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Campus Sexual Assault Tag

Posted by New Neo on November 08, 2016 18 Comments
Last Friday, in the civil suit regarding the Sabrina Erdely story about an alleged gang rape at UVA---the attention-getting piece that portrayed "Jackie" as victim extraordinaire---the periodical Rolling Stone and journalist Sabrina Erdely were found guilty of defamation with actual malice:
A 10-person jury in Richmond, Va., found that Rolling Stone defamed a university administrator who was in charge of handling student complaints of sexual misconduct at the school... In a lawsuit filed last year, then-UVA associate dean of students Nicole Eramo alleged that the article and interviews Ms. Erdely gave about her reporting cast the administrator as the callous villain of its tale and falsely asserted that she discouraged a student identified only as “Jackie” from taking her rape allegations to the police.

Posted by Mike LaChance on August 31, 2016 4 Comments
Who knew attending an Ivy League school could pose such a threat to one's personal safety? Yale University's newest report on campus sexual misconduct suggests life at Yale is almost as dangerous as the city of Detroit. The College Fix reports:
Yale’s latest sexual-assault report suggests school is more dangerous than Detroit Yale University continues to impose sanctions on students and faculty even when they are not found responsible for sexual misconduct, according to its latest half-year report on sexual misconduct.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 28, 2016 33 Comments
For several years we have been covering the near elimination of due process rights for men accused of sexual misconduct on campuses. Universities, compelled by a directive from the Obama Department of Education under threat of loss of federal funding, have combined with toxic radical feminist "rape culture" warriors to create tribunals in which men are presumed guilty in what amount to Kangaroo courts for men on campus. These campus tribunals have turned our traditional notions of justice around. While we used to hold to a standard that better 10 gulity men go free than 1 innocent man be convicted, now it's Better 10 Innocent Men Suffer, Than 1 Guilty Man Escape.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on July 20, 2016 14 Comments
When Kim Corban was a 20-year-old college student, a predator broke into her student housing and assaulted her in the middle of the night. Years later, Corban is now a mother of two and she has a message for any would-be predators who count on unarmed, defenseless victims like 20-year-old Corban.

Posted by Mike LaChance on May 21, 2016 10 Comments
We recently reported that some law professors of the American Law Institute wanted to expand the concept of sexual consent in a way which would make it easier to define people as criminals. The proposals were outrageous and would have put people at risk of being legally guilty of rape even if their partners consented. Proponents of the changes were largely left wing professors who undoubtedly agree with the progressive concept of rape culture. The good news is that the institute rejected the proposal. Bradford Richardson of the Washington Times:
American Law Institute rejects affirmative consent standard in defining sexual assault In a rebuke to a feminist idea that has migrated from college campuses to mainstream culture, an influential legal group overwhelmingly rejected Tuesday a provision that would have endorsed an “affirmative consent” standard for the purpose of defining sexual assault.

Posted by Mike LaChance on May 15, 2016 27 Comments
Sexual consent laws on college campuses are already reaching absurd levels, but if the American Law Institute has its way and loosens the concepts of consent, it will easier to accuse participants of crimes. Stuart Taylor Jr. writes at Real Clear Politics:
Legal Group Weighs Radical Expansion of Sex Crimes Imagine the following case: Two recent college grads meet in a bar, talk, begin kissing, and go to her apartment. After a little more talking, they resume kissing there. He undresses her and initiates sexual intercourse. She neither objects nor resists. He leaves, and they have no further contact. A month later, she files a criminal complaint with police, complaining that this was rape because she never expressed verbal consent and was physically passive.

Posted by Amy Miller on November 09, 2015 13 Comments
The drama swirling around Rolling Stone, staff writer Sabrina Erdely, and the University of Virginia continued today when Phi Kappa Psi's UVA chapter filed a $25 million dollar lawsuit against the magazine over a (now-retracted) story claiming that a freshman girl was gang raped during a house party. Erdely's "A Rape on Campus" story published in November of last year, and immediately ignited a firestorm of debate over campus "rape culture." The fraternity's image was trashed, their house vandalized, and both the university and fraternity national chapter suffered a major hit to their reputations. By December, however, Erdely's account of the attack on "Jackie" began to unravel. Following investigations by law enforcement, the university, and an increasingly skeptical media, Rolling Stone published a frantic retraction---and then the lawsuits started. More via Reuters:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on October 28, 2015 5 Comments
For years, we have heard that that 1-in-4 or 1-in-5 college women are victims of rape or sexual assault. The studies behind the statistic tended to be agenda-driven and unscientific, but now according to hundreds of news stories, there’s a new, more comprehensive survey that confirms epidemic levels of sexual predation on campus. Could these researchers be right?

Posted by Amy Miller on July 18, 2015 5 Comments
Here at Legal Insurrection, we devoted a lot of (virtual) ink to the Rolling Stone campus rape story debacle. Sabrina Erdely's now-retracted article on "Jackie's" traumatic gang rape---and its relation to the campus sexual assault problem Erdely so desperately wanted to prove exists---serves as a textbook example of how not to conduct an investigation, and may end up costing Rolling Stone more than its reputation (or at least, whatever is left of it.) Back in May, University of Virginia associate dean of students Nicole Eramo filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against Rolling Stone, its parent company Wenner Media, and journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely for their portrayal of Eramo in Erdely's story. Eramo argues that Erdely and Rolling Stone knew Jackie was unreliable, had serious doubts about the story, and yet ran with it anyway because they were desperate to fulfill their own narrative and sell magazines. As I said in May, the benefits of attempting to salvage Eramo's reputation via the courts must outweigh the risk that opposing counsel and the MSM could find something that causes further damage; her attorneys likely would not have filed the suit had they not performed that analysis. Still, Rolling Stone has decided to answer the complaint by claiming that UVA actually contributed to the faulty report. Via WaPo:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 08, 2015 22 Comments
We have been covering the absurdity of the "Yes Means Yes" movement, and the violation of fundamental due process rights under the banner of "rape culture," for quite some time: In our coverage, we frequently have posted this parody video from 2007. Now life is imitating parody, as reported in The Washington Examiner (via Instapundit), Advocacy group distributes sexual 'consent contracts' to college students:

Posted by Amy Miller on June 16, 2015 32 Comments
We've discussed extensively the problems and scandals surrounding the campus sexual assault investigation process. Procedures that favor the accuser, and offer no protection to the accused, have led to lost academic careers, ruined reputations, and high-profile lawsuits brought by the accused against the institutions that allegedly threw them under the bus. One such lawsuit has risen out of sexual assault allegations brought against "John Doe" by another female student at Amherst College. John Doe was expelled after Amherst's kangaroo court decided with 50.01% certainty that he may have raped "AS." After the expulsion, John Doe's attorney dug deeper into the case, and discovered a series of text messages that eviscerated AS's testimony:
In fact, as Doe’s attorneys later would discover, AS had texted two people after the hookup—a friend, and a possible paramour. Even before hooking up with Doe, AS had texted the other male student, telling him, “I mean I happen to have my room to myself this weekend, if you wanted to come over and entertain me.” After she finished with Doe, AS resumed flirtatious texting with the male student, who came to her room and spent the night with her. He found her “friendly, flirtatious, and spirited,” and not “anxious, stressed, depressed, or otherwise in distress.”...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 16, 2015 14 Comments
The number of lawsuits by men wrongly accused of sexual assault on campus is increasing almost by the day. Most remain silent, preferring to go the "John Doe" route to avoid further reputational damage. Slowly, however, some men are going public, often where there names were already published anyway in high profile cases. One example is the suit against Columbia University by Jean-Paul Nungesser after Emma Sulkowicz drew attention to the allegations by carrying a mattress around campus. Here is one story playing out at San Diego State University, in which the charges were plastered all over campus and the news, only to be dropped once police investigated. Where does someone wrongly accused go to get his reputation back? It started with the arrest of Francisco Paiva Sousa, SDSU sex assault suspect out on bail:
A day after being arrested on suspicion of a sexual assault near campus, an SDSU student is out on bail. CBS News 8 cameras were there when 20-year-old Francisco Paiva Sousa was released from jail Wednesday. He was taken into custody Tuesday in connection with the alleged assault Sunday. Sousa said nothing as our cameras caught up with him after he made bail. The SDSU sophomore is accused of forcing a female student to perform oral sex while at a party off campus, according to campus police. Detectives say it happened at a duplex on College Avenue sometime Saturday night or Sunday morning....

Posted by Amy Miller on May 12, 2015 42 Comments
The smoke may have cleared, but the Rolling Stone retraction disaster isn't over yet. UVA associate dean of students Nicole Eramo has filed a multimillion dollar defamation lawsuit against Rolling Stone, its parent company Wenner Media, and journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely for their portrayal of Eramo in the now-retracted and forever infamous "A Rape on Campus." One of Eramo's chief responsibilities at UVA was to handle allegations of sexual assault. In the complaint, she argues that Rolling Stone and Erdely used her to personify the "campus indifferent to sexual assault" narrative and as a result caused her emotional and physical distress, and damaged her reputation. The complaint itself is a parade of horrors. It lays out the allegations Rolling Stone and Erdely made one by one---that Eramo coddled Jackie, that she was indifferent to Jackie's allegations, that she pressured Jackie to not report a rape, that she abused Jackie, and that she attempted to suppress Jackie's rape---and lays out the case that Rolling Stone's own subsequent statements to the media prove that those allegations weren't only untrue, but "categorically false" and defamatory per se.

Posted by Hans Bader on April 09, 2015 38 Comments
I and my wife are happily married, and neither of us is abusive, much less criminal. But under the University of Virginia's broad new "sexual assault" policy, my wife could be deemed guilty of "sexual assault" when she hugs me without advance permission. So, apparently, would any couple in America that engages in making out, without lots of explicit discussion in advance -- that is, pretty much every person in America who is married or in a committed relationship.  U. Va.'s policy bans a wide array of conduct that is perfectly legal under Virginia state law, and that neither involves sexual intercourse, nor occurs against anyone's wishes. This is an outrageous invasion of students' privacy, and an insult to U.Va. alumni and state taxpayers (like me). U.Va. adopted its new "Interim Policy on Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment" to appease the Office for Civil Rights, where I used to work. Under its policy, if you hug your boyfriend, and as an inevitable result your "clothed" "body parts" (such as "breasts") touch him, you could be accused of “sexual assault” that "consists of" "sexual contact.” That's because U.Va. now defines such touching, “however slight,” as sexual assault, lumping together both touching and intercourse as "sexual assault" when they are deemed "sexual" and occur without "affirmative consent."

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 07, 2015 15 Comments
Yet another Complaint has been filed by a male student disciplined after a campus adjudication of alleged sexual assault, this time against the California Regents for the conduct involving UC-Santa Barbara. As in all the other complaints, there are allegations that the sexual relations were consensual, a substantial delay in reporting, and alleged bureacratic bungling and mischief denying the male student. But this one has a unique twist -- the male was on leave of absence and the conduct was after the semester was over and the female accuser was transferring to another school.  This raises a unique question of the reach of university jurisdiction to enforce campus sexual conduct rules. What is not unique about this case is the salacious nature of the alleged facts. According to the Complaint, the accused male and accusing female were part of a group sex encounter at his parent's Lake Tahoe house, after school was over in June, with the male having graduated and the female transfering:
32. On June 14, 2014, John Doe and Jane Doe, along with a group of friends, traveled to Jane Doe’s parents’ home in Lake Tahoe for the weekend to celebrate the end of the school-year. Although some of the individuals on the trip happened to be members of the UCSB Mock Trial Team, the trip was in no way sponsored by or affiliated with UCSB. * * * 37. While John Doe was out of the house, L.B. approached Jane Doe in the master bedroom and asked whether she would be interested in having group sex with her and B.R. Subsequently, Jane Doe, L.B. and D.J. advised B.R. that they would be interested in the group sex only if John Doe was also involved. 38. When John Doe returned to the house, Witness B.R. advised him of B.R.’s earlier conversation with Jane Doe, D.J. and L.B. and inquired whether John Doe would be interested in taking part in the group sex.

Posted by Amy Miller on April 07, 2015 31 Comments
The Rolling Stone rape story debacle keeps getting worse. We now have a ton of information about how Sabrina Erdely and her team lashed together their potentially libelous tome about a victim named Jackie, and those who sought to silence her. We know that Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity targeted by the story, is exploring its legal options, and we know that nobody involved on Rolling Stone's end is going to suffer any real consequences. What we've been missing---at least until now---are faces for the names of those who have been harmed by Rolling Stone's negligent reporting. Ryan Duffin, identified as "Randall" in the article, and Alex Stock, identified as "Andrew," both played significant roles in the story Jackie spun for Erdely and that Erdely in turn published. In her statements to Erdely, Jackie said that she made contact with three friends the night of the alleged rape. Jackie called Ryan late that night, and when he met up with her he says that he saw no physical evidence on Jackie's person to suggest that she had been attacked. Jackie told Erdely a completely different story, and said that Ryan had indicated that he wouldn't speak to Rolling Stone about what happened because he "didn't want to be part of [Jackie's] shitshow."

Posted by Amy Miller on April 06, 2015 20 Comments
When Rolling Stone inflicted its UVA "gang rape" fantasy on the American people, it didn't just damage its own reputation; it took down members of the targeted fraternity and university communities down with it. As I reported on yesterday, there will be no consequences for the RS staff members who contributed to the now-redacted article. No one has resigned in disgrace, or been given 15 minutes to clear out their office. It's business as usual at Rolling Stone---at least for now. Spokesmen representing Phi Kappa Psi fraternity have made a statement indicating that the organization will "pursue all available legal action" against Rolling Stone. From CNN Money:
"After 130 days of living under a cloud of suspicion as a result of reckless reporting by Rolling Stone magazine, today the Virginia Alpha Chapter of Phi Kappa Psi announced plans to pursue all available legal action against the magazine," the fraternity said in a statement.
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