Endeavoring to Do Better


2010s Carleton Spotlight

Deja Vu All Over Again, Part One

Even with an updated sexual misconduct policy, Carleton’s system for dealing with assaults still isn’t working, and a lawsuit after two rapes reveals the limits of Title IX. 

A 2013 graduate of Carleton College who was raped on two different occasions by two different fellow students sued the college in 2016, saying the college’s response after she reported the rapes deprived her of her right to equal access to education conferred by Title IX. Carleton didn’t dispute that the rapes occurred or that administrators knew about them. But in its reply to her suit, the college said it responded appropriately to her reports. Leaving aside for now the issue of why colleges are expected to adjudicate criminal behavior in the first place, it’s worth considering whether the minimal legal requirement is the best Carleton can do.In the late 1980s Carleton students had won the fight for changes to the college’s sexual misconduct policy, including one year’s suspension as a minimum punishment for sexual assaults. But it wasn’t long before the minimum was removed, discarded by presidential fiat in 1990. (See 1990s Carleton Spotlight.)The survivor who sued Carleton in 2016, we’ll call her Eva, accused the college of negligence, breach of contract, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. She asked for punitive damages and the requirement that going forward Carleton would have to impose a minimum two-year suspension for perpetrators of rape.This wasn’t Carleton’s first time in the hot seat. Four survivors of sexual assaults by students who were known to be serial offenders had sued the college in 1989. They settled out of court, but the fallout from the case led to major national reforms. With one of the plaintiffs standing at his side, Minnesota congressman Jim Ramstad announced legislation he called the Sexual Assault Victims’ Bill of Rights. Signed into law by President George W. Bush in 1992, it became part of the Clery Act. Thanks to four Carleton students, institutions of higher education now must support victims of violence, report campus crime data, and publicly outline their policies and procedures on campus safety.Thanks to four Carleton students, institutions of
higher education now must support victims of violence,
report campus crime data, and publicly outline
their policies and procedures on campus safety.Four days after Eva arrived on campus, in the fall of 2011, she went to a party for New Student Week and walked home afterward with another freshman from her dorm. When they got to her room, he “violently raped her.”Eva wanted to get a forensic exam and went to the Student Health and Counseling Center to request a token for travel to the hospital. The receptionist turned her down, saying they didn’t allow travel for procedures that could be done on campus. But SHAC didn’t do the forensic testing, and Eva never got the evidence she was after.A day or so after the attack, her attacker messaged her on Facebook to apologize, writing, “I didn’t seek consent from you and I’m sorry about that.” Eva decided against filing a complaint against him, worried that he might get angry and threaten her.In mid-October the dean of freshman, Joe Baggot, learned through a Community Concern Form (CCF) submitted by another student that Eva had been engaged in self-harm by cutting. Later he explained why he hadn’t followed up with her: “Cutting, in and of itself, is not a suicide attempt and may be a coping mechanism for stress, anxiety, depression—all kinds of things,” he said. That same month, however, a professor told Baggot that Eva, a National Merit Scholar, had stopped handing in classwork and had badly failed an exam. He also said her advisor had contacted him asking if she could drop the class. Baggot had his assistant send Eva an email introducing him and suggesting that she should get in touch with him about her academic issues. She didn’t reply.When Eva returned from winter break in January 2012, she saw her rapist everywhere: not only because he lived on her floor but also because a track and field poster showing him shirtless in a tiny pair of shorts was plastered all over her dorm. The phrase “Go Hard!” was printed across his thighs. Eva said that the posters made her keep replaying the rape in her head and “made her want to die.”Eva’s roommate sought help from an administrator when she began showing signs of PTSD: she was cutting again, having insomnia and panic attacks, and talking about ending her life. She was hospitalized and placed on suicide watch for three days in February 2012. When her parents came to campus to meet with Dean Baggot, he learned from them that she had been sexually assaulted. He hadn’t been given the name of her assailant, but he filed a Community Concern Form about the incident, and when the CCF reached Title IX coordinator Joanne Mullen, she wrote to associate dean of students Julie Thornton to say that even if Eva didn’t want to initiate an adjudication process, Carleton had “an obligation to make sure that our other students [were] safe.” This may have marked a new direction for the college, as in the previous three decades, students had repeatedly raised concerns about serial predators. Of course, they still hadn’t been told the rapist’s name.Baggot began meeting with Eva regularly to keep tabs on her. Without offering to intervene on her behalf, he said she should contact her instructors about any academic accommodations she might need. She ended up dropping two of her classes, and though she asked him to strike them from her record, Baggot said it couldn’t be done. Apparently, they still hadn’t discussed the thing that started all her problems: Baggot said she told him she “would let him know” if she wanted to discuss the rape.In the meantime, Eva kept crossing paths with her assailant. Though Carleton administrators knew she’d been raped and that her rapist lived near her, no one from Carleton ever mentioned that the student handbook gave sexual assault survivors the right to a change in housing. But after a friend’s mother brought it up, Eva asked about it, and in April she got into a new dorm.That spring Eva learned that her attacker had been offered a position as an RA for the following year. With the help of student volunteers from Campus Advocates Against Sexual Harassment and Assault (CAASHA), she anonymously submitted a Community Concern Form identifying him as the perpetrator of a rape. Thornton connected the dots, and Baggot was tasked with approaching Eva to see if she wanted to file a formal complaint. Meanwhile, word got back to the perpetrator. A mutual friend told Eva that he was furious and suspected Eva of submitting the form. The friend suggested Eva could try to talk to him and calm him down.According to her suit, Eva intended to speak with him, but as she approached him she saw him gesticulating angrily to other students, so she changed her mind and backed away, “convinced that it would be dangerous to either talk or meet with him.” On May 1 she met with Amy Sillanpa, Title IX deputy and the associate director of Residential Life, to speak with her about the assault, and afterward Sillanpa was, in her own words,“freakin’ out” about the prospect of having an RA who had been accused of rape.As required by policy, Sillanpa appointed a sexual misconduct support advisor (SMS) for Eva, choosing associate dean of students Cathy Carlson. Eva showed Carlson the Facebook message from her attacker, where he admitted to having sex with her without consent. Eva also confided that now that she knew he was enraged about the CCF, she was too scared to file a complaint. Eva said Carlson agreed she shouldn’t file a formal complaint if she was afraid that he might retaliate, and urged her to focus on her studies. Eva was persuaded.The administrators, however, still had the matter of the assailant’s appointment as an RA to deal with. They decided to issue a formal complaint against Eva’s attacker themselves, a process that didn’t exist in policy but that they seem to have created to fit the moment. They asked Eva to provide a written statement about the assault—something she’d been trying to avoid. She complied but let Carlson know that she’d left out those violent details she’d mentioned and could add them with help from Carlson or her therapist. Carlson said she already had all the details she needed to make the complaint. In keeping with current practice, Carlson also asked her to spell out what she wanted the sanction against her rapist to be. Eva wrote that she would “allow the administration to decide how to properly respond.”“What I wanted was for him to get expelled,” she said later. “But I didn’t want him to think that I was the reason he got expelled. . . . I didn’t want to have a target on my back.”While their assailants were allowed to stay at Carleton,
survivors were given to understand that their own education
and membership in the community were on the line.Eva told Carlson she wanted to have some agreement from her assailant about how he would behave toward her at Carleton going forward. Carlson provided the court with a statement she’d sent to the hearing board. It read, “Regardless of the finding [Eva] would like to have closure regarding this incident. This could be in the form of a mediated conversation . . . concerning the nature of future interactions at Carleton.”The case was heard by a panel of three members from the Community Board on Sexual Misconduct, who found that the student had violated Carleton’s sexual misconduct policy by “a preponderance of evidence.” As punishment he received a year’s probation and was advised that to avoid suspension he “must remain in good standing with the college academically and socially.”The panel also rescinded the RA offer, requiring him to attend counseling and to submit a letter that “demonstrate[d] an understanding of [his] past actions and their effects.” Lastly, they issued a no-contact order, meaning he was not to interact with Eva in any way or have anyone else contact her for him. This was the only sanction Eva was allowed to know about.The CBSM had recently given two other perpetrators of similar assaults a year’s suspension, and according to court documents, Eva, Carlson, and another administrator were all surprised at the outcome of the hearing on Eva’s attacker, agreeing that it seemed “unusual” that he wasn’t suspended or expelled: Thornton told Eva he was given softer treatment because he was “truly sorry.”The policy allowed for appeals if the board’s sanctions were “substantially inconsistent with past institutional responses” or if the board received new information. Eva believed this punishment met that criteria, and, to bolster the case for an appeal, she offered to provide the violent details about the attack that she’d withheld earlier. She had no standing to object to the ruling, but Eva’s parents asked Carleton, the nominal plaintiff, to pursue one. Carleton declined to appeal.Back on campus as a sophomore in the fall of 2012, Eva said, she continued to see her assailant frequently around campus and “would drink to cope with it.” Then she found out that she wasn’t even protected by the sanction: “Although the CBSM had issued the no-contact order against [him] the previous spring, Carleton had not yet provided him with a copy of that order.”Eva repeatedly asked Thornton to tell her what his other sanctions had been, but Thornton refused to divulge them, citing concerns for his privacy. In fact, the complaint said, Carleton’s policy allowed staff to inform a victim of violent crime about “the results of any disciplinary proceeding conducted by Carleton against the alleged perpetrator of that crime.” But Thornton told Eva if she wanted to know what standards he was supposed to be following, she would have to ask him herself.Eva wanted to meet without anyone from Carleton present so she could ask him about his sanctions, and, according to the case, Thornton was a proponent of the idea of using meetings between parties in disputes as a means of restorative justice. She arranged for Eva and her assailant to meet, and they sat down to talk alone in Thornton’s office, with Carlson in her own office next door. She said Eva could call upon her with a knock or a bump on the wall if she was needed. Eva described the meeting as “terrifying and disastrous.”In the lawsuit, Eva’s expert witnesses Mary Koss and Jennifer Freyd (links to other stories) expressed dismay about this meeting. Dr. Koss said in her deposition that an in-person meeting “is not a part of any recognized form of restorative justice,” and is “a dangerous practice.” She also testified that “Carleton violated ‘gold standard practices’ of restorative justice by, for example, failing to meet with [Eva] beforehand to prepare her and by not having a facilitator present.”Dr. Freyd testified about the concept of institutional betrayal, saying, “If you told anyone, I think, in the main of sexual violence, whether they’re a researcher or anything else, they’d be, like, ‘No, don’t put these two people alone in a room together, not at this point. Not without a whole lot of safety precautions taking place.’”Eva said that during the meeting the other student “turned the tables” and “emphasized how angry he was with” her, pressuring her to lift the no-contact order “because he did not think it was ‘fair’ and he did not want his brother to find out that he had been sanctioned.”Eva said she felt “frozen,” just as she had during the rape. And she agreed to ask for the sanction be lifted. Carleton complied.Now, even more terrified by her assailant, she said, she spent the rest of her years at Carleton playing “cat and mouse,” “taking roundabout routes,” avoiding the dining halls, and skipping classes.Unfortunately, this wasn’t Eva’s only encounter with a rapist at Carleton: As a sophomore, in the spring of 2013, she was drugged and sexually assaulted by a senior who lived in her dorm. When she told Carlson about it and said she wanted to file a formal complaint, Carlson said she’d heard about this student’s sexual misconduct before but no one had ever filed a formal complaint. Nevertheless, Eva said in her deposition, Carlson “talked her out of” filing one this time, too, reasoning that the assailant would be graduating and “off campus in two months anyway.”Eva recalled Carlson telling her she should focus on school or she’d be suspended and suggesting that she might want to take a medical leave or change her major to something less challenging. Carlson countered that she urged Eva “to focus on her overall health and well-being so she [could] graduate. . . . But I was not telling her she should not go through the complaint process. I want that clear.”Either way, this admonishment to focus on her studies is one that survivors of sexual assault had heard before. While their assailants were allowed to stay at Carleton, survivors were given to understand that their own education and membership in the community were on the line.Eva, who was now skipping classes and meals to avoid two rapists, agreed not to file a complaint against her second assailant, saying she wouldn’t be able to handle the pressure anyway. But three weeks later, she and three other students submitted a Community Concern Form about the man’s known tendency to prey upon “extremely intoxicated” women. Rather than interceding in a way that would protect all women students, however, Baggot sent  the senior a letter ordering him to stay away from the four women who had reported him.Eva made it to her senior year, but in January 2015, she found that she’d enrolled in a class her freshman-year assailant was also taking. She asked if the no-contact order could be reinstated, reiterating that the attack had been worse than she’d previously reported and adding that the situation was “impacting her ability to be a student at Carleton.”The order was reinstated the next day: he was removed from the class and restricted from several campus locations. But in March, Eva made a presentation required for her major at a gala, one her name had appeared on posters for. Her rapist attended, and when they saw each other, it was Eva who left. In ensuing meetings between Eva and administrators, the harsh details of the rape came out, and her assailant was instructed to finish his final trimester off-campus. Carlson later explained that the new details “changed it from a ‘he said, she said’ first-time encounter with sex and alcohol to a violent, almost premeditated rape and that is very different.”Before graduation Eva asked that the no-contact include the ceremony, but when that wasn’t granted, she opted not to attend.When Eva sued Carleton in 2016, the district court granted summary judgment in favor of Carleton on all counts, ruling that she hadn’t demonstrated a “causal nexus” between the college's conduct and her experience of sexual assault, seemingly overlooking the complications for her that flowed from the decision to let her assailant remain on campus after finding him culpable.Eva appealed, and In 2021 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth District affirmed the earlier decision, writing, “Title IX establishes a relatively high bar for plaintiffs who claim that the insufficiency of school-imposed sanctions shows deliberate indifference.” It went on, (italics added) “That high bar is not met by evidence showing imperfection or even negligence in a school's response to rape, other forms of sexual assault, or sexual harassment.” They said Eva had failed to show that Carleton was “deliberately indifferent,” to ‘known acts of discrimination,” that “occurred under its control.”The ruling goes on, “Nor does the record suggest that the college denied [Eva] reasonable accommodations as she endeavored to finish her degree while struggling with challenges to her mental health brought on by the sexual assaults.”The courts came down on Carleton’s side here, conceding that while these two men did rape Eva, the college’s procedures didn’t deprive her of her rights. But in May 13, 2016, the Carletonian made pointed comparisons between Eva’s allegations and those of the students who sued Carleton in 1989—namely that the college did not protect her after she came forward, discouraged her from formal reporting, and allowed the offender to remain enrolled even though he had violated its sexual misconduct policy.The law is one thing: it establishes the minimum standards institutions must follow. But considering the severity of the problems raised by Carleton assault survivors, it seems reasonable to ask if those standards are sufficient.