Because they are rolling it into the coverage of the Turner case, which right now is non-stop. Basically some version of
Ahh. Got it now. The wheels of justice grind slowly though, and I would assume that by the time this case gets anywhere near ripe for a decision the Turner case will have faded.
I am not so sure they are similar since he is contesting how the university evaluated his case while the other one is an uproar about a judge’s sentence.
“I would assume that by the time this case gets anywhere near ripe for a decision the Turner case will have faded.”
I agree – a judicial clerk won’t even read the complaint until there’s a response. That’ll be weeks from now at the very earliest.
Weeks? - ha, ha, ha, ha. 
For those that like the legalese, the NYT article has the document.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/10/sports/ncaabasketball/jack-montague-yale-rape-lawsuit.html
That’s an interesting document. I would like to see the university’s response; Montague’s case is a lot more sympathetic than I would have thought, except for the ranting about how Yale wanted to target him. And the facts are weirder.
Agree, I, too, thought it was an interesting document. I totally expected that he would have a previous assault complaint in his file. Shoving a rolled up cardboard down someone’s shirt might be assault on some strange planet but not sexual assault so effectively expelled on this one report made by an administrator not an accuser. No hearing notes, no taping of the hearing. Interesting. Yale is standing on rather thin ice, IMO. Will be interesting to read their response in coming months. I love, too, that Occidental has stalled turning over their administrative files for about 550 days or so…they are on thin ice also…that’s the two freshman kids that got drunk and had sex, she filed, he got expelled although she was the aggressor. Naughty naughty colleges.
If you read the complaint, there’s no question he was expelled because this was a second offense. It’s not clear that anyone looked at what the first offense actually was before reaching that determination, however. And it seems that the woman involved was actively misled by administrators into believing that he had been accused of sex without consent by another woman, not simply boorish, juvenile behavior while drunk.
For those who have not read the complaint: The “prior” was an incident in March or April 2013, when he was a freshman. He stuck a rolled-up, used paper plate down the shirt of a woman he did not otherwise know who was giving him a hard time in public, then walked away. The possibly nonconsensual sex occurred in October 2014, and the complaint was brought in the winter of 2016. He did not know expulsion was a possibility until he received the letter expelling him, which expressly relied on the proposition that he had not modified his behavior after the first incident. There was pretty much nothing in common between the two incidents, even if you accept everything the second woman said as gospel.
I have to say, too: Had someone given me the conduct described by the woman as a hypothetical, I would have said it was theoretically possible but I didn’t think real people behaved that way.
If the complaint is true, it appears many working at Yale do not know their own procedures. I also think Gleason comes off as if she manipulated Jane Roe.
It very rarely is. Or more charitably, it very rarely gives a balanced view of the actual facts.
That said, if this case survives the inevitable Motion to Dismiss, it should shock no one if Yale’s administration looks like a bunch of imbeciles and true believers. That seems to be the pattern in the majority of the cases we hear about.
@OhioDad51: The complaint looks decent to me. I wouldn’t expect it to get kicked on a motion to dismiss.
^ I am old and a cynic. I don’t think there are any sure bets in this area of the law yet. Certainly I think you are right that the rationale laid out in the complaint appears “tight enough”, and I get what you are saying about how the case survives.
But the fact is that this is all changing with every decision (as you know). Excepting the fact that we are dealing with real people’s lives, it is what always fascinated me about the law. It is an organic process, and the system is attempting to feel its way to a consensus in how to respond to this new assertion of jurisdiction/power by the colleges and the executive branch.
Couple three years maybe we can begin to predict how this shakes out legally. Now, I try not to have any preconceptions.
@Ohiodad51: Some of the counts looked a little strained to me (like the title ix and tortious interference counts), and I think the plaintiff is going to have a hard time overcoming Twombly/Iqbal in that regard. The breach stuff as to the original incident with the paper plate may have statute of limitations problems (I haven’t looked). The more recent breach stuff looks pretty solid, and the defamation cause was better than I expected.
I somewhat agree that the law is up in the air on the title ix stuff (that no one has fully litigated the “Dear Colleague” letter as enacting a new Rule within the meaning of the APA I find odd), but the breach of contract is just regular old breach of contract. The circumstances may be new, but the underlying issues are the same they ever were.
It seems his case depends in large part on what Ms. Roe has to say. If she corroborates his story (that she told Yale she didn’t think he heard her) and feels she was manipulated into pursuing this by being told he had done this before, he may be vindicated.
Parsing the language, the way she’s quoted is ambiguous. She said that he “acted as though he didn’t hear her.” She might have meant that she was unsure if he heard her. She also might have meant that she felt he was deliberately ignoring her.
If this gets to the point where Ms. Roe is subject to being deposed, Yale will have already lost.
Agree.
That’s absolutely right. The problem is, it would be awfully difficult for an eyewitness, much less an administrative panel 15 months later, to distinguish between someone who hasn’t heard you and someone who is pretending not to have heard you on the basis of observable behavior. Given Montague’s testimony that she didn’t say anything, the consistency of his actions with either hypothesis, and the undisputed testimony from both that he had honored her limits in the past and apparently did not use force or restraint, not to mention the situation they were in, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that she resolve the ambiguity. If she felt he might be deliberately ignoring her, and she planned to kick him out of college for it 15 months and $140,000 in tuition checks later, maybe she could have said, loudly, “Didn’t you hear me? No.” Or maybe at least someone else who was thinking about kicking him out of college could have asked her, on the record, “What do you mean? Are you sure he heard you?”
Of course, at the time, she didn’t plan to kick him out of college for it, so she didn’t have the foresight to develop an unambiguous case. At the time, she may not even have known how bad she would feel about it a few hours or days later. I could hypothesize that, at the time, she was ambivalent and changing her mind about what she wanted every few seconds, and it was only later that she resolved things into a narrative where she had said no and he hadn’t stopped. I could also hypothesize that she clearly said no and he deliberately ignored her and lied about it later. I don’t know how you decide which hypothesis is correct in a situation like this in a manner that’s reliable enough to support the consequences.
This drives me back to a position I’ve taken before: When you have to get this far into the sheets, as it were, to make a decision, you are way past what’s necessary to accomplish any legitimate goal the college or Title IX has. Even on the most sympathetic interpretation of her story – at least as we have it so far, from a not-fully-reliable source – a college with no administrative remedy for the situation she described is not a hostile or unsafe environment for women.
I think standing would be a huge hurdle with a private litigant trying to prove that the DCL was rule making in fact if not in name, but I know just enough about administrative law to know I don’t know much. My guess is that a college would have to either sue in the first instance or, more likely, refuse to comply with the DCL and then fight the ensuing investigation.
PS - For those following along at home the APA is the Administrative Procedure Act, which grants an individual the right to sue under certain circumstances.