LAWSUIT: Williams College Suspended Male For Not Dating Girl After Consenting Kiss
Williams College suspended a male student based on his failure to pursue a relationship with a female student after “kissing and touching” her, according to a lawsuit against the private school.
Both the unnamed Hispanic student “John Doe” and his accuser “Sally Smith” are foreign students. She accused him of sexual misconduct not because he acted without her consent, John claims, but because he was “culturally insensitive” after their amorous encounters…John asked for Sally’s permission to kiss her and she agreed. The kissing escalated to “consensual touching” while fully clothed. Two days later she sent him a message saying “I’ve liked you quite a lot” and calling their amorous encounter “amazing.” She apologized for “being so weird and awkward the entire time.” And wrote, “I’ve not been this happy ever since I started college.” But later on…Sally “expressed anger about what she saw as Doe’s cultural insensitivity around their prior interaction” – failing to seek a romantic relationship with her after showing physical affection. And then three months later Sally filed a formal Title IX complaint against John alleging both November and January encounters were nonconsensual.
John claims that he was subject to several disadvantages during the investigation and hearing, including that Williams refused to judge the credibility of Sally and witnesses “face to face.” Sally also physically threatened him but the college did nothing. Williams refused to let John offer evidence that Sally had a history of making “repeated accusations of cultural insensitivity,” casting doubt on her accusations against him.
The three-member panel concluded that John violated Sally’s consent in January but not November. The panel was operating under a set of stereotypical assumptions based on the training they had received, John claims. He submitted a 90-page training manual on adjudicating sexual assault, dating violence, stalking and retaliation cases at Williams. “These training materials contain anti-male bias and encourage panelists to stereotype men as sexually aggressive and more likely to commit sexual assault.” “The training materials include claims about ‘traumatic memory’ suggesting that panel members should ignore inconsistencies in complainants’ accounts,” the suit says. The panel also seems to have invented a provision that isn’t written in the Code of Conduct: that students can’t ask for consent for a particular sexual activity more than once.
John’s life and career path is functionally foreclosed by the finding of nonconsensual sexual contact on his record, he argues. He has already been forced to resign from a “competitive” campus leadership position after others in the organization threatened to remove him. John wasn’t even able to finish his college career at the three schools that “routinely accept Williams students for temporary study.”
The accused student claims breach of contract, breach of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and violation of Title IX.
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