USC Student Cleared Of Rape Charges, Could Still Be Expelled
. . . thanks to academia’s current radical interpretation of Title IX
The war on male college students under the mantle of Title IX continues. A USC student was accused of raping a fellow student in her dorm room, and after being cleared by security video, could still be expelled.
Security video from outside a local nightclub has cleared a USC student of rape, CBS Los Angeles reports.
Armaan Premjee was accused of sexually assaulting a 19-year-old student in her dorm room but video from the Banditos club near campus tells a different story.
“I’m very grateful for these tapes,” Premjee said. “She put her arms around my neck, she started kissing me.”
Premjee says the woman wanted to leave the club and have sex with him.
The security video shows the woman leading Premjee out of the club and shows her making a sexual gesture to her friend behind Premjee’s back.
She’s then caught on video signing them into her dorm.
Prosecutors charged Premjee with rape, claiming the woman was too drunk to give consent. The woman told detectives she didn’t remember anything from that night. Premjee says she was the aggressor.
“She knew what she was doing. She was able to stand on her own two feet. She led the way,” he said.
After seeing the video, the judge dismissed the case saying, “I believe there was consent. There is a very strong indication that the alleged victim in this case was the initiator.”
Watch the security video footage:
Back in May, when the still-unnamed “victim” filed her rape report, prosecutors sought $1 million in bail. Had he been convicted—i.e. had there not been security video—Premjee faced up to ten years in prison.
The Los Angeles Times reported at the time:
USC student has been charged in the rape of a fellow student “by use of drugs,” according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.
In addition to the charge of rape by use of drugs, Armann Karim Premjee, 20, faces a count of sexual penetration by a foreign object, the district attorney’s office said in a statement. Los Angeles police have spelled Premjee’s first name as Aarman, but a USC student directory spells it Armaan.
Premjee pleaded not guilty at his arraignment Tuesday. The judge declined prosecutors’ request for $1-million bail, and Premjee was released from custody on $100,000 bond.
Prosecutors allege that Premjee sexually assaulted the 19-year-old student in her dorm room just after 1 a.m. on April 1.
“The victim’s roommate walked in when the alleged crime occurred,” the district attorney’s office said. “Premjee went into a bathroom and when he returned, the roommate confronted him and he left.”
. . . . If Premjee is convicted as charged, he faces up to 10 years in state prison.
What if there was no video? Why does she get to stay anonymous while he may still be expelled? https://t.co/kSOfU41Wd6
— Karol Markowicz (@karol) August 7, 2017
He may not be facing a prison sentence, but he may still be expelled by the university. This is where the ridiculous reading and application of Title IX by American universities, heightened to hysterical levels under Obama, comes into play.
Last week, after reviewing evidence from security footage, a California judge dropped charges against University of Southern California (USC) student Armaan Premjee, 20, after finding that his female accuser was the party that initiated the sexual encounter.
However, under USC’s Title IX, Premjee could still face campus discipline because the woman he slept with was inebriated and did not give formal verbal consent.
USC’s rules state, “Consent must be affirmative. ‘Affirmative consent’ means affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity. It is positive cooperation in act and attitude made with knowledge and agreement to the nature of the act.” It adds, “It is the responsibility of each person involved to ensure they have the affirmative consent of the other(s) to engage in sexual activity. Affirmative consent must be ongoing throughout the sexual activity and can be revoked at any time.”
. . . . “My life will be ruined if I get kicked out of school,” Premjee said during an interview with Inside Edition last week.
Title IX, no longer the shield it was intended to be but a weapon, is being used not to protect students but to persecute them.
The Wall Street Journal addressed this problem in 2015.
Since its passage 43 years ago, Title IX has proved to be a remarkably elastic law. It has been stretched and warped from its original intent to end discrimination on the basis of sex in schools that receive federal funding. As long as Title IX’s victims were wrestlers or swimmers from low-revenue men’s sports that were jettisoned to achieve participation-parity with women’s sports, nobody much cared.
. . . . A tipping point was reached earlier this year when a Northwestern University film professor and feminist, Laura Kipnis, dared to criticize new Title IX regulations governing campus sex. The regulations, promulgated in the name of preventing a “hostile environment” for women, broadly defined sexual harassment as “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature.” An unwelcome touch or comment was grounds for a Title IX investigation, with college administers forced to be police, judge and jury in allegations of sexual harassment from offensive speech to rape.
. . . . The movement of Title IX into areas as remote as the mere discussion of sexual politics on campus has followed the same trajectory. Beginning in 2011 the Obama Education Department wrote “Dear Colleague” letters to schools. Suddenly, schools were responsible for harassment and assault that occur off campus. A lower standard of evidence was established to prove the guilt of the accused. Earlier protections for academic freedom and free expression were dropped.
With that, the pas de deux with activist groups commenced. Title IX investigations of accusations of sexual assault and harassment on campuses exploded. Just as they had with Title IX in sports, activists went in search of victims to be the media face of a rape crisis—and to become plaintiffs in litigation against schools.
The notorious and now-debunked story of the University of Virginia’s “Jackie” gang-rape is a case in point. Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely was, in her words, searching for a victim who would show “what it’s like to be on campus now . . . not only where rape is so prevalent but also that there is this pervasive culture of sexual harassment/rape culture.”
The new demands to combat what federal education officials also call a “rape culture” on campus are so excessive that even current and former Harvard Law professors have publicly complained that their school’s attempt to comply has undermined due process and is “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused.”
This is yet another area in which President Trump’s intervention would be greatly appreciated. While the seeming majority of colleges and universities are flush with SJWs happy to bring down the hammer of Title IX on its students, less ideologically-minded colleges and universities are so fearful of losing federal funds to Title IX violations that they create policies and engage in actions that are oppressive, reactionary, malignant, and ludicrous.
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Comments
So if Aarman is kicked out of school, but the female isn’t couldn’t Aarman sue for discrimination based on sex? She didn’t receive “affirmative consent” either. And she initiated the whole encounter. How is that not affirmative consent?
She certainly did get affirmative consent, even if she doesn’t remember it. He was sober, after all.
Are you sure he was sober? From the NYT article “In the early hours of April 1, neither student at the University of Southern California knew what the other had had to drink. An Uber was called, and the male student was seen on video following the female student into her dorm, where they had sex.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/05/us/usc-rape-case-dropped-video-evidence.html
He was at least sober enough to remember what happened.
But I don’t understand where they’re getting the requirement for consent to be verbal. Or the idea that she didn’t consent verbally. All it says is “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary”, and her consent certainly seems to have been all three, even if there’s no recording of her actual words.
We have a society being run by women, why are we so shocked the outcome is a confusing set of “Have your cake and eat it too.”?
On one hand, we have women SCREAMING they have the right to be sexual aggressive, it is “liberating”. On the other hand, if they don’t like the outcome of their actions, they can fall back on the “I am just a woman, protect me!” position.
Back and forth, back and forth. Endlessly.
I still point out that if you look at the photo of NASA personnel during the time of the moon landings, done with less computing power than your typical cellphone holds, you will see a group of organized, crew cut, white shirt wearing MEN and not many women at all. Why? Because if women were in charge, we’d still not be on the moon and they would still be arguing about the design and color scheme of the Apollo capsule’s interior!
Women are different. Women compensate for the differences by creating issues where issues did not used to be. Fifty years ago girls were encouraged to be good and careful about the relationships they had. Now they are encouraged to be aggressive and wild, following their immediate gratification urges. The outcome, often bad, is inevitable. Either they own up to THEIR actions or change their behavior. Being a optional victim, depending on the outcome, is not the way to go.
Feminism, like liberalism, is a debilitating disease.
If I were a woman I’d be offended by the fact that the law deems men to be responsible adults at all times no matter how much they have to drink but after one drink women become children unable to give informed consent.
Young men, act like gentlemen.
If you encounter drunk chicks…STAY AWAY. They are dangerous. They are generally stupid and bad. Yes, I understand that one of the attractions of chasing wild wimmins is that they let you catch them.
It almost never ends well… Girls in bars who lead you out into the night are not your best choice of diversions.
Word to the wise.
Don’t stick your **** in crazy.
Rags is right. Not to say there’s anything wrong with having a drink with a woman. If you know her. But drunken hook-ups are like playing Russian roulette.
Oh, and one thing I learned in the post Tailhook Navy. It’s the “cool ones” you have to watch out for. The obviously crazy ones are, well, obviously bad news.
Male students in college should only get involved with non-student females. Yeah, they can indulge in the modern American female recreation of false rape accusations too. But with the non-student female, the rape charge will be dealt with by the legal system and there is a chance of due process. Never happen in a school based system. Further, a non-student is not going to have every aspect of the school pushing her to consider any sexual contact as rape and that consent is revocable.
So now you can’t do the old fashioned respectable thing and meet a quality girl at your school.
Now you’re supposed to do what? Go to bars to meet townies?
The Duke Lacrosse accuser was not a Duke student.
This is ridiculous. If he has been cleared by a court of law, then he is INNOCENT. Expelling him would be a gross miscarriage of justice.
For what it’s worth, courts can never find criminal defendants “innocent”; the best they can do is “not guilty.” And given the high standard of proof required for a criminal conviction, the public must accept that some who are guilty will inevitably be found “not guilty.” At least that’s how the criminal justice system works when it works as intended.
Further, colleges can and do proscribe behaviors that are not unlawful; for example, academic dishonesty (cheating on a test, plagiarism, etc.) can get you expelled even if there’s no violation of criminal or civil law.
And, yes, in a perfectly just world his accuser would at least be suspended for making what are almost certainly false accusations, and the school would do what it could to support the accused. And while they’re at it, and having recognized that human sex and courtship have never at any time and place been anywhere near as tidy as their asinine rules presume, they’d permanently jettison these rules. And perhaps for good measure serve up a big helping of ridicule for those who drafted and promoted them.
Of course, that’s not going to happen. But we could at least expect the DoE to re-instate a higher standard of proof in these college tribunals, and to demand schools ensure substantive due process.
Although if “hostile environment” is to remain precedent then DoE might consider whether the strongly ideological nature of the Title IX apparat, combined with the bad advice contained in that infamous “Dear Colleague” letter has, in fact, lead to a truly hostile environmen for straight males on many campuses and, if so, take steps under Title IX to remedy this.
“Male students in college should only get involved with non-student females…”
Similarly, after Tailhook I vowed never to get involved with a woman in uniform. As we used to say, anybody that stupid deserves what they’re going to get.
The thing is, it wasn’t always the women who were the problem.
It’s a tradition in the Navy that when you get promoted you throw a party called a wetting-down. The newly promoted officer is supposed to spend the difference for the first month between the old pay grade and the new pay grade.
A friend of mine got promoted and got snot slinging drunk at her wetting down. Not unusual considering what outfit we joined. She wandered away from the party and didn’t come back. We got worried about her and formed search parties. One of my other friends found her and brought her back to her BOQ (Bachelor Officer’s Quarters) room. We all went there to make sure she was OK. That was a mistake; she thought the party was still on. We were going out into town and she wanted to come with us.
She had already had too much. We told her, “Here’s some aspirin and a glass of water. Go to sleep.” Then we left. It was endearing that as I was walking out the door she asked me, “Did I make a fool of myself.” I told her no, don’t worry about it.
Famous last words.
An expletive deleted who also lived in the BOQ saw all this, and he apparently had the hots for her so he thought it was his chance. Apparently she didn’t lock the door. Then my acting XO walked in on them because he was concerned about her, too.
Acting XO wanted to know what this guy was doing in a passed out woman’s room. So, thinking fast, expletive deleted came up with a story that he was rescuing her from a drunken orgy in the making and kicked us out. And he started naming names.
So we all show up to work fat dumb and happy on Monday and get taken aside by our various department heads and basically get accused of attempted rape.
This is how you got promoted after Tailhook. You showed you were on board with the Navy’s new zero-tolerance policy regarding sexual misconduct. Even if there was no sexual misconduct. As a matter of fact, her department head told her that if she didn’t accuse us of sexual assault he’d charge her with conduct unbecoming an officer.
She refused. She knew we had done nothing wrong to her. Finally the real XO (she had returned from travel over the weekend) put an end to it. There was nothing there, she declared.
Note; all the bad actors were men.
As an aside some things may sound good in theory but are horrible in practice. Among them is “affirmative verbal consent.” The way college administrators apply the term it means the woman has to give affirmative verbal consent to every stage of the love making process.
“May I unbutton your blouse?”
“May I remove your bra?”
“May I unzip your skirt?”
No human beings have ever made love this way. There would be no human race. And I hope everyone realizes how s****y it is to call love making a process.
Another is “universal background checks.” Who could possibly be against that, right? The way the pols want to implement it, though, is that any “transfer” of a firearm would require a background check. Not a sale, not a loan, but a “transfer.” That means that before I can hand you a firearm we have to a gun dealer and do a background check. So that means if we’re out hunting and for gun safety purposes I want to hand you my firearm to cross a stream or a fence we have to go back to town. And then we can go back to the obstacle, I’ll hand you my firearm, cross it, and then you hand me both guns and then you cross. if we have to cross another stream we have to go back to town again. Except we can’t because to safely cross the first stream we’d have to make an illegal firearm transfer because the background check is only good for one “transfer.”
That isn’t a joke. The laws are written by pols who despise me. And that includes my earlier point. Yes, drunken hook-ups are a bad idea. But there is no marital exemption from the “affirmative consent consent” rule. You can be married and if your wife gets angry at you she can accuse you of rape and if you missed getting permission at any stage of the process (puke) you’re screwed.
Or suppose you did ask? How do you prove it? It becomes a he-said-she-said sort of deal and the default position of law enforcement and prosecutors is she-said. Unless you video all your sexual encounters, like this guy did. Without the Kardashian-style sex tape you’re hosed.
Dear Arminius:
It’s my belief that one of the attractions (pun intended) of “affirmative verbal consent” is that no human beings have ever made love that way. The left wants there to be fewer humans, and certainly fewer WESTERN humans, so this accomplishes exactly what they want.
CTF
I couldn’t agree more. I’m convinced the laws and regulations are written by lesbians who can’t stand the idea of my cisgendered white patriarchal butt getting some tail now and again or (shudder) owning guns.
But the regs apply to lesbians as much as they do to anyone else. So they’re laying traps for themselves too, and I hope every person who has participated in writing these sorts of regs gets caught by them.
Lesbians are constantly fighting each other anyway. They are sort of irrelevant here. I don’t feel better about the damage done to straight students, because the lesbians suffer too.
Granted a lot of diversity and sexual enforcement types may be lesbians. That Diversit Diva at Google, Danielle, looked like that’s a possibility. But still.
Contrary to stereotype, leftists love to get busy as well. Hell, they still consider themselves to be the side of the political aisle that isn’t wrapped up in traditional sex roles, acts or kinks. They love sex and by god they’ll tell you that, given the chance.
These rules aren’t to decimate western civilization. They’re tools for unequal application. They’ll never have to live under these rules. These rules are only there for them to use as tools to ruin your life.
That’s why do you don’t see articles talking about how that purple-haired feminist didn’t get sober consent from the fraternity pledge six months ago. Because nobody is going to enforce the rules against the campus activists.
1) Always know where your date is on the Hot/Crazy matrix.
2) You can never know where your date is on the Hot/Crazy matrix until it’s too late.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwbKYcBdVyk
Back in the old days, college was where a lot of talented young men and women met their spouses. Then settled down and had families.
Now due to Obama’s insane interpretation of Title IX, nobody dares have much contact with the opposite sex, certainly men are very conservative with women rather than going for it. I doubt I would have met my wife under today’s restrictions. I just wouldn’t have felt the freedom to “go for it”.
And that’s the white depopulation agenda, so Obama could bring in his replacements.
welcome to the society of promiscuity… what else can one expect