Throwaway account for obvious reason of not wanting this to be linked to him. Also, this isn’t some rhetorical post asking advice for “some guy I know who had this thing happen to him who definitely isn’t me,” this is actually about my friend, so if you guys have any questions let me know. These are all just the details to the best of my knowledge based off of what he’s told me.
My friend, who I’ll just refer to under the pseudonym Eric, goes to a university that’s pretty conservative in the northern part of our state. I’ve known Eric my entire life, and I genuinely mean it when I say he is the single sweetest man I have ever met. The guy doesn’t have a mean bone in his body, he actively goes out of his way to help anyone he can, and he’s just overall such a great guy. I know that people can definitely be hiding something under a nice personality, but Eric isn’t that person.
He’s been friends with this girl, who I’ll call Ashley, since he started going to college last year. They’ve been friends for a while, actively talked and texted each other, and had some unspoken feelings for each other, but nothing too serious. It’s also worth noting that around September of 2018, she confided in my friend Eric that she had been raped by some guy, and he was supportive of her and helped her work through it. She never pressed charges against the guy, and she never even went to law enforcement/the university to alert them.
Fast forward to December of 2018, and my friend Eric and his friends had been out drinking and partying. He was going back to his dorm when he bumped into Ashley and one of her friends, and she asked him if he wanted to come over to her dorm for a little bit to drink with her and her dorm mate. Eric, who was already pretty drunk, decided to go over there.
Just to give you an idea of the dorm layout - it’s 4 rooms with either bunk beds or single beds, which all are connected by a large common room + a kitchen. I know this because I’ve been inside of Ashley’s dorm before when she, Eric, and I had hung out together when he first got to uni.
Either way, as soon as they get to the dorm Ashley’s friend goes to bed because she’s completely plastered, and Eric/Ashley just end up laying on the couch in the common room together watching some TV. Eventually she gets up and says she’s going to get ready for bed, but that he’s welcome to just sleep in her bed and stay the night with her since they were both pretty intoxicated at this point.
This is the point in the story where things get complicated.
Eric and Ashely, both completely plastered, ended up making out. One thing lead to another, and they had sex. From what he told me (and I felt bad having to ask him this but it was kind of an important detail later on) she was “actively involved.” In other words, she wasn’t a passed out rag doll, and she initiated different sex acts/asked him to do certain things to her. The next day they wake up, both hungover as hell, and part ways. She texted him later in the day because she said she didn’t remember anything from last night, and he informed her that they had sex.
She ends up going to the university and the title 9 office, and opens up a case against him for rape. They interview her roommates (who said they didn’t hear any signs of rape in the room), his roommates (who all said he wouldn’t do that and described the relationship that Eric and Ashley had as friends), and some of their teachers. It’s also worth noting that she filed a restraining order against him through the campus police at the same time that she went to the title 9 department. It was a no contact/no communication order, and it meant that neither of them were allowed to contact the other in any form.
Eventually the officer handling my friend’s case told him that, after conducting a lot of interviews and building up a case, that they were going to rule it as inconclusive. This meant that he wasn’t found guilty of anything, but that if something of this nature happened again in the future, this would be used as evidence against him. Throughout this 2 month long investigation, Eric had to start seeing a psychologist several times a week because of how this whole thing affected him. I’ve never seen this guy be in a bad mood in my whole life, but I’m not making an understatement when I say that this ruined him. He ended up flunking most of his classes that semester, his parents almost forced him to dropout and move back home, and he started drinking a lot more.
Fast forward to a month ago and she slides a note under his door saying that she wants to talk and work things out. He takes the note to the title 9 office (since it’s a breach of the restraining order but also because he wants to talk to her and work things out) and let’s them know. The officer in charge of his case lets him know that she’ll set up a mediated meeting between the two of them.
He shows up to this meeting and the officer lets him know that Ashley is going to talk first, but that she (the officer) is going to make sure that everything remains civil and well mannered, and that the goal of this meeting was to come up with some sort of conflict resolution. He goes in, and this girl just rips into him - she told him how he should rot in hell, that this has ruined her life, he’s the worst person she’s ever met, that the school fucked her over because they ruled the case as inconclusive, and she even gave him (and was kind enough to make a copy for the title 9 officer) a 3 page letter dictating how he ruined her life.
Meanwhile, the officer who was mediating this doesn’t intervene. Didn’t stop her from saying any of that. There wasn’t any mediation at all. Until they pulled him out of the room to let him know that now it’s his turn to talk, and that he “needs to be careful with what he says, since she’s in a really sensitive place right now. He needs to take into account how she’s feeling, and if he says anything too direct or attacks her, they’re going to end the mediation.” Obviously he declined to go back in and speak to her, and he went back to his dorm where he wrote an email to the title 9 department head (who was the officer who lead the mediation) describing how one sided and manipulative that meeting was, and that he felt it was used as an attack against him.
It’s been about 3 weeks since he sent that email and there’s been no response. He called me last night to let me know that he got a text from one of Ashley’s roommates letting him know that the whole case was actually still open, and that the title 9 department never officially closed it. They’ve started pulling people for interviews again and asking more people about the whole situation. They also never informed my friend that they were even doing this again. However this time, the two roommates who were with him when this whole situation happened are no longer attending the school. They just got expelled for drug possession a month ago (as part of an investigation by the school’s police department). So now he doesn’t have anyone to back up his side of the story.
From what I know about all of this, I think that two college students were stupid and had drunk sex. I do not think in anyway that she was raped by him, but I do know that they were both heavily intoxicated when this happened. However from what’s been going on, I feel like the school is seriously screwing him over. Is there any sort of action he could/should take to defend himself?
Written By: floralbean12
Source: https://ift.tt/2I5ggxl
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