MUST Reads

TITLE IX UPDATE: Fake Claims of Rape Due to Trauma Are Under Scrutiny

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TITLE IX UPDATE: Fake Claims of Rape Due to Trauma Are Under Scrutiny

The big news in campus sexual misconduct hearings is that believers in trauma-informed adjudications are on the defensive. What that verbal mouthful means is that apparent weaknesses in a complainant’s case—inarticulateness, contradictions, lying, or being too “frozen’’ or fearful of testifying—must not be automatically taken as evidence that sexual trauma has occurred.

In recent years, the one-sided nature of “trauma-informed” training has formed a noticeable trend in the flood of lawsuits filed by accused students. In a lawsuit against Penn, the court cited the university’s trauma-informed training as a key reason why the complaint survived a motion to dismiss. During the Brown university bench trial, the decisive vote in the adjudication panel testified that she ignored exculpatory text messages because of the training she had received. Ole Miss’ trauma-informed training suggested that an accuser lying could be seen as a sign of the accused student’s guilt. And at Johnson & Wales, the university was so disinclined to make public the contents of its training that it refused a request by the accused student’s lawyer to see it before the hearing.

Amidst this legal backdrop came Emily Yoffe’s blockbuster article in the Atlantic. Published on September 2017, the piece reviewed the dubious science behind the trauma-informed training used at many schools. Yoffe’s conclusion: “The result is not only a system in which some men are wrongly accused and wrongly punished. It is a system vulnerable to substantial backlash. University professors and administrators should understand this. And they, of all people, should identify and call out junk science.”

In a remarkable statement, ATIXA, the Association of Title IX Administrators, an organization that generally defended the Obama administration’s accuser-friendly approach to Title IX adjudications, acknowledged that “Emily Yoffe did not win many friends for her critical piece on the topic but ATIXA believes her points needed to be made.”

mindingthecampus-KC Johnson

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AMERICA’S NEW SEX Bureaucracy: Campus Title IX Tribunals Are “So Unfair As To Be Truly Shocking”

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AMERICA’S NEW SEX Bureaucracy: Campus Title IX Tribunals Are “So Unfair As To Be Truly Shocking”

Four feminist law professors at Harvard Law School have been telling some alarming truths about the tribunals that have been adjudicating collegiate sex for the past five years. Campus Title IX tribunals are “so unfair as to be truly shocking,” Janet Halley, Jeannie Suk Gersen, Elizabeth Bartholet, and Nancy Gertner proclaimed in a jointly authored document titled “Fairness for All Students.”

I recently profiled Gersen and her colleagues in a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education recounting their effort to defend the “most basic principles we teach” against a movement that is working tirelessly to subvert them. It is significant that they speak from within that movement—the feminist movement—not just because this gives them a margin of credibility within a discourse that tends to assign standing on the basis of identity, but also because their intimate knowledge of the antecedent and ongoing struggles within feminism helps them to understand the intellectual roots of what is happening, and where those ideas are taking us.

According to Gersen and Halley, who have extensive experience advising accusers and accused within the system, the tribunals are typically not adjudicating cases that conform either to legal definitions or to common intuitions of what rape and sexual assault entail. “Everyone who works in the Title IX world,” Gersen told me, “if you talk to them about the nature of these factual claims, for the most part we are not talking about accusations of forcible or coercive conduct.”

“To stand up for fair treatment became something considered brave,” Gersen told me. “That was so amazing. People kept saying, ‘This is so brave of you!’ This is what we are trained to do, which is to stand up for fair procedures. It’s the most basic, boring, and vanilla things that lawyers do,” Gersen said. “And yet the idea was, ‘Wow, this is just really sticking your neck out.’ That’s when you knew the political environment had become extreme—when the most banal thing a lawyer says requires courage to say.”… Collectively, they have a stern message about the present course of the movement: As Halley, writing in the Harvard Law Review about a case in which a loud demand for punishment accompanied indifference to the guilt or innocence of the accused put it, “We have to pull back from this brink.”

tabletmag-Wesley Yang

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FALSE ALLEGATIONS of Sexual Misconduct: Basics for Young Men and Their Parents

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FALSE ALLEGATIONS of Sexual Misconduct: Basics for Young Men and Their Parents

The experience of a false accusation can be devastating to young men, especially if they are up against a legal or academic system that views an allegation as proof of guilt.  False allegations can result in everything from expulsion from school, to job loss and legal nightmares– and overwhelming feelings of shame and anger.  Moreover, young men and their families may face loneliness or social isolation due to the real or imagined circumstances that their social circle harbors a misguided premise that believing all women is always helpful…One of the worst parts of a false accusation is that it can upend a young man’s life at the exact point when college and work were supposed to be his focus; and losing focus in these areas at such a critical point in life can have long term consequences on the young man’s mental, social, and economic health if he is unable to regain his focus.

For Young Men: Some days, you may feel profound anger or shame; other days you may feel numb or depleted; and other days you may feel surprisingly normal.  For example, anger is often a natural emotion when we feel our boundaries have been violated or an injustice has occurred, so in the case of a false accusation, you might channel your anger into the action of doing any support work for your own legal or Title IX case if it’s still active; or volunteering for groups that advocate to support victims of false allegations regardless of whether your case is closed.  Intense physical exercise can also be helpful.

Seeing a therapist: I know it is extremely difficult to find an understanding mental health professional in this particular situation. Some victims of false allegations have told me they had to visit up to 15 different therapists to find the right person. Feel free to ask the therapist to share their stance with you on the “believe all women” position that many therapists (and many people in general) seem to embrace. Explain that you are only asking because you feel it is important for you to have a therapist whose belief system does not stipulate that all women must be believed, because this implies that men (including you) must be disbelieved.

For Parents: Parents have a very difficult balance when trying to be supportive without becoming enabling or actually prolonging a young man’s return to a path of strength and independence. While it is essential to be supportive, parents must not become co-dependent or enablers. Parents may want to go to their own therapy as well if they need help learning how to set healthy boundaries and positive expectations for their son.

drchloe.com-Dr. Chloe Carmichael, PhD

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JURY FINDS Boston College Interfered​ in 2012 Hearing, Awards John Doe Damages

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JURY FINDS Boston College Interfered​ in 2012 Hearing, Awards John Doe Damages

The lawsuit brought by a Boston College alumnus against the University for allegedly interfering in his 2012 disciplinary hearing over sexual assault accusations went to jury trial recently. A federal jury ruled in favor of the Boston College alumnus who had sued the University for improper interference in violation of fair process in his 2012 disciplinary hearing on Monday. The jury awarded the alumnus—referred to by the pseudonym “John Doe”—$102,426.50 in damages: $24,819.50 for tuition and fees for the semester he was suspended and $77,607 for one year of lost income as a result of his delayed graduation from BC.

  

The scope of the trial had been limited significantly—per presiding District Court Judge Denise Casper’s instructions, jurors were to consider only whether administrators improperly interfered in the hearings through two key communications, violating the Student Code of Conduct and the implied promise of basic fairness.

In the months leading up to the trial, Casper ruled out the testimony of several witnesses who would have testified about whether BC violated Title IX, the role of the University’s general counsel in the disciplinary process, and Doe’s emotional state around the time of the disciplinary process, as well as in the years that followed. Although the jurors heard testimonies related to Doe’s claim that another student—identified in court as “JK”—committed the alleged sexual assault and the hearing process itself, such information was only used to establish background surrounding the case.  Casper instructed the jury to consider only three questions: whether a contract—both explicit and implicit—existed in the student guide, whether there was a breach of contract, and whether Doe is owed damages.

The jury said that the plaintiff proved by a preponderance of evidence that the Dean of Students office improperly interfered with the hearings in two communications with the head of the board, and therefore breached its contract with Doe to provide basic fairness. The jury also said that Doe proved by a preponderance of evidence that the interference caused the board to find him responsible. The preponderance of evidence standard is based on whether evidence points to at least a 51 percent chance the breach of contract occurred.

Heights magazine bcheights.com/magazine -Martin, Baker, &  Zhang  bcheights– Jack Miller

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THE BROCK Turner Industry Begins. Book Deal For Emily Doe Who Outs Herself.

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THE BROCK Turner Industry Begins. Book Deal For Emily Doe Who Outs Herself.

Excerpts from: Know the Truth: Chanel Miller by Tom Lallas

On September 5, 2019, a feeding frenzy erupted among the mainstream media, bloggers and others when articles were published regarding the imminent release of a new book about Chanel Miller, Know My Name.  Miller, who was an intoxicated twenty-two (22) year old adult college graduate, and not a member of the Stanford community, met Brock Turner, a nineteen (19) year old Stanford freshman, in January 2015, at a Stanford Fraternity party, and the incident that occurred between them led to the prosecution and conviction of Turner for sexual assault, and a six (6) month jail sentence.  Some media reports regarding the incident, criminal charges, trial, sentencing, and jail sentence have been distorted, inaccurate, malevolent, false, and untrue. On the eve of the release of Miller’s book, which will enable Miller to monetize the incident at Turner’s expense, and receive from a publisher what may possibly be a million dollars or more, the familiar admonition of an iconic crime detective television series, Lt. Joe Friday of Dragnet, is instructive: “Just the facts, ma’am”…This report provides facts in the Trial Record not disseminated (widely, or perhaps at all) by the mainstream media demonstrating that Turner was not guilty of criminal conduct in any of his interactions with Miller.

Miller.The Undisputed Truth: Miller concealed from, and did not disclose to Turner, at the KA Party or afterward, that Miller: (i) had a history of serious problems with alcohol; (ii) had a history of blacking out after drinking at parties, and elsewhere; (iii) had blacked out after drinking at parties prior to the KA Party on four (4) or five (5) or more occasions; (iv) consumed four (4) shots of whiskey and a glass of champagne at the Miller residence between 10:00 p.m. and 10:45 p.m. before going to the KA Party while Miller also drank straight vodka at the KA Party and shotgunned beers. Miller’s blackout history was critical information that Miller wrongfully concealed from Turner.  Toxicology evidence confirms that Miller’s blood alcohol content, at the time of the incident, was between 24 and 25%.  Expert testimony established at the Trial that a drinker in a blackout does not know she is in the blackout at that moment, and that a third party, Turner, with the drinker, would have no idea that the drinker is having a blackout…Dr. Kim Fromme is a nationally recognized expert on the effects of alcohol intoxication related to alcohol induced blackouts, sexual risk taking, and driving under the influence. Dr. Fromme described a blackout as a “period of amnesia during drinking in which the person is fully conscious and aware to be able to engage in all kinds of activities – walking, talking, driving a car, dancing, having sex, etc., they’re simply not just forming memories for those events.”

Consensual Sexual Conduct In Plain View by the Basketball Court: Contrary to published reports, when Turner and Miller were making out on the ground, and the incident occurred, they were not “behind a dumpster.”  Instead, they were in plain view next to a concrete basketball court where they were eventually observed by two graduate students…Significantly, Turner’s DNA was not found on Miller’s underwear, but a laboratory examination revealed the presence of the DNA of another person on her underwear, indicating that her underwear retained traces of DNA from an unidentified third party, but not Turner.

Full Article: Know the Truth-Chanel Miller by Tom Lallas 

 

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ANATOMY OF A Blackout. Why Are We Not Talking About The Campus Culture of Blackout Drunk?

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ANATOMY OF A Blackout. Why Are We Not Talking About The Campus Culture of Blackout Drunk?

In the war against campus sexual assault, why are we not talking about drinking? College presidents have long considered alcohol to be one of the biggest problems they face on campus. Alcohol is also involved in a great number of campus sexual assault cases. We find ourselves in a landscape where the key talking points address everything but alcohol. How we raise young boys. How accusers are treated in the media, courts, and interrogation rooms…In October 2013, when Slate contributor Emily Yoffe wrote an essay suggesting that women would lower their chances of being sexually assaulted if they drank less, the blowback was massive. A month later, Southern Methodist University student Kirby Wiley received a similar lashing when she wrote an op-ed for the college paper saying that women put themselves at risk by drinking too much.  Epidemiologist Richard Grucza has tied the rise of women drinking with the rise of women in college—across Western democracies, the more affluent and educated a female, the more likely she is to drink. And yet. High-profile assault cases keep unfolding in the media, many of them under a foggy haze of booze.

…A blackout can mean the total erasure of an entire chunk of time from a person’s memory, an occurrence known as an en bloc blackout. Or they might just forget bits and pieces, in a fragmentary blackout, or a brownout, as some call it. These are more common. Even during a blackout, a drinker’s short-term memory is generally fine. She can carry on a conversation, though, like a human goldfish, she may quickly forget things and repeat herself. It’s episodic memory where alcohol gums up the works. These are the memories of events—what happened, but also where, when, and with whom. Alcohol impairs the encoding of these contextual memories, which happens in the hippocampus. “Your brain is sending information to the hippocampus, and it falls into a void, the hippocampus doesn’t tie it together, or it skips a little bit.”

How quickly one’s blood alcohol content rises is the biggest risk factor for a blackout. That means things that make you drunker faster—drinking liquor or drinking on an empty stomach—make you more likely to black out. You’re also more likely to black out if you’re a woman.

theatlantic-Antamony of Blackout    texasmonthly-The Alcohol Blackout 

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STANFORD. Brock Turner. And The News Black Out.

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STANFORD. Brock Turner. And The News Black Out.

It is my opinion that Brock Turner has been a pawn in a high stakes game for a #MeToo cause, and now it appears for significant monetary motivations as well. I believe it will become clear over the next many months that Brock Turner was wrongly convicted, and that he faced multiple due process injustices from the outset.

I realize these are bold statements to make but I come to these conclusions after:

  1. Researching court documents and reviewing facts,
  2. Following the trail of an endless harassment and mis-information campaign,
  3. Examining what Brock’s attorney did and did not do,
  4. Coming to a realization that the Santa Clara District Attorney’s office appears to be unethical and unprincipled,
  5. Reading about a pre-trial hearing in the judge’s chambers that set limits on what evidence could and couldn’t be heard, and learning how the 13th Motion in Limine took away Brock’s effective defense, to say nothing of the missing evidence, evidence that was withheld until the last minute, the undermining of Brock’s only expert witnesses and other actions and inactions before, during and after the trial.

Some surprising facts regarding Brock Turner, based on the evidence I have seen:

  • Emily Doe never said she was raped and there was no evidence whatsoever of rape. But the DA and prosecutor intentionally kept the rape charges pending for a full nine months, (DNA lab results  were finally disclosed nine months after the samples were collected) until just before the preliminary hearing, so the case could be characterized as a “rape case” and the media taglines ever since could (wrongfully) refer to it as “the Stanford rape case” and Brock as “the Stanford rapist.”
  • Brock’s DNA was not found on Emily Doe’s underwear nor on her.
  • Emily Doe says she has no memory. It increasingly appears she was in what medical authorities call a blackout state, and where a person in a blackout state appears to be functioning perfectly well to third parties (here, to Brock and the others at the party).
  • Legal authorities thought Brock should not have been charged. Having been charged, the legal standard was that he must have known, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Emily Doe was incapacitated. But in a blackout state, there would be no such appearance to Brock, or anyone else for that matter. Brock Turner’s BAC was a .17, twice the legal limit. He himself was near blackout, which raises the question:
  • Why did Turner’s attorney (Armstrong) fail to raise the Voluntary Intoxication Defense?
  • A Stanford law professor has been engaged in an ongoing false information campaign against Brock.
  • Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office distorted the case and may have engaged in other inappropriate actions.
  • There is a Santa Clara news media blackout.

There are two sides to every story. For years the public has only been privy to one side of the story: the accuser’s side. She was Emily Doe, recently revealed to be Chanel Miller as part of Ms. Miller’s pending book tour.  But there were always two people involved, Ms. Miller and Mr. Turner. Why aren’t we privy to Mr. Turner’s story? I think now is the time to take a deep dive into the untold story of a Stanford professor and the professor’s relationship with Ms. Miller and Ms. Miller’s family. And to look into the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office and the DA who wants to be the next State Attorney General.

My deep dive is only the beginning, but the evidence is starting to present a case showing that the Turner family was an unknowing pawn in a tangled political and #MeToo publicity storm, and now a plan to make a lot of money, all of which created a miscarriage of due process and injustice for a young 19-year old, Brock Turner.

In beginning my deep dive to understand,  my journey began by reading the public documents that Santa Clara County Superior Court released. And from there I unearthed a great amount of information that was purposely kept from the public. (Remember the Santa Clara news blackout.) I’ve only begun to piece together the injustices and unimaginable torment that has been following the Turner family since 2015.

But from the documents I am reading, I believe that politics, money, greed, celebrity, book deals, movie deals, victim status, egos, news black outs, and campaign career moves have been at play from the very beginning.  And a student new to Stanford on a scholarship from a middle-income family in Ohio named Brock Turner was a sacrificial lamb. And everyone at Stanford, in the Bay Area and nationwide stood back in silence, even when they knew the truth and the injustices that were taking place.

This is the first post in a series. These are my personal opinions.

-Alice True

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TITLE IX Professionals Warn Colleges To Be Wary of ‘Trauma-Informed’ Ideology

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TITLE IX Professionals Warn Colleges To Be Wary of ‘Trauma-Informed’ Ideology

An organization that represents Title IX officials has a surprising recommendation for its members: Stop relying on unproven scientific claims. The Association of Title IX Administrators issued a position statement last month on “Trauma-Informed Training and the Neurobiology of Trauma,” warning that training for the field is going in an “unhealthy direction.” Many ATIXA members are involved in sexual-misconduct proceedings on college campuses, and their training materials may direct them to show bias in favor of accusers, the statement explains.

Brett Sokolow admitted that “due process was not a top ‘radar screen’” for ATIXA when the organization started in 2011, the same year the Obama administration released its “Dear Colleague” letter on campus sexual-misconduct investigations. ATIXA believed that due process was important but “we assumed members were getting solid due process training content elsewhere.”

While noting its statement could be “controversial,” ATIXA gives credit to journalist Emily Yoffe for sounding the alarm about trauma-informed training in The Atlantic two years ago. She said popular theories about the “neurobiology of trauma” were “junk science,” and while ATIXA doesn’t completely agree with Yoffe, “her points needed to be made.”…The Center for Prosecutor Integrity published a rebuttal written by two behavioral neuroscientists, Sujeeta Bhatt of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and Susan Brandon, formerly of Yale University’s psychology department.

“The impacts of trauma on memories and recall are widely variable,” the rebuttal reads: It is possible for trauma to cause vivid memories, no memories, distorted memories, or incorrect memories…we should avoid the use of information on the neurobiology of trauma also to substitute for showing empathy,” Brandon said. When neurobiology is used to explain inconsistencies and make “victims look more plausible,” she said, it creates another risk of bias: that investigators will expect “victims to exhibit certain symptoms and behaviors.”

thecollegefix-Lexi Lonasa

 

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A CAMPAIGN of Disinformation. Putting it in Perspective. Brock Turner

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A CAMPAIGN of Disinformation. Putting it in Perspective. Brock Turner

There is a critical need for a dialog about campus sex and allegations of sexual assault, including when exacerbated by alcohol. But that dialog needs to include a more careful examination of the issues for everyone involved. For third parties to so viciously wage the type of disinformation campaign that has happened in the Brock Turner case works against such a dialog, and we would urge everyone who is part of the Stanford and Bay Area communities and elsewhere to examine what actually happened, who has been waging this campaign of disinformation and what that should teach all of us going forward.

This summary is a composite of efforts by a number of alumni and other volunteers who had no preconceived notions about the case when we first heard about it. We do not represent Turner or his family or speak on their behalf. We were, however, startled by what seemed to be a concerted and even malicious campaign against Turner as well as the judge in the case, Judge Aaron Persky. That led to our obtaining all fifteen volumes of the trial transcript, many of the trial exhibits and other related materials. The records we obtained are available in the public record and could have been reviewed by media outlets in advance of their publishing the articles that raised our initial concerns. We also made inquiries of people on various sides of the issues concerning campus drinking, Title IX, allegations of sexual assault and proper media practices

Based on our review and as discussed more fully below, we have concluded that the facts do not support a finding of guilty, and Turner is actually innocent as a matter of law. He should never have been prosecuted for let alone convicted of the crimes he was charged with.

The Turner case also is showing a process that is similar to what occurred in the Duke/Lacrosse, University of Virginia/Rolling Stone and Stanford/Joe Lonsdale matters. In the Turner case, the false narrative is being orchestrated by third parties who have done this before, and where their prior campaigns likewise have often proved to be false. Here, the campaign apparently was started before and during the trial and has continued ever since, including against Judge Persky as well as against Turner.

Read the full summary- Putting It in Perspective 

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MOB RULE Can Not Be Allowed To Override the Decisions Of Our Courts

It “got” it. Regardless of the hysteria, the lies, the emotions and the mindless outrage over the lenient Brock Turner sentence, the LA Times recognized that the legacy of Stanford non-lawyer lawprof Michelle Dauber’s war against Judge Aaron Persky would be to strike fear in the hearts of judges should they show more mercy than the mob would allow. The problem is not what happened to Persky. The problem is how his recall will affect all the other California trial judges, some 1,500 of them, who now may be more likely to craft their sentencing decisions to take into account the degree to which an angry public wants the defendant punished.

Being California-centric, it focused only on its own judges. And indeed, the message was heard, loud and clear, throughout California. The idea of recall because a lawful sentence that fell short of the angry women’s demand for retribution would have seemed ridiculous before. That was no longer the case. But as bad as the Persky recall was, as damaging to the fabric of an independent judiciary, to the ability of judges to wield their authority without fear or favor, it wasn’t done yet. He’s off the bench, the recall won, but once the mob cranks up its outrage machine, it’s hard to stop. You can’t reason with the mob. The mob can’t reason with itself. If Persky was evil on the bench, then he’s evil off and must be destroyed. Hear that judges? It’s not just your robe at risk. It’s your life.

The effort to put into words why the removal of Persky as a JV tennis coach is irrational is hard. It’s doubly hard when it’s necessary to do so using language that won’t offend anyone and give rise to responsive cries of misogyny or rape apology. It’s not as if the LA Times can come out and say, openly and clearly, that the Dauber Gang are unhinged and disingenuous, a dangerous group of empowered morons who wield the most potent weapon of the day, accusations, with reckless abandon. And yet, the LA Times took an enormous risk, doing the best they could with the words they’re allowed, to call out the astoundingly crazy extension of guilt from Turner to Persky the judge, to Persky the person, as if Judge Persky would shrug off, or perhaps even enable, some rapist raping with rapey abandon the women on the JV team on the tennis court. It’s nuts. Completely bonkers. Utterly irrational. And the LA Times said so, as much as it could.

blog.simplejustice– Scott Greenfield

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