Rape on campus

Hoda Kotb Correspondent • Profile

It’s supposed to be the best four years of your life. But five young women “Dateline” spoke to say that for them, college turned into something very different.

Five college students who say they were sexually assaulted on campus. But this is a story of how their universities handled their cases. When each of these women reported being attacked by a fellow student, did their schools act quickly or strongly enough?

Annie, Kate and Samantha, went to the University of Virginia, Georgetown and William and Mary. All three say they were raped by fellow students their freshman year of college. All three reported the alleged assaults to school officials.

Annie: Right away I wanted to go through the adjudication process the school has to offer. I’m like, let’s get it going now.  I want him out.”

Samantha: I was hoping that he would—they would force him off campus, and force him off campus quickly, and that he’s never be able to come back. 

Students reporting acquaintance rape often turn first to campus officials: these allegations are hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal court because it’s often one person’s word against another. Many schools hold formal court-like hearings where panels of faculty and students determine whether a student is responsible for sexual misconduct and recommend how to discipline a student who is found responsible.

Samantha says after filing a police report, she was told William and Mary officials would get in touch with her promptly. But she says a few days later, she hadn’t heard a thing.

Samantha: Actually I had to contact the Dean’s Office myself and just say, “Yes, I was raped.  Why haven’t you guys called me yet?”

Hoda Kotb, Dateline Correspondent: And what did they say the hold up was?

Samantha: There was just a lot of busy stuff.  And it took them a while to write up the report.  Apparently some very serious things had happened that week.  And I felt like screaming, “Well hello, I was raped. Is that not serious enough for you?”

Samantha, Kate and Annie all say they were discouraged by university officials from moving forward with their cases, claims school officials deny. All three students say they pushed their schools to hold hearings anyway.

All three were found responsible for sexual misconduct.

Samantha’s alleged assailant was dismissed from William and Mary, but given the opportunity to reapply after a year. In the end, he did not.

Georgetown initially decided to expel Kate’s alleged attacker, but after he appealed, the punishment was changed to a one year suspension.

Kate: Expulsion would be too harsh. Like that I wasn’t important enough to say “You don’t belong here.”

Annie’s alleged assailant wasn’t expelled or suspended from UVA — instead he was ordered to stay away from Annie, and required to attend counseling.

Annie: It was disgusting.  It was, you know, it said that anything that I was worth, I was worth a restraining order?

All the more infuriating, Annie says, when compared to UVA’s strict academic honor code. Students are automatically expelled if they violate it, by say cheating on an exam.

Kotb: Everyone knows that if you cheat, you’re out.  If you steal, you’re out. If you lie, you’re out.

Annie: If you rape, you graduate.

After Annie’s alleged assailant graduated from UVA, she sued him in civil court, and a jury found him liable for gross negligence. He is asking the judge to throw out that verdict.

The men accused of attacking Annie, Samantha and Kate have all denied any wrongdoing. And none of them was prosecuted.

Each year, about 4,000 U.S. college students report to school officials that they’ve been sexually assaulted. What happens after they file those reports has stirred controversy at campuses across the country: Dateline took a closer look at the case of one young woman— Stacy, at Ohio State University.

Stacy: I know that this nightmare will follow me for the rest of my life.

Stacy’s freshman year at Ohio State back in 2001, started out as you might expect — football games, all nighters, a little too much partying and plenty of friends.

Stacy: I loved my roommates.  Everything.  My grades were up.  Everything was going as planned.

Kotb: Really?  What kind of grades did you get your first semester?

Stacy: Around a 3.5.

One of the guys Stacy hung around with freshman year was Jeremy Goldstein, a wrestling star from her high school back in Cleveland. Stacy acknowledges she had consensual sex with Jeremy once in October. But she says what happened the night of February 22, 2002 was completely different.

That night, Stacy came back from an off campus bar— a little buzzed, she says, but not drunk—and met up with Jeremy for a smoke outside his dorm. Stacy says he’d left his cigarettes upstairs, so she agreed to go to his room. But she says she told him she wasn’t interested in anything physical.

Kotb: Is there any way Jeremy could have misunderstood when you went up to his room that night?

Stacy: No.

Kotb: Is there any way he could have thought—

Stacy: Not a chance.

Kotb: She’s coming up here and we know what’s going to happen.

Stacy: No way.  Not a chance. I said, “We are not hooking up, right? You know that right?”

Kotb: And he said?

Stacy: Oh of course.  My roommate’s up there.

But his roommate was passed out cold. Jeremy started to kiss her and at first she let him, but Stacy says the former wrestler turned violent, pulling down her pants, and penetrating her with his hand, and biting her neck, all while he had her pinned down. 

Stacy: My hands above my head.  Pulling my ears with his teeth.  Telling me how much I was enjoying it, although I was gasping in pain. And right away he was—started raping me.  And I told him several times—I don’t know what words I can use and what words I can’t.  But, “Get the fuck off me.”

Stacy says the third time she yelled so loud his roommate stirred and Jeremy got off of her. She says she walked back to her dorm, feeling numb. The next day, she went to a university official and reported she’d been raped.

Kotb: How tough was it, Stacy, to get those words out?  I was raped? 

Stacy: I couldn’t even say the word rape for a very long time.  Months.

The official wrote up Stacy’s allegation and called the police, who asked if she wanted to file a criminal report. Stacy told them she wasn’t sure and didn’t do so.

During the spring semester, Stacy tried to get back to her classes and her friends. The whirr of college life was going on all around her, but Stacy says she didn’t feel a part of it.

Stacy: There’d be nights that I would just turn off every light in  my room, even the TV and just lay there.

By the week before final exams, Stacy says, she was in danger of failing all her classes.

Stacy: I withdrew from classes, every class spring quarter.  Because if I wanted to get a "D" in any of the classes, I would have to get 100 percent on every final.

Kotb: Was there a low point that you just said, “That’s it, I need to do something and I need to do it now”?

Stacy: I was angry because as far as I knew, Jeremy Goldstein was going on about his life as if nothing had happened. And I was just sitting in my room in the dark, metaphorically and literally. And that, to me was not justice.

Stacy took incompletes in her classes. But before she left school that June of her freshman year, four months after she says she was raped, she decided to go back to the police and file a criminal report. As the criminal investigation of Jeremy Goldstein got underway, Stacy says she wanted the university to take action against him too — to have him expelled. Starting in the fall of her sophomore year, she says, she had several conversations with the official in charge of campus hearings, but she says those talks went nowhere.

Kotb: You went to the head of judicial affairs to say what?

Stacy: Say I want a school hearing.

Kotb: And he said what?

Stacy: "If I were you it would be in your best interest to wait until the criminal proceedings were over."

But justice was moving slowly through the criminal courts. And at Ohio State, no further action was taken on Stacy’s case all through her sophomore year.

Then, at the end of her sophomore year, Jeremy was indicted for rape by a Columbus grand jury. Stacy says she came back to school the next fall, a year and a half after the alleged assault, determined to push for his expulsion. And that’s when she says a rape counselor she was seeing happened to mention something university officials had never told her:

Just three weeks before Stacy says she was assaulted, another student had filed a complaint against Jeremy Goldstein.

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