Surprised that I didn’t see a thread on this (unless I missed it which is quite possible) but this seems to be a very odd situation.
Details here:
Brief summary: Columbia student alleges that she was raped by another student over a year ago. No action was taken directly against the alleged perpetrator who is still at the University.
The student then starts carrying around a mattress to protest against the alleged assault and the University’s handling of the situation.
So what’s the SD on all of this? I had some sympathy for her until she started calling it a work of art as well as a protest which is confusing the issue I think.
Depending on who you ask, it’s either because the administration are a tool of the Patriarchy and are defending the rape culture they depend upon to keep women subjugated…
… or it’s because she’s full of shit.
It seems to be difficult to find any middle ground on the Internet, but that’s because well duh it’s the Internet. As you can probably tell I’m favouring the latter hypothesis by about 8:1 at the moment.
Huh? I genuinely don’t see how that descriptor fits, whether the alleged perp is guilty or innocent.
I am having a hard time believing that trauma was the reason she was still able to be friendly with him after the incident. That’s not to say it isn’t a reaction that could happen to someone who was assaulted but it would appear to be more likely that you would react that way to someone who is constantly in your life and who would be hard to just suddenly break away from. Not so much a friend with benefits.
FYI any criminal procedures would have to be handled by the New York City Police Department. Columbia University has security guards but no police department. In this case I don’t remember if it was ever reported to the NYPD. Like many institutions there is a tribunal which makes decisions about kicking people out of the university. Many of these tribunals are little more than kangaroo courts.
I couldn’t help but notice that the NYT reported that there was little crowd response when the ALLEDGED rapist appeared on stage. I wonder if that was because the crowd doesn’t believe Sulkowicz, or because the crowd found the mattress stunt to be annoying?
*Minutes before Ms. Sulkowicz walked across the stage, Paul Nungesser, the student she has accused of rape, did so as well, to little response from the crowd.
Mr. Nungesser, who was cleared by the university and has maintained that their sexual encounter was consensual, filed a federal discrimination suit last month against the school, Mr. Bollinger and the professor who approved Ms. Sulkowicz’s thesis project, saying he has been the victim of a harassment campaign.*
They did, inasmuch as a university administration can properly “investigate” something, which isn’t much since they are a university administration and not a law enforcement agency.
Sulkowicz refused to cooperate with the NYPD when they investigated, then complained that the university wouldn’t expel a student based on a he-said, she-said case.
Cathy Young has been doing some detailed reporting on this matter. Here’s her latest article. I highly recommend it as an overview of the case.
In summary, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that Sulkowitz made up the rape allegation, perhaps to get revenge on her ex-boyfriend. She made no report of it for months after it supposedly took place, during which time she continued to date him and sleep with him. In fact, she aggressively insisted on sex with him, and text messages prove it. She wouldn’t cooperate with a police investigation, and she stopped speaking to Young when it became clear that Young had seen the text messages. Four separate hearings by a panel at Columbia all cleared Nussenger of sexual assault charges. She refuses to speak to any journalist who’s skeptical to her, and in public she accuses anyone who questions her account of “invalidating” and “violating” her, and so forth.
Cathy Young is a rape apologist who didn’t include information from any of the victims (there’s three women and now, one gay man, who just came forward). Young’s article is bullshit. She relies on interviews with Nungessor’s parents and a bunch of screenshots of conversations given to her by Nungessor supposedly to prove that he and Sulkowicz were friends. He’d stripped out the timestamps, however, and edited them to make it seem like Sulkowicz was still his friend afterwards.
Emma Sulkowicz published the actual conversations at Jezebel, with annotations:
For more context, here is another article written anonymously by one of the victims (One who hasn’t come forward with her name, not the one with the mattress, that’s Emma Sulkowicz). Columbia initially judged that Paul Nungesser was responsible sexually assaulting her. Later, Nungesser was allowed a retrial of sorts (such as it is, this isn’t a court of law, remember). By then, the victim had graduated and gotten another job. Rather than drag it out, she eventually declined to cooperate with the second trial and Columbia found in favor Nungesser.
Bottom line: people who get raped on campus need to treat it exactly like any other rape victim. Get a lawyer and go to the police. The College can’t do shit and expecting any more from them is doomed from the start.
Even bottomer: Rape apologists are worse than actual rapists.
Can you provide any instance in which Cathy Young has been an apologist for rape?
First of all, we have no evidence of victims, we have alleged victims. That’s different. Second, Young tried to talk with Sulkowitz and “Josie”, they chose not to cooperate with her. I mentioned this already. To say that Young didn’t include information from them and imply that Young failed, is dishonest.
That article does not show that messages which he claimed were after the alleged assault were actually before. Quite the contrary, it confirms that Sulkowitz sent friendly messages to Nungesser after the rape supposedly occurred. Oops.
In any case, the Jezebel article is well worthy of a blog named after a liar. To give just one example, it says “Here’s Cathy Young using Rolling Stone’s now-discredited article as a jumping off point to claim, basically, that most rape isn’t real.” It hyperlinks those words to an article in which Young doesn’t say what Jezebel says she says. Oops.
If Nungesser has been repeatedly found innocent of the charges against him, perhaps it’s because he is innocent.
In any case, Nungesser has now sued Columbia University and others for spreading false accusations against him, and it’s likely they will pay for doing so.
I genuinely don’t see how that descriptor fits, whether the alleged perp is guilty or innocent.