Content warning: This article contains references to sexual violence.
A source included in this story asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. A pseudonym is used to improve readability. The Daily is also withholding specific dates, instead using general timeframes, to protect the identity of the source.
In her sophomore fall, Amy and her friend attended a party. As she was visibly drunk, an acquaintance offered to walk her back to her dorm while her friend stayed. At her dorm, he asked to use the bathroom, then asked to enter her room. After she rejected his repeated requests to kiss her, he climbed onto her bed and raped her. Amy was left bleeding, she said.
“I just felt super empty, like I lost something,” she said. Amy went to Sunday mass the next day, for the first time since coming to college.
The Sexual Harassment/Assault Response & Education (SHARE) Title IX Office later wrote in their determination of responsibility letter that “a preponderance of credible evidence” indicated that the perpetrator was responsible for non-consensual oral sex, digital penetration and unprotected vaginal penetration. The perpetrator was suspended for two years — a sanction that the Office deemed fitting for the “gravity of the findings,” according to the letter.
A SHARE Title IX flyer shared with Amy estimated that the entire process would take three to four months. By the time the perpetrator was found responsible, it had been almost two years — six times the initial estimation.
The Title IX coordinator and director of the SHARE Office at the time of the case did not respond to a request for comment. The investigation took place within the past four years.
Delays are not uncommon in Title IX cases across the country and are “the number one complaint from survivors,” according to Nicole Bedera, a researcher of sexual violence and author of “On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence.”
“[Survivors hope] this would be one bad semester, and then it turn[s] into multiple bad years,” Bedera said.
Frustrated with the slow progress, Amy filed a police report in spring of her sophomore year when she was a few months into the Title IX process. Her junior spring, and two weeks before the scheduled Title IX hearing, the lead detective on her case verbally informed her that the prosecutor would be pressing felony charges. The Santa Clara County District Attorney’s (DA) office officially filed the charges — rape of an intoxicated person, oral copulation of an intoxicated person and penetration by force — in her senior fall.
In a university Title IX proceeding, a perpetrator is found responsible if the alleged conduct is more likely true than not, or “50% plus one,” according to Maha Ibrahim, a managing attorney for the Ending Sexual Violence in Education Program at Equal Rights Advocates. In a criminal case however, “it takes a very high threshold of evidence” for the DA to even press charges.
“The fact that [the DA] feels they have enough to go on to pursue a criminal matter, but it took Stanford over 600 days to finish a campus misconduct proceeding based on the same facts, is to me, as somebody in the field, statistically wild,” Ibrahim said. “That’s pretty eyebrow raising.”
According to the criminal case files, the detectives had interviewed fewer witnesses than the Office did and had accessed some of the Office’s files. Amy also gave them a blanket that had been on her bed during the assault, which she believed to have blood stains.
The Title IX process is supposed to be “prompt and equitable” because it concerns the “immediate safety of the survivor on campus,” said Ibrahim. “A criminal case takes a long time because we’re talking about the loss of liberty of a person who may go to jail.”
One significant delay in the process was the pre-hearing stage, which took 200 days longer than the estimated 22 days. The pre-hearing stage includes the scheduling of the hearing date and follows the conclusion of the investigation, in the cases that the Office decides the perpetrator engaged in Title IX sexual harassment, necessitating a hearing.
After being notified in her junior fall that a hearing would take place, Amy chose the earliest date available, set for later that quarter. The hearing was then rescheduled for early winter quarter, since not all parties were available for the original date.
Prior to the hearing rescheduling, Amy had accepted an offer to study abroad in her junior winter. Even though the hearing would be held virtually, she made the difficult decision to withdraw from the program to be with her support system and to hopefully end the process quickly.
Two weeks before the hearing, Amy was told the date no longer worked, due to witnesses who could not attend. The next available date was more than a month later, in spring quarter, according to email correspondence obtained by The Daily.
The perpetrator studied abroad both the fall and winter quarters of that academic year.
“It is a prime example of the ways that [Amy's] education and her ability to maximize the quality of her education at Stanford has been negatively impacted by this process,” Alyssa Burgart, professor of FEMGEN 143: “One in Five: The Law, Policy and Politics of Campus Sexual Assault,” told The Daily.
The aim of Title IX, a federal civil rights law, is to prevent students, “on the basis of sex,” from being “denied the benefits of” or “subjected to discrimination under any education program,” including universities.
Throughout the process, the Office provided little support, Amy said. According to a flyer shared with The Daily by the University, SHARE can “help facilitate accommodations,” like academic extensions or schedule adjustments. However, Amy was told that accommodations like online lectures were at the discretion of the professor, and the Office could not force professors to comply.
Amy said she “just got scared of asking [the Office] for things,” so the responsibility fell on her to reach out to professors for accommodations throughout the Title IX process. For a course shared with the perpetrator in her sophomore fall, that meant watching every lecture over Zoom.
Her junior spring, Amy was excited to take ECON 136: “Market Design” with Paul Milgrom Ph.D. ’78, an economics professor and a Nobel laureate. When she discovered the perpetrator was enrolled for the class, which had mandatory attendance, she notified the teaching team and was told she could do extra assignments in place of in-person attendance.
“I didn’t get to be in lecture, I didn’t get to hear from the famous professor and instead, I was doing extra homework,” Amy said.
From her research, Bedera noted that some universities will allow “for the perpetrator to be the one who has to attend class online instead of the survivor.” At those universities, the Title IX administrators will request for perpetrators to take a certain class virtually and a surprising number comply, Bedera said.
Ibrahim told The Daily that lawyers can “help keep the process on track by holding the school’s feet to the fire.”
However, Amy did not have adequate legal representation during the process, due to financial barriers and a lack of support from her parents. The University allots 11 hours of free legal aid, in addition to hearing time, for both parties involved in a Title IX process. This time is divided into six hours during the investigation and pre-hearing stage, three hours for hearing preparation and two hours for the appeal.
Amy ran out of the time allotted for investigation and pre-hearing by her sophomore summer.
“The idea that, for someone who knows nothing about the law and nothing about Title IX, 11 hours will be sufficient to address their sexual assault is offensive,” Burgart said.
University spokesperson Luisa Rapport wrote in an email to The Daily that the 11 hours of free legal aid was “determined in collaboration with attorneys, taking into account their understanding of the reasonable time considerations for these matters.”
The Stanford-provided attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.
“The Title IX process has become so legalistic in ways that oftentimes disadvantage survivors,” Burgart said. Ibrahim says that Title IX is “supposed to be a school disciplinary process,” but in reality, “it’s very much quasi-legal.”
For evidentiary review and rebuttals, Amy had to read documents about her and “[her] body” submitted by the perpetrator and his friends, which “was so dehumanizing,” she said.
“I had to read hundreds of pages… and somehow had to be analytical about it, take a step back and try to think about how to form an argument or make a case about it,” Amy said.
She reviewed over 200 pages and 16 hours of recordings throughout the entire process, and wrote around 80 pages of documents herself, incorporating feedback from her Stanford-provided lawyer. “It was, mentally, pushing me to my breaking point,” Amy said. “It was just so cruel.”
Ibrahim is a trauma-informed lawyer. “We will act as a shield for the client,” Ibrahim said. “We sit down and tell the client, ‘The file contains this material we know isn’t true, and we’re going to slowly go through it with you and decide how to reply.’” However, Amy did not have access to resources like trauma-informed lawyers.
The process concluded just before Amy’s senior year began, with the University deciding to suspend the perpetrator for two years. “It felt like [it was] to appease me in a way, because I said I was co-terming, so I would only be at school for the next two years,” Amy said.
“Universities almost never expel perpetrators,” Bedera said. “And it’s strange, because they do not feel this way about plagiarism. They do not feel this way about drug use.”
During the pre-hearing stage of the process, the perpetrator had proposed an informal resolution, in which he offered to voluntarily leave the University after their sophomore year. An informal resolution is a way to mutually resolve the Title IX process without need for a hearing, leaving no formal disciplinary record.
Amy did not accept the proposed informal resolution, and the University never communicated to her what a sanction might look like if the perpetrator was found responsible.
“It’s still going to feel like an injustice. It’s still like he just decided to leave,” Bedera said. “And, the school hasn’t been honest about the fact that they don’t actually expel people.”
Only one student has been expelled from Stanford as a result of the Title IX process since the 2016-17 academic year, when Stanford began publishing Title IX Annual Reports, according to Rapport.
Bedera’s research has indicated that expelled perpetrators often “are not expelled for sexual violence.” Instead, it’s for “something else that happened after the sexual violence,” such as a violation of probation or, in a case from her own research, threats of a mass shooting targeting Title IX staff.
Determining the length of suspension “has nothing to do with the violence,” Bedera said. Instead, universities will often suspend a perpetrator for “the number of years that the survivor should take in their degree to graduate, maybe plus one.”
Bedera sees two issues with this perspective. “It presumes that the survivor is only getting one degree and that, as an alum, she’ll never be a meaningful part of the campus community,” she said. “It also makes it sound like if the survivor hadn’t raised concern, the university doesn’t see an issue with [sexual violence].”
Prior to the assault, Amy “hadn’t heard super positive things” being said by her peers about other girls on campus who had made Title IX reports. “If anything, the girl’s name was being slandered, or people were always talking about her, and it was like gossip,” she said.
Amy initially hesitated to report the incident in fear that her “business would become everyone’s business.” But, after reading “every administrative guideline” about the process and hearing support from her friends, Resident Fellows and a professor, she ultimately decided to file the initial report with the Office.
A 2019 campus climate survey of Stanford students conducted by the Association of American Universities (AAU) revealed a lack of confidence in the University to address instances of sexual violence. Only 33% of women and 24% of men reached out to campus programs or resources following an experience of non-consensual penetration.
“We could end campus sexual assault within 10 years if people in positions of power wanted to do something about it,” Bedera said. The key is recognizing the patterns of sexual violence and seeing confessions for what they are, she said.
“People don’t realize, perpetrators confess. For example, in cases of intimate partner violence, they won't say, ‘I never hit my partner.’ They’ll say, ‘I did it, but she deserved it,’” Bedera said.
According to the Title IX investigative report obtained by The Daily, the perpetrator argued that the incident occurred, but was consensual.
“If we had a Title IX system where we wanted to actually address violence and end discrimination on college campuses, it would be so easy to train staff… to be able to see a confession for what it is,” Bedera said. “It doesn’t have to be as complicated as it is.”
Amy thinks she wouldn’t have filed the initial report if she had known what the process would be like, and perhaps would have “gone straight to the police.”
“I didn’t know it was going to take over half of my academic career, or I’d have to give up studying abroad and be my own lawyer,” Amy said. “It just took so much time away from every part of my life.”