Transcripts For CSPAN2 After Words With Stuart Taylor 20170521

After words, journalist Stuart Taylor examined can post Sexual Assault policies in his book, the campus rape frenzy the attack on due process that americas universities. Mr. Taylor argues that federal regulations on Sexual Assault and harassment impedes student rights on college campuses. Hes interviewed by Beth Frerking editorinchief of national law journal. Hello. Stuart taylor. Thanks for being here to discuss your book the attack on due process of americans university. I thought i would start by asking you to tell us about your coauthor and when you started working together that led up to the book were talking about today. Sure, Katie Johnson hes a brilliant professor of history at Brooklyn College in the city of new york graduate center, harvard phd and probably if you are more politically correct tb teaching at harvard. We both became interested before we knew each other against the rape fraud as it turned out to be. It began in 2006 and ended in 2007. We both saw, not only the National Media but the duke faculty and administration, rushing to judgment and a despicable way against a bunch of lacrosse players who were accused of a brutal gang rape at a party. It turned out they were totally innocent and evidence of their innocence long preceded the acknowledgment of that by the faculty and the media. Casey as an academic thought this was an outrageous perversion of what academics are supposed to be about. He started doing a blog and it was amazing blog about it called durham in wonderland. I had a friend who was on the Lacrosse Team and had said switch and take a look at this. I was washing writing for the washington journal at the time. There was no rape, no, typical fraud, District Attorneys criminal faculty and media are acting terribly and thats what youll find. I can tell you some sources. I started looking into it and i came to that conclusion and ended up writing the book. Casey join me in writing the book at a time and the actual reason he joined was i needed to finish in a hurry, to get ahead. I couldnt do it without help and casey was the guy i needed to help me and he was a brilliant help. We stayed in touch, over the years. He continued to follow a lot of the campus rape stuff and i followed it last but twothree years ago he asked if i thought it was time for a new book. I had been following it enough so my answer was yes, it is. I can go into why that was. Right. I guess the first thing id like to do and will talk about the duke case later but i want to focus more on whats in this book. If you could just share for the viewers whats your general thesis that we are looking at here. What will be reading about when we open the pages. The gist of it is that theres a huge mess that taken root that there is an epidemic of campus rape, theres a culture of campus rape where its encouraged and condoned even by the administrators and thats out of control, is increasing, its worse on campus than it is offcampus and that it requires completely demolishing all due process in the presumption of innocence for the accused people, 99 of whom are male. Thats not an accident. This comes from extreme feminists, male hating extreme feminists, in some cases. It also is normally pushed ahead by the obama ministration because the Obama Administration thanks for political reasons latched onto this idea well into the Obama Administration. Suddenly, bam, for reasons i can describe they ordered every campus in the country, every college in the company, to receive federal money which is more than 7000 of them to revolutionize the disciplinary process to make sure that not only if a woman complained that she had been raped or sexually assaulted but if her roommate best friend complained that they get to the bottom of it and have an investigation, have an adjudication of sorts, discipline and the guy and follow specified rules that were clearly designed to presume guilt. Okay. Lets start with and ill come back to some of your comments later but i want to start with. I should add that every piece of the myth i described false. Lets start with the case that you opened with the book. That is the student that you name and its a pseudonym Michael Caine and his accuser alice stanton. Can you walk us through this case, first of all, give us the highlights of what happened here and tell us why you decide to lead with this case. The answer to the second question. There were so many cases we could have led with. Thirty or 40 that would have sufficed perfectly well to make our point. We thought this was one of the worst and most emblematic and one of the most ironic because if there was a Sexual Assault in this case, it was the woman assaulting the man, not the other way around. But the way amherst saw it they kicked out a man on the claim that he had assaulted the woman and there were a number of factors that led to this. There typical of what goes on although the woman assaulting a man is less difficult. First, she had a motive for making up the idea that he had assaulted her. Lets back up a second. What was the situation. A guy and a woman who didnt know each other wellin a dorm started making out and having four plate with clothes on, lets say. In front of other people and it became sort of blatant and embarrassing to the other people and they said go get a room. So she took him back to her room. He was blackout drunk which meant he didnt remember anything about it the next day and the evidence suggests he was either passed out as well or close to being passed out. She administered oral to him for whatever reason. Then she had had enough of him, sent him away, some and another guy she had been flirting with earlier that day and said your military trained bod over here and entertain me, im alone. Then she had a sexual encounter with him which he was a little bit less ready to do that she was. We know all these facts because she was sending Text Messages all along to a campus friends. She realizes at some point that this happened to be her roommates boyfriend. The roommate is away. Then shes worried. Michael caine or the other guy. The first guy. The guy was blackout drunk i wanted to make that clear. She started saying through Text Messages, ive done something stupid and nobody he wont be able to make up a goliath so she ends up starting to tell people that he assaulted her when the reverse was true. She told this to her Social Circle and she lost her surf friends and she hang out with military anti rape actress and over a long period of time she starts blogging and so forth. She starts telling more and more people that she was sexually assaulted and finally, after more than a year, she filed a complaint with Amherst College saint she he sexually assaulted me. They did a sloppy investigation and didnt find any of the Text Messages im talking about which could have easily been found, lawyer for the guy easily found them without having to use, just ask around. Convened a Disciplinary Panel of about three extreme feminists, i will call them, faculty types and after violating every rule of fair process in the book, which they were commanded to do, by the way by the Obama Administration, they found them guilty and kicked him out. Then he hired a lawyer, the lawyer from the Text Messages, the Text Messages clearly proved his innocence and he took the Text Messages to amherst and they said, too late, you been kicked out, its over. The saga continues in federal court. Thats the gist of the case. All right. Thank you for going through that. Lets back up a little bit and i want you to talk about what was the university required to do. Lets get away from just the specifics of this case but clearly they were under a mandate, federal mandate, having to do with title x, i mean title ix and i mean, tell us about the memo from 2011, cracked . April 4th 2011. More than two years after the obama imagination took office. Its an interesting timetable. Theres been no things that this was coming. He hadnt campaigned on Sexual Assault but bam, out of the blue, the office of civil rights and id say generally democratic administrations to some extent, republican image patients but their extreme ideologues in a civil right agency. Thats what they do. They about a initiation certainly did it. The extreme ideologues and so they issued about a 19 page memo with a bunch of marching orders to the university which they claim were based on title ix, and discrimination. In fact, they were persian and by ablation of title ix. The five specific things where you must adopt the lowest possible burden of proof, preponderance, if its a tossup, a feather on the woman side of the scale that hes guilty, period. A lot of colleges in the ivs had previously had an in between clear and convincing evidence, not criminal standard. This load the dice. Its not quite presumption of innocence. When you combine it with the others, it is. No crossexamination. You better not crossexamine in 2011 and in 2014, they upped the ante to if you allow crossexamination then your violating title ix by just doing that. You mean the accused person having the right to crossexamine the accuser. Exactly. The law was laid down that nobody on behalf of the accused person, not a lawyer, not a representative, not anybody can crossexamine it the accuser and generally, cant examine any other witnesses either. The Supreme Court has said repeatedly that crossexamination is the greatest engine for discovery of the truth the legal system has ever invented. Taking that away in any case is a formula for unfairness. Taking it away in a he said she said context where you dont know much except what he said, she said and sometimes theres evidence but not always. This usually loads the dice against the accused. The other way they loaded the dice was they had a form of double jeopardy, not criminal so its not unconstitutional but they gave her the woman a right to appeal the guy, man and woman, sometime is a man in a man. They gave the right to appeal to the accuser which had not been true and which has not been true in any other criminal proceedings. They started what they call interim measures which is a form of punishment of the accused right away, the minute the accusation is made before theres any investigation. You cant go to the library anymore or you cant go move out of your dorm, that sort of thing. That was for and what was the fifth. The fifth was in there somewhere. Overhanging all of this and i cant emphasize that enough was this atmosphere of pressure coming from the Obama Administration and the colleges, all of them, became terrified that if they didnt hammer as many accused guys as possible, and sometimes roundup people to do the accusations, they would get an investigation and the minute the investigation started by the obama office of civil rights they would make an announcement were investigating these colleges and theres more than 300 on the list now and this would be terrible publicity with the ultimate threat being will take away your federal money, maybe all of it which you put campuses on business. So, the people who iran these adjudicatory systems on campus, title ix coordinators had a huge conflict of interest. They knew the federal government was likely to come down hard on them if they did not hammer the accused and so hammering the accused became the order of business. Thats quite a charge in terms of literally rounding u up talk more about that. I certainly understand where you have cases and weve seen activism on the campuses by not just women, meant to say that these kind of things have been ignored in the past and that this isnt being made up in a lot of cases. In fact, part of the response that the obama ministration had was perhaps in response to various cases all over the country where Police Departments may not have handled these in such a focused way so that they put that on universities. Also, locus printers when you send your kid to college you want to know that theyre safe. How do these two things come together . This didnt come out of nowhere. Theres a buick thread there. Its true that Police Department and often prosecutors if you go back to the 70s or before, lots of them, most of them, were fairly cold and hostile toward rape complaint is. I used to go to the Police Districts in baltimore every day when i was in the Baltimore Sun as a cover reporter nearly 70s and i remember the cops would joke, they use joking references one woman complained. That was a big problem. Its still a problem in some places but not nearly as big a problem as it used to be. Theres been a revolution in Police Attitude toward that thing. You might find some places where they arent ideal but another problem that led to colleges get into it was even when the police and prosecutors are exemplary in the way they behave, the criminal process is pretty tough on a rape complaint in. It has to be. The guy has to have a defense lawyers job is to make the woman out to be a liar. Thats what hes there to do. You get nasty crossexamination, you might get nasty proper city, its not an pleasing. Then the colleges come along with feminist pushing and say, dont go to please, come to us, will be nice to you and we know the guy is guilty, you can testify from behind a screen, we wont let them crossexamine you, your name will become public which would be fine if the process they used was there but its not. When i get to rounding up, youre quite right that women are often reluctant even in the campus context to report a real Sexual Assault. Its legitimate for the campuses to say that lets encourage people to report by making it easier. Theyve done that. But they have done more than that. Yale is a classic example. Yell, over and over again, more and more often brings sexual complaints against guys when the woman did not complain or want to complete. The outstanding example of this is jack montague, the yale pascual canton who suddenly disappeared about a year ago from the basketball court. It became apparent that he was being kicked out on account of Sexual Assault allegations. The woman did not make the allegations, she said she had an unhappy experience with him and told a roommate and someone told somebody and it gets around to the campus texmex bureaucrat and thats what they are. There campus sex bureaucrats and they been hired by the thousands under the obama ministration. They decide, in part because they want to gratify themselves the Obama Administration, they decided they would have an investigation and a was a prosecution anyway, even though the woman didnt ask for it. This violated yields written rules, by the way. But they did it anyway. Not only did they do it but they misled the woman by telling her, this guy had a prior record, hes dangerous, its not as you he did this to you. So, we need to take him out. She testified under those grounds. In fact, his prior record had nothing to do with sex of any kind. If you have patience for what her testimony was its interesting to. Lets move away from the specific cases and i want to talk about you devoted an entire chapter to statistics, misleading statistics as you say. With particular attention to the onefive sided champions of the obama policy. Certainly by a lot of women out there who talk about their own experiences and will get back to that. Is it as problematic as you say and why does it continue to be highlighted . Tell us what it stands for . How did that become so widely used . Frankly, because of media bias and the bias of other people. There are reliable statistics and its more like one in a hundred are raped and. Those statistics are from. Bureau of justice which is the gold standard. These surveys go back to the 80s. A woman named mary costa did the first of these surveys and more recently the centers for Disease Control did it and, by the way, their interest is a Health Problem and so theyre all kinds of things that arent really crime that they count as Sexual Assault. Surveys were done by the Washington Post and by the association of american universities which you might think would want to play down the rape problem but in fact reasons i can explain they want to play it up. They get to onefive by a view, they dont think of it as fraudulent but i think of it as fraudulent. First, they have small sample sizes which means people who are particularly motivated about Sexual Assault are more likely to answer than others. To, they have a vastly overbroad definition of Sexual Assault and of rape that doesnt meet any of the usual criminal standards or the common popular standards of what one is. They dont ask women in the service, none of them, mary costa did and she didnt get the answer she wanted. Since then they havent done it. They dont say where you raped were you sexually assaulted all of the women, most of them, will say no. They want yes. So, did you ever have with someone when you have been drinking or were drunk . Why, yes. Check the rape box. Have you ever been kissed when you didnt want to be cast . Yes, check the Sexual Assault box. And so they vastly inflate the numbers. Let me interrupt you on that. Kissing, if you dont want to be cast . It sounds like to me that is something that is a problem. If you are kissed and you dont want to because, i think, young women today would say there were lines that were acceptable, 50 years ago, 40 years ago when no one called it that but theyre determined to say if someone does that, to me that is Sexual Assault, statistics aside. Weve entered a new era in terms of younger women insisting that no, someone else doesnt, especially from another generation doesnt get to say that a non unwanted Sexual Assault. Its one things one can be secure. Were you ever kissed when you didnt want to be . One end of the inspector might be forceful addressing, kissing and shes pushing him away and hes kissing her anyway. At the other end of the spectrum and many of the yeses come from this, a guy who is either awkward or getting the signals wrong and thanks she wants to be cast. So he doesnt ask, thats not the way it works through lovemaking of history, so he gives it a try, a test case and the woman might say no, i dont want that. He stops and he doesnt do it again. When the survey comes around and shes asked that question, some women might say, well, now, and other say yes. Those inflate the statistic. I dont think were disagreeing on this. I think we are talking about a spectrum of the situation and you get a lot of yeses to questions that are not a Sexual Assault category as i understand it. Right. Lets talk about what you call the rape culture. You talk about for tenants in the book. Why is that concept so important both to the activists to support this approach, they strongly believe and then those who say its not credible. Tell us what those are. Im not sure boost use that phrase but its been around for 30 or more years. The gist of the concept is not only that there are men who are sexual predators and its an exaggeration so that this is the default situation men are mostly sexual predators and some of the activists say that, professor figured one of the cases, for example, Danielle Dorset said to new York Magazine and most of them are sexual predators. There is that in a lot of this goes on to campus. Theres also the idea that the colleges are condoning it. They dont want anybody to hear about anything like that happening on their campus and so therefore, they covered up, they condone it, they help the guy get away with it. They we get it back reason being what, stuart . They dont want to hurt their reputation. Thats the main reason. Also, in the athlete context, if youre talking about a very start the ball or best ballplayer at one of the colleges that make a lot of money, which is not to say yell for example but texas, there is maybe something of a rape culture in the sense that coaches sometimes want to cover stuff up because they dont want to lose this valuable player. Those are rare cases but there are some. Weve seen those over the last 30 years. I dont mean to say there is no rape culture anywhere at all, i can imagine there is some athletic departments in which there are some great cultures but in general it was a reputation thing. Over time the reputation concern hasnt gone away but its been overpowered by the hour of feminist on campuses. Id call myself any quality feminist but those who have a problem with the rape issue continue to claim that universities are insensitive to rape victims when in fact they are hundred hypersensitive to anyone who supposedly had an unhappy experience, most of them are in the culture now, we think, is a presumption of guilt culture. Part of the presumption of guilt culture is almost men who are accused of Sexual Violence are guilty and as they deny it, they are lying. Thats one of the mists and its not true thats in fact what i want to talk about next. The focus of your book is the denial of due process for the accused. It is a bedrock, Legal Protection in our constitution and the system is different than the criminal Justice System that these cases often have been. Either gone through or not ended up well depending on ones perspective or not. Talk about what would happen if we got to the point where all of those cases were put back into the criminal Justice System. Well, i reluctantly concluded that that ought to happen. Because i think the criminal Justice System is pretty fair in the way it deals with these things. I begin to think there are some places where there too likely to convict an innocent guy in some places where there too likely to acquit a guilty guy but theyre everywhere when you have a requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt and you have often, he said, she said where theres not much physical evidence if any, youre likely to end up with a lot more guilty guys getting off on the criminal charge even if its brought in a lot of women for very good charges dont bring them in the first place. Youll have more of that then innocent guys convicted. Which is as it should be. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Blackstone said better ten guilty go free than one innoceng about rape in particular then one innocent suffer punishment. This is not a satisfactory situation for the victims. There ought to be a way the victim of rape, whether college or not, can get some kind of redress even if the criminal Justice System wont quite give it to her. Well, there is such a thing as a civil lawsuit. You can sue the guy. Lawsuits cost a lot of money and its not an easy way to go. Theres something attractive about the idea that well, at least for the college and we have these people and there are students and maybe we can help out. Im id be with that in principle as some kind of way if they did it fairly, if they had processes, if they were protective, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt but clear and convincing evidence, allow cross examination, if you have something thats closer to criminal process than what they do now that would be okay. They have shown the university, and the obama ministration has shown resoundingly that they are incompetent at doing this and that they are terribly biased. Incompetence is they dont have to investigate, they dont have subpoena power, they dont do good scientific evidence, they dont dig up evidence, they train their socalled adjudicators by telling them almost all guys who do this are guilty, if the guy is persuasive and logical when he says hes innocent, thats a sign of guilt. It is not persuasive and logical, that too is a sign of guilt. This is stanfords process im describing. I think, the question is is there any way the system can be reformed so that its not so guilt presuming. Theoretically, there is. I hope the top and ministration will take some steps to do it. In practice, i have grave doubts knowing what the campuses are like today, knowing basically how skewed to the left and skewed to the feminist side the attitudes are the people who run it, maybe not all of them but the people who make the noise and the people the leadership is afraid of, i just dont trust any campus in america to do a decent job of this. Okay. You said several times extreme feminism and im going to play devils advocate a little bit and say much of the work a lot of feminists have done over the years have been to bring to light problems that really did exist in society and that words, as we talked about earlier, looked at, shushed away, tell me in looking at these processes because theyre under again, a mandate from the federal government, you talk about being trained to tell adjudicators a certain way. Now, ive seen you interview a lot of people to get a sense that its that way, i dont know how many colleges are talking about that you look at your specific processes. Im interested. The training is secret. Weve only got a handful of colleges where stanford, i think, middleberry, is dribbled out and youve seen it. Extrapolating from those, we know the federal government under obama demanded they have some kind of training. We know that theres a firm called margot and seeley that provided the training at some of these colleges and we know theyre hired by a lot of other colleges to provide training there too. Theres some extrapolation from that. We also know for example, colleges used to have students as part of the panels but the students werent guilt presuming enough for them so they tended to get the students off the panels. They tended to get faculty members off the panels, even tended to get fewer sex bureaucrats under the encouragement, not a command of the Obama Administration, have gone to what they called a single investigator of adjudicator system where one bureaucrats is the investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury, total power to decide the fate of anyone who is accused of sexual misconduct. You raised a broader question on extreme feminists and ill come back to that, if youd like. Yeah, let me back up a little bit. Let me go first two, again, as youre pointing out with your own research, its hard to know, it would be interesting for all of these systems to be opened up because i assume that activists who are on the other side would use the same argument to you that you do about the one inside which is how many have you really looked at and how many are you sure. The statistics. No, no, what adjudicators are trained to do. A part of what you are seeming to reveal here is that were not sure how all this training goes. Im pretty sure but i cant give you a thousand examples. Based on what ive seen, might be sure. Right, im sort of trying to say what would the other side say. You been a reporter and we like to hear all sides of that. You also talk about media malpractice. Probably, the case that you wrote a book about is one that you would certainly put in that but the one that is more recent is that you be a case, Rolling Stones story which a lot of us watched closely and saw the Washington Post sort of deconstruction of what happened they are and that fell apart. Tell us about that case, how that matches with other cases that you look at and do you think thats changed anything in terms of, you talked about an overcorrection or is it going back in another direction because of that case . I dont think it is. That case is a little atypical because the campus discipline was not involved. But its very representative of what is going on. Rolling stone magazine had a reporter, Sabrina Hurley is her name, i think, was going to campuses all over the country to find a great case to illustrate this rape culture and she was having a hard time finding one, which should tell you something to start with. Finally, she gets to the university of virginia and says shes found it, a woman named jackie and her real first name who had told the story of various campuses sex bureaucrats and she interviewed jackie and how they brutal in statistic, gang rape out of fraternity by sevennine guys, Something Like that, on top of broken glass because it shattered a tabletop. There she is lying on her back with glass and everybodys driving around in the glass and so when i first read that, i thought, nothing like this has ever happened before as far as we know on any american campus. Nothing quite that sadistic and brutal. Therefore, i was skeptical from the start but Rolling Stone wasnt skeptical and the rest of the media rushed to the same judgment they had at the time of the duke lacrosse case. Of course the woman was telling the truth, women dont lie about these things. It got picked up and picked up and there were a few skeptics and they got savaged by many in the press until it started to fall apart. As you point out to the credit of the Washington Post, their reporters. [inaudible] metro porter, i think. He played a valuable role in making it fall apart. It fell apart completely. You might think a lesson would have been learned but its true as in 2007 the lesson wasnt learned. In fact, the media many in the media continue to say, well, many at uva, it might as well be true because we all know thats what really happened so the fact that it turned out not to be true the colombian journal review did a huge reconstruction and condemned the Rolling Stones as they should have but i didnt think it was very thoughtful because they repeated a lot of the myths that were talking about including uncritically and they didnt examine whether there was more of a problem here than just Rolling Stone going on a bender whether there was a general problem with attitudes in the media elsewhere with the guilt presuming attitude. They didnt take that on at all. In fact, the university of Virginia Administration and faculty, students even, and this is different than duke in 2006, by the way, continue to act as though it was true. Well, even if it wasnt true, we should act as though it was true. Let me ask you, i know you thought about victims and women who are raped or sexually assaulted and they would say there is not nearly enough attention to us. In fact, they might say, id like you to come and do about about what we experience. Where are we in society. This is a due process is a real issue and i tend to believe in the sunshine approach which is the more we air things and get them out, and look at them critically in a way they should be according to a criminal prosecution is standard, the more we will learn. My question would be for some of that the will believe it anyway attitude that you just talked about and ive read takes of all of this, women is saying its always been the other way. In other words, we were always presumed guilty or we were presumed bad. Where are we in the system both from a college standpoint but a criminal defense standpoint from being more open to that prosecution . Weve seen it with Domestic Violence and weve seen much more as you know, 20, 30, 50 years ago, cops didnt get to like involved in those cases. That has changed. Weve seen a real change on that. Do you think that a focus on these things will it hurt victims in some cases . Victims that are really felt truly exalted. It does not hurt victims. It is true, please in the 70s there was dismissiveness toward rape complaints. Those days are over. Weve had, what i would say, is an overcorrection, in the direction of presuming guilt as opposed to just saying lets be fair to both sides. The obama image patient put it into overdrive. Yeah, theres more books that you can shake a stick . If you give me ten minutes and amazon are fine 50 bucks about women suffering from rape wont find books about the presumption of guilt. As a journalist and author i prefer doing something that is not being done rather than joining a chorus. Writing another book about victims would be joining a chorus. Its a good chorus, it is terrible, its a terrible crime and by the way, the actual true statistics of rape on campus which is about one hundred, its too high. Thats terrible. Those victims, when you multiply that by 10 million women in college, thats a lot of victims. By the way, one thing the colleges to do that theyve done for a while but they should continue to do is when youre dealing with them presuming theyre telling the truth, treat them with kindness, treat them with consideration, psychological counseling, medical counseling, rape crisis centers, all of that. All of that is good. But that presumption of honesty should not be given to the accuser is when youre determining the fate of the accused. Thats when you need to have a different attitude. Sure. Sure. Lets look back at some of the cases, im interested the man from the Lacrosse Team. Where are they now . Smack their life has gone well. They all have good jobs, im not sure where theyre working and i know their families. There are were three indicted and they were another four on the team. They had a good landing but theres a reason for it. Most people who are falsely accused dont have an easy landing. The reason is not only was there in a sense definitively proved, not only was the District Attorney who prosecuted them disregard for misconduct for lying about them, spent a night in jail but the guy who took over the case from that prosecutor, the attorney general of North Carolina who is now the governor, roy cooper, had a press conference and i was there where everyone is waiting for him to drop the case on insufficient evidence and that would have left the company but he said we believe these young men were innocent. Nothing happened and there was no rape, no sex. When you combine that with what id like to think our book did some good and other things did some good, the presumption of guilt that tends to hang over accused people was pretty well exploded. Now, these guys still encounter people who are saying or thinking, hes that rapist i read about but its not a big cloud over their heads whereas a lot of people in this book not only have the cloud over the head but they have a deep depression, posttraumatic stress syndrome, some have become suicidal and the consequence for someone falsely accused who doesnt happen to have a vindication on National Television are very severe. Very different. Right. Lets talk about your conclusions. I want to get to that. We can go back over some of the other but im very interested, as you reported this and talked about it and you have lots of statistics in here for people who are into statistics, i think a really deep read of those are very interesting. For the people on the ground, the people who are living their lives, young women who might feel frightened, hearing about the stories and certainly, weve heard some tragic ones where cases of drinking and women go missing and thats different, odyssey, then sexually assault. That happened in virginia about the same time but thats murder. Murder, right. When you send your children off to campus, to colleges, whether parttime or fulltime, that impacts the statistics as well, you want to know theyre safe. So, i have some sympathy for those bureaucrats who are charged with that. The last thing they want i like to think they all have good intentions. I come from that point on the compass. Most people do. Most people have good intentions and want to do the right thing. Were talking about parents, we are talking about young women, we are talking about young men, were talking about, as you say, student, parent, media, politicians, judges, lets go through your conclusion and bottomline, if you had a kid going to college, what do you tell them under the circumstances today . Start with parents. I have two wonderful daughters and their through college. Frankly, if there wasnt so much talk about campus rape when they were in college and it never occurred to either of them or to me, as far as i know, or ignored to my wife, that it was something that we needed to have high on our worry less. Of course you worry about everything but now, especially after the noise and to the city, its different. One of the most interesting conversations i had was with a female civil libertarian talking about her son and daughter. She said my daughter, has a good head on her shoulders, she didnt get drunk, she didnt get naked in bed with people before she decided she didnt want to have with them. I didnt worry about her. I worried about her and i told her to be careful that bad things can happen but she might get run over by a bus but i didnt worry about her too much. I identify with that. I worry about my son a little more because although the mathematical odds of him being falsely accused for rape or Sexual Assault may be fairly low, still, i know because the woman knows the system that if he is accused he is likely to be toast. Doesnt matter how strong the evidence pointing to an innocents. In the end of the book we advise them to be careful, we say you might check out the disciplinary systems at your college but i also say in my own voice, if i had a son i would tell him be a gentleman, treat women with consideration, never make advances that you dont think i wanted but that alone is not going to guarantee safety. You need to know that if you have sexual relations or foreplay with any woman who decides later that she wants to destroy you she will have the power to do it. She was very carefully. Im not going to say you need to be a monk and we also say, by the way, if you stay a women from women on your campus and eight women from elsewhere, youre a little bit less likely to end up in the hands of because proceedings wont go in the same way mac its not satisfactory to say. I dont say take a Television Camera with you everywhere. And i dont say join a monastery but careful. Yeah, interesting. Zero, and hire a lawyer if youre accused. Dont think this will go well and it will be settled. Im telling the truth and theyll be fair. They will not be fair. Hire a lawyer. The lawyer wont be allowed to participate in there is proceeding but he will do some good things. Counsel you to make and sue them if necessary. Student, thats what you talked about. Lets talk about the media. The media. Many in the media are a lost cause in terms of this. Take the New York Times. They were appallingly biased in the duke lacrosse case. Long after newsweek and lots of other most news media had realized this was a fraud and the New York Times was still trying to shore up the prosecution. In an appalling way. They never came clean. After words one of their editors said well, we learned our lesson and will do better next time. Every time a big case, sex case, rape accusation comes up and the New York Times decides to cover it, they write a guilt pursuing narrative. They did in the case of Florida State and they did it in the case of free time Pulitzer Prize writer did that, by the way. They did it in hobart, theyve done it in a case at yale with quarterback patrick and so, i guess, what i would hope media people would do is to finally get it through their heads that these cases are complicated, that some of the accusations are true, that some are false and that you should not just jump in assuming that you will run the rescue to the victim until youre sure shes a victim. For example, in the jamison, the Florida State quarterback. I do know from the facts of the woman went to his bedroom, voluntarily after meeting him in a bar and then whatever happened happened but she lied about every detail of her progress to the bedroom in the process of making her complaints. So, should you believe the last part of complaint which is that he raped me when i got there. Well, you would not know in all the thousands of thousands that the New York Times wrote about it that you would never have learned about those lies. They erased from the record. Its hard to the specifics of that case. Obviously, i dont know what reporting involved and i have te times but im not comfortable saying i suspect they would argue and you been a reporter before to that we had good deep sources. They didnt argue that. I wrote an article in real clear politics about them and they sent a response in. You dont have to get into it but their response was prophetic. They didnt deny a single thing i said in my article, not one. We dont want to adjudicate that. By the way, i did spend eight years. Your former times meant yourself. Its hard to break that particular case down and since theyre not here to respond, i dont want to make any responses for them. We looked at your conclusion. One thing i want to ask and i always ask the people when a do looking at the discussion of a big issue, who are the heroic figures on all sides of this . I also me on the other side. Its very hard to boil things down to black and white. The other way i put that question is if you would be on a debate stage and there was going to be someone who disagrees with you on this, principally, in a principled way, disagrees with you, who are those people . And what would they say and how would the conversation go . The people you might expect to be in that category would be smart feminists, right . Some as some harvard law professors and that the parts elect, jeannie zug, the problem with answering the question is that all of them are on my side in spite of very distinguished records and many ways including a feminist being feminist heroes. Every principled civil libertarian that i know largely agrees with my side of this and ill mention some of the others. There are five that i mentioned worth 5128 who basically denounced what is going on in more or less the same way i am doing, but not exactly the same way. They were professors at yale did the same mac was that. Two or three years ago is published in the boston globe. It was calling for more. More to process. It was at a time when harvard had lashed by the Obama Administration in adopting one of the opponents that i talked about. Harvard law professors they actually got Harvard Law School exempted from the general harvard rules. Other heroes on my side are the Fire Foundation for individual rights, its founders are the liberal, sometimes Civil Liberties lawyer from boston, Ellen Charles and greg luciana, a liberal. [inaudible] theres a group of families called family advocating for campus equality and they in a website. Obviously, they have a stake in it. Their sons are involved. You dont look to them for neutrality, lets say that they certainly are invaluable. Theres good lawyers have taken these cases, justin dylan in dc is one. Now, is there somebody who would come in here and say Stuart Taylor is completely wrong about all of this, who i respect. Maybe but i have not met her yet. Yeah, interesting. All right. We just have a little more time. Now we have a new president and we have new people and all the agencies, will see the changes continue. What are your predictions Going Forward . Is this approach going to continue, will colleges continue, they have these mandates in place and as you pointed out they are under pressure to make sure they make in turn meet those mandates. Where are we going from here . I have some thoughts. Ive heard the Trump Administration will act forcefully in this area. Im not confident but i hope they will wipe off the books everything the obama demonstration dead, just about everything they did in terms of packing on due process. Everything. Everything they did on campus rate. Maybe theres something they did okay but the attack on due process, presumption of guilt, cross examination, all that, i hope they write it off the books. The obama initiation did not follow the legally required procedures for an important federal regulation which as you know, requires Public Notice and opportunity for comment a quasi legislative process. The reason the initiated agencies usually get deference from the courts is going to a quasi legislative process. They didnt do that. What was established by a pen can be erased by another stroke of the pen. I hope he will do more than that. I hope you will also to the right process in certain universities will if they continue to presume guilt of all accused that violates title ix as a foreign of sexs commission against men. There are bunch of lawsuits that have made the case in some judges have been receptive and some have not. What i am afraid will happen is if trump says undo obama and walk away from it is that all the people who were hired as title ix bureaucrats at the insistence of the obama imitation, they are still there. All of the rules the campus is adopted and vetted in their disciplinary codes upon the orders of the obama initiation are still there. All of the campus cultural biases accused against men, they are still there. Those wont go away unless something makes them go away and although i dont particularly like the Trump Administration or the idea that it would throw its weight around this is one area where i think such a severe crisis that i like to see them throw their weight around. First, the republicans in general have been scared of this issue. There scare of war on women rhetoric. Theyre scared if they do the right thing bite my light bill be attacked by feminists and lose ground. Second, the top education people say they have higher priorities. There into vouchers and charters, there into bathrooms, boys are into bathrooms, and im not necessarily with them on the bathrooms but im afraid they will look at the campus sex thing and say there are not many votes in that and will let that one go. It will be interesting to see, what wanted to mark any parting thoughts that you have. Well wait and see if you do another follow up on this spec i dont think. That reminds me, my party that would be my two daughters that i mentioned, wonderful young women, almost 33 and 30, have said to me in the past, dad, why are you writing about rape duke lacrosse and now this. The best answer i could give them is its not that im particularly obsessed with rape is that i obsessed with injustice in the duke lacrosse my form of encounter with the rape and justice, i thought id done that but then it came back at me in this form and i thought im invested tension into this already so maybe i could go back to it specially since i had a wonderful coauthor. Yeah, so, i think people watching this might legitimately think this guy is right, why havent i heard it before. Why should i believe him . To which my answer would be a, read the book and see if you find anything that anyone has ever had any doubt on, and be careful what you trust from what you read in the newspapers because theres a lot of bias out there. Theres a bias to the right and bias to the left but in the most powerful organizations in this country, news organizations the bias is to the left. We will end on that. Thank you so much, stuart for being here today. We will keep reading. Thanks. I appreciate it. Cspan where history unfolds daily. In 1979, cspan was created as a Public Service by americas Cable Television companies. It is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. [inaudible conversations] good morning, everybody. Its great to have you here. Thank you. Im cochair of the board of american writers museum. Its my pleasure to welcome you and just get us started this morning