Activists Vow Protests as Betsy DeVos Calls for Greater Protection of the Accused on Campus
“would require colleges to hold hearings at which a representative of each party has a right to cross-examine witnesses, including the other party, and to provide both students with all evidence gathered in the investigation”
Under Obama, the left advanced the narrative of “rape culture” on college campuses. The structure and rules surrounding the reporting of sexual assaults on campus sided overwhelmingly with accusers, and sometimes left the accused to be tried in campus kangaroo courts.
As Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos has tried to roll some of this back and return due process to campuses. Her efforts have been continually met with resistance.
KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr. write at Real Clear Politics:
Colleges Bristle as Judges, DeVos Push Protections for the Accused
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ proposed Title IX regulations, which are due to be issued in final form early next year, seek to require colleges that adjudicate claims of sexual assault against their students using some of the same procedures to ensure fairness that have long been treated as fundamental by courts. The most important provisions would require colleges to hold hearings at which a representative of each party has a right to cross-examine witnesses, including the other party, and to provide both students with all evidence gathered in the investigation.
But these proposals have generated furious opposition from pro-complainant activists and politicians willing to perpetuate the biases against accused students – procedures initiated by the Obama administration and with which most colleges were happy to comply. Alexandra Brodsky, a co-founder of Know Your IX, the nation’s most powerful pro-accusers’ rights organization, recently promised “massive national student resistance” to the effort to make campus procedures more even-handed.
Josh Richards, a lawyer who regularly represents universities in lawsuits filed by accused students, dismissed cross-examination as being “without any meaningful addition in a truth-seeking function.” This view flies in the face of America’s founding principles, the Constitution, and longtime Supreme Court precedent. The high court has called the right to cross-examination “the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.” Yet Sen. Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the Senate HELP Committee, is leading the effort to neuter the regulations’ cross-examination provisions, according to the Washington Post.
DeVos is trying to protect due process, yet Alexandra Brodsky, the activist mentioned above, suggests that DeVos is trying to harm students’ civil rights:
Any day now, DeVos will release her Title IX regs, which will require massive national student resistance against both the administrators and schools that accept DeVos’s regs as an invitation to violate students’ civil rights. Youth organizing is more important than ever.
— Alexandra Brodsky (@azbrodsky) November 29, 2019
Taylor Mooney of CBS News provides some background on how we got here:
How Betsy DeVos plans to change the rules for handling sexual misconduct on campus
The 2011 Dear Colleague Letter urged schools to handle cases of sexual misconduct more promptly than ever before, stating that “If a school knows or reasonably should know about student-on-student harassment that creates a hostile environment, Title IX requires the school to take immediate action to eliminate the harassment, prevent its recurrence, and address its effects.” And it explicitly stated that schools must use “a preponderance of the evidence” as the standard for determining guilt in these proceedings; a finding of guilt means “it is more likely than not that sexual harassment or violence occurred.”
The letter also “discourages” allowing the two sides to cross-examine each other, as it may be “traumatic or intimidating” for the alleged victim…
For Mark Hathaway, an attorney who specializes in representing people who claim they were not provided their rights to due process in Title IX investigations, the 2011 letter does not do enough to protect the rights of the accused, allowing schools too much flexibility.
“[The letter] doesn’t say, you know, four bullet points: You need to provide notice — adequate notice; you need to present the evidence; and you need to have a fair hearing,” says Hathaway. “None of those were laid out in a simple way that was understandable, so it allowed the schools to create rather complex, difficult-to-understand policies that don’t provide those protections.”
Prior to 2011, the number of lawsuits filed against universities for failing to provide due process in Title IX cases averaged one per year. It is expected there will be over 100 such lawsuits filed in 2019 alone.
Over the last several years, we have seen numerous examples of young people having their lives ruined based on nothing more than an accusation.
College students deserve the same presumption of innocence and right to due process as all people. DeVos deserves credit for her efforts to return these rights to campuses.
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Comments
Yes she does!
And what exactly have “we” , the people, done to help her?
”Lynch mob organized to prevent threat of fair trials.”
How can you tell a woman accusing a man of sexual assault is lying? Her lips are moving….
Oh come on, rape does happen.
Yes, and any flippant, self-serving accusation thrown around by an unscrupulous or vindictive woman does nothing but further hurt the genuine victims of sexual assault, by eroding their credibility and diverting investigative resources away from their cases.
Hear hear.
Another thumbs up to the Jim Crow laws from a leftist. After all, “rape does happen” and if we’re going to “believe all women” then every black man who was lynched because a white woman of rape deserved it.
Capital punishment was one of the penalties for rape in the 19th century and indeed well into the 20th.
Sure, technically there should have been a trial. But with the left firmly on the side against due process for the accused they are exactly on the side of the KKK lynch mobs. Exactly as it should be since the KKK was always the “armed wing” of the Democratic party.
Kudos, pst. Thanks for helping to clear things up.
Oh, come on, false rape charges happen frequently!~ Nikki Yovino is about half way through her year in jail for falsely accusing classmates of rape, Brian Banks went to jail on a false rape charge and I could site more even without consulting GOOGLE
Let me help you out, Mark.
The Nikki Yorvino story is one to warm the cockles of pst’s Jim Crow lovin’ heart. She had consensual sex with two black football players in the bathroom of a house where they were all at a party.
Then she falsely accused them of rape. Always putting great emphasis on the fact they were black. It turned out that she lied because she was friends with a guy at school (Sacred Heart! What are they teaching them at that university?) and she hoped to gain sympathy from him so they would become more than friends.
According to the FBI, which BTW does not collect statistics on false rape accusations (more on that later), these are the five main reasons women lie about rape.
1. Depression/mental illness
2. Need for attention
3. Gain sympathy
4. Need of an alibi
5. Revenge/extortion/generate jealousy
I’m not going to provide any specific examples for category one as I feel it’s unnecessary. Judy Munro-Leighton lied when she contacted the Senate Judiciary Committee and claimed she was the Jane Doe in the anonymous letter sent to Sen. Kamala Harris’ office (more likely produced by the staffers in Harris’ office). She didn’t provide any contact information but because of her unique hyphenated name (leftist feminists, pay attention) Senate investigators tracked her down. And she admitted it was all a lie; she didn’t author the letter (clearly she’s not one of Senator Harris’ staffers), she had never met Brett Kavanaugh who was decades younger than her, and she had never even been to kali where the hoax rape supposedly occurred. She admitted it was a ploy, a tactic to try and derail Kavanaugh’s nomination but more importantly as a left wing activist she wanted to attention. She wanted to be the hero of the hour.
That’s category two. Arguably Blasy-Ford fits in this category. She clearly lied. For instance, she said she had a second front door in her house in Palo Alto because she was afraid all these long years after that house party that no one else knows about (her own father and her self-proclaimed best friend at the time didn’t believe a word of it) she was still afraid of Brett Kavanaugh breaking in to rape her.
For rational people that second door is called the back door.
But this was a provable lie since you can’t do anything to your own house in kali without a permit. At the same time they installed the front door to provide a separate entry to that former home office they also added a bedroom and a bathroom.
Which means either they were building a “mother-in-law” apartement as many people do in Palo Alto because it’s an expensive place to live so the rent income helps, or she was secretly hoping Brett Kavanaugh would break in and rape her and she wanted there to be a nice bed where she could be raped and a place where she and Brett could shower afterward. Possibly together.
She lied about being claustrophobic and afraid to fly. Also provable lies.
Why did she lie. Arguably for the same reason Munro-Leighton did; she knew she’d be a left wing hero. And according to her attorney, who ranks with Avenatti for giving attorneys a bad name, she had admitted before an audience that while she didn’t think she could derail Kavanaugh’s nomination she could put an asterisk next to his name marking any of his rulings illegitimate particularly on abortion issues.
She has definitely gotten the attention she craved. Almost a million dollars in her gofundeme account. Award after award from fawning leftists, most recently and predictably from the ACLU. Sure she claims to have gotten death threats just like Jusse Smollett. She’s probably sent them herself. Or they could have come from the same Nigerian brothers who Jusse Smollet paid to fake a hate crime against himself. There is likely a new cottage industry in Nigeria in which instead of engaging in bank scams they are paid by leftists to write hoax death threats to leftists that us wing-nut right wingers couldn’t bother with.
As always, the market for right wing hate crimes exceed the supply.
Nikki Yorvino is a self-confessed example of category three. There was a guy at Sacred Heart University she was just friends with and she wanted more. This guy, BTW, was following the first rule of dating; never stick your **** in crazy. Advice for any college guys reading this. Nikki Yorvino is a cautionary tale. If a girl at a house party invites you and a friend into the bathroom for an orgy, refer to Rule 1 and don’t do it. She hoped a rape story would gain sympathy from the smart guy and trick him into falling in bed with her.
With a tip of the hat to pst, apparently the story is a lot more sympathetic if you’re a white girl claiming you were raped by two black men. Always emphasizing that your rapists were black.
Tawana Brawley is a classic example of category four. She had been out too late with her boyfriend and was afraid she’d be in trouble with her parents. So she covered herself in her own feces and wrote racial slurs on her back and lied about four white men raping her. This gave her the alibi she needed.
Crystal Mangum of Duke Lacrosse infamy is in my estimation an example of category five. She is clearly a vengeful person. If she isn’t still in prison for killing one of her boyfriends she was only recently released. He had done something that P.O.’d her so she set him on fire. At first she only facing an assault charge, but when he died of his burns the charge was upgraded to manslaughter and she was duly convicted.
Why did she lie about the Duke lacrosse team gang raping her? Maybe they didn’t tip her enough. Maybe she looked at how well off they were while she had to take her clothes off for strangers to try and make ends meet. Maybe it’s because she was black, they were white and here was a chance to strike back at her oppressors. Or she might have been involved with a man (lucky guy since if he existed he possibly remains unkilled, at least by her) who wasn’t paying her enough attention. Category five is kind of a jumble but generally involves more than one of those interconnected motives. Possibly extortion was a motive. But clearly she was lashing out at the Duke lacrosse team.
You often hear feminists cite a statistic, that only 2% of rape claims are false. Where do they get this number. Not from FBI crime statistics, which is the most comprehensive set of crime statistics in the country. For two reasons. First, there is no mandate for any law enforcement agency at the state, county, or municipal level to contribute to the FBI database. It’s completely voluntary. Second, there is no standard terminology for rape claims the different jurisdictions can’t or won’t try to prove in court.
“Mattress girl” clearly lied about being raped (I’m not going to say her name since that would be giving her the attention she clearly still craves). But the man she falsely accused of rape was completely exonerated by the local D.A. The man, Paul Nungesser, successfully sued Columbia. As part of the settlement Columbia University issued a statement saying that he was “not responsible for any misconduct” in his brief and unwise (Rule 1. gentlemen) sexual liaison with “mattress girl” and that he had suffered through an experience during the last two years at Columbia that, the university stated, they would wish on no student.
Really? then why did the university allow “mattress girl’s” professors to give her academic credits for hauling around mattress around campus all the time? It seems to me Columbia did in fact wish that experience on Mr. Nungesser, which explains why his suit against Columbia was successful. I hope there was a hefty cash settlement as well, but it seems to be NDAs all around.
Despite being exonerated by the D.A. (this is extremely rare for a prosecutor, the only other case I can think of was with the Duke lacrosse players, and why it was a cheap shot of Andrew Weissman to insert that while they couldn’t prove Trump committed a crime they couldn’t exonerate him into the report the ailing, demented Mueller put his name on, thus providing the impeachment hook for the lying Democrats as intended) and cleared by the university, nobody ever charged “mattress girl” with lying to authorities about a crime. Specifically, the false rape claim.
Do actual rape victims behave this way? While still a student she reenacted her “rape” with another student for a sex video (he was probably reassured that the whole thing was being videoed which is the best insurance there is that you can’t be falsely accused later) for distribution on the internet under the title “This is not a Rape.” I wonder if her professors gave her academic credit for that.
Then in March of the year after Trump was elected this art student (gents, your rule 1 warning light should be a bright glowing red now that her major is a danger signal just below gender studies) she participated in a bondage “art” exhibit at a museum where she was participating in an “advanced,” if you can call it that, self-study art program.
How advanced was this art. She wore a bikini and high heels, was strapped to a board, and was then suspended horizontally over a male performer who hurled misogynist insults at her, theoretically in protest of Trump being elected President. Yeah, modern art, I suppose.
Why didn’t the D.A. charge this lying exhibitionist with filing a false police report, at the very least? No clue. It was a slam dunk case. But the bottom line is that this clear fraudulent rape claim won’t be reflected as such in FBI crime statistics.
So if the feminist claim of only 2% of rape claims are false (which means they are ecstatic about sending one innocent man in every fifty to prison if it were remotely true) doesn’t come from the FBI crime statistics, where does it come from? As near as I can tell, nobody knows. The NYPD established an all-female sex crimes investigatory unit back in the eighties, and they started tossing the 2% figure around. But not even the former members of that unit can tell you where it came from.
The best candidate seems to be a feminist author of a feminist novel back in the 1970s. She made it up, which is fine because her entire novel was a work of fiction. But now the leftist idiots are taking fiction for fact which, let’s face it, is what leftists always do.
I don’t mean to say women are liars. The vast majority of women would never lie and falsely accuse a man of rape. Furthermore, men lie about being victims of crimes that never happened and for the same reasons as women. Note, the five main reasons the FBI has listed aren’t the only reasons. They just tend to lie about different crimes. Mostly assault and attempted murder.
Moreover, women are far better than men in sniffing out a false rape claimant lying about a man. Which is why if you are falsely accused of rape or other sexual assault you don’t want a male jury. Those jurors are going to sit there glaring at the accused as the prosecution makes its case thinking, “Oh, if this f***er ever did that to my mother/wife/daughter and I got my hands on him he wouldn’t have LIVED to get a trial.”
You want as many normal, as in non-leftist, women on that jury as possible. Because if the accuser is lying, they’ll be the first to know it.
If schools are going to get into the business of charging people with felonies, they must provide due process of law. Period.
What they are finding, of course, is that they are ill-equipped to run criminal trials.
Alexandra Brodsky should not be allowed anywhere near young, impressionable people. She is interested in ginning up show trials and demonstrations, not anything remotely related to fair and honest results.
why are schools even playing the vigilante game? If a crime occurred then the legal system should be the adjudicators
Because the public colleges have an almost 100% Democrat Party member administrations and this PUSHES the DEMOCRAT PARTY
AGENDA.
Simple as that.
Please substitute the word fascist,/i> for <activist
Feminazi.
Activist is just a polite word for Ignorant Bully,
In this context “un-educated college administration BULLIES.
Protesting the protection of civil liberties, how enlightened. To paraphrase an old New Leftist slogan: “We are the people our Founders warned you against.”
In Leftist circles only the preferred ones are entitled to civil liberties
I’ve asked this before, why is a SCHOOL investigating potential crimes?
thats a job for law enforcement.
And it remains a stupid question. The school has to determine whether it’s safe to keep this person on campus, which is a completely different question to whether he should be sent to prison. What is a college to do if a student is probably a rapist, but reasonable doubt exists? He can’t be convicted of a crime, but should be be allowed to continue at the college as if nothing had happened?! The college has a duty to his next victim, which the criminal justice system does not. Whether to keep a student enrolled is a civil matter, and in any civil matter the standard is not reasonable doubt but the preponderance of the evidence.
Yes, if he can’t be convicted of a crime then why should he suffer the consequences of a criminal? And if you want to play that game then the accused should have all the due process that he should be entitled to, including the most basic one as to be able to confront the accuser
If he can’t be convicted of a crime, he may still be someone it is dangerous to have on campus. Do you really think colleges should accept students whom they know to have probably raped a fellow student? Do you not think that person’s next victim should be able to sue the college for such a decision?
Even when deciding a case by a Preponderance of the Evidence, such as in a civil suit, the Defendant is STILL allowed legal representation, is allowed to cross examine his accusers, and is allowed to present his own witnesses which would absolve him of responsibility. There is a REASON these are required, because hundreds of years of experience have taught us that gross injustice always follows when these safeguards are not allowed.
You appear to be advocating pure kangaroo court standards – no defense allowed at all. That’s Stalinism, not “reasonable care”.
No, I am explaining why colleges have to make an independent determination in these cases, and not simply rely on the criminal legal system. The question they have to answer is different from the one the criminal legal system does, and the standard of proof required is different.
“We don’t want hearings, we want to rule our campuses.”
Their main goal is always to preserve their portfolio [net worth] and avoid costly lawsuits. By not allowing males their due process, they increase the likelihood of a large payout. Dumb.
We need a separation of Chamber and State. Due process for men, boys, and babies, too. It is progressive to deny women’s faculty and moral character. Girls will be girls, no more.
In the pursuit of their socially acceptable misandry, radical feminists have ironically returned to downright Victorian attitudes toward their fellow women.
Universities are not equipped to prosecute felonies. If someone is raped, the rapist should be prosecuted by the district attorney’s office and, if convicted, should be sentenced via the criminal justice system, not merely expelled from school.
And what if his guilt cannot be proved beyond reasonable doubt?
then under the law, he is innocent!
He is not guilty of a crime, and therefore can’t be sent to prison. That doesn’t mean he’s not a rapist. If the college knows he’s probably a rapist, do you really think it should still allow him on campus?! Would you knowingly employ him in your business, with women? And if your employer knowingly employed him and he raped you, would you not sue the employer?
Just so I understand…it is your position that if someone is accused of rape and acquitted at trial, it is the responsibility of his employer to conduct a second subsequent investigation, using a lesser standard of proof, to determine whether the employee was actually probably guilty?
Are you aware of this actually happening anywhere?
It is definitely the employer’s responsibility to somehow make a reasonable determination, based on the information available to it, on whether keeping this person employed is consistent with its duty to provide a safe working environment. If it fails to do so, and just lets him come back to work because a criminal jury failed to find him guilty beyond reasonable doubt, or because the DA said it couldn’t prove his guilt beyond reasonable doubt, then it will be sued and it will lose.
Most employers probably take the easy road and just fire the person immediately, without making any determination, just in case. A university doesn’t have that flexibility, because it has a contract with the accused, so it must make some sort of determination that it will be able to defend in court if it has to.
what if someone were to accuse you of sexual assault, someone you had never even met, and you were not allowed to question this “witness” against you, and you were not allowed to present evidence that you were in another state at the time of the alleged assault? Is is Justice for you to be tossed out of your position just to be safe?
That is not the question. The question is why the college is getting involved, and the answer is that it has to, because the question it needs answers is not the same as the one the legal system is trying to answer.
Hopefully the concept withholding federal funding from schools that do not provide constitutionally hearings, for all accusations of misdeeds, is within the “solution matrix”.
Even a non-attorney dummy with horse s–t on his boots and sawdust in this pants cuffs can see that terminating someone’s education path is a “taking” under the 6th Amendment. Once adjudged by one of these tribunals the victim (not the accuser) is toxic to any institution.
Unless you are going to have police teach Intersectional Feminism, you probably not have professors of Intersectional Feminism act as police.
If it is a crime report it to the police.
As an attorney who represents students in these kinds of hearings, I can tell you that the universities are not interested in fair hearings–fish in a barrel have a better chance at survival than a lot of students who go before these committees and panels.
Bad news for the fascist left.
Given that Alexandra Brodsky has an identifiably Ashkenazi Jewish family name, it’s interesting to note she has an oddly National Socialist view of due process and rights of the accused.
Rape is a crime. Colleges have absolutely NO business weighing in on a criminal matter until the police have determined whether or not charges should be filed. What Devos should be advocating is a mandate that college rape accusations be handled by the local police in an immediate and timely manner.
No, No, and hell NO! Rape and other sexual assault is a crime. And these crimes should be turned over to the relevant law enforcement agency (not the campus cops) for investigation and disposition. Under no circumstances should untrained administrators, faculty or students be allowed to “adjudicate” these kind of accusations.
Wonder if most folks know that colleges and universities have a Decades Long History COVERING UP RAPE AND OTHER CRIMES on campus?
It appears this is just their most recent TOOL for COVER UP of Their crime ridden campuses………
And what happens when that investigation’s result is that he probably did it, but reasonable doubt exists so he can’t be convicted of a crime? You still have to determine whether to let him continue at the college?