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Males Fight Back Against “Me, Too” Claims


Bobref

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The so-called “Me, Too” movement has resulted in numerous claims of sexual harassment/assault/abuse in a variety of contexts. As has been observed in other threads here, often the mere allegation is enough to trigger serious consequences for the accused. Now, at least in the university context, accused males are fighting back against the process which they view - with some reason - as unfairly slanted against them. 

Recently, the US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit reinstated a case brought by a former Purdue University student against the University that expelled him following such a claim. The Court described the Purdue disciplinary proceeding that resulted in the expulsion as one that “fell short of what even a high school must provide a student facing a days-long suspension.” Ouch!

Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of this case is that the 7th Circuit’s unanimous opinion was written by Judge Amy Coney Barrett, former law professor at Notre Dame and one who is consistently mentioned as on the short list of potential Trump appointees when RBG’s chair on SCOTUS is empty.

https://www.theindianalawyer.com/articles/purdue-ruling-first-in-flood-of-campus-sex-assault-appeals

As the number of lawsuits filed by male college students fighting expulsion for alleged sexual assaults grows, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals has finally weighed in, reviving a case against Purdue University after it found that the Boilermakers’ disciplinary process for determining guilt “fell short of what even a high school must provide a student facing a days-long suspension.”

The case, John Doe v. Purdue University, et al., 17-3565, was brought by a then-freshman at the West Lafayette campus after the university found him guilty of sexually assaulting his former girlfriend and expelled him for one year. Not only did he have to disrupt his education, he also had to resign from the Navy ROTC.

Under the pseudonym John Doe, the student sued Purdue. The Indiana Northern District Court dismissed the case, but the 7th Circuit reversed and remanded, with the unanimous appellate panel concluding Doe had adequately alleged 14th Amendment due process and Title IX violations.

Less than a week after the Purdue ruling was issued, it was cited by at least two other plaintiffs in similar lawsuits against other schools. The unidentified male student in John Doe v. Oberlin College, 19-3342, included it in his brief to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Another John Doe who filed a complaint against Marian University in Wisconsin cited heavily in a court filing to Purdue, calling it a “significant decision regarding Title IX cases.”

KC Johnson, a history professor at Brooklyn College who has extensively studied and written about the rise of Title IX lawsuits against colleges and universities, described Purdue as a “well-written and precise” opinion and believes other federal courts will follow its reasoning.

“My sense is this ruling will be cited in every due process complaint filed by an accused student going forward,” he said.

Biased process?

The Purdue opinion, written by Judge Amy Coney Barrett, faulted the procedure employed by the university to determine whether Doe was guilty of sexual misconduct, as alleged by his ex-girlfriend.

Although Barrett acknowledged the 7th Circuit had to accept Doe’s presentation of this case as accurate, the ruling particularly spotlighted the Advisory Committee on Equity’s decision to accept Jane Doe’s story without ever having her testify or submit a written statement. Instead, a rape counselor relayed the story Jane had told her about the alleged assault by John Doe.

Kealey

The 7th Circuit also noted John Doe’s allegations that the committee did not give him a copy of the investigator’s report prior to the hearing and, during the hearing, two of the three committee members said they had not read it. Also, the committee refused to take testimony from Doe’s roommate, who maintained the accused was with him at the time of the alleged assault.

Purdue’s counsel, William Kealey, partner at Stuart & Branigin LLP in Lafayette, denied the process favored the accuser. As testament of the university’s fairness, he pointed to the seven Title IX lawsuits against Purdue, of which four were filed by plaintiffs “on the complaining side in the underlying matter, while three were respondents.”

He also reiterated that the 7th Circuit only considered Doe’s account of the facts.

“On the question of how Purdue in fact investigated and decided Jane Doe’s allegation and John Doe’s response, the only story that matters is the whole story, which will look much different when Purdue puts its evidence into the public record,” Kealey wrote in an email.

Byler

Doe’s attorney, Philip Byler, senior litigation counsel at Nesenoff & Miltenberg LLP in New York, described Purdue’s procedure as “just awful.” Asserting the university put its finger on the scale in favor of the woman, he said the 7th Circuit agreed by calling for a real hearing and “not a sham one.”

Overall, Byler was pleased with the 7th Circuit’s ruling. He said the opinion will help push back against academic disciplinary procedures by underscoring the need for due process and unbiased sexual assault tribunals.

“The process is hurting people, not protecting people,” he said.

‘Revolutionary’ ruling

Saundra Schuster, attorney and co-founder of the Association of Title IX Administrators, said institutions of higher education are wrestling with how to handle allegations of sexual assault on their campuses.

A letter issued by the U.S. Department of Education in 2001 started the storm, she said. It outlined a formula for how schools could avoid being found deliberately indifferent as they investigated sexual misconduct complaints, but colleges and universities paid no attention.

Things changed in 2011 when the DOE published its “Dear Colleague” letter and the U.S. Department of Justice started filing Title IX actions against colleges and universities. Schools scrambled to stay off the Justice Department’s list, but because the letter was influenced by victims’ advocates, they created systems that found guilt on “pretty skimpy evidence,” Schuster said.

Since then, the accused students, who are predominately men, have filed lawsuits, Schuster said. The 6th Circuit’s opinions have put forth procedures for colleges and universities to follow and the DOE has relaxed some of the provisions in the 2011 letter, but the storm has not abated.

“Today, schools continue to struggle to get it right,” said Schuster, who is also a consultant with The NCHERM Group LLC. “(They struggle) to provide notice, provide appropriate support and provide a process that is fair and nonbiased against any individual.”

Johnson believes through Purdue, the 7th Circuit has contributed important guidance for judicial review of Title IX discrimination claims. The panel rejected the doctrinal tests in Yusuf v. Vassar College, 35 F. 3d, 709, (2nd Cir. 1994), which called for the plaintiff to first show he was innocent and wrongly found to have committed the offense then prove the punishment was based on his gender.

Instead, the appellate court took what Johnson called a “revolutionary” approach to Title IX. He sees the 7th Circuit examining all the evidence holistically to determine if gender bias is plausible.

“It’s a much clearer and really much more intuitive test, but it’s also a much more plaintiff-friendly test,” Johnson said.

The Purdue case has returned to the district court, where it is moving into the discovery phase. Along with reinstating the due process and Title IX claims, the 7th Circuit instructed the lower court to address the issue of having Doe’s record expunged.

Although his one-year suspension is completed, Doe has not re-enrolled in Purdue because, Byler explained, he does not want to return under a cloud. Getting exonerated would allow Doe to return without having to go through the required sensitivity training, and getting an expungement would enable him to try for a Navy career, the attorney said.

However, Kealey pointed out more litigation remains.

“Plaintiffs such as John Doe are arguing what they believe best practices for institutions such as Purdue should be, not what the law specifies today,” he wrote. “While there is a wide spectrum of perspectives and opinions in the media on those practices, in the trial court the focus is limited to the question of compliance with existing law.”•

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https://www.mrctv.org/blog/nyt-corrects-their-kavanaugh-bombshell-after-internet-explodes

The New York Times on Monday issued a “correction” to their earlier reporting alleging that SCOTUS Justice Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted a woman at a college dorm party when some of his buddies “pushed” his genitals into a woman’s hands against her will.

And that “correction” wasn’t exactly a minor one.

The Times updated their piece to include the fact that the alleged victim in the whole incident said she has no memory of the event. Which, of course, seems like a relevant tidbit to have included in the original story – until, of course, you remember that this is the New York Times.

The allegation was supposedly made by a former classmate of Kavanaugh’s, Max Stier, who reportedly told the FBI he saw Kavanaugh expose himself at a frat party in college some 30-odd years ago, according to the Times. While Stier has declined to talk about the incident publicly, two Times reporters got ahold of his testimony from someone else and ran with it as the Gospel truth.

Those same reporters, however, never actually spoke with the woman who was supposedly victimized by Kavanaugh and his friends – a woman who apparently says she doesn’t remember anything of the sort. That pertinent fact that was notably absent from the Times’ original hit piece, which was immediately seized upon by others in the liberal media as well as left-wing lawmakers who used the unsubstantiated claims to demand Kavanaugh's resignation and bolster their own "pro-woman" platforms.

That is, until the Internet learned it was included in the larger tell-all book from which the Times' article was pulled. Amid the resulting firestorm, the Times issued a "correction" to their reporting, adding that their supposed victim may not have actually been a victim at all.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/the-new-york-times-anti-kavanaugh-bombshell-is-actually-a-dud/

If you opened Twitter on Sunday morning, you were likely greeted with the bombshell headline of the top trending news story: “NYT reporters’ book details new sexual assault allegation against Brett Kavanaugh.”

The allegation, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly write in a New York Times story adapted from their forthcoming anti-Kavanaugh book, is this: “We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.”

Wait a second. Who did what to whom?

Kavanaugh’s “friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student”?

Can someone explain the logistics of the allegation here? Was Kavanaugh allegedly walking around naked when his friends pushed him into the female student?

No, if I’m reading Pogrebin and Kelly right, the friends didn’t push Kavanaugh in the back. Rather, the “friends pushed his penis.”

What? How does that happen? Who are the friends? Who is the female student? Were there any witnesses besides Stier?

All that the authors write in the New York Times essay about corroborating the story is this: “Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.)”

So they corroborated the fact that Stier made the allegation to the FBI, but the authors give no indication that they have corroborated any details of the alleged incident.

The book isn’t released until Tuesday, but Mollie Hemingway got a copy, and she writes on Twitter: “The book notes, quietly, that the woman Max Stier named as having been supposedly victimized by Kavanaugh and friends denies any memory of the alleged event.” Omitting this fact from the New York Times story is one of the worst cases of journalistic malpractice in recent memory.

Wow - Just Wow..........a guy tells someone (the FBI) he saw "something" that the alleged "victim" doesn't even remember......I wonder why the FBI didn't investigate this?  Because the story probably lacked something......Like a small sense of legitimate evidence or validity......All this just to sell a book and the NYT published it as gospel right from the start.....and now the NYT says the dems are calling for his impeachment?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/15/us/brett-kavanaugh-allegations-trump-impeach.html

 

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