When Emily Yoffe started looking into the issue of young men being expelled from colleges over alleged sexual assaults, she had in mind writing a “cheeky” 2,500-word story telling them what not to do. Instead, she wound up with more than 11,000 words delving into the Kafkaesque way campuses handle sexual assault allegations, the reporting of which she swears nearly drove her to quit and work at Trader Joe’s. She carried on, and the story was a 2015 National Magazine Award finalist in the public service category.
Yoffe, 60, decided she wanted to be a journalist when she was 15 and reading Nora Ephron in her parent’s copies of Esquire. After graduating from Wellesley College in 1977, she took an Associated Press test, and realized she was not destined to be a wire service reporter. Since then she’s written for Esquire, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The New York Times, O, the Oprah Magazine and The Washington Post. She won several investigative awards for her work at Texas Monthly. Yoffe also published a book, “What the Dog Did: Tales from a Formerly Reluctant Dog Owner,” and was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, as well as a Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow. She recently joined The Atlantic after a 17-year stint at Slate, most of the last decade as the writer of its advice column, “Dear Prudence.”
She spoke with me in person at the Nieman Foundation’s Lippmann House, with a follow up by phone. This interview was condensed and edited.
When did you start working on the reporting of this piece?
I had [in October 2013] done a rather infamous story, called – I didn’t write the headline – College Women: Stop Getting Drunk. It was about alcohol on campuses, and it just got an explosive response. I hadn’t intended to really do any more, but I remained interested in the field. And people started writing to me about stories of boys who’d gotten kicked off campus for the kind of drunken encounter I was advising people not to engage in. So I just started reading about the topic and thought I should do a flip side to “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk,” and do something dealing with, ‘Okay, boys here’s what not to do.’ I had in my head conceived maybe a 2,500-3,000 word story, almost kind of cheeky: ‘Here are cases where people have been expelled, so don’t do the following.’ We dropped our daughter off at college [in August 2014] and I started in earnest kind of reporting, reading on this and it just [laughs] mutated into this giant thing. My previous piece had gotten an explosive reaction, and Slate was very supportive, though most of the reaction was very negative. So they were kind of excited, “Whoo! Would I cause another explosion?”
There are various places that collect current lawsuits brought by young men against universities, so I started reading the lawsuits, and I was just flabbergasted, absolutely flabbergasted. A lawsuit is your side’s description, but I thought, ‘If this is remotely accurate, something very bizarre is happening on campuses.’ It would describe these procedures where I kind of felt like, maybe a contingent from North Korea could come and see how to really set up a system where there are no rights for the accused. I mean just shocking, utter disregard for the rights of the young men. So I started thinking, ‘Hmm, this is a little more than I thought.’ I started talking to lawyers, just doing what you do, following the footsteps, doing the reporting, gathering information. Let me just say here, some people mischaracterize me as thinking I don’t think there is sexual assault. Obviously, I think there is sexual assault on campus. There is sexual assault out on the street, in people’s apartments. There is sexual assault. But what was being posited was that campuses are a uniquely dangerous place with epidemic levels of sexual assault. So I also started looking at the studies upon which the policy was based. I’m completely innumerate, but even I could read in the studies that they seem to be slightly problematic, particularly as a basis for such draconian policies. So it just started growing.
Did you get guidance from Slate on how long you could write? Or did you just say, “Here it is, I’m dumping this in your lap now?”
[Laughs]. I did after a few months start calling my editor [John Swansburg] and saying, ‘Um, this is getting a little longer than I thought.’ He was about to go on paternity leave in October, so when I started in August, my goal was get it in, have him finish it, have it published, wife has baby, all is good. So I’m writing and writing, and baby’s coming due, and I’m really not anywhere close, and I’m like, ‘Can you hold off on the baby thing, ’cause this story’s really important to me?’ So they didn’t listen, she gave birth and he went on leave. Which was actually unbelievably good for me, because as he went on leave I was like, ‘I’m at 8,000 words now and I’m not close to finished.’ And amazingly he said, “Just do what you need to do.” I mean, how often do you hear that?
So I kept going. I would send updates, ‘Okay, now I’m at 10,000,’ and I [would think] ‘What? What am I doing?’ But this thing was just so amazing to me, and fortunately, everything I told him [had him saying] “Are you kidding me?”
It’s written in nine sections. When did you know you were going to do this in nine sections?
Pretty early on I started seeing it very much delineated into boxes. I felt that, as this thing was growing, I wanted to break it down into parts. I had to get a hold of the material for myself, but also for the reader. Because sometimes when you get online and you scroll down, it just appears to be one long blob that never ends. I felt that would really put people off. Physically, if they were scrolling [to see how long it was], I wanted them to see very clear breaks with headlines and sections, so they could say, “Maybe I don’t have to read the whole thing, I’ll read the beginning of each section.” Also for me, the material started dividing in different ways. I had the cases. I knew I had to describe what happened to some of the boys. You don’t want to say, “Oh gee, some unfairness happened to boys.” It’s why is this unfairness happening? And when I started this there was “science” to prove it. The studies that our officials quoted with these just astounding numbers. You’d go see the study. You’d read the abstract. The [abstract] confirms what they’re saying, so this has to be true. So just taking apart those studies, I knew there had to be a section [on them]. I was worried about how dry the policy would be, how dry looking at the statistics would be. I really felt, I don’t want to interweave all this stuff, I don’t want to knit it together, so let’s make it more like a quilt. A human section, a policy section, and then, most daunting for me, looking at the numbers, because these all feed each other. There’s no policy without a belief that there is epidemic sexual assault on campus. People could start a section, say “I’m not interested in this,” then go to another section. I wanted to as kind of a gift to the reader say, this isn’t as overwhelming to read, you can pick and choose.
Slate is online. Would you have tried it the same way if you were writing in a different medium?
Yes. I think it really helps people. I read an interesting interview with the author of “All the Light We Cannot See” [Anthony Doerr], the novel that just won the National Book Award (I loved it!). Each chapter was very short, and he said, “I felt that was my gift to the reader, that this is a long book, but each thing is packed but contained.” And I sort of had that in my mind and I think it really does help the reader.
This modular structure, then, really lent itself to a story of this complexity?
Yes. When I started as a journalist, this would just be called an article. Now it’s “longform.” It’s like, it used to be a guitar, now it’s an acoustic guitar. In this weird way, online reporting had evolved to the point where there was an audience for things that really were lengthy.
Did you ever think about doing it as a series of stories, instead of one big narrative?
No. We never even talked about that. It would have lost its power. I don’t think people would’ve stuck with it. You would say, “Okay, fine, I get the gist, there’s bad stuff going on.” I think it worked because it was this kind of daunting thing.
Would you set aside specific time to write as you were doing the reporting?
I’m not that systematic. When you’re undertaking something really big, sketch out the story as you’re gathering material, because it’s really daunting if you collect for two months, then you go through all your notes, then you have to start writing. So I would collect and do big bullet points or blocks of type or paragraphs, not in necessarily a coherent way, but, ‘I’m going to be writing about this subject, that subject.’ So I’m simultaneously reporting and sorting out and roughing out what I’m writing. There’s always this [moment of], ‘Why am I doing this, and not working at Trader Joe’s? They’ve got older people at Trader Joe’s, I should apply for a job at Trader Joe’s. I like stacking things, so I’d be good at stacking, ’cause this is the worst idea I’ve ever had in my life.’ I had many of those moments. I actually, at one point deep into this, I go to Trader Joe’s and there’s this older cashier and I said, ‘So what is it like to work here, is this a good place to work?’ Because I thought I might have to abandon this and just do the Trader Joe’s thing.
Why did you think that?
Because overall writing is horrible, I hate writing and I had embarked on this monstrosity that was going to be 3,000 words and now it’s 14,000 words. It’s very high risk, very high risk, because from my alcohol story [I knew] there are people out with knives ready to impale me if there are any mistakes embedded in there. It felt very, very high stakes, very high pressure. It was so big. [While] I’d been working on it, I was doing Prudie the whole time, so I was literally working on this seven days a week. It went through 11 edits back and forth, literally I have time stamps on this from 5 a.m. returning [to my editor]. I’ve been up all night and then do Prudie. By the end I was in almost a state of collapse.
What was that like, to go through 11 revisions?
It wasn’t top to bottom revision, the whole thing each time. But it was enough so that I had to do track changes, so I’d rename it. In the Drew section, very late [in the process], my editor said the narrative is just not clear enough. I just need you to rewrite these and make it clearer. I remember getting his notes back, and by this time we’d gone over and over it, and I get that, and I go ‘What?’ I remember walking around screaming, ‘I can’t take this anymore!’ And sitting down and going through it and realizing, ‘Oh shit, he’s right.’ I know this story, and you present a narrative and when you get all these legal documents, it’s not, “So on the evening of…, here’s what happened, and how everything unfolded.” It’s in a deposition, a reply, it’s a big mess you have to pull apart and [then] make it hang together. I redid that whole thing and each line had to be, “Here’s the citation in the deposition. Here’s the citation in their filing. Here’s the citation in the university’s motion to dismiss,” for my editor, and I sent it back to him at 5 a.m.
What kept you from Trader Joe’s?
I just felt, this is why I became a journalist. I’d really been put through the mill over the alcohol stuff. But you know, I’m not a kid. It’s kind of fascinating to get international opprobrium, because okay, at least people are reading it. The worst thing would be no one read it. I felt I found something important. I proved it. I don’t want to sound like some kind of noble soul, but I hate abuse of power and injustice. It was a coming together of things that kind of have always animated me as a journalist, but as Prudie I didn’t really [pursue them]. Injustice, abuse of power and the use of junk science to underwrite those two things. That all came together.
So that carried you through?
Here’s the other thing. I read [Drew Sterrett’s] story over and over, I read these documents over and over. Here was this brilliant, lovely young man who was going to be an engineer and do something great with his life and for society, and it got smashed up for no reason. So I felt this animating [sense of], ‘I want to tell his story.’ I had no illusions about what journalism can do, but I was feeling if I can be some part of righting this injustice, that will make my whole career worthwhile. And I was a part. Obviously, he had a great lawyer and there are lots of other people who helped vacate the findings.
How do you feel about it now?
I’m so glad I did it. And here, the most shocking part of this story. After I did the alcohol story and got all this hate, 90 percent of the reaction to this was “Thank you.” Ninety percent. Which is almost too much. As I was working through this thing and it was getting delayed for this, delayed for that, babies are being born and gang rape stories come and go, and I was talking to my daughter saying, ‘My God, this thing is killing me, it’s never going to run, it’s never going to run.’ I was thinking ‘What if Slate in the end says, “We can’t run this?”‘ I really was. And my daughter said to me, my college freshman daughter, said, “Mom, soon this will be over. Your story will run, you’ll get death threats and hate, and you’ll be happy.” I was like, ‘You know me so well!’ [Laughs] I got too much love for this!
My questions are in red; her responses in blue. To read the story without annotations first, click the ‘Hide all annotations’ button below the byline, up and to the right.
The College Rape Overcorrection
Sexual assault on campus is a serious problem. But efforts to protect women from a putative epidemic of violence have led to misguided policies that infringe on the civil rights of men.
Originally published on Slate, December 7, 2014
1 The Assault
Drew Sterrett couldn’t know that when his friend slipped into his bottom bunk late one night in March of his freshman year, she was setting off a series of events that would end his college education. It was 2012, and Sterrett was an engineering student at the University of Michigan. The young woman, CB, lived down the hall. A group of students had been hanging out in the dorm on a Friday evening—there was drinking, but no one was incapacitated—when CB told Sterrett that her roommate had family members staying in their room and she needed a place to spend the night. Sterrett loaned her a shirt to sleep in and assumed she’d crash on the mat he and his roommate kept for visitors. Instead, CB came and lay down next to him on his bed. The two had made out in the past but had no serious romantic interest in each other.
They talked quietly, started kissing, and then things escalated, as they often do when two teenagers are in bed together. When it became clear they were going to have intercourse, CB asked Sterrett about a condom, and he retrieved one from a drawer. Their sex became so loud and went on for so long that Sterrett’s roommate, unable to sleep in the upper bunk, sent Sterrett a Facebook message around 3 a.m.: “Dude, you and [CB] are being abnoxtiously [sic] loud and inconsiderate, so expect to pay back in full tomorrow …”
The two finally finished and went to sleep. The next morning, Sterrett says CB told him that she wanted to keep their interlude private. He thought she was embarrassed that she’d had sex with a friend and agreed not to talk to others about it. They saw each other frequently in the dorm until the school year ended.
How many court cases did you actually read through to find Drew?
I would say at least 10. One thing I really wanted was not a John Doe. I wanted something with a record, with a legal record, because most of the reporting I’d seen up to this point was about the victim and it was essentially her side and they’d say, “The alleged perpetrator refused to speak to us.” I thought, if I’m trying to describe what happened to a young man, it’s very likely the accuser won’t speak to me, so I want a record in case that happens. I wanted cases where they both spoke. There were depositions in Drew’s case, so in every turn I could say, his accuser says here’s what happened, here’s what he says happened, here’s what the roommate says happened. So even though I came very strongly to believe that it was a consensual encounter that later turned into an accusation [of rape] under pressure from the mother, you can also decide for yourself. This case was one of the very few filed under the young man’s name. When I found it and I started reading it, I had written “Holy shit!” I said to my husband, ‘You will not believe this one.’ It had everything, a complete record, a name, and everything about it was appalling. The genesis of it, from the mother finding her daughter’s sex diary, to just the mindblowing cruelty of the university’s treatment [of him]. The facts laid out in this lawsuit were just astounding. I had this running list of possibilities and Drew’s case just immediately went to the top.
When I hear case, I start thinking about boxes and boxes and boxes of documents. How long are these things?
It can depend. The initial lawsuit is generally not that long, 25 to 30 pages. But depending on what happens, if there’s depositions and stuff it can be hundreds of pages.
Sterrett was home in New York for the summer when he was contacted by a university official, Heather Cowan, program manager of the Office of Student Conflict Resolution, and told to make himself available for a Skype interview with her and another administrator. No reason was given.
As the interview got under way, Sterrett realized that CB must have told Cowan something disturbing about their one-time assignation. Becoming concerned about the tenor of the questions, he asked the administrators if he should consult a lawyer. He says they told him that if he ended the interview in order to seek counsel that fact would be reported to the university and the investigation would continue without his input. He kept talking. He told Cowan that he and CB had had a consensual encounter while his roommate was only a few feet away. As the interview was coming to a close, Sterrett says the administrators told him this matter was confidential—though he’d still not been explicitly told what the matter was—and that he should not talk to anyone about it, especially not fellow students who might be witnesses on his behalf.
Later, Sterrett would consult a lawyer and file a lawsuit against the university alleging he’d been deprived of his constitutional right to due process. This account is drawn from the legal filings in that ongoing case. These include Sterrett’s case against the university, affidavits from witnesses sworn on Sterrett’s behalf, the university’s response, and a deposition of CB taken by Sterrett’s lawyer. (Through his lawyer, Sterrett declined to speak to me. A Michigan spokesman said the university cannot comment on a pending case. CB has remained anonymous in court filings. I contacted her lawyer, Joshua Sheffer, who sent the following statement: “While we strongly disagree with Plaintiff’s description of the night in question, we do not feel that it should be played out in the press.” It continued: “This lawsuit is between Plaintiff and the University of Michigan; my client wishes only to put this traumatic event behind her and move forward with her education and life.”)
Cowan told Sterrett over Skype that there would be restrictions placed on him when he returned to campus for his sophomore year. Sterrett and CB were part of a special program called the Michigan Research Community, and members lived together in a residence hall. Although Sterrett and CB had continued to live on the same floor until the end of the school year, and she hadn’t complained about his presence, Cowan told Sterrett that he would be removed from the dorm. He was also told that he could not be in the vicinity of CB, which meant he was in effect barred from entering the dorm, cutting him off from most of his friends.
The events that prompted the university to take these actions against Sterrett are detailed in an affidavit sworn on Sterrett’s behalf by LC, a friend of CB’s and her sophomore year roommate. LC stated that in July she received a call from an “emotionally upset” CB who explained that her mother had found her diary. LC recalled that CB explained that the diary “contained descriptions of romantic and sexual experiences, drug use, and drinking.” (CB confirmed the contents of the diary in her own deposition.) During the phone call, CB asked LC if she remembered the night CB had sex with Sterrett. LC didn’t, because CB had never mentioned it. Now CB told her, “I said no, no, and then I gave in.” Eventually, as described in CB’s deposition, CB’s mother called the university to report that CB would be making a complaint against Sterrett. CB’s mother drove her to campus, and CB met with Heather Cowan.
You have this opening section here where we meet Drew Sterrett, we see what happens in his room, we feel like we’re inside his room. We get through it and you say, “They wouldn’t talk to me.” How much of a challenge was it to go through and really try to put us in the room?
Thanks. That was from a court record. It was actually very compelling reading in and of itself. It’s lengthy, but the story I laid out there is in the various statements under oath. As you can see, there’s no physical description of him, there’s no sense of “He’s a diffident young man” or whatever. I tried to just use what I had to paint as vivid a portrait of that night [as I could].
Calvin Trillin loved to use court cases, for some of the same reasons you wanted someone named in a court case. Did you have what he had done in mind at all as you were putting this together?
That’s interesting! I had not, but I loved his murder reporting in The New Yorker, I always read all those stories. So maybe subconsciously in the back of my mind, but not consciously.
2 An Overcorrection
In section two, The Overcorrection, you create the case for your case. I wrote down, ‘The colleges are the villain.’ I also found myself thinking of the Catholic Church. Not in the sense of a coverup, but it felt to me like there was sort of an institutional inability to see common sense. I was curious if that was on your mind at all, this idea of a large institution that has walled off outside perspective.
I hope what comes through is that the colleges are responding to the mandate of the federal government. This is all, you know, flowing downward, and they have put these [policies] in place as a result of the Office for Civil Rights.
It’s absolutely clear [by the end of the piece]. But there are multiple villains that we meet over the course of this. I found myself saying, ‘Here’s the villain. Oh, here’s the villain. Ah, here’s the real villain.’ Why do you not give us the real villain first?
I certainly could have flipped it. I had thought of starting at different places, and one of them would have been the Office for Civil Rights. I went back and forth, ‘Do I open with a statement of purpose?’ Which I initially was going to do, open with a statement, “Injustice is being done to young men on campus. Here’s what it is,” and then go to my anecdote. I generally don’t like anecdotal leads. I’m more of a ‘Tell me what this is about and if I’m not interested, I’m not going to read it. But if I am, I’ll stick with your anecdotal lead.’ But, I don’t know, I woke up at like three in the morning and said, ‘No, gotta start with Drew.’ I think the piece is held together by what follows it, saying there are a lot of Drew Sterretts. What happened to him is not an anomaly. What happened to him is a result of a set of beliefs and policy. This is not a mistake, a misinterpretation. This is what colleges and universities are undertaking deliberately. Once I decided to start with Drew, then you’re kind of at the micro level at the university. So then I start pulling back further and further.
You kind of have a telescoping structure, you go out and out to the federal government and then back to some specifics, “here are some things we can do.” Was that natural or did you have to tweak it?
Yes, except for the first two [sections]. But after that, we knew statistics had to come right away. It just seemed to fall into place. Maybe there was some moving stuff around a little on the bottom, a little bit of furniture moving, but not too much.
When one is writing about a controversial subject, does this kind of a structure help readers engage with it differently?
Maybe it just beats people down. Just the massiveness of it, that it wasn’t this kind of op-ed style polemic. It was through this grinding reporting, it was in the statistics section, let’s look at the foot notes, which actually say our assumptions are just made up out of whole cloth. How do you refute that?
We are told that one of the most dangerous places for a young woman in America today is a college campus. As President Obama said at a White House event in September, where he announced a campaign to address campus violence, “An estimated one in five women has been sexually assaulted during her college years—one in five.” (At an earlier White House event on the issue, the president declared of sexual violence, “It threatens our families, it threatens our communities; ultimately, it threatens the entire country.”) In recent weeks, Rolling Stone’s lurid account of a premeditated gang rape at the University of Virginia has made the issue of campus sexual violence front-page news. (The reporting and the allegations in the article have since been called into question, and Rolling Stone has issued a statement acknowledging that the magazine failed to properly investigate and corroborate the story.)
Sexual assault at colleges and universities is indeed a serious problem.
As our narrator, you appear here where you say, “Okay, sexual assault is a serious problem.” You are not citing other people saying this. You are saying it, “I’m your narrator and I’m telling you this.” Was that something you also did consciously, or talk about with your editor? How does that narrative voice come forward?
I just felt, okay, my reporting supports that larger statement. I don’t need a link. But that whole voice [question] and how much I’m in it and how much personality was a big back and forth with my editor. I’d get a version back, and we do track changes, so I can see he’s put a line through something. There’d be a bracket: [love this line. It’s going.] He did that a lot and it almost became, ‘All right, I’m doing it for you, John,’ privately, a little line. And in the end, he was absolutely right to take out, not 100 percent, but 80 percent of my little asides. Because it’s written so straight, I think it allowed people who would naturally be skeptical of what I was saying to get into the story and see this isn’t a polemic, this is reporting.
But did he ever come to you and say, “I really would like to see somebody else as the voice of authority here?”
No. And skip ahead to the last section where I do this brief, ‘Where do we go from here?’ which is very unjournalistic, and not something I normally do, but that was at his encouragement. He said, “Look, the reader’s stuck with you all the way through to here, I think the reader’s going to want some kind of, “Okay, what’s next?” and I think you owe them your own conclusions.”
The attention it’s receiving today—on campus, at the White House, in the media—is a direct result of the often callous and dismissive treatment of victims. For too long, women who were assaulted on campus and came forward were doubted or dismissed, and the men responsible were given a mild rebuke or none at all. Those who commit serious sexual crimes on campus must be held to account.
In recent years, young activists, many of them women angry about their treatment after reporting an assault, have created new organizations and networks in an effort to reform the way colleges handle sexual violence. They recognized they had a powerful weapon in that fight: Title IX, the federal law that protects against discrimination in education. Schools are legally required by that law to address sexual harassment and violence on campus, and these activists filed complaints with the federal government about what they describe as lax enforcement by schools. The current administration has taken up the cause—the Chronicle of Higher Education describes it as “a marquee issue for the Obama administration”—and praised these young women for spurring political action. “A new generation of student activists is effectively pressing for change,” read a statement this spring announcing new policies to address campus violence. The Department of Education has drafted new rules to address women’s safety, some of which have been enshrined into law by Congress, with more legislation likely on the way.
You don’t use an activist as a character. You don’t really go in and say, “I can’t talk to these victims, these alleged perpetrators, the universities won’t talk to me, but I could base this around some crusader.” We meet some of these people later in the story. I’m curious about whether one of them emerged as a potential [character], because you kind of have a characterless story.
Yup.
The characters that you have, many of them are in fact institutions. They’re not people. Which feels to me like would have created some dilemmas while you’re trying to write, and engage people.
Yeah, I got 11,000 words out of a story where most of the people or institutions I’m writing about wouldn’t speak to me. That was a funny thing. There is now an organization that’s advocating on behalf of the accused. It’s called FACE, Families Advocating for Campus Equality. That was just coming together as I was writing this. Were I doing it now, they would have appeared there, because that would be part of the story, that there are so many of these families that they’ve come together and they do have their own advocacy group.
Unfortunately, under the worthy mandate of protecting victims of sexual assault, procedures are being put in place at colleges that presume the guilt of the accused. Colleges, encouraged by federal officials, are instituting solutions to sexual violence against women that abrogate the civil rights of men. Schools that hold hearings to adjudicate claims of sexual misconduct allow the accuser and the accused to be accompanied by legal counsel. But as Judith Shulevitz noted in the New Republic in October, many schools ban lawyers from speaking to their clients (only notes can be passed). During these proceedings, the two parties are not supposed to question or cross examine each other, a prohibition recommended by the federal government in order to protect the accuser. And by federal requirement, students can be found guilty under the lowest standard of proof: preponderance of the evidence, meaning just a 51 percent certainty is all that’s needed for a finding that can permanently alter the life of the accused.
One of the things that emerges from this narrative, is that you’re not talking to people, you’re quoting what these institutions are saying. You create this feeling of, I don’t know if it’s Kafkaesque, but faceless institutions, bureaucracies, you cannot engage with.
Yes! Writing about this subject, Orwellian and Kafkaesque has to appear. Absolutely, it is Kafkaesque. Drew never had written charges against him. He never met in person with any of the administrators or investigators charged with destroying his education. He had one Skype interview and that was it. You cannot believe this is going on in America and I hope that comes across.
More than two dozen Harvard Law School professors recently wrote a statement protesting the university’s new rules for handling sexual assault claims. “Harvard has adopted procedures for deciding cases of alleged sexual misconduct which lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process,” they wrote. The professors note that the new rules call for a Title IX compliance officer who will be in charge of “investigation, prosecution, fact-finding, and appellate review.” Under the new system, there will be no hearing for the accused, and thus no opportunity to question witnesses and mount a defense. Harvard University, the professors wrote, is “jettisoning balance and fairness in the rush to appease certain federal administrative officials.” But to push back against Department of Education edicts means potentially putting a school’s federal funding in jeopardy, and no college, not even Harvard, the country’s richest, is willing to do that.
Did you think about finding people to say this for you?
Again, where I asserted things, I felt the reporting allowed me to say it. Michael Kinsley was my first major editor, and he is a very low quote man. And that has stayed with me forever. You use the quote, almost like punctuation. It’s a punch. You don’t use blocks of quotes.
Hard-line policies like Harvard’s are necessary, government officials say, because undergraduate women are in unique peril. Often-cited studies of sexual violence at colleges describe an epidemic. But each of these studies has serious methodological limitations. In some cases, the studies make sensational assertions that are not supported by the underlying data. In others, the experiences of one or two campuses have been made to stand in for the entirety of America’s higher education system.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D–New York, is a co-sponsor of the bipartisan Campus Accountability and Safety Act, or CASA, expected to be voted on next year. The legislation would, among other things, require all colleges provide a confidential adviser to guide victims through the entire process of bringing an accusation while no guidance or assistance is mandated for the accused. Gillibrand said in announcing the legislation, “We should never accept the fact that women are at a greater risk of sexual assault as soon as they step onto a college campus. But today they are.”
This is one of the frequently made assertions about campus violence, but the evidence to back it up is lacking. Being young does make people more vulnerable to serious violent crime, including sexual assault; according to government statistics those aged 18 to 24 have the highest rates of such victimization. But most studies don’t compare the victimization rates of students to nonstudents of the same age. One recent paper that does make that comparison, “Violence Against College Women” by Callie Marie Rennison and Lynn Addington, compares the crime experienced by college students and their peers who are not in college, using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. What the researchers found was the opposite of what Gillibrand says about the dangers of campuses: “Non-student females are victims of violence at rates 1.7 times greater than are college females,” the authors wrote, and this greater victimization holds true for sex crimes: “Even if the definition of violence were limited to sexual assaults, these crimes are more pervasive for young adult women who are not in college.”
Rennison, an associate professor at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver, recognized in an interview that her study goes against a lot of received wisdom. “Maybe that’s not a really popular thing to say,” she said, adding, “I hate the notion that people think sending kids off to college is sending them to be victimized.”
This quote is a pretty strong quote.
Yes. That’s the kind of quote I’m looking for.
Any woman who is raped, on campus or off, deserves a fair and thorough investigation of her claim, and those found guilty should be punished. But the new rules—rules often put in place hastily and in response to the idea of a rape epidemic on campus—have left some young men saying they are the ones who have been victimized. They are starting to push back. In the past three years, men found responsible for sexual assault on campus have filed more than three dozen cases against schools. They argue that their due process rights have been violated and say they have been victims of gender discrimination under Title IX. Their complaints are starting to cost universities. The higher education insurance group United Educators did a study of the 262 insurance claims it paid to students between 2006 and 2010 because of campus sexual assault, at a cost to the group of $36 million. The vast majority of the payouts, 72 percent, went to the accused—young men who protested their treatment by universities.
Assertions of injustice by young men are infuriating to some. Caroline Heldman, an associate professor of politics at Occidental College and co-founder of End Rape on Campus, said of the men who are turning to the courts, “These lawsuits are an incredible display of entitlement, the same entitlement that drove them to rape.” Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, a co-sponsor of the CASA bill, said to the Washington Post of these suits, “I don’t think we are anywhere near a tipping point where the people accused of this are somehow being treated unfairly.”
I’ve
I’m curious about why you chose to introduce yourself there. I could think about ways you could recast this.
Right. Coming over here I read the piece again, I hadn’t read it in a long time. And I surprised myself. ‘Oh, I used the first person there. I wonder why I did that.’ So I can’t really tell you because I surprised myself. But when I read it I was like, ‘Huh.’ And then I was like, ‘Well, I kinda like it because it makes it more human.’ Because there aren’t that many humans in this, that you hear from.
read through the court filings and investigative reports of a number of these cases, and it’s clear to me that many of the accused are indeed being treated unfairly. Government officials and campus administrators are attempting to legislate the bedroom behavior of students with rules and requirements that would be comic if their effects weren’t frequently so tragic. The legal filings in the cases brought by young men accused of sexual violence often begin like a script for a college sex farce but end with the protagonist finding himself in a Soviet-style show trial. Or, as in the case of Drew Sterrett, punished with no trial at all.
3 The Punishment
Did you think about saving this section for a little later? In a way, these [Drew] sections are your scenes.
No. We leave you hanging, ‘What happens to Drew?’ and then I give you the overview. I’m not going to tease you. I’ll just tell you what happens to Drew.
At the beginning of his sophomore year, Drew Sterrett was in limbo. He did not know whether he would face further disciplinary action as a result of the accusation against him, and indeed no formal written charge was ever issued. The single, cryptic Skype interrogation—the one that blindsided Sterrett over his summer vacation—was to be his sole hearing with campus administrators. He never met them in person. Sterrett’s suit against the university accuses it of violating his constitutional right to due process. But as he waited out the fall, often there didn’t seem to be any process.
Through September and October, he heard nothing further about the charge. Unbeknownst to him, CB was having second thoughts, as she explained in a deposition taken as a result of Sterrett’s case against the university, because she wasn’t sure she wanted Sterrett to be able to read her statement against him. The only word he received from school administrators during this period was a warning email from Cowan, in October. One day Sterrett was walking with a friend who was putting his bike away at Sterrett’s old dorm. CB saw him near her residence and contacted Cowan, who informed Sterrett that the visit gave an appearance of “retaliatory contact.” He replied to Cowan and said it was troubling that his mere presence near a residence hall was considered an act of impropriety and asked that the investigation be finished “as quickly and compassionately as possible for everyone involved.”
On Nov. 9, 2012, Sterrett was given a one-page document titled “Summary of Witness Testimony and Review of Other Evidence.” It consisted primarily of summaries of statements from anonymous witnesses. For example, it stated: “Two witnesses stated the Complainant
reported to them that she tried to push the Respondent off her.” (CB didn’t know who these two witnesses were. She confirmed in her deposition that in her original statement to Cowan, she never said that she had tried to push Sterrett off her.) It also stated: “[A] witness reported
that the Respondent told them that he engaged in penetration with the Complainant and ‘she
was saying ‘no,’ and that it was just—it
was ‘just like a second,’ and then he stopped, and then the Complainant left.’ ” (In her deposition, CB acknowledged this was not how their sexual encounter transpired, although she maintained that at some point she said “no.”)
The document made clear to Sterrett that CB was claiming that she had said “no” during their encounter. He put together a lengthy rebuttal. Of CB’s claim, he wrote, “I cannot state it more clearly that this is untrue. I asked her if she wanted to have sex; she said ‘yes.’ ” (CB’s assertion was also challenged later by an affidavit sworn on Sterrett’s behalf by his freshman year roommate, the one in the upper bunk. The roommate said that he saw CB get into Sterrett’s bed of her own volition and that his bed and Sterrett’s were so close that he would have heard if she had exclaimed, “no” or “stop.” He stated that he was annoyed that their sex was keeping him awake and that as a friend of both he would have intervened if he felt something untoward was happening.)
In a weird way it’s almost better for you as reporter that you didn’t get to talk to these people, but used them talking on the legal record. Does it make it feel more verifiable than if you’re trying to interview each of them separately and parse out the story as a journalist?
In a way, yes. It got away from me getting one tearful party or another giving me a version of the story. Here, they sat through hours of depositions, so it was really a voluminous record that gave the prelude, the event, the lengthy aftermath. I did like that more clinical quality. A lot of coverage gets so awash in the emotion of it, I liked that by necessity it was a step away from the high emotions.
Sterrett’s rebuttal also noted that Cowan’s document failed to mention the role CB’s mother played in bringing the accusation against him after she found her daughter’s diary. CB’s roommate, LC, in an affidavit sworn on behalf of Sterrett, said that over the summer CB’s mother had called her repeatedly warning her not to talk to Sterrett and to take CB’s side in all proceedings. LC stated that she never saw any change in CB’s behavior from the time of the alleged assault until the end of freshman year. But, she said, CB’s personality changed dramatically after her mother found her diary and the fall semester began. In her affidavit, LC said it pained her to speak against her friend, but she stated: “It is my belief, based on my personal observations and conversations with CB, that it is possible CB manufactured a story about a sexual assault in response to the conflict CB described occurring between her and her mother in the summer of 2012.”
On Nov. 30, Sterrett received Cowan’s final “Sexual Misconduct Investigation Report.” His lawsuit states that the final report failed to take note of anything he had written in his rebuttal. The final report was longer than Cowan’s previous one, and included further allegations that either CB herself did not corroborate or appeared unsupported by the available evidence. For example, it stated: “The Complainant framed the events in question as a sexual assault to
witnesses the day following the event.” In her deposition, CB acknowledged that she didn’t do that, that in fact she’d never used the words “sexual assault” to describe what happened. The report said that Sterrett’s roommate was asleep during the entire sexual encounter. This was contradicted by the time-stamped Facebook message complaining that he was being kept awake.
The report also said that Sterrett had confessed to his roommate that he’d had a nonconsensual encounter with CB. When Cowan interviewed the roommate—who says she never told him the purpose of her investigation—he had mentioned that Sterrett said he regretted the encounter with CB. In Cowan’s report, that statement is described as a confession of sexual violation. But as the roommate clarified in his affidavit, Sterrett was not expressing “that he had done anything morally or legally or ethically wrong.” He was expressing regret for sleeping with someone in their group of friends.
The final report came to this conclusion: “[I]t is determined that the Respondent engaged in sexual intercourse with the Complainant without her consent and that that activity is so severe as to create a hostile environment.” His punishment was that he was suspended from college until July 2016—after CB graduated. In order for the university to consider reinstating him, he would have to agree that he had engaged in sexual misconduct. Whether or not he returned, the finding would stay on his permanent record. Sterrett’s lawsuit says a university official acknowledged to him that these sanctions would “limit his educational, employment and career opportunities.”
With the help of a lawyer, Sterrett filed an appeal to the Office of Student Conflict Resolution. He included affidavits from classmates who said their words had been misconstrued and even falsified, and included the statement by Sterrett’s roommate that CB was a willing participant and that the roommate would have heard and intervened if CB had said no. The university’s response was to stand by its finding that Sterrett was responsible for sexual misconduct but to change the reason. Now Cowan issued an addendum stating that Sterrett had committed sexual misconduct because CB was too drunk to consent. (In her deposition, CB acknowledged that while she had been drinking, she was not incapacitated.)
Upholding the finding that he committed sexual misconduct required Sterrett to leave the university. But he had already decided not to return to school after winter break of his sophomore year. His lawyer explained in an email that Sterrett felt the restrictions put on his movements in order to avoid running into CB—he could be expelled if she saw him and felt his presence was “retaliatory”—made it impossible for him to be at school. Sterrett filed another appeal, this one to Michigan’s university Appeals Board. In July 2013, it upheld the sexual misconduct finding, though it agreed to place Sterrett on disciplinary probation instead of suspension. The probation, however, came with onerous conditions, according to his lawyer: He would now be barred from any university housing and was prohibited from enrolling in any class in which CB was enrolled (and thus prohibited from registering and enrolling in classes until CB had finalized her schedule). He declined to return.
In April of this year, Sterrett filed suit against the university. The suit states that the public university violated his 14th Amendment rights of due process and that Michigan contravened its own procedures for disciplinary hearings, which call for written notice of allegations against a student, sufficient time to prepare for an arbitration or other meeting (Sterrett says there was no arbitration or meeting), knowledge of the names of witnesses, the opportunity to pose questions to the complainant or other witnesses, and more. As a result of these violations, his suit says, he was subjected to a process that was “capricious, reckless, incomplete, [and] lacked fundamental fairness.”
Michigan has asked the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan to dismiss Sterrett’s suit. Its motion to dismiss outlines the university’s version of events. Michigan asserts Sterrett was given fair notice of the charges against him, citing the fact that Sterrett’s own suit stated that he “gleaned” that he was being accused of sexual assault from his Skype interrogation. The motion states that Sterrett was given several opportunities to file his rebuttals and appeals, concluding, “That’s not lack of due process. It’s abundant process.” It also noted that Sterrett decided to file a lawsuit rather than return to the university under the sanctions and restrictions it offered. The statement issued by CB’s lawyer noted, “The University of Michigan thoroughly investigated the matter. Plaintiff and my client each had an opportunity to present evidence. Plaintiff was found responsible; he appealed that decision, and it was upheld.”
I spoke to Sterrett’s lawyer, Deborah L. Gordon. She said that like many similarly accused young men, Sterrett believed that once a responsible investigation was undertaken, everything would be straightened out. “He had no idea he was on his way out no matter what he said or what the facts were,” she said. She hopes to get the case to a jury, but she says the university is making every legal effort to delay. Sterrett should be graduating from college next spring, but the sexual misconduct charge against him has made it virtually impossible for him to be accepted as a transfer student elsewhere. He was accepted to one well-regarded university, but the offer was rescinded when the school heard of his disciplinary finding at Michigan. Now 22, he’s hoping that if his suit is successful, he will be able to finish his education—some day.
4 The Numbers
And then we go into Numbers. It’s the longest section and apparently the section you heard the most about.
First of all, when you write an 11,000-word story, [you wonder] is anyone going to read it? And I thought people would be most shocked by the human cost. The section people liked best was the analysis of the studies. People loved the numbers. It turns out a lot of people were feeling, “There is something crazy going on. I went to college, 25 percent of my female classmates weren’t raped. I have a kid in college, there seems like this kind of level of insanity about this.” But if you say anything you’re a rape denialist. And I supplied them with, it wasn’t a polemic, it wasn’t an op-ed, it was, “This study does not support this [statement of fact].” These cases of these rapists? Read it. It’s two drunk kids hooking up. So people were [saying], “Thank you for bringing sanity to this subject.”
You’re putting together a story without a real character that nonetheless creates vast emotional impact.
People were outraged by the Drew Sterrett story but most compelled by shocking studies and shocking policy. You think, ‘How do I get people to read this and pay attention to this dull stuff?’ It’s not dull. Adults understand institutions and we’re all part of institutions, and I think the point you made about the Catholic Church is really good. If you can show how an institution is grinding up individuals, and show how a person’s life got ruined…
One campus rape is one too many. But the severe new policies championed by the White House, the Department of Education, and members of Congress are responding to the idea that colleges are in the grips of an epidemic—and the studies suggesting this epidemic don’t hold up to scrutiny. Bad policy is being made on the back of problematic research, and will continue to be unless we bring some healthy skepticism to the hard work of putting a number on the prevalence of campus rape.
How [important is it] as a journalist to make yourself look beyond the [study] abstracts?
You so often read, forget sexual assault, you see “A study a study a study.” You have to read the study, you simply do. This is not my revelation, there are books out now and big meta studies saying, “Most studies are not replicable.” A study is just the starting point, not the end point. I’m not saying people who do the studies are trying to purvey false stuff. But how robust are their findings? How do they arrive at their findings? And in social sciences that’s absolutely necessary. Because the fundamental assumptions can dictate what your conclusion is.
It is exceedingly difficult to get a numerical handle on a crime that is usually committed in private and the victims of which—all the studies agree—frequently decline to report. A further complication is that because researchers are asking about intimate subjects,