Host hallo, Stuart Taylor. Thanks for being here to discuss your book, the campus rape frenzy the attack on due process at americas universities. I thought i would start by asking you to tell us a little bit about your coauthor and when you all started working together that led up to the book were talking about today. Guest mike coauthor is casey johnson, a brilliant professor of history at Brooklyn College and the City University graduate center, harvard phd, probably if he was more politically correct to be teaching at home. We both became interested before we knew each other in a duke lacrosse rape fraud as it turned out to be a begin at 20066 and ended in 2007. We both saw not only the National Media but the duke faculty and administration rushing to judgment in a very despicable i kind of want to focus more on what is in this book is share for the viewers whats your general thesis that we looking at here, what are we going to be reading about when open the pages . Guest the gist of it is that theres been a huge myth thats taken root, that theres an epidemic of campus rape, that theres a culture of campus rape where it is encouraged and condone even by the administrators, that that outofcontrol, its increasing, its worse on campus than offcampus. And it requires completely demolishing all due process and the presumption of innocence for the accused people, 99 of whom are male. Thats not an accident. This comes on extreme feminists, who male hating extreme feminists in some cases but also is enormously pushed ahead by the Obama Administration because they i think for political reasons latched onto this idea well into the Obama Administration, they required about it for two years and suddenly for reasons i can describe the ordered every campus in the country, every college in the country receives federal money which is more than 7000, to revolutionize the display processes to make sure that if any, not only if the woman complains she is been raped or sexually assaulted, if her roommates best friend complained that they get to the bottom of it, have an investigation, and adjudication of sorts, disciplined the guy and follow specified rules, they were clearly designed to presume guilt. Host okay. Lets start with a new come back to some of your comments later but i want to start with guest every piece of the myth i described is false. Host lets start with the case that you open the book with and that is the Amherst Student who you name and its a pseudonym Michael Chang and his accuser alice stanton. Can you walk us through this case first of all just give us the highlights of what happened here and then tell us why you decided to lead with this case . Guest sure. There were so many cases we couldve led with. There were maybe 30 or 40 that would suffice perfectly well to make, so why this one. We thought this was one of the worst and most emblematic and when the most ironic because if there was a Sexual Assault in this case, it was the woman assaulting the man come not the other way around. But the way amherst saw it, they kicked out the man on the what claim he assaulted the woman. There were a number of factors that led to this, sort of typical although the woman assaulting a man is less typical. First she had a motive for making up the idea he had assaulted her. Host backup a second. If you could, what was the situation . Guest the situation was a guy and a woman who did know each other well in a dorm started making out and having kind of foreplay with clothes on, lets say, in front of other people and it became sort of blatant embarrassing give people are quite at your local a room . So she took him back to her room. And he was blackout drunk which meant he didnt remember anything about it the next day. The evidence suggest he was either passed out as well or close to being passed out, and she administered oral sex to him for whatever reason. Then she had had enough of him, send him away, some with another guy who should been flirting with earlier that day, said get your military trained bod over here and entertain me. Im alone. And then she had a sexual encounter with him, which he was a little bit less suited to do that she was. She was sending Text Messages all along to a campus friend. She realizes at some point a larger that this happens to be her roommates boyfriend. The relate is away. Suddenly she is worried host Michael Chang or the other guy . Guest the first guy. The guy who was blackout drunk. So she started telling, she was saying in more text message, ive done something so stupid. And nobody is going to come hes ugly that the makeup a good lie. She ends up starting to tell people that he assaulted her when the reverse was true, and she told this to her social circle. She loses her first circle of friends. She starting out with a bunch of militant antirape activists, and over 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 i think she filed a complaint with Amherst College saying he sexually assaulted me. Amherst college did a sloppy investigation, didnt find any other Text Messages that in talking about which could easily have been found. A lawyer for the guy easily found them later without having, just as brown, anybody got a Text Messages . Convened a Disciplinary Panel of i think it was three extreme feminists, i will call them, faculty types. After violating federal affair process in the book, which they were committed to buy the Obama Administration, they found guilty and kicked him out. Then he hired a lawyer. The boy found the Text Messages. The Text Messages clearly proved is innocent. He took the Text Messages to amherst and they said to late, youve been kicked out, its over. The saga continues in federal court but thats the gist of the case. Host thank you for going through that. Lets back up a little bit. 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, a federal mandate having to do with title x. I mean title ix, and tell us a little bit about the office of civil rights, the letter, the memo from 2011, correct . Guest it started april 4, 2011. More than two years after the Obama Administration took office which is an interesting timetable because there had been no hints anything like this is coming. He had not campaigned on campus Sexual Assault but bama, out of the blue the office of civil rights and i was a generally democratic administrations to some extent republican administrations put their extreme ideologues in the civil rights agency. Thats kind of, thats what they do. The Clinton Administration did it, the Obama Administration certainly did it. The extreme ideologue, and republicans, and so they issued about a 19 page memo with a bunch of marching orders to the university which they claimed were based on title ix, sex discrimination. In fact, they were perversion and a violation of title ix, thats my interpretation, but the five specific things were you must adopt the lowest possible burden of proof, preponderance means if its a tossup, put a feather on the womens side of the scales, the plaintiffs cited this government is guilty. A lot of colleges had previously had kind of an in between clear and convincing evidence, not the criminal standard. This loads the dice. Its not quite presumption of innocence, guilt all by itself but when you combine it with the others it is. No crossexamination. They made this kind of, they said you better not crossexamine in 2011 and in 2014 it up the ante to if you allow crossexamination then youre violating title ix may be just by doing that. Host you mean the accused person having the right to cross examine the accuser . Guest exactly. Basically they lay down the law not only the accused person but nobody on the half of the accused person, not a lawyer, not represented, not anybody can crossexamine the accuser and generally cant crossexamine 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. So taking that away in any case is a formula for unfair, taking away in a he said she said context where you dont really know much except for what he said and she said, sometimes as evidence but is not always, hugely loads of the dice against the accused. The other ways they loaded the dice was they had a form of double jeopardy. Its not criminal so its not unconstitutional but they gave the woman a right to appeal if the guy, i keep saying man and woman, once and what it is a man and a man, they gave the right to appeal to the accuser, which had not been to before and which is not true in any other kind of quads i criminal proceeding. They started what they call interim measures which are a form of punishment of the accused right away. The minute the accusation is made before theres any investigation. So you cant go to the library anymore, or you cant go, you have to move out of your dorm, that sort of thing. Lets see, what was the fifth . The fifth was in the summer but overhanging all this, and i cant emphasize this 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 round up people to do the accusations, they would get an investigation. The minute the investigation started by the obama office of civil rights that would make an announcement where investigating these colleges, theres more than 300 on the list, and that this would be terrible publicity, the ultimate threat being we will take away your federal money, maybe all of it which would put a lot of campuses out of business in less you do exactly what we want. And so the people of randys adjudicatory system on campuses, the title ix coordinator so forth they call them had a huge conflict of interest which is a new the federal government is likely to come down hard on them if they did not hammer the accused, and so hamming the accused became the order of business. Host thats quite a charge in terms of literally rounding up. Talk more about that. I understand where youve got cases where, and we seen a lot of activism on the campuses by not just women, men, too, who say that these kinds of things have been ignored in the past, that this isnt being made up in a lot of cases and that, in fact, part of the response that the Obama Administration had was perhaps a response to various cases all over the country where Police Departments may not have handled these in such a focus way so that they put that on universities. Also in loco parentis, when you send your kid to college you want to know that they are safe. How do these two things come together . This didnt just come out of nowhere. Guest theres a few threads there. Their tickets to the Police Departments and often prosecutors if you go back to the 70s or before, lots of them, maybe most of them were fairly cold and hostile to lay complaints. I used to go to the Police District in baltimore everyday when i was a cub reporter in the early 70s and remember the cops would joe, they would use joking references when a woman complained. That was a big problem and it still a problem some places but its not nearly as big a problem as it used to be because theres been a revolution and Police Attitude about these things. You may still find places where the police are not ideal. Another problem that led to colleges to get into it was even when the police and prosecutors are exemplary in the way they be it, the criminal process is pretty tough on a rape complainant. It has to be the guys got have a defense lawyer. His job is to make the woman out to be a liar. Thats what he is to do. You get nasty crossexamination, nasty publicity. Its not a pretty thing. So then the colleges come along with them and is pushing and say dont go to the police. , to us. We would be nice to you. We know the guys guilty. You can testify from behind the screen. We were not met in crossexamine you. Your name will not become public. Which was fine, we define it in the process they used was there but its not. When i get round up, you are 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 lets encourage people to report by making it easier. Theyve done that but theyve done more than that. Yale is a classic example. Yale over and over again more and more often bring sexual complaints against guys when the woman did not complain or want to complain. Outstanding example of this is jack montague, the basket will captain who suddenly disappeared about a year ago on the Basketball Court and he became a paired that he was being kicked out on account of Sexual Assault allegation. The women did not make the allegation. She said she had an unhappy experience within until the limit and somebody told somebody and he gets around to the campus sex bureaucrats and thats what they are, they dont like the term but their campus sex bureaucrats and theyve been via been hired by the thousands. They decided in part because he went to gratify themselves with the Obama Administration, they decided that theyre going to have an investigation and a kind of quads i prosecution anyway even though the woman didnt ask for it. This violated their written rules by the way but they did anyway. Not only did they do it, they miss led the woman by telling her this guy had a prior record. Hes dangerous. Its not just you he did this too. So we need to sort of take it out. She testified on those grounds. In fact, his prior record had nothing to do with sex of any kind. If you got patience for water test but was its, too. Host lets move away from this specific case. I wanted to talk about, you devote an entire chapter to misleading statistics, and with particular attention to the one in five statistic frequently cited by champions of the obama policy, and certainly by a lot of women out there who talk about their own experiences. Well get back to that. Is it as problematic as you say, why does i continue to be highlighted . And tell us what it stands for. How did that statistic becomes a widely used . Guest to continue to be highlighted because of media buys and the bias of other people, and there are reliable statistics and is more like one in 100 are raped and more than two and 100 are Sexual Assaulted. Host though statistic use are from guest the gold standard. These surveys go back to the 80s actually, a woman did the first of the surveys and recite the centers for Disease Control did it. By the way their interest is kindlcurrently think of it as a Health Problem and so theyre all kinds of things that are not really crimes that they count of Sexual Assault were done by the Washington Post and by the association of american universities which you might think would want to lay down the rate problem but in fact, the reasons i can explain, they get to one in five by a few i dont think they think of it as fraudulent but i do. They have very small sample sizes which means people who are particularly motivated about Sexual Assault are more likely to answer than others. Number two, they have a vastly overbroad definition of Sexual Assault and rape that doesnt meet any of the usual criminal standards or the common popular sense of what one is. So they dont ask women in the surveys, none of them, mary did and she didnt get the answer she wanted and since then they have a they dont say where you raped . Resection assaulted . Because they know almost all the women will say no. They dont want that. They want yes. So would you ever have sex somebody when you have been drinking i were drunk . Yes. Check the right box. Thats what they do. Have you ever been kissed when you didnt want to be just . Yes. Check the Sexual Assault box. Close dancing when you were holed up close and you want to be . Sexual assault. They inflate the numbers. Host let me interrupt you on that, stuart, on kissing, if you dont want to be cast. There are, you know, sounds like to me that is something thats a problem. If you are being and you dont want to. I mean, young women today would say there were lines that were acceptable 50 years ago, 40 years ago where no one called it that. But theyre pretty determined to say if someone does at, then to me that is Sexual Assault. Statistics aside. I think we have entered a new era in terms of younger women insisting that no in fact, somebody else doesnt give them a special from another generation doesnt get to tell me that thats not an unwanted Sexual Assault. Guest theres a spectrum of things that went to be thinking of when you say were you ever kissed when you didnt want to be. At one end of the spectrum might be really aggressive forcing of kissing, the woman pushing them away, hes tried to kiss her anyway, okay, sexual soul. At the other end of the spectrum, and many of the yes is on these questions come to this is, a guy whos either awkward or maybe its a welcome he thinks she wants to be kiss. He doesnt say may i kiss you . That cannot the way it usually has worked throughout the history of lovemaking. He gives it a try, a test kiss, and the woman might say no. He stops, he doesnt do it again. When the survey comes around and shes asked that question, some women might say well now, but others will say yes. Those inflate the statistics. So i dont think we are really disagreeing on the spirit i think were talking about a spectrum of situations and you get a lot of yeses to questions that are not in the Sexual Assault category as i understand it. Host right, right. Lets talk about what you call the rape culture. You talked about the tenets in the book. Why is that concept so important both to the activists who support this approach, very strongly believe, and then those who say its not credible. Tell us what those are. Guest the gist of the concept, not sure who first used the phrase, the gist of the concept is not only that there are lot of men who are sexual predators and its kind of an exaggeration since this is the default situation mean, theyre mostly sexual predators and some of the activists say that. A professor who figured in one of the cases at occidental said that to new York Magazine that most of them are sexual predators. So theres that and a lot of this goes on on campus. But theres also the idea that colleges are condoning it. They dont want anybody to hear that anything like that happening on the campus and so therefore they covered up, they can tell you, help the guy get away with it. They wink at it. Host the reason being what . Guest they dont want her to reputation. And also in the athlete concept, thats a special concept, if youre talking about a very star football or basketball player at one of the colleges make a lot of money that way, not which to say hell for example, lets say texas, there is maybe something of a rape culture in the sense that coaches sometimes want to cover stuff up because they do want to lose this valuable play. Those are extremely rare cases but there are some. Host weve seen those over the last 30 years. Guest item he did say there is no culture anywhere at all here i can imagine there are some Athletic Department to which there is some rape culture, but in general it was a reputation thing. Over time the reputation concern hasnt gone away but its been overpowered by the power of feminists on campus, extreme feminists i would say because i would call myself an inequality feminist. But feminists on campus and people are obsessed with the rape issue, to continue to claim that universities are insensitive to rape when, in fact, they are hypersensitive to anyone who supposedly had an unhappy experience. Most of them are. The culture now we think is a presumption of guilt culture. Part the present of guilt culture is almost all men who were accused of Sexual Violence are guilty. And if they deny they are just line. Thats one of the myths. Its not too. Host that is annexing i was going to get to is what i would say is the nub and the focus of your book and that is the denial of due process for the accused. It is bedrock Legal Protection in our constitution, but this system is different than the criminal Justice System that these cases often have been either gone through and not ended up well, depending on ones perspective or not. I mean, talk about what would happen if we got to the point where all those cases were put back into the criminal Justice System . Guest well, i reluctantly concluded thats what ought to happen. Because i think the criminal Justice System is pretty fair in the way it deals with these things. I think theres some places where there too likely to convict an innocent guy. There some places where they are too likely to acquit a guilty guy. They are everywhere. When you have a requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt and you have often he said she said situations where theres not much physical evidence, if any, you are likely to end up with a lot more guilty guys getting off on the criminal charge, even if its a broad and a lot of women for very good reasons dont bring the charges in the first place, again more about than your innocent guys convicted which i would say is as it should be, proof beyond a reasonable doubt. This is not a satisfactory situation for the victims. There ought to be away that a victim of rape, whether she is in college or not, can get some kind of redress even if the criminal Justice System while not quite give it to her. There is such a thing as a civil lawsuit. You can sue the guy, but lawsuits cost a lot of money. Its not an easy way to go. At least where the college, we have these people that are all our students, maybe we can help out. Im with that, i would be with that in principle as some kind of what if they did it fairly, if they had their processes, if they were very protective, maybe not proof beyond reasonable doubt that clear and convincing evidence, allow crossexamination to get something thats closer to criminal process than what they do now, that would be okay. But they have shown, the universities have shown andy Obama Administration has shown i think resoundingly that they are incompetent of doing this and that their terribly biased. Incompetence is they dont know how 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 they guy is persuasive and logical when he says hes innocent, thats a sign of guilt. If you thought persuasive and logical, that is a sign of guilt. This is stanfords process im describing for one. So then the question is, is there any way the system can be reformed so that its not so guilt presenting . Theoretically there is at help a Trump Administration 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 extreme feminists ieyed their attitudes are two people who run it. Maybe not all of them but the people, the people make the noise, the people who leadership is afraid of. I just dont trust any campus in america to do a decent job at this. Host you said several times extreme feminism, and im going to play devils advocate and say that much of the work a lot of feminists have done over the years has been to bring to light problems that really did exist in society and that when it as a doctor when i looked at or sort of pushed away. Tell me, in looking at these processes, because they are undertaken mandate from the federal government, you talk about being trained to tell adjudicators a certain way. I assume you guys interview a lot of people to get a sense that its that way, i dont know how many colleges are we talking about that you look at, at their specific processes. Im interested. Guest the training is a secret. Most colleges it secret from fully got a handful of colleges where stanford i think middlebury i think where it is dribbled out and juicy. Extrapolating from those, we know the federal government under obama demanded that it some kind of training and we know theres a firm called margolis ely for example, the provided the training of some thesdiscounts whizzing and we kw theyre hired by a letter of the colleges to provide training. So the some extrapolation from it. We also know that, for example, the college is used to have students as part of the panel. Well, students were not guilt presenting enough for the so they tend to get the students off the panels. They tended to get faculty members on the panels. Even tended to get fewer sex bureaucrats. So under the encouragement not particularly a commit of the Obama Administration many colleges, hundreds, of god what they call a single investigator adjudicator system where one bureaucrat is the investigator, prosecutor, judge and jury with total power to decide the fate of anyone who is accused of sexual misconduct. And, but you raise a broader question on extreme feminists and i will come back to that if you like as what i mean. Host let me back up. Lets go first, and again i think as you pointing out with your own research its hard to know, it would be interesting for all these systems to be opened up because i assume that act to the source or on the other side would serve use the same argument to you that you do about the one in five and that is how many have you really look at and how many, are you sure. [talking over each other] i mean i what adjudicators are trained to do. A part of what you are seem to reveal is we are just not sure how all this training goes. Guest im pretty sure but i cant give you 1000 examples. They so what ive seen a preacher. Host like i say, im so trying to say what would the other side say. Youve been a report and we all like to all sides of that. You also talk about media malpractice anything probably the case that you wrote a book about is one that you would certainly put in that but the one thats more recent is th ist you be a case of the Rolling Stone story, which i think a lot of us watched closely and saw the Washington Post sort of deconstruct what happened and felt fell apart. Tell us all a bit about the case have that magic of the cases that you looked at. Do you think thats changed anything in terms of, you talk about an overcorrection. Is it going back another direction because of the case . Guest i dont think it is. That case is a typical because campus just what was not involved. But its very representative of whats going on. Rolling stone magazine had a reporter, sabrina, who by her own account was going to campuses all over the country trying to find a pragmatic case to illustrate this rape culture and shes having a hard time finding one, which should Say Something to start with. Finally she gets to numerous epogen and she decides she sounded. Theres a woman named jackie thats been, or real first name, it wouldve told a story of campus sex bureaucrats are told this to sabrina and she interviewed jackie. They really brutal statistic gang rape at a fraternity by i think seven or nine guys consulting like that, two of them looking on, on top of broken glass. Shatter table top. There she is lying on her back with glass anybody is diving around, so when i first read that i said, nothing like this has ever happened before as far as we know on any american campus. Nothing quite that sadistic and brutal. And if im skeptical about it from the start but Rolling Stone was skeptical about it 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. And so it got picked up a pickup, and do a few skeptics and he got savaged by many in the press. Until the start to fall apart. As you point out to the credit of the Washington Post one of the reporters host and metro reporter i think. Guest he played a very valuable role in making a fall apart. And it fell apart completely. You might think maybe a lesson wouldve been learned but as is true in 2007, 2006 the duke rape, the lesson wasnt learned. In fact, the media, many in the media continue to say well, certainly many at uva, continue to say well, it might as well be true because we all know thats what really happens. So the fact to turn out not to be true the columbia journalism review did a huge reconstruction and condemn the columbia, condemn Rolling Stone as a should have. Bubut i didnt think it was very thoughtful because they repeated a lot of the myths were talking about including the one in five myth, and 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 and elsewhere with the guilt presenting attitude. They didnt take that on at all. Edifact at university virginia, the faculty, the students even, this is different than duke, continue to act as though it was true. Even if it wasnt true, we should act as though it was true. Host let me ask you, how does, i know you thought about victims and women who are raped or sexually assaulted, and they would say theres not nearly enough attention to us. Fact they might say id like you to come into a book about what we experience. Where are we in society . This is, due process is a real issue, and they came to believe in the sunshine approach, which is the more we carry things and get them out and really look at them critically in the way they should be according to the criminal defense or criminal prosecution standard, the more were going to learn. I guess my question would be for some of that, the soda we will believe it anyway attitude that you just talked about, and i have read critiques of all of this, women 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 also criminal defense standpoint, from being open to that kind of prosecution . Weve seen it with domestic violence. Weve seen much more, as you know 20 years ago or 30 or 50, tops didnt like to get involved in those cases. Thats changed. We seen a real change on that. Do you think that a focus on this thing, does it hurt victims in some cases, victims that really are sexually assaulted . Guest i think it does not hurt victims. Its true, i was talking about the belief in the 70s. There was a lot of dismissiveness towards rape complaints for a long time. Those days are over. Weve had what i would say is an overcorrection, you use the word earlier, in the direction of reasoning guilt as opposed to just say lets be fair to both sides, for a long time. And then the Obama Administration put into overdrive so yeah, theres probably more books than you could shake a stick. If you gimme timmons and amazon i i will find you 50 books about women suffering from ray. You will not find many books about the presumption of guilt. As a journalist and author, i prefer doing something thats not being done rather than joining a chorus. Writing another book now about victims would be joining the chorus. Its a good chorus. It is terrible. Its a terrible crime. And by the the actual true statistics of rape on campus which is about one in 100, thats too high. Thats terrible. And those victims, when you multiply that by 10 million women in college, thats a lot of victims. I think, and by way one thing i think that colleges should do for victims which have been doing for a while to continue to do is, when youre dealing with them, presume theyre telling the truth. Treat them with kindness, treat them with consideration, psychological counseling, medical counseling, rape crisis centers, all of that record that is good. The only time when that presumption of honesty should not be given to the accuser is when you are determining the fate of the accused and thats when you need to have a different attitude. Host sure. Lets look back some the cases. Im interested, the men from the lacrosse team. Where are they now . What happened to them . Guest there lies have gone well and they all have good jobs. Not sure exactly where theyre working out. I know their families. Im talking there were three and died and another 40 or so on the team. But theyve had a good landing but theres a reason for it. Most people who are falsely accused of rape dont have an easy landing. The reason is not only was there any sense definitively proved, not only was the District Attorney who prosecuted them disbarred for misconduct, for like about it, spend the night in jail, but the guy who took over the case from the prosecutor, the attorney general in North Carolina who is now the governor, roy cooper, had a press conference. I was there, where everybody was waiting for him to drop the case, insufficient evidence, we dont know what happened, loblaw block. That would left the crowd hanging. He didnt say that. He said we believe these young men were innocent. Nothing happened. There was no great. There was no sex. And when you combine that with i like to think we did some good and other things get some good, the resumption tends to hang over acute people which prewas excluded. He says i a think still encounter people who are either thinking hes at rapist i read about, but its not a big cloud over their heads. Whereas a lot of people who in this book, then i dont have a cloud over their heads. They have deep depression, post dramatic stress syndrome. Some have become suicidal. The consequences for someone falsely accused who doesnt happen to vindication on national television, are very severe. Host very different. Lets talk about your conclusions, because i want to get to that. We can go back over some of the other but im very interested in, as you reported this and talked about it, and youve got licensed at this as any for people who are into statistics, and i think a really deep read of those, very interesting, but 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 had some tragic ones where weve had cases of drinking and women go missing and thats different than Sexual Assault, but guest one of those have been in virginia about the same time. Host that was in murder, right. When you send your children off to campus, to colleges, whether going parttime or fulltime, i know that impacts statistics as well, people want to know their safe. I have some sympathy for those who are charged with that pick the last thing to want, and i like to think that they all have good intentions. I sort of come from that point on the compass. Most people do. They want to do the right thing and they have good intentions. So were talking about parents. Were talking about young women. Were talking about young men. Were talking about, as you say, students, parents, the media, politicians, judges. Lets go through your conclusions and sort of bottom line, if you had a kid going to college, what do you tell them under the circumstances today . Guest start with parents. I have two wonderful daughters. They are through college, and, frankly, there wasnt so much talk about campus rape when theyre in college. It never occurred either to them or to me as far as i know, or to my wife, as something that we needed to have high on were listed of course you worry about everything, but now especially after all the noise and all the publicity, its different. One of the more interesting conversations i had was with a female civil return talk about her son and her daughter. She said my daughter has a good head on her shoulders. She didnt get drunk and she didnt get naked in bed with people before she decides she didndid want of sex with them. I didnt worry about her too much. I worry about her. I told her to be careful, that things can happen. She might get run over by a bus but but i did worry about her to much. I identify with that big she said i worry my son a little more because all the mathematical odds on you being falsely accused of rape or Sexual Assault may be fairly low still. I know because this woman knows the system that if he is accused, hes likely to be toast. The matter how strong the evidence of his innocence. We say in the book at the end, be careful. We say you might write a check of the disparate systems after college but it 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 your 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. So choose very carefully. Im not going to say you need to be a monk. We also say, by the way, if you stay away from women on your campus, and date women from elsewhere, you are a little bit less likely to end up in the hands of host because the proceedings will not go the same way. Guest i dont say take a a Television Camera with you everywhere. I do say have her sign a waiver. And i dont say join a monastery, but be careful. Host interesting. Guest and hire a lawyer, if youre accused. Dont think this will go well. Im telling you the truth, it would be fair. No. They will not be there. I avoided the boy would not be allowed to participate in the precedent that he will be able to do some good things, counsel you and in the end susan if necessary. Host so students, thats what you just talked about. To the media. Lets talk about the media. Guest i think the media, im afraid that many in any are just 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, and most of the news media had realized that this was a fraud. The New York Times is still trying to shore up the prosecution. In an appallingly. And they never really came clean. Clean. So afterwards one of the editors said well, weve learned our lesson, well do better next time. They didnt do better next time. Every time a big case, sex case comes up, big rape accusation comes up at the New York Times decides to cover, they write a a guilt person narrative. They did in the case of florida state, quarterback james winston. They did in the case at hobart. Theyve done it in jail quarterback and so i guess what i would help me people would do is finally get it through their heads that these cases are complicated, that some of the accusations are true, that some are false and you should not just jump in assuming you are going to run to the rescue of the victim until youre sure she is a victim. So for example, in the Janus Winston case, im not sure whether he did great or not. The florida statequebec. But i do know from the fact that 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 complaint. So do believe the last part of the complaint which was a raving when i got there . Well, you would not know and all the thousands and thousands of words in your times wrote about the case, you would never have learned about those lies. They kind of erased from the record host its hard for me to do the specifics of the case. Obviously i dont know what the reporting of all and i would have to look, ive read the piece in the times but im not comfortable saying. And i suspect they would argue angevin reporter before, we have really good deep sources and we know guest they didnt argue that. I wrote an article in real clear politics about them. They sent a response in. You had to get into it by the response was pathetic. They didnt deny a single thing i said my article, not one year. Host we will not adjudicate that a third is the same way we guest i did spent eight years of their. Host youre a former times menu so. Its hard to break that particular case down in cincinnati to respond i do want to make any responses for them. Lets go, so we looked at your conclusion. One thing want to ask and i always ask this of people when it is sort of looking at the discussion of a big issue. Who are the heroic figures on all sides of this . I also mean on the other side. Its very hard to boil things down to black and white and i know, the other way i put the question is, if youre going to be on the debate stage and there was going to be some 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 got . Guest the people that you might expect to be in that category would be smart feminists, right next such as some harvard law professors, nancy, janet, betsy, jeannie. The problem with answering your question is that all of them are on my side, in spite of very distinguished records and many ways including feminists being feminist heroes. Every principled civil libertarian i know largely agrees with my side of this. I will mention some of the others. There are five imagine, among 28 harvard law professors basically denounced whats going on in more or less the same way that i am, not exactly the same way and it was a bunch of professors at yale to do the same. Host when was that, the letter of the 20 professors . Guest two or three years ago. I was in the boston globe. Host basically calling for more due process. Guest and at a time when harvard had been lashed by the Obama Administration and adopting one of the appalling system of talked about. The harvard law professors, they got Harvard Law School exempted from the general harvard rule. But others have been heroes on my side of it are the fire, the foundation for individual rights and higher education, and founders, wonderful liberal, sometime Civil Liberties lawyer from boston, alan charles coursed and a liberal from graduate from Stanford Law School who is the head of five. Theres a group of families called families advocating for campus the quality, face, they have a website. They obviously have a stake in it. Their sons are involved. You dont look to them for neutrality, lets say, but they certainly have been valuable. There are some very good lawyers have taken these cases. Justin dillon in d. C. Is one but there are others. Is there somebody would come in and save Stuart Taylor is completely wrong about all of this . Who i respect. Maybe but i havent met her yet. Host interesting. All right. We just have a little more time. Now we have a new president and weve got new people in all the agencies do were going to see those changes continue. What are your predictions Going Forward . Is this approach going to continue . Will colleges continue to, theyve got these mandates in place. As you pointed out, they are under a lot of pressure to make sure that they meet those mandates. Where do you think were going from here . Guest i dont have a prediction but have some thoughts. I hope the Trump Administration will act forcefully in this paper im not confident they will but i hope they will wipe out the books everything the Obama Administration did, just about everything they did in terms of hacking on due process. Im not talking everything. Host but they might want to do that. Guest on campus rape. Maybe theres something to did thats okay but the attack on due process, the presumption of guilt, not crossexamination. And by the way it would be easy to do because the Obama Administration did not follow the legally required procedures for and born of federal right relation which requires public notice, opportunity for comment, quasilegislative process. The the reason administrative agencies usually get deference on the courts is going to a quasilegislative they did do that it was established by stroke of the pen can be erased by another stroke of the pen and hope trump will do that. But hope he will do more than that. I hope he will also go through the right process and serve notice on universities that if they continue to presume tilt of all accused, that violates title ix a as a form of sex discrimination against men. Theres a bunch of lawsuits that it made the case and some other judges have been receptive to it. Some of that. We will see a that goes. What im afraid will happen if all trump does is undo obama and walk away from it is that all the people who were hired as thailand bureaucrats at the insistence of the obama transition, they are still there. All of the roles they campuses adopted embedded in a display codes on the order of the Obama Administration are still there. And all of the campus cultural biases against accused men that refuse this whole process, they are still there. Those are not going to go away unless something makes them go away. And although i dont particularly like the Trump Administration or the idea that it would go throwing its weight around, this is one area where i think that such a severe crisis that id like to see them through its weight around. Why might they not do it . They have other priorities. First the republicans and you have been scared of the speaker think. They get attacked by feminists and they lose ground. Second, the trump education people have higher priorities i think. They are into vouchers, charters, in the bathrooms. Boy, there into bathrooms. Im not yesterday with them on bathrooms but im afraid that you look at the campus sexting and say well, not many votes, maybe we will let that one go. I hope thats not what happens. Host it will be interesting to see. Any parting thoughts you have . I guess well all wait and see if you do another follow up on this in a decade. Guest i dont think so. That reminds me, i parting thought would be, my two daughters i mentioned, wonderful young women, almost 33 and almost 30, had said to be in the past, what are you always writing about rape . Duke lacrosse, now this jerk the best and i could give them is is not that on particularly obsessed with rate. Its not an sort of obsessed with injustice and that the duke lacrosse, i thought my little encounter with the rate form of injustice i thought duke lacrosse i thought okay, ive done that but then they came back at me in this forum and us with thought i did this a certain amount of attention in this already so maybe i should go back to it a special sense i had a wonderful coauthor. In so doing, and i think people watching this might legitimately think if this guy is right, why havent i heard it before . Why should i believe him, to which i guess my answer would be, read the book, and see if you find anything into that anybody has ever has any doubt on, nobody has yet, publicly, and be careful, you know, be careful what you trust what you read in the newspapers because theres a lot of bias out there. Theres bias to the right, lies to the left but in the most powerful organizations in this country, news organizations i think the device to the left. Host i think will end on that. Thank you so much for being here today, and i will keep reading. Thanks. Guest thanks very much. Appreciate it. Cspan where history unfolds daily. In 1979 cspan was created as a Public Service by americas cabletelevision companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. Booktv takes hundreds of author programs throughout the country all year long. Heres a look at some of the events we will be covering this week. Thats a look at some of the vincent booktv will be covering this week. Many of these events are open to the public. Look for them to air in the near future on booktv on cspan2
comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.