Why Do Even Informal and Confidential Complaints of Student Misconduct Under Title IX Snowball into Permanent Shaming of the Exonerated Men Responding to Them?
Permanent shaming of sexual misconduct respondents results from the fire that rages at the intersection of generations of angry victims of misogyny and overpowering technology. Thus, if a male who responds to sexual misconduct at school succeeds, he is very likely, absent extremely hard work from his legal team, to face the fact that anger and the internet will keep his name stained, and in a false light, for a very long time. Male respondents need to dig deeply and quickly, to become relentless fighters.
We live our public life through its online social identity. (1) Thus, the powerful light technology shines on our past means nothing in it ever goes away. People who think all men are rapists pounce on that to shame men; even while the bulk of the views in the United States hold that in the case of exoneration, a new life starts (2) and that even in the case of guilt, after penance, forgiveness and a second chance belongs to every human. (3) This “pouncing” causes much hurt in the higher Ed context, and particularly in student sexual misconduct. A past sexual misconduct complaint, even if informal, or exonerated, unless expunged, can become one that never goes away—alarmingly it becomes one that continues to harm, stain, and humiliate even the man who has been exonerated. This means that guilt or innocence matters little—what matters is electronic social identity and who shaped it first or, frankly, who can get sued and who cannot, for this shaming.
There are many examples of exonerated men who continue to live in a false light, in a bad context, almost pariah-like, after an unfortunately wrong complaint of sexual assault:
At the absolute worst end of the spectrum is Brian Banks, a standout high school football star at Polytechnic High School (Poly) in Long Beach, California. In 2002, his Junior year, Banks verbally committed to USC but after being falsely accused of rape by classmate Wanetta Gibson, he spent close to six years imprisoned and five years on parole. Eventually he had his conviction overturned in 2012 after his accuser confessed that she had fabricated the entire story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Banks_(American_football)
Patrick Witt fell from the heights of an exemplary Ivy League career because an informal sexual assault complaint from his ex at Yale that was leaked. Witt never was allowed to respond to this complaint. Writing in the Boston Globe, Witt said that he was assured by Yale officials he had no need to clear his name as nothing about the informal procedure would be included in his official record. But, then, he lost a chance at a Rhodes Scholarship no doubt because of an anonymous tip-off concerning his ex’s informal, supposedly confidential, complaint. He also lost his post-graduation employment offer because of this same tip-off and has engaged in a relentless reputation re-building campaign ever since.
Fully aware of the injustice of Mr. Witt’s case, and of his efforts to rebuild his name, Yale, the school which caused all this in the first place, hid and avoided every opportunity to defend his good name or to at the very least correct the record. “Yale administrators reached on Monday night, including University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct Chair David Post and University Title IX Coordinator and Deputy Provost Stephanie Spangler, declined to comment at the time. Assistant Dean of Student Affairs Melanie Boyd and Michael Della Rocca, the UWC Chair in 2012, could not be reached for comment. Former dean of Yale College Mary Miller declined to comment.”
This is typical. The school is out to maintain its brand name, not to defend the fact that the respondent’s legal team secured exoneration. Most schools do very little, if anything at all, to protect their falsely accused students. For example, at Wolford, while “hundreds of students at the school heard the false allegations that the Plaintiffs were rapists,” their lawsuit against Wolford now states that none of the students heard they were cleared of wrongdoing or of Doe’s and Roe’s complaints of this treatment. STUDENTS CLEARED of Rape Sue Wofford. Males Claim College is Biased & Failed To Protect Them From False Accusation. May 10, 2019 available at: https://helpsaveoursons.com/students-cleared-of-rape-sue-wofford-males-claim-college-is-biased-failed-to-protect-them-from-false-accusation/
Male respondents of sexual assault have a lot in common with Tom Robinson, the fictional black defendant in To Kill a Mockingbird. Everyone is systemically set against the male respondent. In the student misconduct context, unfortunately, while the school’s Title IX staff simply go out of their way to protect the woman complainant and to keep their jobs (4) all at the expense of the rights and needs of the male respondents (5), the faculty, most often, simply go academic/political and come out against male white privilege and the patriarchy. Faculty’s unusual world—limited to students and to academic colleagues—also distorts their response. It becomes naive and self-reflective. This often fosters faculty’s inability to analyze, inflaming their pre-disposition to judge the male-respondents with bias. The Duke scandal, which destroyed innocent students’ lives (6) cost millions (7) and even got one lawyer disbarred (8) provides a perfect example of out-of-touch faculty continuing to shame the exonerated, compensated, now-famous-for-their-suffering, male respondents:
“Mrs. Dowd, after the rape charges were dropped in December, sent an e-mail message to Houston Baker, a celebrated English professor at Duke who, when the story first broke, condemned rapacious athletes “safe under the cover of silent whiteness” given “license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech and feel proud of themselves in the bargain.” She asked him if he would reconsider his early statements.”…“LIES!” responded Dr. Baker, now a distinguished university professor of English at Vanderbilt. He said she was a “provocateur” who was “trying to get credit for a scummy bunch of white males!” He accused the players of living like “farm animals” and concluded that she should forgive him if she really is “quite sadly, mother of a ‘farm animal.’ ”
Peter Applebome: After Duke Prosecution Began to Collapse, Demonizing Continued, The New York Times, April 15, 2007, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/nyregion/15towns.html
One model to keep in mind in terms of perpetual shaming for being a respondent (even an exonerated respondent) to sexual misconduct while in school is that of the Catholic Church. Of course there are differences. But if even the Catholic Church has been forced to release lists of “credibly accused” abusers who have served in their ranks, using their own criteria for whom to include, it would not be out of the ordinary for the extreme fringes of the anti-male-respondent groups to publish their own database. This has already happened in the context of the Catholic Church. A public interest group lists and publishes all suspected priests (9). To provide an anonymously funded database that lists every known or suspected student respondent to sexual assault who is now at a new campus would not be much different and would guarantee permanent shaming.
In that context every respondent to sexual misconduct, but particularly the men, and even more so the male athletes (10) need to immediately lawyer up. Today’s life on the web means that sexual misconduct does not end. Today’s campus culture pits everyone—activists, complainants, Title IX staff and faculty, against the man trying to clear his name and safeguard his reputation. And this process can and often does get worse the farther along it goes, because people are evil and evil people do not think about the impact of their actions—including continuing shaming on the web.
Raul Jauregui
Jauregui Law Firm
I am an attorney and I defend mostly respondents of sexual misconduct in colleges or universities. This is absolutely not my legal opinion or my legal advice, but rather survey of the Title IX topic. If you’re in this situation, in any way, consult a lawyer now.
As posted in Quora:
ENDNOTES
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_identity
2. See, e.g., “The couple maintained the importance of helping wrongfully convicted individuals and urged those in attendance to create an organization similar to the Innocence Project. Pringle also encouraged people to forgive those that have hurt them, claiming that those individuals did “the best they could at that point in time.” Emily Messer, Exonerated Inmates Speak on the Importance of Forgiveness, The Dickinsonian, September 28, 2016, Available at: https://thedickinsonian.com/news/2016/09/28/exonerated-inmates-speak-on-importance-of-forgiveness/
3. If you really have the time, read this bravura discussion of forgiveness from Hanah Arendt: https://cenlib.m.tau.ac.il/sites/cenlib.tau.ac.il/files/media_server/Wiener/forgiveness_arendt.pdf
4. https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20190905-titleix-pressure-cooker
5. For brief summaries of what is it that male respondents have as rights and count as needs, see, https://www.studentmisconduct.com/news/jauregui-law-office-quora-answer-to-why-is-it-that-men-sue-their-school-under-title-ix-more-often-than-women and see https://www.studentmisconduct.com/news/quora-answer-how-can-you-best-tell-if-a-title-ix-investigation-is-using-techniques-that-are-based-on-science-and-evidence-of-effectiveness
6. ““This woman has destroyed everything I worked for in my life,” said the student who graduated, David F. Evans, 23, of Annapolis, Md. “And, worst of all, she’s split apart a community and a nation on facts that just didn’t happen and a lie that should have never been told.” Duff Wilson, Rape Accusation Has Ruined Lives, Students Say, The New York Times, October 16, 2006 available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/16/sports/sportsspecial1/16duke.html
7. “AIG ended up having to pay part of the multi-million settlements that Duke University paid to the three lacrosse stars who were accused of raping a stripper the team had hired for one of their parties, Crystal Gail Mangum, back in 2006.” Courtney Comstock, AIG Ended Up Having To Pay Millions For The Duke Lacrosse Stripper Lawsuit, Business Insider, February 23, 2011, available at: https://www.businessinsider.com/aig-had-to-pay-for-the-duke-lacrosse-stripper-lawsuit-2011-2
8. “On June 16, 2007, the North Carolina State Bar Disciplinary Committee unanimously voted to disbar Nifong after delivering a guilty verdict to 27 of 32 charges. The committee found Nifong's previous disciplinary record and acknowledgment of his improper pre-trial statements were substantially outweighed by (among other things) the players' vulnerability and his failure to acknowledge the "wrongful nature of (his) conduct with respect of the handling of DNA evidence."
“Committee chair Lane Williamson called the case a "fiasco" and said Nifong's actions involved "dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation." Williamson further stated, "At the time he was facing a primary, and yes, he was politically naive, but we can draw no other conclusion that those initial statements he made were to further his political ambitions." In the end, the panel concluded that "there is no discipline short of disbarment appropriate in this case given the magnitude of the offenses found.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Nifong#Disbarment
9. See, e.g., Propublica’s “Credibly Accused” database available at: https://projects.propublica.org/credibly-accused/?fbclid=IwAR1pAcSB2v482IO1ZNGZqcI4ZeX_dyHXJlNjE4mAJmzbNaefPzb5Rv1Aifs