Maybe this case helped convince Donald Trump that he should sue E. Jean Carroll, the victorious plaintiff in the sexual assault case against him, for defamation.
The Connecticut Supreme Court ruled 7-0 that a former Yale student is not immune from being sued for defamation by the male student she accused of raping her. Saifullah Khan was found not guilty in a criminal trial of raping “Jane Doe” in her dorm room in October 2015 in what Khan insisted, and a jury agreed, was an incident of consensual sex. Yale had expelled Khan using the “preponderance of the evidence” standard forced on educational institutions by the Obama Department of Education.
The court determined that because Khan had fewer rights to defend himself in university proceedings, which, again prompted by the Obama administration, provided limited due process protections, his accuser should not benefit from the civil immunity granted to witnesses in criminal proceedings. “Statements made in sexual misconduct disciplinary proceedings that are offered and accepted without adequate procedural safeguards carry too great a risk of unfair or unreliable outcomes,” the unanimous opinion held.
Over a dozen sexual assault activist and feminist groups submitted amicus briefs arguing that immunity from civil liability is critical in permitting rape victims from coming forward. The problem is that it also is essential in allowing accusers to ruin academic careers, reputations and lives with false allegations that biased university procedures are rigged to support. The accused have rights too, a concept increasingly under siege in the U.S., especially when the accused belong to a disfavored gender or race.
The Connecticut ruling is likely to be an influential one, cited in future cases. Nonetheless, it comes too late for many students caught in the trap Obama’s DOE “Dear Colleague” letter set. The elimination of fairness and due process protections from college and university disciplinary proceedings after sexual assault accusations led to hundreds of lawsuits and egregious injustices. If the result of this decision is that female students take special care that their claims are legitimate and provable, it will restore much needed balance and fairness to process that was warped by the destructive “Believe all women” fixation.
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Source: Legal Insurrection
Ethics Alarms 
“immunity from civil liability is critical in permitting rape victims from coming forward. The problem is that it also is essential in allowing accusers to ruin academic careers, reputations and lives with false allegations that biased university procedures are rigged to support.”
There you have it. This is one area where women have a decisive advantage. If you want to shake down a rich family, destroy someone who rejected you or didn’t call you fast enough after a date, shake down a professor (i.e. Oleanna) or just ruin some guy for the hell of it, this is the way to do it. This works especially well if the other person was alone at the time of the alleged rape and can’t prove he was somewhere else.
Extra credit for mentioning the Mamet play.
I an surprised this sort of thing never results on retaliatory violence.
Wait. We’re being graded?
It all goes into your permanent record…
This works especially well if the other person was alone at the time of the alleged rape and can’t prove he was somewhere else.
This got me to thinking about how we get tracked and maybe can’t access the data easily to prove where we were, but what else might I have? I have a dashcam that at least can help me prove the places I drove to, when I arrived, when I left. It’s not a perfect alibi, but it’s a start to creating a tighter timeline and forces someone inventing a story into some corners, really quickly. Some others might have home security cameras that might show arriving and leaving times. I definitely recommend some of these “ad-hoc” things that don’t necessarily track you, but they are enough to discredit a shoddy story from an opportunist.
If the result of this decision is that female students take special care to only have honest to God sex with guys they are genuinely interested in and appear to be decent human beings equally interested in the female student’s wellbeing, maybe it will protect a lot of female students from a lot of largely self-inflicted misery. Trust me, girls and boys, play at sexual intimacy, sooner or later and to one extent or another, you’re playing with fire.
And you will get burned.
Am I interpreting this correctly? Had the alleged victim gone directly to the New Haven police, and Khan been found not guilty at trial, would she be immune from this suit? Or had Yale not acted, using the lower standard (“preponderance of evidence), would she not be in this predicament? Does she therefore have a case against Yale?
It is well within the realm of possibility that both the Yale disciplinary board and the jury in the criminal case did the right thing, if, say, they both thought it was 90% likely that rape had occurred: considerably more likely than not, but well short of beyond reasonable doubt. This is rather a no-win situation for everyone involved.
I have long argued that universities aren’t the place to adjudicate serious crimes. The investigators aren’t sufficiently trained, the proceedings aren’t public, and the advocates aren’t trained in the law. On two separate occasions, at different colleges, I was asked by both the accuser and defendant to be their advocate in college hearings about date rape cases. I didn’t want to take sides between my students, and declined.
I was also asked by a student accused of a drug-related offense (she, rather stupidly, I think, took a deal before the hearing took place).
By the way, in at least one of those cases, actual lawyers were not only not specifically forbidden. I was pre-law for a couple years as an undergrad. That’s probably the closest thing to a real attorney most of these students–accusers and accused alike–would be likely to have available to them.
I can certainly understand the position of the accuser if she actually was raped. She wants not to be around that guy, and to protect other women on campus from him, and now she’s getting sued for telling the truth. And expecting rape victims to have a “provable” case before reporting to the authorities is an unreasonable standard at best.
On the other hand, if Khan’s account is accurate, then he has in fact been defamed, and he has unquestionably suffered irreparable damage to his reputation.
Victims and accused both need protection, but ultimately one needs to take priority over the other. This is a real-world Kobayashi Maru situation, complete with an antagonist whose name is in the title of the movie in which that dilemma is introduced. I know which way I have to lean, but I hate it.
“Had the alleged victim gone directly to the New Haven police, and Khan been found not guilty at trial, would she be immune from this suit?”
Yup. The key fact is that an acquittal only means guilt wasn’t proved BARD. Bringing the case against a fellow student in the campus system increased the likelihood that the accusation bears fruit, but at the same time, it is done at the expense of the victim’s civil rights. So it’s a trade-off, and one thing that’s traded off is immunity from defamation suits.
Hoping not to seem arrogant in the following, I’d suggest that the fact that I didn’t know that might reasonably suggest that the average undergraduate doesn’t, either. This trade-off is information that victims need to know to weigh their options going forward, but it clearly isn’t being shared by universities, and it is probably being actively suppressed.
Once, my employer was considering such a system (after the ‘Dear Colleague’ letter). My dean went over what that would entail. I told her that if one of my students told me that she was raped, I was taking her directly to the city police or the county sheriff. This is a felony crime, universities are not equipped to investigate, try, and punish serious crimes. I mean, it is one thing if universities want to handle parking infractions and littering, but rape? Luckily, we decided to send those cases to the city police and stay out of it.
I’m sorry, I don’t think anyone who was actually raped would want to have it decided through a university system where the worst that could happen to the perpetrator is that they are expelled and their name dragged through the mud. This is a serious prison time crime, with harsher penalties than 2nd degree manslaughter. You wouldn’t want the university to handle the manslaughter case for you relative, would you? Then why would you have them handle a rape case?
OK, they might just be stupid and feel coerced by the ‘women’s studies’ people to push it through the university system, but I can’t see many people doing that unless they are being pressured with academic penalties for themselves.
I agree with most of this, but I find it easy to see how a victim would opt for the university system first, chronologically. It’s faster and more likely to solve the immediate problem of getting this guy away from her.
Then move on to the criminal case. This is what this woman at Yale did, apparently.
It’s extremely difficult to prove a rape charge in criminal court. How do you prove a lack of consent? Even injuries are explained away by “she said she likes it rough.” Twelve out of twelve jurors believing your version of events beyond reasonable doubt? That’s a high hurdle. (Yes, it’s supposed to be, but that’s not part of a victim’s thought process.)
It’s easy to believe that a victim thinks, “at least the university will do something.”
I honestly never considered that. However, during the process, where in many cases the accused was not permitted to have counsel, for example, I would think the issue would begin clarifying considerably. Maybe not.
I was thinking the other day about this stuff, and I realized that the people who claim “women don’t lie so we can automatically believe them” are actually engaging in a form of benevolent sexism, and the left is clear that all forms of sexism are bad, regardless of intent.
Benevolent sexism looks at women as “above men” Women are more pure and moral while men are kind of brutish, right? Well, if you claim an “entire gender” doesn’t generally lie about sexual assault, that sounds like a benevolent sexism. You treat women’s accusations differently and with less scrutiny than other allegations, even if you are motivated by “women are better.”
So, in the name of eliminating sexism, these people on the left can’t make this argument anymore. Otherwise, they are sexist!