The Hunting Ground Page #2

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.

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