process and civil liberties and rights are already being court tested in civil courts, so to an extent the college or university - public or private - is not an island, they cannot operate in a manner that violates those basic rights. And to an extent that is considered as the Title IX investigations continue - for instance OCR has said if a college offers one student a adviser (legal or otherwise) they must also offer the other student.

I don’t know if she can’t move on or just doesn’t understand that for the rest of her career she’ll be easily identifiable as “the mattress woman” who just couldn’t let go when things didn’t go her way no matter what. That could work in her favor or it could be very, very detrimental to her career since few HR managers would recommend hiring someone who gets that POed when she doesn’t get her way and would fear something would tick her off in the workplace and she’d protest and kick up a fuss.

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In a real criminal prosecution, in a court, the victim doesn’t have (or need) a lawyer. The dispute is not between the victim and the accused, it’s between the state (represented by the prosecutor) and the accused. The prosecutor decides what evidence will be presented; the victim doesn’t really get much, if any, say in those decisions.

In these college disciplinary hearings, we have a weird hybrid of criminal-like and civil-like proceedings. So who is the prosecutor? The accuser herself? Who decides what evidence to present? Should the accused have the right to have an attorney who actually participates in the hearing? I don’t find these to be easy questions, and, in my opinion, they only get harder when the colleges are pushed in the direction of being surrogates for criminal prosecutions.

And just to harp again on the issue of the evidentiary standard, let’s assume that the factfinder thinks it’s important to determine whether the accused strangled the accuser or not. What evidence are you going to look at to determine that? She says he did, and he says he didn’t. There’s no physical evidence of any kind. The first time she mentioned to anybody the allegation that he strangled her is many months after it happened, and there is evidence of friendly interaction between them after that. So, how are you going to decide if it happened or not? If you are using the preponderance of the evidence test, you let them both testify, and judge which one of them you believe more. But what if one of them is attractive and the other one is ugly? What if one is white and one is black? What if one is a skilled actor, and the other one isn’t very articulate, or speaks with a foreign accent? What if one is a well-known popular person on campus, and the other is a nobody? What if one of them has a bunch of friends in the hearing room, and the other doesn’t? What if hundreds of people are demonstrating in favor of one of them, and nobody is doing so for the other one? What if you know that the University bigwigs are taking heat for not taking sexual assault seriously enough? (I’m not suggesting that all, or any, of these situations exist in the Columbia case.)

I guess one concern that I have is that colleges may be pushed to extremes, either expelling a person, or finding no responsibility, rather than taking steps that are in between when the facts are murky.

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Columbia was offered an in between by Paul and the school didn’t take the offer.

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This is so helpful to have those of you who are lawyers weigh in. Seriously. I fear that posters who aren’t lawyers have a tendency to wave around terms and concepts that have very specific meaning in law and not fully understand what they are saying, rather like how people claim “freedom of speech” is being abridged when one private party doesn’t allow another private party to speak.

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I agree with you Hunt that it’s thorny. think about some of the campus advocates, including the mattress brigade, on some level it could be argued that they are harassing students that don’t hold their same beliefs. So which is it a violation of Title IX or a right under the first amendment?

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Did the woman oppose allowing him to complete his degree abroad? I’m still having trouble understanding that decision. Why they’d want to bring the controversy back on campus is unclear to me.

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IMO, it’s OK to conclude, in these murky cases, that the preponderance of the evidence doesn’t point one way or another. So, for me, it would be OK to conclude that there is not enough evidence to discipline Nungesser, and there is not enough evidence to conclude in civil court that Sulkowicz is defaming Nungesser. We just can’t know.

People’s memories are not as we imagine. Rather than remembering an event as if there were a video recording, we construct our memories. They’re inaccurate, and our confidence in our memory is not correlated with the accuracy of the memory. Here’s an interesting article about “emotional memories,” how we remember events with a strong emotional content, like hearing about the Challenger explosion:

http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/idea-happened-memory-recollection

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@‌ KKRSCG “That’s your key takeway from the snippet?”

KKR, if you think I should divert my focus from the facts of the Sulkowicz case and jump on the “false accusations” bandwagon, sorry you have the wrong girl.

False accusations are serious matters and should be treated as such. With sexual assault they make up 2% to 3% of the cases reported, very similar numbers to false reports of every other crime. And when you take into account the high number of sexual assault cases that are not reported, the numbers are likely lower.

In the “snippet” you posted Faircloth, who was obviously among the 2% - 3%, made up and publicized a blatant lie that damaged Oberest’s career. In most jurisdictions that constitutes libel and is actionable. And it should be. Apparently Oberest was convinced to withdraw his lawsuit because it would “intimidate” real victims of rape. That’s patently ridiculous in my mind and yes, that is what “jumped out” to me when I read your “snippet.”

I perceive that you might have some preconceived prejudices when you evaluate the facts of these cases. I don’t, as I fundamentally see the goal as trying as best one can to get to the truth. It is irrelevant that I am female, I automatically do not assume anything when looking at the facts of a case. That would be unfair.

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HarvestMoon, we all have preconceived prejudices. That’s another reason I’m against the preponderance of the evidence standard when the stakes are high.