by beelzeboener
I, too, was unjustly railroaded by a private school despite the lack of a victim, accusations, or evidence. And although I was not expelled or charged in a court of law, the incident severely tainted my college experience. Here’s the story:
It was the fourth week of freshman year, that time when people are still making friends but kind of already know who everyone is. Late one night in the dorm common area, I encountered this girl I had flirted with a handful of times before while playing ping pong. She asked if she could borrow my computer to check Facebook, and one thing led to another. We had sex twice (once while my roommate was asleep in his bed), and she stayed overnight in my room. No alcohol or drugs were involved.
The next morning we parted on good terms and agreed to meet up again sometime soon. I didn’t have her phone number but a couple of days later I got a harried Facebook message asking if she could come to my room & talk. When she arrived in a panic she told me that there were virulent rumors being spread that she was raped. Apparently, the morning after, she had some soreness in her lady bits, and her roommate/friends started jumping to conclusions. She claimed she adamantly denied it but to no avail and honestly, I don’t doubt her. Needless to say, I was stunned and scared shitless.
At that point, I said that I was overwhelmed and needed to clear my head by going to Chipotle, inviting her to come along. When she replied she wasn’t interested, I announced I was going anyway, and if she didn’t want to tag along she would have to leave my room. “But I’m so horny,” she nonchalantly stated. So after doing the deed again we went to Chipotle and actually got to know each other, like a real date, oddly enough.
After arriving back to my room, I went into damage control mode. I gathered up all my booze and bartending supplies (I was on a mojito kick at the time) and dumped them down a gutter miles away in the barrio. I tried to study in my room but the silence was unsettling, so I went to the downstairs lounge. While there, one of my newer friends, a big rugby player, asked if he could talk to me outside. He asked me what the story was in a friendly and inquisitive manner. But only a few sentences in he turned on me and insisted on telling me what he thought he knew, eventually threatening to beat my ass. He surely would have succeeded. I defused the situation enough to avoid having my face caved in but didn’t quite succeed in successfully convincing him of my innocence. After that, I avoided being seen on campus for anything but class. Admittedly, it was bad optics.
The next afternoon while leaving the lunch hall, I was approached by one of our security guards, a pretty cool dude who looked like he played linebacker only a few years back but never went pro. He politely but firmly informed me we were going to my room and he was going to inspect it. So I then had to nervously walk all the way across campus while everyone stared. In that moment I had the gut-wrenching feeling that the process WAS the worst punishment. Before rifling through my belongings, he informed me someone anonymously reported that I had been brandishing a big knife and was talking about stabbing people. I was too shocked to do anything except repeatedly mumble “but, no, what?” I admitted to having a Swiss army knife and the only contraband left in the room, a decorative airline-sized bottle of tequila that was a gift from my high school lover. Luckily he wasn’t a pro pig and let me keep the bottle after pouring out the low-quality liquor.
It was at this moment I knew it was only going to get worse and became extremely paranoid. Although I had a few peeps I was on friendly terms with, there was no one I could confide in or consult. And of course, at that time I wasn’t accustomed to nutpunches or similar incidents. Funnily enough, the coolest guy in class that I highly respected for his game said he didn’t know, didn’t care, had no bad blood, and wasn’t getting involved. That weekend I made the rounds of a few house parties, barely drinking shitty beer and chain smoking a whole pack of cigarettes. My story got a lot of attention from some dudes who I guess initially gave me the benefit of the doubt because I seemed too physically weak and smart to be a real rapist. The semblance of normalcy provided some small measure of hope.
A day or two later, I was summoned by the Director of Student Resources or whatever bullshit admin title she had. She informed me that the school was going to be enforcing a “no contact order” between me and the girl, who I hadn’t spoken to in a while anyway. They would also be evicting me from my room and forcing me to move to another dormitory in a solitary room. Pretty much everyone I knew was in my dorm, so this was basically a social death sentence before even considering the appearance of guilt. I tried to be as reasonable as possible, asking what accusations had been made and if we could all sit down to a mediation session and talk things out. The administration refused to even tell me if there WERE accusations. I prodded and explained that I knew there were none because this girl had no ill will towards me and it would be social suicide to falsely cry rape. Needless to say, I left out the part about her coming back for thirds.
This simpleton attempted to sympathize and say she knew it was all probably part of the “rumor mill” (a phrase she loved for some fucking reason), but that their methods were for the best. I protested that the appearance of guilt was socially almost as bad as actually being guilty and of course that I was completely innocent. Another thing she insisted on was me seeing the school therapist, something I vehemently opposed. But I eventually caved on that matter in order to leave the room and generate some good will. My final request was that I get a meeting with her boss since I knew this lady was too dumb and touchy feely to be pulling the real strings.
It was the most frustrating experience of my life, not just because she didn’t believe my version of the truth, but that she was completely disinterested. Facts, reason, incentives, none of it had the slightest impact. Punitive measures had been decided, my desires were unimportant, and I had absolutely no leverage. I even considered death threats, car vandalism, killing pets, and firebombing people’s houses but figured these people were too dense to adequately grasp the level of insanity they were pushing me to. Threats of force only work when your enemy believes it’s an actual possibility you will take action.
I struggled to keep my calm while waiting for the therapist, a nice enough 40 something gent I’ll call “Brad” because his demeanor was somewhat reminiscent of Mr. Pitt’s character in The Big Short. I had been to therapy as a child after my parent’s divorce and expected him to pussyfoot around the issue (unfortunately there were no legos to play with). But he was cool and immediately acknowledged the awkwardness of the situation and the obviousness I didn’t want to be there. I spilled my guts, particularly the part about how the administration seemed completely indifferent to my plight. I was taken aback when Brad basically sided with me, stating something to the effect of, “You’re right, they’re probably just covering their asses.” After that he proceeded to talk me off the edge, explaining that it’s better to bend over and take it then start fresh, rather than blow my scholarship or worse. So that’s what I tried to do. It never occurred to me that if the thing they most feared was word getting out, then that’s what I needed to threaten. I felt so small, and the notion of getting the press or lawyers involved just didn’t come to mind. I mean who would care? I was a privileged white male loner alleged rapist from the South.
There was another meeting with the frog-faced HR lady and one of my parents who was, in fact, a faculty member, which interestingly didn’t count for shit. I semi-placated the administration’s insistence to bring them in for a meeting but refused to tell any part of the story. The one piece of respect I was granted was that the paper pusher didn’t spill the beans and left it at that. With the only detail to work from being my pissy mood, my family came to assume that I made unwanted advances that simply pissed off some girl.
Eventually, I got my meeting with Ms. Chief Cunt, the bureaucrat in charge of student life. She was even less amiable to reason than her peon and didn’t even bother to feign sympathy. After resisting the temptation to flip her desk, I recognized I was the road, not the rubber, and miraculously left without an escort out from Terry Tate.
I acquiesced and moved dorms, never violating the no-contact order, and steering clear of the girl. I spent a lot of time alone. I never found a clique but did meet my best friend to this day and managed to hook up with a few more girls as well. One was quite evidently innocent, but I’m fairly sure the others were at least familiar with my reputation. Could never tell if it was a turn-on, but the paranoia of being stained never left.
Around the time this was happening, I was recruited by a modeling agency while shopping at the mall. It was completely outside my normal scene but flattering, to say the least. Towards the end of the ordeal, I had the opportunity to take some interviews in New York. When I got offered a contract I jumped at the opportunity to GTFO and start fresh.
The final night on campus, I was smoking in the snowfall at midnight when I spied the girl across the quad. It was the first time I had seen her in forever, so I just stared and didn’t abashedly break eye contact. She paused for a few seconds and eventually left, but not at a hurried pace. For some reason, I had convinced myself she had grown to hate me, and while never actually corroborating the rumors, got ground down by the same system and lost energy to deny them.
A week later, while on Christmas vacation prior to my exile to the east, I finally sacked up and Facebook messaged the girl after 3 months. I wished her well and said I don’t know what I did to make her resent me, but I wasn’t a player and genuinely liked her at the time. She was surprisingly conversational, and after a few messages I called her on the phone and we chatted for hours.
Apparently, the administration gave it to her just as hard as they did me. She was forbidden from talking to me and treated more as a guilty party than a victim. Unlike me, she eventually broke down and told the whole story to her family. As a nice Christian girl from a rural town in the breadbasket, this did not make for a very happy Thanksgiving. The poor girl, who was quite the fit athlete when I met her, ended up gaining weight, abusing Mountain Dew (I can’t make this shit up), starting smoking, and becoming a total slut. After her second semester, she transferred to a school closer to home.
After a semester of online classes in New York, I was ready to leave. Cash was running low, and it was obvious the modeling thing wasn’t going to work out. Despite getting to see some really interesting things while catering for the rich and famous (fun facts: George Soros’s drink is Campari and Beyoncé is even hotter in person), I was still isolated and unfulfilled. I returned to Colorado and cranked out the degree in two more years while only having my one friend. The paranoia of being “that guy” never fully went away and I got the impression some people were skittish around me because they were ashamed for believing unsubstantiated rumors. But I couldn’t bring myself to try and be friends with any of them. I had no illusions that keggers and campaigning for political causes would ever feel normal.
The thing that still sticks with me is the amount of extreme prejudice I was shown. I was literally pre-judged as guilty by my “friends”, the administration, and even my family to a lesser degree. And although there were a few sympathetic souls, not a single one encouraged me to fight back in my most helpless of times. I still carry a grudge against the institution and refuse to donate or even pay my hundreds of dollars in outstanding parking fines. I trash it as “not worth the money” at every opportunity. I delight in their failing financial state and the impending layoffs. But part of me is reluctant to hold a grudge the same way the frog can’t fully blame the scorpion. These administrators are used to absolute authority over petty matters. It is not the individual that concerns them, nor the collective student body, and certainly not principles. It’s the perpetuation of the status quo and exercise of petty power. I’m wholeheartedly convinced their deference to procedure and dictat is so absolute that it wouldn’t take much for them to commit worse atrocities. And it would never occur to them to step back for a moment of introspection. I’ve never bothered to look it up, but I’m fairly confident they repeatedly violated their own due process policies in the student handbook, all on a whim. In short, elites uber alles. And as I’m sure you have gathered, that’s a big part of why I am a libertarian.
Thanks for reading, and if you know of an effective organization specializing in challenging these apparatchiks with extreme prejudice, let me know. I’ve got a big fat check for them.
