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The Hunting Ground (2015)
Like, I already know. Like...
I got in. I got in, I got in! Oh, my God! I got in! Okay. - What? Denied? - I got in! Yes! Yes! Boo-yah! Boo-yah! Boo-yah! Yes! "Application status decision made. " I'm sorry, Janelle. Admitted! - Oh, my God! - Yes, yes, yes! Whoo! New students, as I look out on you today, I recognize that you must be feeling incredible excitement, anticipation, and perhaps a little relief as well. This is the day. As your parents learned when they dropped you off today, what happens in college stays in college. Most of the time. Few things are more worthy of celebration than the entry of a new class of students into the university. You have strengths and skills and smarts that you don't yet even realize. Our Kansas State University new undergraduate students today are indeed the next generation of leaders on whom we will all rely. Let us, the faculty, know what we can do to help you reach that goal. We will be there to advise you, to support you, to guide you, to point you to vast resources and opportunities on your way. To our new treasured students, this is your moment. Ah. You see? Ah... Does it get any higher? Ha-ha! Growing up in inner-city Miami, people like me don't really go anywhere. My dad came over from Cuba, and then my mom is second generation Cuban-American. I really wanted to get out of Miami and do something different. I'm the first person of my family to ever leave the state and go to college. I was actually valedictorian in high school. One of my favorite trips was coming to D.C. when I was eight, and I cried when I saw the Declaration of Independence. I've always been really fascinated with the law and politics and just, like, our country's history. And I knew I wanted to go to a school that had that history. And UNC was the first public school, and they had so much in its history, you know, of activism and social justice, and I just knew I belonged. I grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, kind of in suburbia. High school I actually had a great time in. I was athletic. I played a lot of sports. I was the first female in my class to letter. I lettered in cross country. And then I played soccer. I was basically a straight-A student, graduated third in my class. For college, I thought I would go somewhere in state, and UNC was the best school. I really had a good time there. I learned a lot. I loved my professors. The first few weeks, I made some of my best friends, and we're still really, really close to this day. But two of us were sexually assaulted before classes had even started. It was at night. We were dancing. I was out with some friends. People were drinking, but nobody was ridiculously drunk. And I got pulled outside and banged my head against a wall and was raped. I physically fought and got away and ran, and then went to the bathroom and, like, I still remember just putting my hands on the sink and just looking at myself in the mirror, shaking, like, "What just happened?" My sophomore year, right after spring break, a really good friend of mine said, "Hey, you wanna go to this party?" And it was pretty late in the night. I started dancing with this guy. He was really attractive and a really, really great dancer and just a really good person. At least, I thought he was. It all happened really quickly. I was actually a virgin, so that adds a bit to it, but he just started kind of, like, pulling me towards the bathroom. He grabbed my head by the side of my ear and slammed it against the bathroom tile. And it didn't stop. I couldn't move. I could hear the laughter outside the door. I could hear people dancing. And it made me wonder, why does nobody see me? Why has nobody come to the bathroom? Why am I not screaming? When you're scared, when you don't know what's happening to you, you just stay there, and you hope that you don't die. And that's what I was hoping, that I had more than just 20 years to live. We've known for probably 25 years now that the problem of sexual assault on college campuses is enormous. On college campuses, it is not the person jumping out of the bushes or in the parking lot, who is going to rape or sexually assault you. It is the person whom you know, the person you may have classes with, the person you see at a party. You think about... It's, you know, it's the people we don't know that we should be worried about, but it's really the people that you do know that you should be worried about. But I think a lot of parents think, "Well, we'll drop our daughter off, she'll have a great college experience, and everything will be fine because the college has a reputation for being a safe place. " Um... it's not. I learned later on that I wasn't the only one who was raped that weekend. But at the time, we didn't talk about it because it was something that nobody talked about. Rape's a scary word. You don't wanna fall into a category. You don't wanna be called the victim. I did not want to admit that it happened to me. I didn't tell anybody for a really long time. I went to classes, um... did everything kind of normally, and it was just... something in the back of my mind, and it really started to affect me. And I was like, "I need to do something about this. " And it actually wasn't until one of my other friends came to me and said, "I was assaulted at a fraternity. How do I report?" And I said, "Actually, I don't know. " And I disclosed to her that I was assaulted as well, and we sat down and just pulled up Google and started looking up how to report at UNC. I knew I was more comfortable reporting than she was. So I said, "Okay, I'm gonna go report and then I'll figure out how to do it, and then I'll tell you, and then you can do it too. " So I told this administrator I was violently raped, and we're sitting down at this point, and she looks at me and she's like, "Rape is like a football game, Annie, and if you look back on the game, what would you do differently in that situation?" I was expecting resources. I was expecting support. And instead she gives me this metaphor that rape is football. And it made no sense. And I ask her... I was just, "No, rape is not like football at all!" And she's like, "Well, you know, were you drunk?" And, "What would you have done differently if you could replay the situation again?" And I was just getting blamed and blamed and blamed for this. They kept asking me, like, "What were you wearing? What were you drinking? How much did you have to drink? Did you pregame?" He kind of just lectured us about how we shouldn't go out in short skirts. And we shouldn't drink because, I mean, that's our fault. "Did you say no? How many times did you say no? How did you say it? Okay, what were you wearing?" There was no response. There was no response for seven months. I thought that if I told them, like, they would take action. But the only action they took was against me. After I was sexually assaulted, they said I should just drop out until everything blows over. Out of school. I went back into her office, and I asked her what happened. She looked me right in the eye and told me that she forgot. The school's response always seemed like they were more concerned about him and his needs. She said, "You don't know what he's going through right now and neither do I. He could be really having a hard time. " They also told me, despite the fact that I had a written admission of guilt from him, that I didn't have enough evidence and that, in fact, what I'd presented to them, um, could only prove that he loved me. There's a lot of victim blaming with this crime, which has a silencing effect on survivors. If a student comes to an administrator with a problem, it's not as if the administrator wants that student to be harmed. It's not as if the administrator wants the harm to be perpetuated, but their first job is to protect the institution from harm, not the student from harm. What you do is you make it difficult for students to report, so you don't have 200 or a thousand reported assaults, or whatever the number would be on that campus. So you can artificially keep your numbers low. One really easy way, when a lot of students report, they very much discourage them from going to the police. And that's because if it goes to the police, then it's more likely to end up as a public record. Colleges have been mandated for a long time to report the crimes that occur on campus to the federal government. But it is in the interest of the college to actually suppress all knowledge that that rape has happened. There is a desire to have this addressed internally. And part of that is silencing the kind of problem. It's viewed as a public relations management kind of a problem, I would say. Universities are protecting a brand. They're selling a product. I got a call from the Dean of Admissions first, asking, you know, "If you were to get into Harvard, would you accept?" And I said yes because I knew my mom would kill me if I said anything else. But... I had mentioned a little pressure. Just a little. You know, I saw it as a great opportunity. You know, a Harvard Law degree. Wow. I saw the inside of a court room during my second year of law school. It was insanely stressful, but also super rewarding. So, yeah, I really loved my second year there. It was during the winter term of my third year. I knew him really well. We'd met a couple of years earlier. The guy and my girlfriend who was over, we all met at my apartment to have some drinks beforehand, and then we went out to this bar. He continued to buy us both more drinks. Half an hour into it, I noticed my girlfriend seemed wasted. People started to comment on how drunk my friend seemed. Almost instantly after we got into the taxi, I just felt this extremely heavy feeling come over me. My friend, she was just kind of passed out completely. It was, like, a maybe ten-minute ride back to my place. Me and my girlfriend kind of just flopped down, face first on my bed. The next thing I remember, he, um, was on top of me, and he had a hand inside of my underwear, and he was trying to put a finger inside of me. I yanked him by the hair, and I looked over, and I just saw her naked back, and I know that she'd fallen asleep with all of her clothes on. And so my next question was, "Why is she naked?" Um... And he smiled as he was still on top of me, fondling me with one hand, and he reached out and pet her naked belly and said, "I did that. I undressed her. " And I asked, you know, "And you took off her bra?" Then, um, he... he touched her naked breast, while she was still totally unconscious, and said, "Yeah, I did that too. " And the next day he texted me. And I said something very casually like, "Am I gonna have to tell her that she needs a pregnancy test?" And he said in the text message, "No, we didn't do anything serious. Maybe I put a finger in her V at most. " It seemed pretty clear that he had assaulted both of them while they were unconscious. I absolutely presumed that Harvard would do right by Kamilah. I went to the Dean of Students' office, and she said, "I just want to make sure, above all else, that you don't talk to anyone about this. It could be bad for everyone if people started rallying around, like, having him removed from campus. " And I was like, "Well, he's a predator, and he's dangerous and actually that's exactly what I want. " We both had the right to legal representation. My lawyer was pro bono. She was a phenomenal client. She really told her story with a great deal of confidence. I went into the hearing, and even the professors were like, did I give him the wrong message with our friendship, and that he misunderstood our friendship. My response was like, "No, because, you know, sex was never part of that friendship. And if it were ever going to be introduced, when I was awake would be a good time for that. " I'm getting questions like, "Why didn't you fight him?" And he's like, I think, like 6' 3", over 200 pounds. I was unconscious or just coming to. I, like, could barely take control of my own body. But, "Why didn't you fight him?" There was this extreme reluctance to believe me. Campus administrators are overly concerned about false reporting. You look at statistics on false reporting. It's much, much smaller than what people estimate it to be. The data about false rape claims is that they're a tiny minority of all reports ever made. Rape and sexual assault have the same percentage of false reports that any other crime has in our country. The best research from around the world would put the percentage of false reports somewhere between two and eight percent. Which means 90 percent, but more likely 95 to 98 percent of reports, are not false. We got done with the hearing probably at 4:30 or 5:00. And they came back very quickly. They'd found that he had assaulted me. When we got the call that he was expelled, she was in utter disbelief. And that doesn't come very often with these college cases. The next September, I came back to Cambridge, and I got a Facebook message from the Dean of Students. She said that the assailant, he could appeal the ad board's decision, and they voted again on whether to uphold the decision to remove him and decided to let him back in. The message is clear. It's, "Don't proceed through these disciplinary hearings. No matter what you do, you're not gonna win. " I was like, well, you know what? I'm okay, and I've never had anything happen to me and I'm fine. I'm gonna get through this. But I started feeling different. Not only was my mind in a place of turmoil, my body was as well. I had nightmares that were so vivid that I would wake up and my neck was bleeding of how much I was scratching off that invisible rapist on my neck again. So finally, when it became very overwhelming, I knew that I couldn't keep denying it anymore. So actually the first person I told was Annie Clark. She was a senior when I was a first year. I kind of Facebooked her, and I said, you know, "Can I talk to you about something?" Hey, it's Annie. Yeah, how are you doing? - I mean, we just hit it off. - Oh, my gosh. She, till this day, has been my greatest support system. Are you in a place... Do you feel comfortable talking about it, or...? After I spoke to Annie, I came out publicly to the entire campus in October of my sophomore year with a project called The Courage Project, which was a photo project of survivors on campus. As I became more public, I became kind of that gateway for people to actually start talking about what had happened to them. Within four weeks, I met nine rape survivors at UNC. My school needed to know this was a problem, and I thought that they honestly just didn't know. I made meetings with the Vice Chancellor, and I made meetings with the Dean of Students, and they were passed off and ignored and delayed. And I kept saying, "UNC has a problem with sexual assault. " I had the same meeting with the Chancellor four years ago, and it's like, as soon as there's a new cycle of students, there's no institutional memory, and the problem starts all over again. And so unless you have... To see it happen with my friends going through the same thing I experienced six years ago, it's heartbreaking. And it's... That has affected me more than my own rape. People stop talking about it, and then it just continues and it makes you wonder, what is it gonna take? And we started working with Dean Melinda Manning, who was somebody who a lot of survivors have worked with and trusted. So in your time at UNC, how many students came to you and said they'd been assaulted? Um... yeah, it's hard to put a number on it, so... At least 100. And of the hundred, how many of the perpetrators were removed from campus? From what I remember, no one was expelled during that time. So these guys could just get away with it? Absolutely. Absolutely. And people could commit it repeatedly. I was certainly aware of some individuals who had committed it repeatedly. A survivor at Occidental College contacted me. I noticed that her rapist's name matched the name of two other cases. So, she was the third student to be raped by this student. And the most troubling aspect of this case is that he was allowed back, or is allowed to come back onto campus. I thought it was only one, but now I know there's two other women. And who knows who else who just wasn't able to step forward. It seemed like prime hunting ground for someone like him. My assailant, he's done much worse to other people. He has assaulted at least four different women. That's just who I know of. About two weeks after I reported, I got a call from the detective, saying that they found two other girls that he had previously raped. And they were both University of Tulsa students, and they had both reported to the school. The vast majority of men don't rape, won't rape, haven't raped, so when you start looking at the rapists who are committing these crimes, it is the repeat offenders who are the core of this problem. I was incarcerated for six and a half years for sexual assault. I... I know I was at fault. You know, like I said, I guess the reason I really wanted to do this interview was to maybe help someone else out. You know, maybe have them become aware of, you know, what they're doin' wrong. The really practiced sex offenders identify groups of people who are more vulnerable. College is a place where lots of alcohol's consumed, and the number of victims is endless. These men select victims ahead of time. It could be a bar. It could be a fraternity party where people are drinking. At the parties, like, frat parties, I mean, people are getting wasted. So it's not like... A lot of the time, dependin' on who they're with, nobody, um, keeps an eye on them. The alcohol is essentially a weapon that is used to render somebody extremely vulnerable. Alcohol definitely makes it easier to overpower a victim. If they're inebriated or under the influence, less struggle, for sure. And then there's an isolation phase. So, you know, somebody who has deliberately gotten this young woman extremely intoxicated, and at some point he says to her, "I'll walk you back to your room. " or, "You can sleep it off if you want. We have a bed upstairs. " And that's where the assault occurs. A lot of people say, "Why don't they just have students go to the police?" I have a lot of good friends who are police officers, and I love them dearly, but they have some work to do. Even if law enforcement does do a good job, a lot of district attorneys don't wanna take these cases. And even if there is a prosecution, it takes a long time. It takes a year, two years. In the meantime, that alleged perpetrator could do it again and again and again. So universities, if they have good evidence that somebody is perpetrating that crime on that campus, they should remove them to protect their other students, with or without the police. No more violence! No more rape! No more silence! No more hate! What we're seeing today has been going on for a very long time on college campuses. Sexual violence has always been part of the college experience. Here at Brown University, names of men accused of rape appeared on bathroom walls all over the campus. The administration called the tactic vigilantism. One student had a word for the women who did it: Idiots. I have a lot of friends on the list, and by no means are they rapists. They might be aggressive at parties, flirtatious. And if girls carry a grudge, they call 'em rapists. And to be saying that just because a woman says no and because you have sex, those are the two facts. The woman said no and you had sex. Then are you a rapist automatically because of that? A national study says one out of every four female college students will be the victim of a rape or attempted sexual assault. The first national study was done... published in 1987. Mary Koss's survey of colleges around the country. And those numbers have been replicated over and over again. Good evening. As troubling as your statistics, are charges that this date or acquaintance rape is being hidden by universities and colleges in order to protect their image among prospective students and their families. We had been trying to change the university for years, and nothing was getting any better. And so we started looking to do something to force them or shame them into doing the right thing. We started digging and doing months and months of research on sexual harassment law, on rape statutes. And then I read about Title IX. Title IX is a gender equity law. And it guarantees anyone the right to an equal education. When perpetrators are allowed to remain on campus, and schools don't expel them, even when they're found responsible, then they're in violation of Title IX for contributing to a hostile environment. If a school is found in violation of Title IX, the government has the power to revoke all federal funds, which would hopefully force a school to be in compliance. Title IX and the pending Campus Save Act and now this law? Like, what? And so, we decided to file a Title IX complaint. You basically write to the Department of Education, and you not only explain what happened to you, but you also explain how it's a violation of Title IX. So it is Thursday night, and instead of going out, we are in, learning case law until we know Title IX and the case law like the back of our hands. I had earbuds in. If I was walking, if I was, you know, going on a run or whatever, instead of music there were Supreme Court cases. I read all the case law on all existing Title IX cases. Like, we're sleeping in shifts. I would write for three hours and then sleep for three hours, and she would do the same. And I learned that you don't have to be a lawyer to file it, that you could be 20 and take on a 200-year-old university. We didn't know how to file. So we faxed it, we emailed it, and we mailed it. We didn't know what to expect, and so I go into my university mail office one day, and I have this big envelope from the Department of Education, and I'm just, like, freaking out. I'm, like, crying, I'm calling Drea, Melinda. I'm just like, "They took our case. They took our case. " Flat out denial. Leaders at UNC say accusations that the university underreported sexual assault cases is false. UNC Chapel Hill General Council Leslie Strohm pointed out what a false claim can do to a university's reputation. The allegations are false. They are untrue. And they are just plain wrong. "False. Untrue. And just plain wrong. " That resonates in my head. I hear that when I sleep. To say, "None of this happened. We're not underreporting. We didn't mess up," it's just betrayal. Schools are actively and aggressively not wanting to tell the truth about what's going on on their campuses because the first campuses to do so will be, you know, kind of known as the rape campuses, where they actually have a rape problem. But, you know, rape is happening at all college campuses, and there are perverse economic and reputational incentives to hide those numbers. I analogize it to getting a letter. So you're a parent, and you get a letter in the middle of the summer, and it says, "Dear Mr. and Mrs. Schultz, we're so happy that Johnny is going to be a freshman, and we thought we might need to let you know that there's a one-in-four or five chance that while Johnny's here, he's going to be the victim of a drive-by shooting. What's so vexing about this problem is that the shooters are other students. Thank you so much for your tuition money. We so look forward to welcoming Johnny in the fall. " Would any parent send his or her child there? They protect perpetrators, I think, across the board because they have a financial incentive to do so. Perpetrators who are found responsible for rape are much more likely to sue institutions than survivors are, and institutions like to avoid lawsuits. And so in an effort to avoid lawsuits, they pretty much do whatever they can to give them a slap on the wrist. What to expect if you are accused of a sexual assault. If you are found responsible, you may be... suspended for one semester... suspended over summer vacation... suspended for one day... given a $75 fine... given a $25 fine... given a warning... assigned a paper to reflect on your experience... required to construct a poster board, listing ten ways to approach a girl you like... assigned 50 hours of community service at a rape crisis center. Any allegation of sexual assault is something that we at the university take very seriously. ASU issued a statement saying in part, "Arizona State University takes all sexual misconduct complaints very seriously. " The university says it's taking these allegations very seriously. We take all incidents very seriously. We take these accusations very seriously. We take reports like this very seriously. They take all reports very seriously. James Madison University takes the safety and well-being of our students very seriously. So... So what's the punishment? All three students responsible for sexual assault and harassment, expelled upon graduation. Yes! Justice! Unbe... Wait a minute. Expelled upon graduation? Isn't that... graduation? We will strive to build a community where education, inquiry, and faith combine to respond to the demands of justice. This is our goal, that no one ever say that we dreamed too small. My career in law enforcement started in 1969 from the South Bend Police Department and then went to the University of Notre Dame Police Department. University students are... they're just wonderful kids. But there's... just like anywhere, there's a percentage of, um, of... absolutely horrible people, too. You know. And, of course, I had to deal with that too. Saint Mary's is the sister school to Notre Dame. It's one of the best Catholic all-women's colleges in the nation, and I was proud to go there. I was really happy. I was part of Campus Ministries. I decided to be a biology major. I had a dream of going to medical school. Compared to my sister, I'm more of a book person, and she kinda always made fun of me 'cause I liked to stay in on the weekends, and she'd kinda say I was a party pooper and want me to come out and stuff. And I did go out. And it was fun. It was Halloween. A call came in on my phone. It was from someone I knew who went to Notre Dame. He's like, "You have to come to a Halloween party. " You know, I trust people. I trusted what he said. So, you know, I just went along with it. We got to his dorm. You know, I asked him, "Well, where is everyone else?" And he's like, "Oh, they're coming. " And eventually his friends left, and it was just me and him. And that's when it happened. She, of course, said, "No. " You know, tryin' to keep him from doin' what he was doin'. And then he eventually just forced her and... and raped her. Lieutenant Cottrell interviewed all the people that, you know, I had known that were involved. In my opinion, I had a conspiracy of not only the suspect that was involved in... in raping the victim, but I also had friends of his that helped convince her that there was a party that she was going to. The university had their judicial hearing. I had this idealistic view that if I was telling the truth that they would support me. And, um... they didn't. They preferred to have the crime stats as low as possible, so that, you know, it doesn't detract from applicants to the university. I met with the president of Saint Mary's, Dr. Mooney. Hello, I'm Carol Ann Mooney, President of Saint Mary's College. Saint Mary's must always be committed to providing our students with an excellent intellectual and academic experience. She kind of blew it off and didn't take it seriously, you know. She said, "Well, these things don't happen here. " It got worse and worse for me as the years went along. Um... not only dealing with what happened to the victim, but also dealing with what the university did. My bosses were saying that they had empathy for victims of crimes, but it was like I told them, that... that "Talk is cheap. And that's all it is with you guys is talk. You don't really support victims of crimes. I do. And I can't work for you any longer. " I didn't really talk about it. I kinda just... stayed in my room for a couple months until Christmas. And I didn't sleep. My nights and days were mixed up. Um... I had to, um... couldn't go to class, and so I cut down. I just completely changed as a person. I think the biggest reason why it's so hard to be on a college campus after you've been raped or sexually assaulted is that it's a small place, right, where everything is structured. Your living space is structured, your eating space is structured, so you're gonna run into your rapist. I couldn't go out. Like, I couldn't mingle with strangers. I felt the campus getting smaller and smaller to me. There were less and less places I felt comfortable going. I walk around with my pepper spray on my keys, and I'm always just on edge. There's a whole physiological side to PTSD. When you experience a traumatic event like this, your nervous system, um, tends to get very reactive. I started having more panic attacks. When I was in my depressed state, I just slept all day long. I couldn't stop crying. I couldn't stop thinking about it. I self-harmed. During the vacation between, I guess, semester one and semester two, I tried to kill myself. I had a lot of, I mean, of course, depression, suicidal thoughts. Trey Malone took his own life last June. In his suicide note, Malone wrote about being sexually abused while a student at Amherst College and the school's lack of response. Men are sexually assaulted. And typically that is perpetrated by other men. And I think for a lot of male survivors who are sexually assaulted, it challenges many beliefs that they have about themselves. Men aren't supposed to become vulnerable. They always say, "You allowed yourself to do it. Why did you do it? Why didn't you fight them off?" Men have to be strong, and men wouldn't let this happen to them. Because of the emphasis there is on it being a crime against females, men feel less comfortable coming forward with it. Reporting rates amongst men are just so infinitesimal that it actually makes it very hard to do research on this, let alone to get a real understanding of the scope of the problem. You are built from the ground as a Tar Heel... as a member of a community that is so much bigger than you. I was directly going against it. Tonight the U.S. Department of Education has launched its own investigation into how UNC Chapel Hill has been handling sexual assault cases on campus. It wasn't until we filed the complaint that the retaliation started. And it's been bad. I've gotten death threats, I've gotten rape threats. Of course, Internet trolls are always there. But I had one in-person threat, which was kind of scary. Um... "Bang-bang, bitch. Die. " My residence hall was broken into, and it was completely vandalized. Spray paint everywhere, a knife was left behind. And messages were painted all over. I felt like I was in danger all the time, and that's what I thought of when I went to classes. I went, you know, from being valedictorian in high school and then, you know, struggling to finish my classes. And not knowing how to tell my parents, which I never did. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like when your parents found out? - They still don't know. - They still don't know. Yeah. Um... I thought about telling them many, many times. And I didn't tell my parents until a couple days later, which was probably, like, the hardest thing I've ever had to do, ever. Um... - Now I'm gonna start crying. - It's okay, you can cry. - You don't have to hold it in. - Like, I remember Skyping my dad... What worries you about telling them? The conversation afterwards. I worry that they'd look at me differently. I'm worried that they'd want to talk about it again. And just the fact that they would know. That it would just be there in their minds when they looked at me. Just to hear my mom's voice on the phone, her feeling so helpless in that moment, is probably one of the worst aspects of this entire ordeal, which probably makes me the most angry at my assailant. My mom was on the plane the next day after I told her. My dad, he wears his Notre Dame ring every day. I've never seen him take it off, and he didn't... he wasn't wearing it anymore. His finger that has a permanent mark from his ring didn't have his ring on. And it just... It was even more heartbreaking for me to watch my dad. I call her from a thousand miles away and tell her this. And I just wanted her to be there. Lizzy always had this big, beautiful, radiant smile. It was electric, and it... it... it made other people happy. We had 11 family members attend Notre Dame and two family members, including Lizzy, that went to Saint Mary's. And she, I think, really felt affirmed that this was the right choice. She was really, really happy to be there. And a little bit of chicken fry She went over on August 31st with a friend to attend an activities fair at Notre Dame, and that evening they went back to, um, this football player's room. It was four of 'em in there. The football player and his friend and Lizzy and her friend. And... And, um... I guess, rather suddenly, the... the... the other two left the room and left Lizzy alone with this football player. And then he basically jumps her. He pulls her on top of him and... and removes her shirt, um, and bra, and then also begins to try to take off her pants. And the next day Lizzy reports. It never crossed our mind that they wouldn't do right. The accused, they couldn't find him. They had difficulty locating him. Everyone knows where this individual is. Certainly the athletic department knows. He played two home football games before he was interviewed. Notre Dame stadium holds 80,000 people, so that's times two, 160,000 people knew where this guy was before the Notre Dame Security Police could find him. There was a directive that the campus police cannot contact an athlete at any athletic facility... and we cannot contact any athletic employee to assist us in contacting the athlete that we would be looking for. So what was the point of that? I guess just to... keep us away from student athletes. So Lizzy ends this exchange of intimidating texts from the football player's friend, and he comes at her with a text, "Don't do anything you would regret. Messing with Notre Dame football is a bad idea. " And then Lizzy takes that message and immediately forwards it to the detective in charge. And later the county prosecutor said that they would not be filing any charges on that particular complaint and saying that it wasn't a threat because the individual who sent it believed he was trying to prevent someone from filing a false report. She was becoming very anxious about this... this whole situation. One of her friends is quoted as saying that she said, you know, "He's gonna get away with it. " He denied everything, and made comments like, "She was the aggressor. " Friday evening, I finally looked at my phone, and I saw a text from my wife's best friend, saying, "You need to call right away. " And... And I remember the words in it was, uh, "It's bad. It's bad. Lizzy took her life today. She's gone. " You know, it's... brutal. It's just really profoundly sad in those moments when you just think, she's not here with us. Is it just students? Is it everybody? So I'm in Oregon. 'Drea ends up moving to Oregon and taking the semester off. Every place I've separated with a semicolon is a different... She and I started talking. We're like, "Okay, we're gonna keep doing this. Don't know how we're gonna fund it, but we're gonna do something. " We called everybody. Most people totally laughed it off. Just looking at rape reporting in general, it's really low... But one of the people who we had reached out to about the UNC case was at The New York Times. And he's like, "Oh, that's interesting. " It ended up becoming a front page New York Times story. That's when we got a flood of emails, Facebook, tweets. Like, somebody tweeted at me, "Me too. It happened to me too. " This is Annie. And Andrea's here with me. Do you see a button in the middle of your screen? It says "start video. " - Yay! - Oh, look at that. It was my freshman year. I'd been at school for a couple of weeks. I'd made friends in some frat houses. People reached out through all these different mediums. A lot of Facebook. A lot of emails. "I froze and couldn't fight back. " "I don't know if it's appropriate to have told this story to you without asking, and I'm sorry if it's been harmful to you in any way, but it needs to stop. " Wow. I remember I was in one meeting after some story broke, and I had 50 calls in an hour. I had 50 calls. I've never heard of a case that has gone - in, like, the survivor's favor. - I mean, he admitted it. He admitted to sexual assault and got an eight-week suspension. Mm-hmm. The Dean of Students accused me of being drunk and told me that I had, like, a serious problem. So many of the survivors coming forward were saying, "My rape was bad, but the way I was treated was worse. " I was raped in the Honors Dorm above the department's office. And the department office took my scholarship. It just doesn't... I was up working at four, and then I'd go to work, and then I come back and sometimes there'd be survivors in my apartment that needed to talk. You probably hear stories like this all the time. I know, but it doesn't make it any better. Now I'm realizing, like, how much better I feel from talking about it. You're not alone. You're not alone. And no matter how many awful things... I basically had to make a choice if I wanted to continue to support survivors or have my actual administrative job at a university. I figured I could do more good this way, so I resigned. - On our to-do list, we have Vanderbilt. - Yep. - Um... - UConn. Formalizing a national network - is on our to-do list. - That's pending. I found my paychecks. What Drea and I are looking to see is how do we show that UNC, it's not in isolation? We started seeing, you know, what was happening at campuses across the country. We look at all the cases we've heard, then we make this map, and every time another school called or whatever, we put a dot on the map. I remember talking to Drea, and I'm like, "Why has no one connected the dots before? We have a case at Amherst, Yale, Penn State, Berkeley, Oxy, UNC, and nobody said, 'I think we should connect these dots 'cause there might be something going on here bigger than one problem. " And you see how many people are being impacted by them, and every one of those dots being more than one story. You start to see it as an epidemic. What if we could build a network? What if we could connect our stories? We could actually make campus rape a problem that people cared about. Hi, Sofie! Hello. Hi! Do you wanna see Drea? - Can you see? - Drea! Sofie was one of the first activists who reached out, and she was from Berkeley. There's been an increase in the number of sexual assaults that have happened. She's like, "This is exactly what's happening at Berkeley. I know so many other people that are dealing with this. How can we do what you did?" And so we started working together. - Annie! - Hi! - How are you? - Hi! - Oh! - Hi, how was your trip? - Are you scared of retaliation at all? - Yeah. So far, the students who know have been really, really supportive. I think that once maybe the fraternities find out, then that could be bad. It's called Collegiate ACB, and there are all of these fraternities that post on it about, like, "Oh, who's the most attractive? Which house is the best house?" Or people that say, "I was raped at Sigma Chi last weekend. " Or "I was raped at Teke once. " Why is your name in it? Oh, my God. I don't know. I did not think I was gonna be on this stupid site. Well, also how they spelled your name, though. I know. "Sofiem Karasekem"? - Whatever that means. - They wrote my name... They wrote it in Latin. I don't understand. Probably search it? Interesting. Whoo! The American fraternity industry spans thousands of American colleges, from the most elite, private Ivy League institutions to small regional colleges. We all know about inflicted trauma from hazing. But it's a matter of public record that the second most common type of insurance claim against the fraternity industry is from sexual assault. I don't wanna single out fraternities because it's actually a minority of fraternities, but what you inevitably get are certain fraternities where the sexual assault is really rampant. Within just, say, the last five to ten years, Sigma Alpha Epsilon's had a number of problems. SAE is known at a lot of places as "Sexual Assault Expected. " - Sexual Assault Expected. - Sexual Assault Expected. SAE. Sexual Assault Expected. Is there any, like, parties or places that you've been warned not to go? - Yes, SAE. - Sexual Assault Expected. Sigma Nu. SAE. Deke, at the very top. Those are, like, the main ones, where as a freshman you're told, like, "Don't go there. " There's one fraternity on campus that is called "the date rape frat. " DKE is known as the roofie frat. There is one that was called the rape dungeon. Once you get a group of people like this in that kind of synergistic kind of culture forming, it intensifies this problem. Pledges at a fraternity at Yale surrounded the dorm where many of the freshman girls lived, at night, shouting... "No" means "yes!" "Yes" means "anal!" "No" means "yes!" "Yes" means "anal!" I ended up pledging SAE, Sigma Alpha Epsilon. It's one of the largest national fraternities somewhat notorious for its bad reputation. Every Wednesday night we would have what we would call meetings where all the brothers, usually about 70 if all were in attendance, would gather in the basement and begin a highly structured ritual exchanging stories of sexual conquest. If a brother had had anal sex with a woman, that would be mentioned, and that would be a kind of a pat-on-the-back moment. And I think that that's something that the women at Dartmouth who hooked up with the fraternity brothers didn't really know. That guy who tried to sexually assault me at ATO, he was a pledge at the time, right? And so all the pledges had to, like, photograph girls without anything on their tops, right? - What? - Had to photograph shirtless girls. - I hate that. - And so apparently in the basement there were pictures of girls and just, like, their tits. And apparently this kid... this kid who was, like, so pushy with me, he had, like, the most pictures of girls. So when he comes at me, his behavior of being sexually aggressive gets rewarded by his brothers. Fraternities are essentially unregulated bars. And the individuals that are responsible for managing that alcohol are themselves legally incapable of consuming it. Most sororities don't throw parties because you can't have alcohol at all on the premises, even if you're over 21. So if sorority women want to drink or go to a party even, at all, they have to do it at a fraternity where the fraternity brothers control the dispersion of alcohol. Usually the drinks had Everclear in them. What's Everclear? It's a very strong form of alcohol, and I... The reason why they put it in there is because it would get you drunk quickly. The idea would be to get everyone so incredibly intoxicated, you know, blackout drunk, that would increase the chances that people would be getting laid. There was certainly something predatory about it. The fraternity brothers took great pride in having a predator/prey relationship with the women that would come to these parties. - I was at a fraternity party. - I went to a fraternity. I went to a fraternity party at MIT. I'd never really, I guess, been in a situation like that. He came up to me and we started talking. He was just this guy I thought was cute, and then we were just dancing at FIJI. This big frat brother came up to me, and he put his arm around me and he took me away from my friends, but he was really nice. A friend at the time, um, really fed me a lot of drinks. He said, "Why don't we go outside?" He asked if I wanted to go upstairs. - We went upstairs. - And he invited me to go into a room. He took me downstairs to their basement. He pinned me against the wall and took off my clothes and assaulted me. That's when they both assaulted me. I was assaulted by at least two members of their fraternity. It's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get accurate information about whether or not there have been sexual assaults in a particular... particular fraternity house. What you find in many circumstances that universities have created contractual relationships with fraternities that involve them promoting the fraternities, but not then also disclosing the risks that they've had with those fraternities. On the Johns Hopkins University campus today, following allegations of a gang rape at an off-campus fraternity. Students say the university failed to tell students about the investigation. Problem after problem after problem for the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at UNM. And that was before a new claim of rape. Digging for answers after the same Yale frat house has had a whole bunch of problems. I'm telling you, almost every time there's a rape in a fraternity chapter, there's someone at the university, certainly the person who's in the Office of Greek Residence Life, who's paid for by the university, he or she knew that that chapter was likely to have a rape sometime. But they won't tell the young women. Or if they do, there's hell to pay for these college presidents. It happened at Wesleyan. There was a problem fraternity, Beta Theta Pi. The university sent a letter in the spring to all students and all parents. The fraternity went ballistic. The parents of the fraternity brothers went ballistic, and the new class of freshman women came in, and they didn't send the warning to the new class of freshman women. It was Halloween weekend before a girl was violently raped upstairs. Frat house at Wesleyan University is facing a lawsuit by a student who claims she was raped. And this isn't the first time that frat has come under fire. After that rape, a young woman shows up at an emergency room in Middletown, Connecticut. "I was assaulted at Beta Theta Pi. " It's, to me, outrageous the extent that our colleges and universities are complicit in the sexual assault of young women at these fraternity houses. So why don't the schools just disassociate themselves from the fraternities and kick them off campus? Right. Well, the colleges and universities have much more to gain from the fraternities than the fraternities have to gain from the colleges and universities. One out of every eight college students living on campus lives in Greek housing. That's a tremendous amount of housing stock the colleges don't have to pay for, don't have to supervise. You also have to remember you tie alumni to your campus in a very powerful way when you have a fraternity system. Alumni giving is a massive part of your annual giving, and a large part of that is fraternity membership. It's a deeply powerful industry. You start tracing back, and you find out they're pouring money into political campaigns, and they're hugely overrepresented. There's no college or university or type of college or university that's more represented within Congress than the fraternity system itself is. So people are very loath to get involved and very loath to come up against the fraternity system. - Checklist? Phone charger? - Mm-hmm. - Laptop? - Mm-hmm. It's not a coincidence that you can fly to Boston and fly to California and hear the same stories. We started visiting other campuses. We felt that if we created a model for how to file a Title IX complaint, others would do it. These are our two fraternities where a student was sexually assaulted. And it was going there and being walked to the fraternities and being walked to where their assaults had happened. You know, details that were critical for every single case. Weird, right? So, for the email I'm just gonna... So we move forward with this model, saying, "Here's a complaint. Here's how this process works. " My 21st birthday, I was helping students at Swarthmore file a Title IX complaint. So I think I went to Columbia twice before they filed. Just sat with a group of students and talked them through how to file a complaint. If people are going to talk publicly, then it needs to be about their treatment here at Columbia. - Focus on Columbia. - Yeah. We don't have lawyers. You have 18, 19-year-old students who are standing up to their institutions. We are at Amherst and we found a place to stay. Hi, Drea. - Where we sleeping tonight? - Out on the least terrifying parking lot. And we are changing and doing stuff in a Wendy's bathroom. Yay! I found politicizing my own experience to be actually the most helpful step. It's really exciting to actually get to meet the other activists. I had felt so cared for, until I actually needed Yale, at which point I became this, like, administrative matter. The administration kept telling us to "take our foot off the pedal. " - Hi. - Hi. - Nice to meet you. I'm Annie. - I'm Rachel. Nice to meet you. I just decided to take some time off, kind of... I moved here with my sister, and I've been a nanny, - and it's the most amazing thing, so... - That's so cool. Yeah. And, uh, seeing the two little girls that I nanny for, I like... One of the reasons I've wanted to do this is, like, I never want... them to ever have to deal with something like this. So it's really late, and we have a survivor who's cutting, and, um, she doesn't know if she can stop. The worst part for me has been having to relive the experience of everybody else. This vicarious trauma that I couldn't process anymore. It's just not fair. It's really not fair. But it's the only way I get up in the morning. I would've given anything to have had someone who believed me, someone who supported me. - Hi! - Hi! - Hi, I'm Andrea. - I'm Abby. - Nice to meet you, Abby. - Nice to meet you. - Andrea. Nice to meet you. - Hi. Good to meet you. I was raped by a basketball player at the University of Tulsa. And I felt like, because he was an athlete, everyone was acting like he's worth more than I am because he's an athlete. And that's what happens over and over and over again. It's like you need to re-read your mission statement. Are you here to play sports? Or are you here to educate and protect your students? An alleged sexual assault case involving three basketball players. Four former Vanderbilt University football players are charged with rape. Derrick Washington already had a documented history of violence against women at Missouri. It was former Michigan kicker Brendan Gibbons involved in the alleged sexual assault of a woman back in 2009. This is the fifth student athlete to be accused of sexual assault on campus. I really do believe the vast majority of student athletes are worthy of our admiration. I think they're mostly, for the most part, a lot of good people out there who are trying to do the right thing. But when you have 18 to 22-year-old kids who are celebrities, it creates a toxic environment for a lot of bad behavior. When they walk across campus, it's not like any other student walking across campus. There's a multi-billion dollar industry that wraps around these young men, and if you don't think that they're part of a culture of entitlement, just look at the fanfare that's around college football. I grew up in Zephyrhills, Florida. It's a small town, so everybody does know everybody. I've lived there my entire life. I did very well in high school. I graduated with honors. I took a lot of AP and honors classes. When I was younger, a family friend of ours gave me a Florida State cheerleading uniform, and it came with pom-poms. She was the best child any father could have. She was fabulous. Never any problems. Always had a great smile. Just a joy to be around. She kept saying she was going to FSU, going to FSU, and then when she first got there, I knew she made the right choice. My first semester was really... It was a lot of science classes. I was in six classes. I wanted to go to med school. I didn't go out a lot just because I was in a lot of classes. So it was the week before finals, and we drove to Potbelly's, and we were just hanging out. This guy started following me around, and I, like, said to him, "What...? Stop. " You know? "Stop following us. " And a man standing at the bar saw that I was uncomfortable with this guy following me, and so he kind of like, grabbed me and was like, "This is my girlfriend. Leave her alone. " And I was like, "Thank you. " Like, the guy left, and I was just like, "Thank you. " And he's like, "Do you wanna take a shot?" And I said, "Sure. " So I turned around, like, to make sure that this guy was gone, and when I turned back around he handed me a shot. I'm fairly certain that there was something in that drink. As a college student, I had been drunk before, and I had not drank nearly enough to become drunk and incompetent that night. I remember being in a cab, and there were three guys in the cab also. Anyone you ask would tell you, like, I never would go home with a guy, period, and especially not three people that I didn't know. I remember specific things after that. I was in, like, an apartment, and this guy was... sexually assaulting me. He was raping me. He was on top of me, and I couldn't really breathe that much, but I was saying, "Please stop. Stop. " Like, I remember his roommate, or whoever this other guy was, came in and he was saying, "Dude, stop. Like, what are you doing? She's telling you to stop. " Since his door to the bedroom wouldn't lock, he picked me up and he carried me into the bathroom. He said, "The door will lock in here. " He put me on the tile bathroom floor. I was trying to, like, push him off and kick him off, but he was just too big. And I said, "Please stop" multiple times, and I said "no. " Eventually he pushed his hand over my face and, like, pushed my face into the floor. Um... And he just continued to rape me. He finished and then he put my clothes back on, and he said, "You can leave now. " And then he's like, "I'll take you home on my scooter. " I mean... okay. I had no idea where I was. I didn't know how else I was supposed to get home. I wanted to get out of there. This was the worst feeling because I didn't wanna hold onto him, you know? But I was afraid that I was gonna fall off of the scooter. He dropped me off at the intersection where I told him because I didn't want him to know where I lived. I didn't know really what I was supposed to do. I tweeted, "Someone help me. " My friend responded, and she was like, "Well, tell me what happened. " And we decided that we need to call the police. - You said she was raped? - Yeah. - Okay, so she did not know the person. - No. The Florida State University Police took me in the back of a police car to the hospital. I got all of the, um... the blood work and the rape kit and everything. They were watching bruises appear as I was laying in the hospital bed. We got a call about three in the morning. We grabbed some stuff, and we jumped in the car and started heading to FSU as quick as we could. She was laying in the hospital bed, and we each went to one side, and we just held her, and all three of us laid there... sat there, and cried. That's when Investigator Angulo came in. And I told him kind of everything. I'm very pro law enforcement. And Tallahassee PD was there, and we assumed they were taking care of things. I went back in the beginning of January. It was my first class on Tuesday, and I see him walk into the class. And I knew. I was like, "That's him. " They were about to take attendance, and that's what... I needed to stay calm and just kind of wait it out. He was one of the very last names that they called, and, um... my teacher said, "Jameis Winston?" And he raised his hand. I didn't know who he was. The nation's number one high school quarterback, Jameis Winston, won Gatorade State Player of the Year this past season. Jameis, tell me why you chose Florida State. Just because we're trying to build a tradition there, and hopefully we can get a few national championships and hopefully a Heisman Trophy. I notified Investigator Angulo of who it was. I think at that point he knew that he was gonna be the big football star. He said, "This is a huge football town. You really should think long and hard about whether you want to press charges or not. " It didn't make sense to me, really. I... I just thought, like, you know, that's his job. Why isn't he...? Why is he not gonna do it? The hype for Jameis Winston is as much as I've ever seen for a first-year starting quarterback. Winston, Winston! Winston! Into the end zone! Touchdown, Florida State. Sports teams are the business on these campuses. When you build stadiums that cost 200, 300 million dollars, when you build athletic facilities that can get up into that range as well, and then you look at the multibillion dollar television contracts. When you're talking about that kind of money, there's an enormous investment in a student athlete who may be a quarterback on a top 20 team that's pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Nineteen-year-old Winston is on the verge of leading his team to the ultimate victory. Our main goal is to win a national championship. He's had a meteoric rise to fame, becoming the starting quarterback as a freshman. He's a star on the team, and that doesn't mean he's guilty, but the point is you have to treat that person like you would anyone else in these cases, and that didn't happen here. Poised to play in and possibly win the national championship, a frontrunner for the Heisman Trophy award, Florida State quarterback, Jameis Winston, now possibly finds himself in some hot water. Winston is part of an ongoing investigation into a sexual assault complaint filed nearly a year ago, but today was turned over to the state attorney. As soon as I saw this story break, I thought how terribly, terribly unfair it is to this young man. I think it's very, very unfortunate that this young dude with this Magic Johnson caliber smile and a level of production and the things that he has done en route to pursuing a national championship, and the Heisman Trophy, and now it comes out? It just stinks to me. DNA analysis confirmed the DNA provided by Winston matched that sample taken from the accuser. Although he has never spoken directly to cops or prosecutors, Jameis Winston, through his attorneys, maintains his innocence and says any sex was consensual. Jameis Winston! He's into the promised land! Touchdown, FSU! His voice, his way, his team. Our football team kept winning games. We were gonna play in the national championship. All these people were praising him. People were just calling me names; a slut, a whore. I got a tweet from a girl who I didn't know. The tweet was like, "Why would you blame such a good guy for doing this?" People were threatening me, my family. And there was other people that were threatening my sorority, saying, "We're gonna burn down their house. " Jameis Winston will not be charged with the rape that allegedly happened exactly a year ago. Here's prosecutor and FSU alumni Willie Meggs. We've carefully examined all the evidence in this case and have concluded that no charges will be filed against anyone in this case. Do you think Jameis Winston raped that girl? Uh... I think I did not have sufficient evidence to prove that he sexually assaulted her against her will. Uh... I think things that happened there that night were... not good. As FSU fights for the national title, the alleged victim drops out of school. FSU football fans are predictably delighted by this result. Florida State! Whoo! - Jameis Winston. - He's amazing! What a great guy. Jameis Christ. That's it. The justice system was proved right. Right? It worked. Every school in the country that's a big time powerhouse football team has players dealing with this shit. Some girl got jealous and wanted to be like, a part of the scene, you know. She was a liar. Football star, Jameis Winston, Florida State quarterback, had the game of his young life Monday, when he led the Seminoles to the national championship. Sexual assault cases are always tough. Probably the first time someone is apprehended is not the first time that they have... engaged in forceful conduct on someone. I went to see my victim's advocate. And in that meeting, we were just talking. She was like, "We just wanna let you know, like, there's another victim from him. " It's my pleasure to announce the 2013 Heisman Memorial Trophy winner. Jameis Winston, Florida State University! Is it hard for you to believe that this all has happened? I kinda just wanna know, like... why me? It doesn't really make sense. He won the Heisman Trophy, and the sad thing about that is that the world of college football didn't hold him accountable for the kind of person that he is off the field. The system is based largely on money. And it's not just revenue in terms of TV revenue, but it's also revenue in terms of alumni and trustees. We need to remember where the power really lies on these campuses. Presidents hire athletic directors. Athletic directors hire coaches. Coaches then receive salaries that are higher than the president. - Tell me your title. - President of Florida State University. Wow! So you've got to be the happiest man on earth. You know what? I think it's hard to find a happier person. No doubt about it. These cases are nightmares for college presidents. This is college presidents who hold their nose and cover their ears because they know that this is part of what comes with the big business of college sports. There is a great fear among many presidents of alienating important influential people. What's the number one responsibility of a college president? Fundraising. One hundred million dollars to UC San Diego, the second largest gift in the school's history. Two hundred million dollars. That's the gift University of Michigan alum Stephen Ross has given to the school. Harvard University has received the largest donation in the school's history, 350 million dollars. Good lord, that's a lot of money. Colleges are big business. They have boards that are trying to maintain their endowments, and they don't want anything that's going to touch that. This is about millions and billions of dollars being spent every year to keep this institution running. Harvard is in the midst of a six billion dollar capital campaign. Donors might be troubled if they understood the magnitude of sexual assault on the campus. I think that's part of the effort to silence the problem. Numerous times I was taken aside by a senior tenured female faculty person and told the way to make it at Harvard is by being a dutiful daughter. If you hear it, pretend you didn't. If you see it, you shut up about it. Silence. There's a reason we haven't seen more faculty involved. It does harm your career in ways that you can't even predict. Certainly if you're untenured, but even if you are tenured, it makes it much more difficult to move from one institution to the next if you've been branded an activist or a troublemaker. I've had the honor to work with students who've been asking these kinds of questions for the five years that I've been here. We heard that things were gonna happen, but then there was no conversation about it. And I think there's a huge gap in between that still needs to, A, be bridged, and to be discussed more publicly. I feel like there's this moral high ground in higher education that is just sitting vacant. What I haven't yet seen anywhere, that I'm aware of, is a president who has decided that whatever it takes, it has to be done. And that's what leadership is. ...that we would tolerate for one moment sexual violence and intimidation on our campus. These assumptions are patently false, and such speculations are very, very inappropriate. At the end of the day, I think we share all the same goals, which is to create a safe place where all our students can thrive. Of your 25 possible complainants, how many of them are survivors? Twenty. How many are willing to go public? Um, probably five. So what about just a press conference? Yeah. That, I think could be good. Good morning and thank you for your attendance at this important event. My name is Sofie Karasek, and I'm a third year student here at the University of California Berkeley. My name is Meghan Warner. My name is Iman Stenson. My name is Shannon Thomas, and I'm a proud fourth year, soon to be graduate, of UC Berkeley. I'm a survivor of a sexual assault that occurred less than a year ago. I didn't realize at the time that the nightmare I was in was not limited to the night of the assault. The process that followed is far more upsetting than the assault itself. When I looked at resources from the university online, I saw that most were for the perpetrator, including an info graphic for what to do if you're accused, not what to do if you're a survivor seeking help. She made me feel like what happened to me wasn't real, like it wasn't a big deal, like it was my fault. - My fault. - My fault. Sexual assault at UC Berkley is an epidemic. Several female students say they were sexually assaulted on the University of California campus, but they weren't taken seriously. We were tracking the media frame and how it changed and where it spiked and what articles worked and what didn't. These students who spoke today went from sexual assault victims to survivors and now activists. Their efforts are gaining the attention... We saw what was effective, and that was personal narrative and putting a face and a name to the issues. My name is Carolyn Luby. My name is Alexa Schwartz. My name is Ari Mostov, and I would like to provide you with a more personal account of the kind of abuses that occurred here at the University of Southern California. My name is Hope Brinn. I'm a sophomore at Swarthmore. I was sexually assaulted and stalked by fellow students on this campus. I was raped during my freshman year at Occidental. I wish that I had not been discouraged by a dean from reporting my rape. I'm filing as the lead complainant against the University of Connecticut. - Against UC Berkeley. - Against the institution that I love. Okay, let's go! Seeing students over the last year to two years almost taking control of this... for me it's been a miraculous thing to witness. For my senior thesis, I will be carrying the mattress with me as long as he's still on this campus. Our individual stories are what makes this a story. Here is the experience of 700 survivors, and unless something happens, it's not going to change. There is a revolution happening on campuses across the country, and I'm very hopeful that this really is our watershed moment. We are fed up! - With your university! - Dartmouth has a problem! Dartmouth has a problem! ...of assault and harassment, and today we decide that we will no longer tolerate it. - What do we want?! - A safe campus! - When do we want it?! - Now! We're watching! We're here! We've made ourselves clear! It was happening so quickly. I mean, within a year of our complaint against UNC, the issue had shot to the top of the national agenda. Thank you so much for coming to my office. What else do you think we need to do? Do you wanna run through some of those items on the list that we marked off? Yeah. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, I have my list. The week before my senior finals, I was in D.C. talking to senators. We have seen an inspiring wave of student-led activism and a growing number of students who found the courage to come forward and report attacks. We owe all these brave young people an extraordinary debt of gratitude, but we cannot stop there. I still hear stories from survivors whose experiences reporting to the school sound exactly like mine. Activists all around the country were speaking out on this issue. Stand up for justice. Don't let other students go what I went through. It used to be that the Department of Education didn't release names of who was under investigation, but after pressure from a lot of student activists, they've begun to do that. Fifty-five colleges and universities facing a Title IX sexual abuse investigation. Sixty universities have been put on notice by the Department of Education. More than 70 schools nationwide are now under investigation. We have over 70 that are currently being investigated. When they released that list of schools, that map of where they pinpointed it matched our map. I wanna do a close-up. Okay. Welcome to the 2014 spring commencement at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Here at Notre Dame, we wanna be not just another Harvard or Oxford, but a Bethlehem, a Nazareth, a Calvary, a Cana, the upper room at Pentecost. You know, I'm still practicing my faith. But something I believed in so long and had so much trust in just failed. I have to remind myself that people sin and people aren't good. And so I just have to remind myself that. What do universities owe the future? We owe the future meaning. Universities must nurture the ability to interpret, to make critical judgments, to dare to ask the biggest questions. What is good? What is just? You know, I'll see someone who looks like him on the street, and I don't want to say that I'm afraid of him, but, um, yeah, it's shocking. It was three years ago, and it's, um... it's still right up here. Your reputation is what you have when you come into Florida State. Your character is what you have when you leave Florida State. I know that it was the right thing to do, to come forward. But Investigator Angulo was right whenever he said that I would be driven out of Tallahassee. Andrea Lynn Pino. Yeah, my name's Mike, and my daughter was raped at the University of California Santa Barbara a week and a half ago. After they were done with her, they just dumped her. When she got back from the hospital, she called the school and told them that she wanted to go forward. From there it has been an absolute joke. Nobody up there wants to help us. |
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