STANFORD — An explosive new lawsuit alleges that Stanford University’s lax responses to reports of physical and sexual abuse permitted the same student to victimize at least four young women during his undergraduate years.
The university’s failure to promptly investigate and discipline the young man jeopardized the safety of women across campus, violating federal anti-discrimination law, alleges the suit filed Monday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.
Instead of triggering an investigation into one student’s disturbing allegations that the man she had once dated strangled and raped her after she began losing consciousness in 2011, an academic adviser suggested she drive to the beach to take care of her mental health, the suit says.
A campus counselor disapproved of the shoulder-baring sweater the young woman wore to a counseling session, the complaint adds, asking if she put herself in risky situations to appear “sexually available.” Residence hall staff to whom she later reported her concerns promised to tell the male student that assaulting women was “not okay,” the suit says.
The plaintiff, a different student identified in the complaint as “Ms. Doe,” said the man violently assaulted her in 2014 when she refused to engage in oral sex – an allegation that was confirmed by a Stanford investigation later that year, the complaint says.
“Women will not have an equal opportunity to succeed academically until the epidemic of sexual violence on campus ends,” said Rebecca Peterson-Fisher, an attorney for Equal Rights Advocates, a San Francisco-based civil rights organization that filed the complaint. “Institutions like Stanford need to be held accountable for their failure to recognize the severity of these crimes and to comply with Title IX” of the Civil Rights Act.
Already under close scrutiny — and federal investigation — for its handling of its sexual assault problem, Stanford issued a statement Monday saying that it felt “deep sympathy” for the plaintiff in the case and that it was cooperating with a federal Office for Civil Rights investigation into the matter.
“Sexual assault and sexual misconduct is abhorrent and antithetical to the values of our campus — we take these matters very seriously and have zero tolerance for such violence,” the Stanford statement said.
Stanford did not acknowledge mishandling the case, which was reported by the Huffington Post and Palo Alto Weekly last January. In its statement, the administration suggested that its hands had been tied because one or more of the victims did not wish to pursue a formal investigation. “Without the cooperation of victims,” the statement said, “regrettably the university is very limited in what it can do.”
But the complaint argues that the first victim — who repeatedly raised the incident with various campus employees — initially was discouraged from making a formal complaint after the 2011 incident, and that campus officials failed to connect the dots when other women came forward with complaints about the same man — who was referred to in the suit only as “Mr. X.”
In 2012, when the same woman again raised the issue after hearing rumors that the man might have assaulted other female students, the suit says, a professional residence hall staffer promised her in an email that staffers would give him a stern talking-to. In the email, according to the suit, the staffer wrote that officials would convey that the physical and sexual assaults “were not okay and that he has a very serious problem with anger.”
In February 2014, the plaintiff said in the complaint, the man — whom she had previously dated — twisted her arm behind her back and told her to go kill herself after she refused to have sexual contact with him.
A third woman reported in June 2014 that the man became “violently angry” when she refused to have sex with him, “threw a table at her and punched her in the face while holding a shampoo bottle, splitting her lip.” The woman, a Stanford student, took a leave of absence from school after the incident, according to the suit.
The complaint mentions a fourth case involving another female Stanford student but does not provide details.
In July 2014, Stanford found the student responsible for “serious sexual misconduct” and banned him from campus, the suit says — but by then, he had already graduated. The complaint says that Stanford failed to enforce the ban and the no-contact orders and that the man continued to contact the plaintiff — and even returned to campus.
The plaintiff, now a graduate student at Stanford, said she spotted the man dining with another young woman at an on-campus restaurant in February.
“Alarmed and traumatized, Ms. Doe sought assistance from Stanford public safety officers,” the complaint says. “The officers told her that there was no official record of the ban and they could neither arrest Mr. X nor remove him from campus.”
Stanford law Professor Michele Dauber, an advocate for sexual assault victims, said cases like this one show how important it is for campuses to conduct timely investigations and remove perpetrators from campus before they can harm others.
“We have to send a clear and unambiguous message to perpetrators,” Dauber said, “that this kind of conduct is serious and it’s not tolerated.”
