The Hunting Ground (2015) Movie Script

Like, I already know. Like...
I got in. I got in, I got in!
Oh, my God! I got in!
Okay.
- What? Denied?
- I got in!
Yes! Yes!
Boo-yah! Boo-yah!
Boo-yah! Yes!
"Application status
decision made. "
I'm sorry, Janelle.
Admitted!
- Oh, my God!
- Yes, yes, yes!
Whoo!
New students,
as I look out on you today,
I recognize that you must be
feeling incredible excitement,
anticipation, and perhaps
a little relief as well.
This is the day.
As your parents learned when
they dropped you off today,
what happens in college
stays in college.
Most of the time.
Few things are more worthy
of celebration
than the entry of a new class
of students into the university.
You have strengths
and skills and smarts
that you don't yet even realize.
Our Kansas State University
new undergraduate students today
are indeed the next generation
of leaders
on whom we will all rely.
Let us, the faculty, know what
we can do to help you reach that goal.
We will be there to advise you,
to support you, to guide you,
to point you to vast resources
and opportunities on your way.
To our new treasured students,
this is your moment.
Ah. You see? Ah...
Does it get any higher?
Ha-ha!
Growing up in inner-city Miami,
people like me don't really go anywhere.
My dad came over from Cuba,
and then my mom is second
generation Cuban-American.
I really wanted to get out of Miami
and do something different.
I'm the first person of my family
to ever leave the state and go to college.
I was actually valedictorian
in high school.
One of my favorite trips was coming
to D.C. when I was eight,
and I cried when I saw
the Declaration of Independence.
I've always been really fascinated
with the law and politics
and just, like, our country's history.
And I knew I wanted to go
to a school that had that history.
And UNC was the first public school,
and they had so much
in its history, you know,
of activism and social justice,
and I just knew I belonged.
I grew up in Raleigh,
North Carolina, kind of in suburbia.
High school I actually
had a great time in.
I was athletic.
I played a lot of sports.
I was the first female
in my class to letter.
I lettered in cross country.
And then I played soccer.
I was basically a straight-A student,
graduated third in my class.
For college, I thought
I would go somewhere in state,
and UNC was the best school.
I really had a good time there.
I learned a lot.
I loved my professors.
The first few weeks,
I made some of my best friends,
and we're still really,
really close to this day.
But two of us were sexually assaulted
before classes had even started.
It was at night.
We were dancing.
I was out with some friends.
People were drinking,
but nobody was ridiculously drunk.
And I got pulled outside
and banged my head against a wall
and was raped.
I physically fought
and got away and ran,
and then went to the bathroom
and, like, I still remember
just putting my hands on the sink
and just looking at myself in the mirror,
shaking, like,
"What just happened?"
My sophomore year,
right after spring break,
a really good friend of mine said,
"Hey, you wanna go to this party?"
And it was pretty late in the night.
I started dancing with this guy.
He was really attractive
and a really, really great dancer
and just a really good person.
At least, I thought he was.
It all happened really quickly.
I was actually a virgin,
so that adds a bit to it,
but he just started kind of, like,
pulling me towards the bathroom.
He grabbed my head
by the side of my ear
and slammed it
against the bathroom tile.
And it didn't stop.
I couldn't move.
I could hear the laughter
outside the door.
I could hear people dancing.
And it made me wonder,
why does nobody see me?
Why has nobody come
to the bathroom?
Why am I not screaming?
When you're scared, when you don't know
what's happening to you,
you just stay there,
and you hope that you don't die.
And that's what I was hoping, that
I had more than just 20 years to live.
We've known
for probably 25 years now
that the problem of sexual assault
on college campuses is enormous.
On college campuses, it is not
the person jumping out of the bushes
or in the parking lot, who is going
to rape or sexually assault you.
It is the person whom you know,
the person you may have classes with,
the person you see at a party.
You think about... It's, you know,
it's the people we don't know
that we should be worried about, but
it's really the people that you do know
that you should be worried about.
But I think a lot of parents think,
"Well, we'll drop our daughter off,
she'll have
a great college experience,
and everything will be fine
because the college has a reputation
for being a safe place. "
Um... it's not.
I learned later on that I wasn't
the only one who was raped that weekend.
But at the time,
we didn't talk about it
because it was something
that nobody talked about.
Rape's a scary word.
You don't wanna fall into a category.
You don't wanna
be called the victim.
I did not want to admit
that it happened to me.
I didn't tell anybody
for a really long time.
I went to classes, um...
did everything kind of normally,
and it was just...
something in the back of my mind,
and it really started to affect me.
And I was like,
"I need to do something about this. "
And it actually wasn't until one of my
other friends came to me and said,
"I was assaulted at a fraternity.
How do I report?"
And I said,
"Actually, I don't know. "
And I disclosed to her
that I was assaulted as well,
and we sat down
and just pulled up Google
and started looking up
how to report at UNC.
I knew I was more comfortable
reporting than she was.
So I said, "Okay, I'm gonna go report
and then I'll figure out how to do it,
and then I'll tell you,
and then you can do it too. "
So I told this administrator
I was violently raped,
and we're sitting down at this point,
and she looks at me and she's like,
"Rape is like a football game, Annie,
and if you look back on the game,
what would you do differently
in that situation?"
I was expecting resources.
I was expecting support.
And instead she gives me
this metaphor that rape is football.
And it made no sense.
And I ask her... I was just,
"No, rape is not like football at all!"
And she's like,
"Well, you know, were you drunk?"
And, "What would you
have done differently
if you could replay
the situation again?"
And I was just getting blamed
and blamed and blamed for this.
They kept asking me,
like, "What were you wearing?
What were you drinking?
How much did you have to drink?
Did you pregame?"
He kind of just lectured us about
how we shouldn't go out in short skirts.
And we shouldn't drink because,
I mean, that's our fault.
"Did you say no? How many times
did you say no? How did you say it?
Okay, what were you wearing?"
There was no response.
There was no response for seven months.
I thought that if I told them, like,
they would take action.
But the only action
they took was against me.
After I was sexually assaulted,
they said I should just drop out
until everything blows over.
Out of school.
I went back into her office,
and I asked her what happened.
She looked me right in the eye
and told me that she forgot.
The school's response
always seemed like
they were more concerned
about him and his needs.
She said, "You don't know what he's
going through right now and neither do I.
He could be really having a hard time. "
They also told me,
despite the fact that I had
a written admission of guilt from him,
that I didn't have enough evidence
and that, in fact,
what I'd presented to them, um,
could only prove that he loved me.
There's a lot of victim blaming
with this crime,
which has a silencing
effect on survivors.
If a student comes
to an administrator with a problem,
it's not as if the administrator
wants that student to be harmed.
It's not as if the administrator wants
the harm to be perpetuated,
but their first job is to protect
the institution from harm,
not the student from harm.
What you do is you make it difficult
for students to report,
so you don't have 200
or a thousand reported assaults,
or whatever the number
would be on that campus.
So you can artificially
keep your numbers low.
One really easy way,
when a lot of students report,
they very much discourage them
from going to the police.
And that's because
if it goes to the police,
then it's more likely to end up
as a public record.
Colleges have been mandated
for a long time to report the crimes
that occur on campus
to the federal government.
But it is in the interest of the college
to actually suppress
all knowledge that
that rape has happened.
There is a desire to have this
addressed internally.
And part of that is silencing
the kind of problem.
It's viewed as a public relations
management kind of a problem, I would say.
Universities are protecting a brand.
They're selling a product.
I got a call from
the Dean of Admissions first, asking,
you know, "If you were to get
into Harvard, would you accept?"
And I said yes because I knew my mom
would kill me if I said anything else.
But...
I had mentioned a little pressure.
Just a little.
You know, I saw it
as a great opportunity.
You know, a Harvard Law degree. Wow.
I saw the inside of a court room
during my second year of law school.
It was insanely stressful,
but also super rewarding.
So, yeah, I really loved
my second year there.
It was during the winter term
of my third year.
I knew him really well.
We'd met a couple of years earlier.
The guy and my girlfriend who was over,
we all met at my apartment
to have some drinks beforehand,
and then we went out to this bar.
He continued to
buy us both more drinks.
Half an hour into it, I noticed
my girlfriend seemed wasted.
People started to comment on
how drunk my friend seemed.
Almost instantly
after we got into the taxi,
I just felt this extremely
heavy feeling come over me.
My friend, she was just
kind of passed out completely.
It was, like, a maybe ten-minute
ride back to my place.
Me and my girlfriend kind of just
flopped down, face first on my bed.
The next thing I remember,
he, um, was on top of me,
and he had a hand
inside of my underwear,
and he was trying to put
a finger inside of me.
I yanked him by the hair, and I looked
over, and I just saw her naked back,
and I know that she'd fallen asleep
with all of her clothes on.
And so my next question was,
"Why is she naked?" Um...
And he smiled as he was still on top
of me, fondling me with one hand,
and he reached out
and pet her naked belly and said,
"I did that. I undressed her. "
And I asked, you know,
"And you took off her bra?"
Then, um, he...
he touched her naked breast,
while she was still totally unconscious,
and said, "Yeah, I did that too. "
And the next day he texted me.
And I said something
very casually like,
"Am I gonna have to tell her
that she needs a pregnancy test?"
And he said in the text message,
"No, we didn't do anything serious.
Maybe I put a finger in her V at most. "
It seemed pretty clear
that he had assaulted both of them
while they were unconscious.
I absolutely presumed
that Harvard would do right by Kamilah.
I went to
the Dean of Students' office,
and she said, "I just want
to make sure, above all else,
that you don't talk
to anyone about this.
It could be bad for everyone
if people started rallying around, like,
having him removed from campus. "
And I was like, "Well, he's a predator,
and he's dangerous and actually
that's exactly what I want. "
We both had the right
to legal representation.
My lawyer was pro bono.
She was a phenomenal client.
She really told her story
with a great deal of confidence.
I went into the hearing,
and even the professors were like,
did I give him the wrong message
with our friendship,
and that he misunderstood our friendship.
My response was like,
"No, because, you know,
sex was never part of that friendship.
And if it were ever
going to be introduced,
when I was awake
would be a good time for that. "
I'm getting questions like,
"Why didn't you fight him?"
And he's like, I think,
like 6' 3", over 200 pounds.
I was unconscious
or just coming to.
I, like, could barely
take control of my own body.
But, "Why didn't you fight him?"
There was this extreme
reluctance to believe me.
Campus administrators are
overly concerned about false reporting.
You look at statistics
on false reporting.
It's much, much smaller
than what people estimate it to be.
The data about false rape claims
is that they're a tiny minority
of all reports ever made.
Rape and sexual assault have
the same percentage of false reports
that any other crime has
in our country.
The best research
from around the world
would put the percentage of false reports
somewhere between two and eight percent.
Which means 90 percent,
but more likely 95 to 98 percent
of reports, are not false.
We got done with the hearing
probably at 4:30 or 5:00.
And they came back very quickly.
They'd found that
he had assaulted me.
When we got the call that he was
expelled, she was in utter disbelief.
And that doesn't come very often
with these college cases.
The next September,
I came back to Cambridge,
and I got a Facebook message
from the Dean of Students.
She said that the assailant,
he could appeal the ad board's decision,
and they voted again on whether
to uphold the decision to remove him
and decided to let him back in.
The message is clear.
It's, "Don't proceed through
these disciplinary hearings.
No matter what you do,
you're not gonna win. "
I was like, well,
you know what? I'm okay,
and I've never had anything
happen to me and I'm fine.
I'm gonna get through this.
But I started feeling different.
Not only was my mind in a place
of turmoil, my body was as well.
I had nightmares that were so vivid
that I would wake up
and my neck was bleeding
of how much I was scratching off
that invisible rapist
on my neck again.
So finally, when it became
very overwhelming,
I knew that I couldn't
keep denying it anymore.
So actually the first person
I told was Annie Clark.
She was a senior
when I was a first year.
I kind of Facebooked her,
and I said, you know,
"Can I talk to you about something?"
Hey, it's Annie.
Yeah, how are you doing?
- I mean, we just hit it off.
- Oh, my gosh.
She, till this day, has been
my greatest support system.
Are you in a place... Do you feel
comfortable talking about it, or...?
After I spoke to Annie,
I came out publicly to the entire campus
in October of my sophomore year
with a project called The Courage Project,
which was a photo project
of survivors on campus.
As I became more public,
I became kind of that gateway for people
to actually start talking about
what had happened to them.
Within four weeks,
I met nine rape survivors at UNC.
My school needed to know
this was a problem,
and I thought that
they honestly just didn't know.
I made meetings with the Vice Chancellor,
and I made meetings
with the Dean of Students,
and they were passed off
and ignored and delayed.
And I kept saying,
"UNC has a problem with sexual assault. "
I had the same meeting
with the Chancellor four years ago,
and it's like, as soon as there's
a new cycle of students,
there's no institutional memory,
and the problem starts all over again.
And so unless you have...
To see it happen with my friends
going through the same thing
I experienced six years ago,
it's heartbreaking.
And it's... That has affected me
more than my own rape.
People stop talking about it,
and then it just continues
and it makes you wonder,
what is it gonna take?
And we started working
with Dean Melinda Manning,
who was somebody who a lot of survivors
have worked with and trusted.
So in your time at UNC,
how many students came to you
and said they'd been assaulted?
Um... yeah, it's hard
to put a number on it, so...
At least 100.
And of the hundred,
how many of the perpetrators
were removed from campus?
From what I remember,
no one was expelled during that time.
So these guys
could just get away with it?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
And people could commit it repeatedly.
I was certainly aware of some individuals
who had committed it repeatedly.
A survivor
at Occidental College contacted me.
I noticed that her rapist's name
matched the name of two other cases.
So, she was the third student
to be raped by this student.
And the most troubling aspect
of this case
is that he was allowed back,
or is allowed to come back onto campus.
I thought it was only one,
but now I know there's two other women.
And who knows who else
who just wasn't able to step forward.
It seemed like prime hunting ground
for someone like him.
My assailant,
he's done much worse to other people.
He has assaulted at least four different
women. That's just who I know of.
About two weeks after I reported,
I got a call from the detective,
saying that they found two other girls
that he had previously raped.
And they were both
University of Tulsa students,
and they had both reported to the school.
The vast majority of men
don't rape, won't rape, haven't raped,
so when you start looking at the rapists
who are committing these crimes,
it is the repeat offenders
who are the core of this problem.
I was incarcerated for six
and a half years for sexual assault.
I... I know I was at fault.
You know, like I said, I guess the reason
I really wanted to do this interview
was to maybe help someone else out.
You know, maybe have them
become aware of,
you know,
what they're doin' wrong.
The really practiced sex offenders
identify groups of people
who are more vulnerable.
College is a place where
lots of alcohol's consumed,
and the number of victims is endless.
These men
select victims ahead of time.
It could be a bar.
It could be a fraternity party
where people are drinking.
At the parties, like, frat parties,
I mean, people are getting wasted.
So it's not like... A lot of the time,
dependin' on who they're with,
nobody, um, keeps an eye on them.
The alcohol is
essentially a weapon
that is used to render somebody
extremely vulnerable.
Alcohol definitely makes it
easier to overpower a victim.
If they're inebriated or under
the influence, less struggle, for sure.
And then there's
an isolation phase.
So, you know, somebody who has
deliberately gotten this young woman
extremely intoxicated,
and at some point he says to her,
"I'll walk you back to your room. "
or, "You can sleep it off if you want.
We have a bed upstairs. "
And that's where
the assault occurs.
A lot of people say, "Why don't
they just have students go to the police?"
I have a lot of good friends who are
police officers, and I love them dearly,
but they have some work to do.
Even if law enforcement
does do a good job,
a lot of district attorneys
don't wanna take these cases.
And even if there is a prosecution,
it takes a long time.
It takes a year, two years.
In the meantime, that alleged perpetrator
could do it again and again and again.
So universities,
if they have good evidence
that somebody is perpetrating
that crime on that campus,
they should remove them
to protect their other students,
with or without the police.
No more violence!
No more rape!
No more silence! No more hate!
What we're seeing today
has been going on
for a very long time
on college campuses.
Sexual violence has always been
part of the college experience.
Here at Brown University,
names of men accused of rape
appeared on bathroom walls
all over the campus.
The administration
called the tactic vigilantism.
One student had a word
for the women who did it:
Idiots. I have a lot
of friends on the list,
and by no means are they rapists.
They might be aggressive
at parties, flirtatious.
And if girls carry a grudge,
they call 'em rapists.
And to be saying that just because
a woman says no and because you have sex,
those are the two facts.
The woman said no and you had sex.
Then are you a rapist
automatically because of that?
A national study says one
out of every four female college students
will be the victim of a rape
or attempted sexual assault.
The first national study was done...
published in 1987.
Mary Koss's survey
of colleges around the country.
And those numbers have been
replicated over and over again.
Good evening.
As troubling as your statistics,
are charges that this date
or acquaintance rape
is being hidden
by universities and colleges
in order to protect their image among
prospective students and their families.
We had been trying
to change the university for years,
and nothing was getting any better.
And so we started looking to do
something to force them or shame them
into doing the right thing.
We started digging and doing
months and months of research
on sexual harassment law,
on rape statutes.
And then I read about Title IX.
Title IX is a gender equity law.
And it guarantees anyone
the right to an equal education.
When perpetrators are allowed to remain
on campus, and schools don't expel them,
even when they're found responsible,
then they're in violation of Title IX
for contributing to a hostile environment.
If a school is found
in violation of Title IX,
the government has the power
to revoke all federal funds,
which would hopefully force
a school to be in compliance.
Title IX and the pending Campus Save Act
and now this law? Like, what?
And so,
we decided to file a Title IX complaint.
You basically write
to the Department of Education,
and you not only explain
what happened to you,
but you also explain how
it's a violation of Title IX.
So it is Thursday night,
and instead of going out,
we are in, learning case law
until we know Title IX
and the case law
like the back of our hands.
I had earbuds in.
If I was walking, if I was, you know,
going on a run or whatever,
instead of music
there were Supreme Court cases.
I read all the case law
on all existing Title IX cases.
Like, we're sleeping in shifts.
I would write for three hours
and then sleep for three hours,
and she would do the same.
And I learned that
you don't have to be a lawyer to file it,
that you could be 20
and take on a 200-year-old university.
We didn't know how to file.
So we faxed it, we emailed it,
and we mailed it.
We didn't know what to expect,
and so I go into
my university mail office one day,
and I have this big envelope
from the Department of Education,
and I'm just, like, freaking out.
I'm, like, crying, I'm calling
Drea, Melinda. I'm just like,
"They took our case.
They took our case. "
Flat out denial.
Leaders at UNC say accusations
that the university underreported
sexual assault cases is false.
UNC Chapel Hill
General Council Leslie Strohm pointed out
what a false claim can do
to a university's reputation.
The allegations are false. They are
untrue. And they are just plain wrong.
"False. Untrue.
And just plain wrong. "
That resonates in my head.
I hear that when I sleep.
To say, "None of this happened.
We're not underreporting.
We didn't mess up,"
it's just betrayal.
Schools are actively and aggressively
not wanting to tell the truth
about what's going on on their campuses
because the first campuses
to do so will be,
you know, kind of known as
the rape campuses,
where they actually have a rape problem.
But, you know, rape is happening
at all college campuses,
and there are perverse economic
and reputational incentives
to hide those numbers.
I analogize it to getting a letter.
So you're a parent, and you get a letter
in the middle of the summer,
and it says,
"Dear Mr. and Mrs. Schultz,
we're so happy that Johnny
is going to be a freshman,
and we thought we might need
to let you know
that there's a one-in-four or five chance
that while Johnny's here,
he's going to be the victim
of a drive-by shooting.
What's so vexing about this problem
is that the shooters are other students.
Thank you so much
for your tuition money.
We so look forward
to welcoming Johnny in the fall. "
Would any parent send
his or her child there?
They protect perpetrators,
I think, across the board
because they have
a financial incentive to do so.
Perpetrators who are found responsible
for rape are much more likely
to sue institutions than survivors are,
and institutions like to avoid lawsuits.
And so in an effort
to avoid lawsuits,
they pretty much do whatever they can
to give them a slap on the wrist.
What to expect
if you are accused of a sexual assault.
If you are found responsible,
you may be...
suspended for one semester...
suspended over summer vacation...
suspended for one day...
given a $75 fine...
given a $25 fine...
given a warning...
assigned a paper
to reflect on your experience...
required to construct a poster board,
listing ten ways to approach
a girl you like...
assigned 50 hours of community service
at a rape crisis center.
Any allegation
of sexual assault is something
that we at the university
take very seriously.
ASU issued a statement
saying in part, "Arizona State University
takes all sexual misconduct
complaints very seriously. "
The university says it's taking
these allegations very seriously.
We take all incidents very seriously.
We take
these accusations very seriously.
We take
reports like this very seriously.
They take all reports very seriously.
James Madison University
takes the safety and well-being
of our students very seriously.
So... So what's the punishment?
All three students responsible
for sexual assault and harassment,
expelled upon graduation.
Yes! Justice! Unbe... Wait a minute.
Expelled upon graduation?
Isn't that...
graduation?
We will strive to build
a community where education,
inquiry, and faith combine
to respond to the demands of justice.
This is our goal,
that no one ever say
that we dreamed too small.
My career
in law enforcement started in 1969
from the South Bend
Police Department and then went
to the University of Notre Dame
Police Department.
University students are...
they're just wonderful kids.
But there's... just like anywhere,
there's a percentage
of, um, of...
absolutely horrible people, too.
You know. And, of course,
I had to deal with that too.
Saint Mary's is
the sister school to Notre Dame.
It's one of the best Catholic
all-women's colleges in the nation,
and I was proud to go there.
I was really happy.
I was part of Campus Ministries.
I decided to be a biology major.
I had a dream of going
to medical school.
Compared to my sister,
I'm more of a book person,
and she kinda always made fun of me
'cause I liked to stay in on the weekends,
and she'd kinda say I was a party pooper
and want me to come out and stuff.
And I did go out. And it was fun.
It was Halloween.
A call came in on my phone.
It was from someone I knew
who went to Notre Dame.
He's like, "You have to come
to a Halloween party. "
You know, I trust people.
I trusted what he said.
So, you know,
I just went along with it.
We got to his dorm.
You know, I asked him,
"Well, where is everyone else?"
And he's like,
"Oh, they're coming. "
And eventually
his friends left,
and it was just me and him.
And that's when it happened.
She, of course, said, "No. "
You know, tryin' to keep him
from doin' what he was doin'.
And then he eventually just forced her
and... and raped her.
Lieutenant Cottrell interviewed
all the people that,
you know, I had known
that were involved.
In my opinion,
I had a conspiracy
of not only the suspect that was involved
in... in raping the victim,
but I also had friends of his
that helped convince her
that there was a party
that she was going to.
The university had
their judicial hearing.
I had this idealistic view
that if I was telling the truth
that they would support me.
And, um... they didn't.
They preferred to have the crime stats
as low as possible,
so that, you know,
it doesn't detract
from applicants to the university.
I met with the president
of Saint Mary's, Dr. Mooney.
Hello, I'm Carol Ann Mooney,
President of Saint Mary's College.
Saint Mary's must always be committed
to providing our students
with an excellent intellectual
and academic experience.
She kind of blew it off
and didn't take it seriously, you know.
She said, "Well, these things
don't happen here. "
It got worse and worse for me
as the years went along.
Um... not only dealing with
what happened to the victim,
but also dealing with
what the university did.
My bosses were saying that they had
empathy for victims of crimes,
but it was like
I told them, that... that
"Talk is cheap.
And that's all it is
with you guys is talk.
You don't really support
victims of crimes.
I do.
And I can't work
for you any longer. "
I didn't really talk about it.
I kinda just...
stayed in my room
for a couple months until Christmas.
And I didn't sleep.
My nights and days
were mixed up. Um...
I had to, um...
couldn't go to class,
and so I cut down.
I just completely changed
as a person.
I think the biggest reason
why it's so hard to be on a college campus
after you've been raped or sexually
assaulted is that it's a small place,
right, where everything is structured.
Your living space is structured,
your eating space is structured,
so you're gonna run into your rapist.
I couldn't go out.
Like, I couldn't mingle with strangers.
I felt the campus getting
smaller and smaller to me.
There were less and less places
I felt comfortable going.
I walk around with my pepper spray
on my keys, and I'm always just on edge.
There's a whole
physiological side to PTSD.
When you experience
a traumatic event like this,
your nervous system, um,
tends to get very reactive.
I started having more panic attacks.
When I was in my depressed state,
I just slept all day long.
I couldn't stop crying. I couldn't stop
thinking about it. I self-harmed.
During the vacation between, I guess,
semester one and semester two,
I tried to kill myself.
I had a lot of, I mean, of course,
depression, suicidal thoughts.
Trey Malone took his own life last June.
In his suicide note, Malone wrote
about being sexually abused
while a student at Amherst College
and the school's lack of response.
Men are sexually assaulted.
And typically that is
perpetrated by other men.
And I think for a lot of male survivors
who are sexually assaulted,
it challenges many beliefs
that they have about themselves.
Men aren't supposed to become vulnerable.
They always say, "You allowed
yourself to do it. Why did you do it?
Why didn't you fight them off?"
Men have to be strong, and men
wouldn't let this happen to them.
Because of the emphasis there is
on it being a crime against females,
men feel less comfortable
coming forward with it.
Reporting rates amongst men
are just so infinitesimal
that it actually makes it very hard
to do research on this,
let alone to get a real understanding
of the scope of the problem.
You are built
from the ground as a Tar Heel...
as a member of a community
that is so much bigger than you.
I was directly going against it.
Tonight the U.S. Department of Education
has launched its own investigation
into how UNC Chapel Hill has been handling
sexual assault cases on campus.
It wasn't until we filed the
complaint that the retaliation started.
And it's been bad.
I've gotten death threats,
I've gotten rape threats.
Of course, Internet trolls
are always there.
But I had one in-person threat,
which was kind of scary. Um...
"Bang-bang, bitch. Die. "
My residence hall was broken into,
and it was completely vandalized.
Spray paint everywhere,
a knife was left behind.
And messages were painted all over.
I felt like
I was in danger all the time,
and that's what I thought of
when I went to classes.
I went, you know,
from being valedictorian in high school
and then, you know,
struggling to finish my classes.
And not knowing how to tell my parents,
which I never did.
Can you talk a little bit
about what it was like
when your parents found out?
- They still don't know.
- They still don't know.
Yeah. Um...
I thought about telling them
many, many times.
And I didn't tell my parents
until a couple days later,
which was probably, like, the hardest
thing I've ever had to do, ever.
Um...
- Now I'm gonna start crying.
- It's okay, you can cry.
- You don't have to hold it in.
- Like, I remember Skyping my dad...
What worries you
about telling them?
The conversation afterwards.
I worry that they'd
look at me differently.
I'm worried that they'd want
to talk about it again.
And just the fact
that they would know.
That it would just be there in their minds
when they looked at me.
Just to hear my mom's voice on the phone,
her feeling so helpless in that moment,
is probably one of the worst aspects
of this entire ordeal,
which probably makes me
the most angry at my assailant.
My mom was on the plane
the next day after I told her.
My dad, he wears
his Notre Dame ring every day.
I've never seen him take it off, and
he didn't... he wasn't wearing it anymore.
His finger that has
a permanent mark from his ring
didn't have his ring on.
And it just...
It was even more heartbreaking
for me to watch my dad.
I call her from a thousand miles away
and tell her this.
And I just wanted
her to be there.
Lizzy always had this big,
beautiful, radiant smile.
It was electric, and it... it... it
made other people happy.
We had 11 family members
attend Notre Dame
and two family members, including Lizzy,
that went to Saint Mary's.
And she, I think, really felt affirmed
that this was the right choice.
She was really,
really happy to be there.
And a little bit of chicken fry
She went over
on August 31st with a friend
to attend an activities fair
at Notre Dame,
and that evening they went back
to, um, this football player's room.
It was four of 'em in there.
The football player and his friend
and Lizzy and her friend.
And... And, um...
I guess, rather suddenly,
the... the... the other two left the room
and left Lizzy alone
with this football player.
And then he basically jumps her.
He pulls her on top of him
and... and removes her shirt,
um, and bra,
and then also begins to try
to take off her pants.
And the next day Lizzy reports.
It never crossed our mind
that they wouldn't do right.
The accused, they couldn't find him.
They had difficulty locating him.
Everyone knows where this individual is.
Certainly the athletic department knows.
He played two home football games
before he was interviewed.
Notre Dame stadium holds 80,000 people,
so that's times two, 160,000 people
knew where this guy was
before the Notre Dame
Security Police could find him.
There was a directive
that the campus police
cannot contact an athlete
at any athletic facility...
and we cannot contact
any athletic employee
to assist us in contacting the athlete
that we would be looking for.
So what was the point of that?
I guess just to...
keep us away
from student athletes.
So Lizzy ends this exchange
of intimidating texts
from the football player's friend,
and he comes at her with a text,
"Don't do anything you would regret.
Messing with Notre Dame football
is a bad idea. "
And then Lizzy takes that message
and immediately forwards it
to the detective in charge.
And later the county prosecutor said
that they would not be filing any charges
on that particular complaint
and saying that it wasn't a threat
because the individual who sent it
believed he was trying to prevent
someone from filing a false report.
She was becoming very anxious
about this... this whole situation.
One of her friends is quoted
as saying that she said, you know,
"He's gonna get away with it. "
He denied everything,
and made comments like,
"She was the aggressor. "
Friday evening,
I finally looked at my phone,
and I saw a text
from my wife's best friend, saying,
"You need to call right away. "
And... And I remember
the words in it was, uh,
"It's bad. It's bad.
Lizzy took her life today.
She's gone. "
You know, it's... brutal.
It's just really profoundly sad
in those moments
when you just think,
she's not here with us.
Is it just students?
Is it everybody?
So I'm in Oregon.
'Drea ends up moving to Oregon
and taking the semester off.
Every place I've separated
with a semicolon is a different...
She and I started talking. We're like,
"Okay, we're gonna keep doing this.
Don't know how we're gonna fund it,
but we're gonna do something. "
We called everybody.
Most people totally laughed it off.
Just looking at rape reporting
in general, it's really low...
But one of the people who we had
reached out to about the UNC case
was at The New York Times.
And he's like, "Oh, that's interesting. "
It ended up becoming a front page
New York Times story.
That's when we got a flood
of emails, Facebook, tweets.
Like, somebody tweeted at me,
"Me too. It happened to me too. "
This is Annie.
And Andrea's here with me.
Do you see a button in the middle
of your screen? It says "start video. "
- Yay!
- Oh, look at that.
It was my freshman year.
I'd been at school for a couple of weeks.
I'd made friends
in some frat houses.
People reached out
through all these different mediums.
A lot of Facebook. A lot of emails.
"I froze and couldn't fight back. "
"I don't know if it's appropriate to have
told this story to you without asking,
and I'm sorry if it's been harmful to you
in any way, but it needs to stop. "
Wow.
I remember I was in one meeting
after some story broke,
and I had 50 calls in an hour.
I had 50 calls.
I've never heard
of a case that has gone
- in, like, the survivor's favor.
- I mean, he admitted it.
He admitted to sexual assault
and got an eight-week suspension.
Mm-hmm.
The Dean of Students
accused me of being drunk
and told me that I had,
like, a serious problem.
So many of the survivors
coming forward were saying,
"My rape was bad,
but the way I was treated was worse. "
I was raped in the Honors Dorm
above the department's office.
And the department office took
my scholarship. It just doesn't...
I was up working at four,
and then I'd go to work,
and then I come back
and sometimes there'd be survivors
in my apartment that needed to talk.
You probably hear
stories like this all the time.
I know, but it doesn't make it any better.
Now I'm realizing, like, how much better
I feel from talking about it.
You're not alone. You're not alone.
And no matter how many awful things...
I basically had to make a choice
if I wanted to continue
to support survivors
or have my actual administrative job
at a university.
I figured I could do more good
this way, so I resigned.
- On our to-do list, we have Vanderbilt.
- Yep.
- Um...
- UConn.
Formalizing a national network
- is on our to-do list.
- That's pending.
I found my paychecks.
What Drea and I are looking
to see is how do we show that UNC,
it's not in isolation?
We started seeing, you know, what was
happening at campuses across the country.
We look at all the cases we've heard,
then we make this map,
and every time another school called
or whatever, we put a dot on the map.
I remember talking to Drea, and I'm like,
"Why has no one connected the dots before?
We have a case at Amherst, Yale,
Penn State, Berkeley, Oxy, UNC,
and nobody said,
'I think we should connect these dots
'cause there might be something
going on here bigger than one problem. "
And you see how many people
are being impacted by them,
and every one of those dots
being more than one story.
You start to see it as an epidemic.
What if we could build a network?
What if we could connect our stories?
We could actually make campus rape
a problem that people cared about.
Hi, Sofie!
Hello.
Hi!
Do you wanna see Drea?
- Can you see?
- Drea!
Sofie was one
of the first activists who reached out,
and she was from Berkeley.
There's been an increase
in the number
of sexual assaults
that have happened.
She's like, "This is exactly
what's happening at Berkeley.
I know so many other people
that are dealing with this.
How can we do what you did?"
And so we started working together.
- Annie!
- Hi!
- How are you?
- Hi!
- Oh!
- Hi, how was your trip?
- Are you scared of retaliation at all?
- Yeah.
So far, the students who know
have been really, really supportive.
I think that once maybe
the fraternities find out,
then that could be bad.
It's called Collegiate ACB,
and there are all of these fraternities
that post on it about, like,
"Oh, who's the most attractive?
Which house is the best house?"
Or people that say,
"I was raped at Sigma Chi last weekend. "
Or "I was raped at Teke once. "
Why is your name in it?
Oh, my God.
I don't know.
I did not think I was gonna be
on this stupid site.
Well, also how
they spelled your name, though.
I know.
"Sofiem Karasekem"?
- Whatever that means.
- They wrote my name...
They wrote it in Latin.
I don't understand.
Probably search it?
Interesting.
Whoo!
The American fraternity industry
spans thousands of American colleges,
from the most elite,
private Ivy League institutions
to small regional colleges.
We all know about
inflicted trauma from hazing.
But it's a matter of public record
that the second most common
type of insurance claim
against the fraternity industry
is from sexual assault.
I don't wanna
single out fraternities
because it's actually
a minority of fraternities,
but what you inevitably get
are certain fraternities
where the sexual assault
is really rampant.
Within just, say,
the last five to ten years,
Sigma Alpha Epsilon's
had a number of problems.
SAE is known at a lot of places
as "Sexual Assault Expected. "
- Sexual Assault Expected.
- Sexual Assault Expected.
SAE. Sexual Assault Expected.
Is there any, like, parties or
places that you've been warned not to go?
- Yes, SAE.
- Sexual Assault Expected.
Sigma Nu. SAE.
Deke, at the very top.
Those are, like, the main ones,
where as a freshman you're told,
like, "Don't go there. "
There's one fraternity on campus
that is called "the date rape frat. "
DKE is known as the roofie frat.
There is one
that was called the rape dungeon.
Once you get a group
of people like this in that kind of
synergistic kind of culture forming,
it intensifies this problem.
Pledges at a fraternity at Yale
surrounded the dorm
where many of the freshman girls lived,
at night, shouting...
"No" means "yes!"
"Yes" means "anal!"
"No" means "yes!"
"Yes" means "anal!"
I ended up pledging SAE,
Sigma Alpha Epsilon.
It's one of the largest
national fraternities
somewhat notorious
for its bad reputation.
Every Wednesday night we would have
what we would call meetings
where all the brothers, usually about 70
if all were in attendance,
would gather in the basement
and begin a highly structured ritual
exchanging stories of sexual conquest.
If a brother had had anal sex
with a woman, that would be mentioned,
and that would be a kind of
a pat-on-the-back moment.
And I think that that's something
that the women at Dartmouth
who hooked up with the fraternity brothers
didn't really know.
That guy who tried
to sexually assault me at ATO,
he was a pledge at the time, right?
And so all the pledges had to, like,
photograph girls without
anything on their tops, right?
- What?
- Had to photograph shirtless girls.
- I hate that.
- And so apparently in the basement
there were pictures of girls
and just, like, their tits.
And apparently this kid...
this kid who was, like, so pushy with me,
he had, like, the most pictures of girls.
So when he comes at me,
his behavior of being
sexually aggressive
gets rewarded by his brothers.
Fraternities are
essentially unregulated bars.
And the individuals that are responsible
for managing that alcohol
are themselves
legally incapable of consuming it.
Most sororities
don't throw parties
because you can't have alcohol at all
on the premises, even if you're over 21.
So if sorority women want to drink
or go to a party even, at all,
they have to do it at a fraternity
where the fraternity brothers control
the dispersion of alcohol.
Usually the drinks
had Everclear in them.
What's Everclear?
It's a very strong form of alcohol,
and I...
The reason why they put it in there
is because it would get you drunk quickly.
The idea would be to get everyone
so incredibly intoxicated, you know,
blackout drunk,
that would increase the chances
that people would be getting laid.
There was certainly something
predatory about it.
The fraternity brothers took great pride
in having a predator/prey relationship
with the women that would come
to these parties.
- I was at a fraternity party.
- I went to a fraternity.
I went to a fraternity party at MIT.
I'd never really, I guess,
been in a situation like that.
He came up to me
and we started talking.
He was just this guy I thought was cute,
and then we were just dancing at FIJI.
This big frat brother came up to me,
and he put his arm around me
and he took me away from my friends,
but he was really nice.
A friend at the time, um,
really fed me a lot of drinks.
He said, "Why don't we go outside?"
He asked if I wanted to go upstairs.
- We went upstairs.
- And he invited me to go into a room.
He took me downstairs
to their basement.
He pinned me against the wall
and took off my clothes and assaulted me.
That's when they both assaulted me.
I was assaulted by at least
two members of their fraternity.
It's extremely difficult,
if not impossible,
to get accurate information about whether
or not there have been sexual assaults
in a particular...
particular fraternity house.
What you find in many
circumstances that universities
have created contractual
relationships with fraternities
that involve them
promoting the fraternities,
but not then also disclosing the risks
that they've had with those fraternities.
On the Johns Hopkins University
campus today,
following allegations of a gang rape
at an off-campus fraternity.
Students say the university failed
to tell students about the investigation.
Problem after problem after problem
for the Sigma Alpha Epsilon
fraternity at UNM.
And that was before
a new claim of rape.
Digging for answers
after the same Yale frat house
has had a whole bunch of problems.
I'm telling you, almost every time
there's a rape in a fraternity chapter,
there's someone at the university,
certainly the person who's
in the Office of Greek Residence Life,
who's paid for by the university,
he or she knew that that chapter
was likely to have a rape sometime.
But they won't tell the young women.
Or if they do, there's hell to pay
for these college presidents.
It happened at Wesleyan. There was
a problem fraternity, Beta Theta Pi.
The university sent a letter in the
spring to all students and all parents.
The fraternity went ballistic.
The parents of the fraternity brothers
went ballistic,
and the new class of freshman women
came in, and they didn't send the warning
to the new class of freshman women.
It was Halloween weekend
before a girl
was violently raped upstairs.
Frat house
at Wesleyan University
is facing a lawsuit by a student
who claims she was raped.
And this isn't the first time
that frat has come under fire.
After that rape,
a young woman shows up
at an emergency room
in Middletown, Connecticut.
"I was assaulted at Beta Theta Pi. "
It's, to me, outrageous the extent
that our colleges and universities
are complicit in the sexual assault
of young women at these fraternity houses.
So why don't the schools
just disassociate themselves
from the fraternities
and kick them off campus?
Right. Well, the colleges
and universities have much more to gain
from the fraternities
than the fraternities have to gain
from the colleges and universities.
One out of every eight college students
living on campus lives in Greek housing.
That's a tremendous amount
of housing stock
the colleges don't have to pay for,
don't have to supervise.
You also have to remember you tie alumni
to your campus in a very powerful way
when you have a fraternity system.
Alumni giving is a massive part
of your annual giving,
and a large part of that
is fraternity membership.
It's a deeply powerful industry.
You start tracing back,
and you find out they're pouring money
into political campaigns,
and they're hugely overrepresented.
There's no college or university
or type of college or university
that's more represented within Congress
than the fraternity system itself is.
So people are very loath
to get involved
and very loath to come up
against the fraternity system.
- Checklist? Phone charger?
- Mm-hmm.
- Laptop?
- Mm-hmm.
It's not a coincidence that you
can fly to Boston and fly to California
and hear the same stories.
We started visiting
other campuses.
We felt that if we created a model
for how to file a Title IX complaint,
others would do it.
These are our two fraternities
where a student was sexually assaulted.
And it was going there
and being walked to the fraternities
and being walked to where
their assaults had happened.
You know, details that were critical
for every single case.
Weird, right?
So, for the email I'm just gonna...
So we move forward with
this model, saying, "Here's a complaint.
Here's how this process works. "
My 21st birthday,
I was helping students at Swarthmore
file a Title IX complaint.
So I think I went to Columbia
twice before they filed.
Just sat with a group of students
and talked them through
how to file a complaint.
If people are going to talk publicly,
then it needs to be about
their treatment here at Columbia.
- Focus on Columbia.
- Yeah.
We don't have lawyers.
You have 18, 19-year-old students
who are standing up
to their institutions.
We are at Amherst
and we found a place to stay.
Hi, Drea.
- Where we sleeping tonight?
- Out on the least terrifying parking lot.
And we are changing and doing stuff
in a Wendy's bathroom. Yay!
I found politicizing my own experience
to be actually the most helpful step.
It's really exciting to actually
get to meet the other activists.
I had felt so cared for,
until I actually needed Yale,
at which point I became this,
like, administrative matter.
The administration kept telling us
to "take our foot off the pedal. "
- Hi.
- Hi.
- Nice to meet you. I'm Annie.
- I'm Rachel. Nice to meet you.
I just decided to take some time off,
kind of... I moved here with my sister,
and I've been a nanny,
- and it's the most amazing thing, so...
- That's so cool. Yeah.
And, uh, seeing the two little girls
that I nanny for, I like...
One of the reasons I've wanted
to do this is, like, I never want...
them to ever have to deal
with something like this.
So it's really late, and we have
a survivor who's cutting,
and, um, she doesn't know
if she can stop.
The worst part for me
has been having to relive
the experience of everybody else.
This vicarious trauma
that I couldn't process anymore.
It's just not fair.
It's really not fair.
But it's the only way
I get up in the morning.
I would've given anything to have had
someone who believed me,
someone who supported me.
- Hi!
- Hi!
- Hi, I'm Andrea.
- I'm Abby.
- Nice to meet you, Abby.
- Nice to meet you.
- Andrea. Nice to meet you.
- Hi. Good to meet you.
I was raped by a basketball player
at the University of Tulsa.
And I felt like,
because he was an athlete,
everyone was acting like he's worth
more than I am because he's an athlete.
And that's what happens
over and over and over again.
It's like you need to re-read
your mission statement.
Are you here to play sports? Or are you
here to educate and protect your students?
An alleged sexual assault case
involving three basketball players.
Four former Vanderbilt University
football players are charged with rape.
Derrick Washington
already had a documented history
of violence against women at Missouri.
It was former
Michigan kicker Brendan Gibbons
involved in the alleged sexual assault
of a woman back in 2009.
This is the fifth student athlete to be
accused of sexual assault on campus.
I really do believe
the vast majority of student athletes
are worthy of our admiration.
I think they're mostly,
for the most part,
a lot of good people out there
who are trying to do the right thing.
But when you have 18 to 22-year-old kids
who are celebrities,
it creates a toxic environment
for a lot of bad behavior.
When they walk across campus,
it's not like any other student
walking across campus.
There's a multi-billion dollar industry
that wraps around these young men,
and if you don't think that they're
part of a culture of entitlement,
just look at the fanfare
that's around college football.
I grew up in Zephyrhills, Florida.
It's a small town,
so everybody does know everybody.
I've lived there my entire life.
I did very well in high school.
I graduated with honors.
I took a lot of AP and honors classes.
When I was younger,
a family friend of ours
gave me a Florida State
cheerleading uniform,
and it came with pom-poms.
She was the best child
any father could have.
She was fabulous. Never any problems.
Always had a great smile.
Just a joy to be around.
She kept saying she was going
to FSU, going to FSU,
and then when she first got there,
I knew she made the right choice.
My first semester was really...
It was a lot of science classes.
I was in six classes.
I wanted to go to med school.
I didn't go out a lot just because
I was in a lot of classes.
So it was the week before finals,
and we drove to Potbelly's,
and we were just hanging out.
This guy started following me around,
and I, like, said to him, "What...? Stop. "
You know? "Stop following us. "
And a man standing at the bar
saw that I was uncomfortable
with this guy following me,
and so he kind of like,
grabbed me and was like,
"This is my girlfriend.
Leave her alone. "
And I was like, "Thank you. "
Like, the guy left,
and I was just like, "Thank you. "
And he's like, "Do you wanna take a shot?"
And I said, "Sure. "
So I turned around, like,
to make sure that this guy was gone,
and when I turned back around
he handed me a shot.
I'm fairly certain that there was
something in that drink.
As a college student,
I had been drunk before,
and I had not drank nearly enough
to become drunk
and incompetent that night.
I remember being in a cab,
and there were three guys in the cab also.
Anyone you ask would tell you, like,
I never would go home with a guy, period,
and especially not three people
that I didn't know.
I remember specific things after that.
I was in, like, an apartment,
and this guy was...
sexually assaulting me.
He was raping me.
He was on top of me,
and I couldn't really breathe that much,
but I was saying,
"Please stop. Stop. "
Like, I remember his roommate,
or whoever this other guy was,
came in and he was saying,
"Dude, stop. Like, what are you doing?
She's telling you to stop. "
Since his door
to the bedroom wouldn't lock,
he picked me up
and he carried me into the bathroom.
He said, "The door will lock in here. "
He put me on the tile bathroom floor.
I was trying to, like, push him off
and kick him off, but he was just too big.
And I said, "Please stop"
multiple times, and I said "no. "
Eventually he pushed his hand over my face
and, like, pushed my face into the floor.
Um...
And he just continued to rape me.
He finished and then he put my clothes
back on, and he said, "You can leave now. "
And then he's like,
"I'll take you home on my scooter. "
I mean... okay.
I had no idea where I was.
I didn't know how else
I was supposed to get home.
I wanted to get out of there.
This was the worst feeling because
I didn't wanna hold onto him, you know?
But I was afraid
that I was gonna fall off of the scooter.
He dropped me off
at the intersection where I told him
because I didn't want him
to know where I lived.
I didn't know really
what I was supposed to do.
I tweeted, "Someone help me. "
My friend responded, and she was like,
"Well, tell me what happened. "
And we decided that
we need to call the police.
- You said she was raped?
- Yeah.
- Okay, so she did not know the person.
- No.
The Florida State University
Police took me
in the back of a police car
to the hospital.
I got all of the, um... the blood work
and the rape kit and everything.
They were watching bruises appear
as I was laying in the hospital bed.
We got a call about three in the morning.
We grabbed some stuff,
and we jumped in the car
and started heading to FSU
as quick as we could.
She was laying in the hospital bed,
and we each went to one side,
and we just held her, and all three of us
laid there... sat there, and cried.
That's when
Investigator Angulo came in.
And I told him kind of everything.
I'm very pro law enforcement.
And Tallahassee PD was there, and we
assumed they were taking care of things.
I went back
in the beginning of January.
It was my first class on Tuesday,
and I see him walk into the class.
And I knew.
I was like, "That's him. "
They were about to take attendance,
and that's what... I needed to stay calm
and just kind of wait it out.
He was one of the very last names
that they called,
and, um...
my teacher said, "Jameis Winston?"
And he raised his hand.
I didn't know who he was.
The nation's
number one high school quarterback,
Jameis Winston, won Gatorade State
Player of the Year this past season.
Jameis, tell me why
you chose Florida State.
Just because we're trying to build
a tradition there,
and hopefully we can get
a few national championships
and hopefully a Heisman Trophy.
I notified
Investigator Angulo of who it was.
I think at that point he knew that
he was gonna be the big football star.
He said,
"This is a huge football town.
You really should think long and hard
about whether you want
to press charges or not. "
It didn't make sense to me, really.
I... I just thought,
like, you know, that's his job.
Why isn't he...?
Why is he not gonna do it?
The hype for Jameis Winston is
as much as I've ever seen
for a first-year starting quarterback.
Winston, Winston! Winston!
Into the end zone!
Touchdown, Florida State.
Sports teams are the business
on these campuses.
When you build stadiums
that cost 200, 300 million dollars,
when you build athletic facilities
that can get up into that range as well,
and then you look at the
multibillion dollar television contracts.
When you're talking
about that kind of money,
there's an enormous investment
in a student athlete
who may be a quarterback
on a top 20 team
that's pulling in hundreds of millions
of dollars in revenue.
Nineteen-year-old Winston is on the verge
of leading his team
to the ultimate victory.
Our main goal is to win
a national championship.
He's had a meteoric rise to fame,
becoming the starting quarterback
as a freshman.
He's a star on the team,
and that doesn't mean he's guilty,
but the point is you have to treat
that person like you would
anyone else in these cases,
and that didn't happen here.
Poised to play in and possibly win
the national championship,
a frontrunner
for the Heisman Trophy award,
Florida State quarterback,
Jameis Winston,
now possibly finds himself
in some hot water.
Winston is part
of an ongoing investigation
into a sexual assault complaint
filed nearly a year ago,
but today was turned over
to the state attorney.
As soon as I saw this story break,
I thought how terribly, terribly unfair
it is to this young man.
I think it's very, very unfortunate
that this young dude
with this Magic Johnson caliber smile
and a level of production
and the things that he has done en route
to pursuing a national championship,
and the Heisman Trophy,
and now it comes out?
It just stinks to me.
DNA analysis confirmed
the DNA provided by Winston
matched that sample
taken from the accuser.
Although he has never spoken directly
to cops or prosecutors,
Jameis Winston, through his attorneys,
maintains his innocence
and says any sex was consensual.
Jameis Winston!
He's into the promised land!
Touchdown, FSU!
His voice, his way, his team.
Our football team
kept winning games.
We were gonna play
in the national championship.
All these people were praising him.
People were just calling me names;
a slut, a whore.
I got a tweet
from a girl who I didn't know.
The tweet was like, "Why would you blame
such a good guy for doing this?"
People were threatening me, my family.
And there was other people
that were threatening my sorority,
saying, "We're gonna
burn down their house. "
Jameis Winston
will not be charged with the rape
that allegedly happened
exactly a year ago.
Here's prosecutor
and FSU alumni Willie Meggs.
We've carefully examined
all the evidence in this case
and have concluded that no charges
will be filed against anyone in this case.
Do you think
Jameis Winston raped that girl?
Uh... I think I did not have
sufficient evidence
to prove that he sexually assaulted her
against her will.
Uh...
I think things that happened there
that night were... not good.
As FSU fights for the national title,
the alleged victim drops out of school.
FSU football fans are
predictably delighted by this result.
Florida State! Whoo!
- Jameis Winston.
- He's amazing! What a great guy.
Jameis Christ. That's it.
The justice system was proved right.
Right? It worked.
Every school in the country
that's a big time powerhouse football team
has players dealing with this shit.
Some girl got jealous and wanted to be
like, a part of the scene, you know.
She was a liar.
Football star, Jameis Winston,
Florida State quarterback,
had the game
of his young life Monday,
when he led the Seminoles
to the national championship.
Sexual assault cases
are always tough.
Probably the first time
someone is apprehended
is not the first time that they have...
engaged in forceful conduct on someone.
I went to see my victim's advocate.
And in that meeting, we were just talking.
She was like, "We just wanna let you know,
like, there's another victim from him. "
It's my pleasure to announce
the 2013 Heisman Memorial Trophy winner.
Jameis Winston,
Florida State University!
Is it hard for you to believe
that this all has happened?
I kinda just wanna know, like...
why me?
It doesn't really make sense.
He won the Heisman Trophy,
and the sad thing about that
is that the world of college football
didn't hold him accountable for the kind
of person that he is off the field.
The system is based
largely on money.
And it's not just revenue
in terms of TV revenue,
but it's also revenue
in terms of alumni and trustees.
We need to remember where
the power really lies on these campuses.
Presidents hire athletic directors.
Athletic directors hire coaches.
Coaches then receive salaries
that are higher than the president.
- Tell me your title.
- President of Florida State University.
Wow! So you've got to be
the happiest man on earth.
You know what? I think it's hard to find
a happier person. No doubt about it.
These cases are nightmares
for college presidents.
This is college presidents
who hold their nose and cover their ears
because they know that this
is part of what comes
with the big business of college sports.
There is a great fear
among many presidents
of alienating
important influential people.
What's the number one responsibility
of a college president? Fundraising.
One hundred million dollars
to UC San Diego,
the second largest gift
in the school's history.
Two hundred million dollars.
That's the gift University of Michigan
alum Stephen Ross has given to the school.
Harvard University has received the
largest donation in the school's history,
350 million dollars.
Good lord, that's a lot of money.
Colleges are big business.
They have boards that are trying
to maintain their endowments,
and they don't want anything
that's going to touch that.
This is about millions and billions
of dollars being spent every year
to keep this institution running.
Harvard is in the midst
of a six billion dollar capital campaign.
Donors might be troubled
if they understood the magnitude
of sexual assault on the campus.
I think that's part of the effort
to silence the problem.
Numerous times I was taken aside
by a senior tenured female faculty person
and told the way to make it at Harvard
is by being a dutiful daughter.
If you hear it, pretend you didn't.
If you see it, you shut up about it.
Silence.
There's a reason we haven't seen
more faculty involved.
It does harm your career
in ways that you can't even predict.
Certainly if you're untenured,
but even if you are tenured,
it makes it much more difficult
to move from one institution to the next
if you've been branded
an activist or a troublemaker.
I've had the honor
to work with students
who've been asking
these kinds of questions
for the five years
that I've been here.
We heard that things
were gonna happen,
but then there was
no conversation about it.
And I think there's a huge gap
in between that still needs to,
A, be bridged,
and to be discussed more publicly.
I feel like there's this moral high ground
in higher education
that is just sitting vacant.
What I haven't yet seen
anywhere, that I'm aware of,
is a president who has decided
that whatever it takes,
it has to be done.
And that's what leadership is.
...that we would tolerate
for one moment
sexual violence and intimidation
on our campus.
These assumptions are patently false,
and such speculations are
very, very inappropriate.
At the end of the day,
I think we share all the same goals,
which is to create a safe place
where all our students can thrive.
Of your 25 possible complainants,
how many of them are survivors?
Twenty.
How many are willing to go public?
Um, probably five.
So what about
just a press conference?
Yeah. That, I think could be good.
Good morning and thank you for
your attendance at this important event.
My name is Sofie Karasek,
and I'm a third year student
here at the University
of California Berkeley.
My name is Meghan Warner.
My name is Iman Stenson.
My name is Shannon Thomas,
and I'm a proud fourth year,
soon to be graduate,
of UC Berkeley.
I'm a survivor of a sexual assault
that occurred less than a year ago.
I didn't realize at the time
that the nightmare I was in
was not limited
to the night of the assault.
The process that followed is far
more upsetting than the assault itself.
When I looked at resources
from the university online,
I saw that most were
for the perpetrator,
including an info graphic
for what to do if you're accused,
not what to do
if you're a survivor seeking help.
She made me feel like
what happened to me wasn't real,
like it wasn't a big deal,
like it was my fault.
- My fault.
- My fault.
Sexual assault at UC Berkley
is an epidemic.
Several female students
say they were sexually assaulted
on the University of California campus,
but they weren't taken seriously.
We were tracking the media frame
and how it changed and where it spiked
and what articles worked and what didn't.
These students who spoke today
went from sexual assault victims
to survivors and now activists.
Their efforts are gaining
the attention...
We saw what was effective,
and that was personal narrative
and putting a face
and a name to the issues.
My name is Carolyn Luby.
My name is Alexa Schwartz.
My name is Ari Mostov,
and I would like to provide you
with a more personal account
of the kind of abuses that occurred here
at the University of Southern California.
My name is Hope Brinn.
I'm a sophomore at Swarthmore.
I was sexually assaulted and stalked
by fellow students on this campus.
I was raped during
my freshman year at Occidental.
I wish that I had not been discouraged
by a dean from reporting my rape.
I'm filing as the lead complainant
against the University of Connecticut.
- Against UC Berkeley.
- Against the institution that I love.
Okay, let's go!
Seeing students
over the last year to two years
almost taking control of this...
for me it's been
a miraculous thing to witness.
For my senior thesis,
I will be carrying the mattress with me
as long as he's still on this campus.
Our individual stories
are what makes this a story.
Here is the experience
of 700 survivors,
and unless something happens,
it's not going to change.
There is a revolution
happening on campuses across the country,
and I'm very hopeful that this really is
our watershed moment.
We are fed up!
- With your university!
- Dartmouth has a problem!
Dartmouth has a problem!
...of assault and harassment, and today we
decide that we will no longer tolerate it.
- What do we want?!
- A safe campus!
- When do we want it?!
- Now!
We're watching! We're here!
We've made ourselves clear!
It was happening so quickly.
I mean, within a year
of our complaint against UNC,
the issue had shot
to the top of the national agenda.
Thank you so much
for coming to my office.
What else do you
think we need to do?
Do you wanna run
through some of those items
on the list that we marked off?
Yeah. Sure, sure, sure.
Yeah, I have my list.
The week before my senior finals,
I was in D.C. talking to senators.
We have seen an inspiring wave
of student-led activism
and a growing number of students
who found the courage
to come forward and report attacks.
We owe all these brave young people
an extraordinary debt of gratitude,
but we cannot stop there.
I still hear stories from survivors
whose experiences reporting to the school
sound exactly like mine.
Activists all around the country
were speaking out on this issue.
Stand up for justice. Don't let
other students go what I went through.
It used to be that
the Department of Education
didn't release names
of who was under investigation,
but after pressure from a lot of student
activists, they've begun to do that.
Fifty-five colleges and universities
facing a Title IX
sexual abuse investigation.
Sixty universities have been put on notice
by the Department of Education.
More than 70 schools
nationwide are now under investigation.
We have over 70
that are currently being investigated.
When they released
that list of schools,
that map of where they pinpointed it
matched our map.
I wanna do a close-up.
Okay.
Welcome to the 2014
spring commencement
at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill.
Here at Notre Dame, we wanna be
not just another Harvard or Oxford,
but a Bethlehem, a Nazareth, a Calvary,
a Cana, the upper room at Pentecost.
You know,
I'm still practicing my faith.
But something I believed in so long
and had so much trust in just failed.
I have to remind myself
that people sin and people aren't good.
And so I just have
to remind myself that.
What do universities owe the future?
We owe the future meaning.
Universities must nurture
the ability to interpret,
to make critical judgments,
to dare to ask
the biggest questions.
What is good? What is just?
You know, I'll see someone
who looks like him on the street,
and I don't want to say
that I'm afraid of him,
but, um, yeah, it's shocking.
It was three years ago,
and it's, um...
it's still right up here.
Your reputation is what you have
when you come into Florida State.
Your character is what you have
when you leave Florida State.
I know that it was the right
thing to do, to come forward.
But Investigator Angulo
was right whenever he said
that I would be driven out
of Tallahassee.
Andrea Lynn Pino.
Yeah, my name's Mike,
and my daughter was raped
at the University of California
Santa Barbara a week and a half ago.
After they were done with her,
they just dumped her.
When she got back from the hospital,
she called the school
and told them that
she wanted to go forward.
From there it has been
an absolute joke.
Nobody up there wants to help us.