Editor’s Note: The experiences of this op-ed’s anonymous author were the subject of a May 2025 article in The Daily titled “Stanford’s Title IX office took two years to suspend rapist,” which won First Prize in the student category of the 2026 Collier Awards for Ethics in Journalism.

The Daily reviewed contemporaneous emails, text messages and documents to corroborate all previously unreported claims that appear in this op-ed. The Daily has made an exception to its usual policy against anonymous bylines to edit and publish this submission.

When I was raped in my Stanford dorm room at 19, I too, like Cornell’s Jane Doe, thought that reporting it to Stanford and law enforcement would yield justice. It was their job to keep their community safe and hold others accountable, right?

Like Jane Doe, I was met with negligence and apathy.

Stanford took two years to complete the Title IX process in my case. For two years, I skipped classes I shared with the person who raped me, lived in fear of running into him on campus and missed out on opportunities like study abroad due to Stanford’s constant rescheduling and delaying of proceedings.

The process swallowed half of my time at Stanford, only for it to culminate in a two year suspension, despite Stanford finding the other student responsible for vaginally, digitally and orally raping me. Per this sanction, the person who raped me is eligible to return to campus and graduate with his degree as of this fall.

Campus police waited for four months after my initial report to reach out to witnesses via text and conduct phone interviews.

Stanford University Department of Public Safety (SUDPS) submitted the case for review to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office in late 2023. When I asked for an update almost four months later, the case seemed to be unaccounted for, with each office giving me conflicting responses about who was responsible for it.

The DA’s office claimed it had returned the case to SUDPS for further investigation, who in turn denied ever receiving it. Only after follow-ups from me and victim advocates did SUDPS realize that the original submission had been incomplete and did not contain the witness reports. Months had been wasted on a careless oversight. Had I not followed up, my case could have fallen through the cracks entirely.

In May 2024, the detective called to tell me that the DA’s office had decided to file charges (which the DA’s office subsequently confirmed by email). Yet the charges were not entered into the system until five months later. Throughout that period, neither my repeated messages nor follow-ups from victim advocates at the YWCA and the DA’s own Victim Services office received a response.

That fall, out of the blue, the office finally responded that the charges had just been entered. The only acknowledgment of the months of unanswered messages was one sentence: “I apologize for the delay.”

Years of my life were wasted by preventable errors, prolonged delays and the repeated failures of the institutions responsible for handling my case.

Even now, four years have gone by, and still I am fighting. In the time since I was raped, I have left my teenage years behind, become old enough to legally drink, earned multiple undergraduate and graduate degrees, left Stanford and moved to a different state. And yet, my fight in the criminal justice system is not over, nor has anything changed at Stanford.

I once believed, naively, that students’ suffering meant something to Stanford. I had suffered, but maybe it could be a learning experience for the University, an opportunity to fix things for the next survivor. Maybe what happened to me was a mistake, a loose end. So last year, I reached out to Provost Jenny Martinez about my concerns, who indicated she would stay in the loop and connected me with Patrick Dunkley, Vice Provost for Institutional Equity, Access, and Community.

If finding a student responsible for vaginally, digitally and orally raping their peer didn’t warrant an expulsion, what would? Why is Stanford okay with giving degrees to people they recognize are rapists? Why can you be expelled for some forms of academic dishonesty but, apparently, not rape?

Dunkley sat down with me in person. After conferring with the Office of the General Counsel, he followed up by email. “We will be conducting an attorney-client privileged review of the sanctions imposed by OCS and Title IX over the past five years,” he wrote. “Based on that review we will look for trends and patterns that might suggest the desirability to consider measures that might result in increased consistency of outcomes, or improved alignment with the underlying conduct.”

According to the Title IX Office’s annual reports, since the 2019-2020 academic year, there has been only one reported Title IX hearing addressing nonconsensual intercourse that both concluded and resulted in a finding of responsibility. This occurred in the 2023–2024 academic year, which I assume refers to my case, held in Spring 2024.

How could there be a meaningful review to assess “consistency of outcomes” across cases within the past five years when the relevant sample size appeared to be one? 

Why was the review “privileged”? If the review really did result in changes to sanctions or policies, would those changes not be reflected in the University’s publicly available Title IX procedures? If so, the practical outcome of the review would become visible regardless of whether action was taken or not. We all deserve transparency surrounding how the University responds to campus sexual assault.

Ultimately, an internal review whose outcome the University has not disclosed is nothing more than a performative gesture, allowing Stanford to claim it is taking action, without any accountability or real demonstration of change. In this, Stanford is failing not only survivors, but the broader campus community.

The year I entered Stanford, incoming freshmen were assigned Chanel Miller’s memoir, Know My Name. The Santa Clara County DA’s Office is the same office that prosecuted Brock Turner. How do we reconcile the values these institutions publicly champion with the way they handled my case?

Since the Cornell story broke, I have had to face the reality that despite all the ways Stanford and law enforcement have failed me — along with countless others — they do not have to face the same reckoning as Cornell.

Does justice only matter once it becomes a news headline? 

Jane Doe has watched the most traumatic experience in her life become the center of unrelenting media coverage, faced threats and intimidation and opened herself and her trauma up for intense public scrutiny. I commend Jane Doe for having the courage to stand up not only to the people who raped her, but to the institutions that wronged her. 

But is this what it takes for schools and institutions to listen, to try to make things better? For law enforcement and the justice system to do their job? Why do survivors have to sacrifice themselves for a chance at justice? We have suffered enough.

I am not as brave as Jane Doe. But I shouldn’t need to be.

Over the last four years, I have struggled to make sense of what happened to me, and what continues to happen. Why would someone rape another human being? And why would no one care? These questions are unanswerable, and so they’ve plagued me. The explanation my brain produced was that I was no one.

I was not valuable, or worthy, and that was why people were treating me this way. I saw all the harm done to me as proof that I was deficient in some way, lacking. I wasn’t worth anything, which explained why the person who raped me was only suspended, despite Stanford finding him guilty. A diploma was worth more than me. It was because I was no one, that the ruining of my life meant nothing to anyone but me. 

I used to think to myself, “I am no one now, but one day I’ll ‘be someone,’ and maybe then people will care.”

Now I realize that I am someone. I am someone right now, at this moment, and I have always been someone. I was someone at 19, when I was raped. I was someone at 20 when law enforcement lost my case and no one from the DA’s office would respond to my messages. I was someone at 21 when Stanford didn’t expel the person who raped me. The people who have hurt me have done so in spite of this. That is their failure, not a reflection of my value. I matter. I know that now.

But I also know that to these institutions, my voice alone will never matter enough. I’ve spent years trying to address these failures behind closed doors, only to be repeatedly let down. Stanford and law enforcement should not need to face media attention to make the pursuit of justice worthwhile.

To all the Jane Does watching events at Cornell and thinking about their own experiences: Your trauma does not need to be validated by an institution or a news outlet or even a peer. Your worth is not measured by the outcome of an investigation, or an institutional response. These systems have interests other than pursuing justice. Victims are expendable to them. 

What happened to you and how you were treated afterward is not a reflection of your worth. You are someone. You matter.

The Santa Clara District Attorney’s Office also shared a statement, writing that the office has filed a criminal case and is preparing for trial. The office added that it is “working to ensure there is clearer and better communication with the victim” and wrote that it hopes to “reassure this resilient survivor that we are working hard to find justice and accountability.”

SUDPS shared a statement as well, noting that they “will not comment on specific details out of respect for all parties and for the integrity of the legal process.” They state that “the Stanford Department of Public Safety takes every report of sexual assault seriously. We are committed to conducting fair, thorough, impartial, and trauma-informed investigations.”

Vice Provost Patrick Dunkley and the University declined to comment prior to publication.

The Daily also contacted Provost Jenny Martinez, who did not share a statement.