If the alleged victim agrees to have sex wth John, two others join in and the alleged victim is against this, the situation changes. If John is encouraging these two guys against her will…
I think the above is how somebody at USC saw the case. I don’t find the case so bizarre. John should have been allowed to defend himself.
This is bizarre to me.
The accuser did not mention the butt slaps originally. Later she did. This is human psychology at work. The story comes out over time…in pieces. This happens all the time. This is how the mind works.
When this happens people think the accuser is making things up.
No. The accuser is not necessarily making things up.
In this case, there were butt slaps. They weren’t soft gentle ones either.
What about this?
There are cases where the accused says he or she didn’t get due process.
Is John’s case going to set a precedent for future cases?
Legally, it’s probably a precedent in California. In the long run, all this expensive litigation will likely prompt schools to be more careful with their process, but I don’t know how long the long run is.
I wonder if this USC case will be the one to determine if the guidance from the DOE OCR is consistent with federal law.
Also, does this mean if I am a college student, I am responsible for the safety and behavior of every other student who I am in face to face contact. What a legal mess this would be.
That’s the same case from post 1017, and a very interesting one it is.
Another student is suing the DOE as well as his university. I haven’t found the complaint online. This is one of a small but notable group of cases where the alleged victim didn’t complain; a third-party witness filed the complaint alleging the assault.
I’ve now read a bunch of articles about this Grant Neal suit, and from what I understand:
The school felt, under the OCR and Dear Colleague, that it had to investigate the complaint even if the alleged victim said there was no crime and that it was consensual (that she may be saying that to protect her boyfriend and not because it is the truth). Where is the respect for her agency and her wishes in this matter?
The guilty verdict and punishment seems to stem from the one moment where he penetrated her without a condom. He seemed to have consent up to that point; when she withdrew consent, he stopped and asked if she would like to continue with a condom. She said yes, let’s continue. and they did so.
Isn’t that what we say partners should do? He may have misinterpreted a cue at a certain point, but he took immediate steps to remedy the situation to her satisfaction.
Jane Doe has testified she was not raped and that their encounters were consensual—and the school still kicked him out. Am I missing something here?
“Where is the respect for her agency and her wishes in this matter?”
What a good question. I don’t want my school telling me that my private choices are not my own.
I don’t think we’ve posted this finding by a Massachusetts judge that a lawsuit against Brandeis can proceed. This is the student who was disciplined for, among other things, waking his long-term lover with a kiss and making admiring comments about his anatomy.
"The new, 100-page complaint again alleges the school participated in gender-based harassment, sexual harassment and gender-based misconduct against Nungesser that “was severe, pervasive and objectively offensive and that deprived Plaintiff Paul Nungesser of educational opportunities.”
“I sincerely hope that Judge Woods allows my case to move on to trial,” Nungesser tells Newsweek via email on Monday. “While I personally would like to put this case behind me, I also think this complaint raises some fundamental questions that our society deserves answers to.” Those questions, he says, include whether male and female students have the same rights, and whether “a false accusation [is] all it takes to lose any right to a normal life and a normal college experience.”
Monday’s complaint offers updated arguments for why Columbia allegedly discriminated against Nungesser as a male. It urges the judge to consider “the case at hand if the genders were reversed,” and then proposes a scenario involving people named Paula and Emmet, with details mirroring what happened between Nungesser and Sulkowicz."
I haven’t read Nungesser’s latest complaint, but I did skim the first few pages of his first one.
I am not a lawyer, but to my eyes it looked like the attorneys that he used did a very bad job. The complaint read more like a polemic than a solid legal argument. Frankly, I wasn’t even sure that his first complaint fulfilled the basic requirements to be well pled.
If Nungesser hasn’t hired better lawyers then I think he’s probably going to lose, and lose quickly.