Editor’s Note: This piece contains mentions of sexual assault, suicide and psychological manipulation. The author of this piece is being kept anonymous under a pseudonym to ensure the author’s personal and professional protection.
Author’s Note: In this piece, I refer to my perpetrator as “R” for Respondent, which is what he has been referred to throughout the Title IX process.
From my own experiences and reading the comments on Reddit, I have learned one important fact about the Title IX process: It can be quite ineffective at its intended purpose.
Title IX is treated as a civil matter from its burden of proof to its sanctioning, though its proceedings often address criminal acts. It advertises itself as bringing about justice, but that is not entirely true. It simply seeks to restore a non-hostile learning environment for victims.
Also, due to the fact it is only institution-wide, a lot of the nepotistic and oligarchical facets of a school — especially if private — can come into play. In my story, one factor in favor of R’s acquittal was his impending graduation with a Ph.D., while I was no longer attending Vanderbilt.
Several others at Vanderbilt have come forward and told stories that reveal mishandling within Vanderbilt’s Title IX office. With that said, Fran, Ellie and countless others, this is for you.
Backstory
My story began when I was a sophomore. I had just moved away from my homophobic Christian family, and looking to delve into the gay dating scene, I downloaded Grindr. There I met a graduate student, R. He was moderately older than I was but seemed nice, and I was of age, so I decided to meet him.
But before we became intimate, as I ask any of my partners, I inquired if he was clean and free from STIs and requested to see his test results. To this, he responded yes and showed me his lab work. All of them appeared to be negative. R and I continued to correspond over the next few days until he said something inadvertently offensive, and I stopped talking to him for a few weeks. Despite this, still with my rose-colored glasses, I messaged him again and invited him to a party. R agreed to come but said he wanted to talk with me in his car first. R pulled up in his car, got out and ushered for me to come sit in the passenger seat. This is when things got eerie.
R started to cry profusely out of nowhere and kept repeating, “If I open up, you have to promise not to judge me.”
“Why would I judge you? Unless you gave me some deadly disease like HIV or something, why would I judge you?”
That’s when the scariest moment of my life began. R stopped crying abruptly and went, “Oh wow…”
“You have HIV…?”
“Yeah…”
I stared at the dashboard ahead of me for what seemed like an eternity. “I need to get out and make a phone call,” I said.
I stepped out and Instagram rang my friend from back home. After a few minutes, R followed me, approached me on the sidewalk and said, “Please don’t be like this, you’re reacting just like the last guy did!” Wonderful, there were others he had done this to, too.
I took an Uber back to my dorm and contacted a few friends about the incident, all of whom later became witnesses to my case. Due to my reaction, he called emergency services to bring him to the psychiatric unit. When he texted me saying the police had shown up, I went to give my account of what had happened.
As soon as I could, I visited Student Health to get tested for everything, which thankfully returned negative results. You can bet I also got onto PrEP. This is when I found out he had shown me a viral load test. It began to make sense. All of his test results read: “Target Not Detected.” Those test results were alluding to the fact he was undetectable, not negative, even though he framed it as the opposite. Additionally, I learned later that the Undetectable=Untransmittable or U=U campaign isn’t always completely accurate. While having an undetectable viral load does lower the chances of transmission drastically, other factors can influence it. Blips can occur randomly with anyone on antiretroviral therapy; medication habits or lack thereof can influence viral load; and other humors of the body can contain detectable levels of the virus, while the blood does not.
Though contemplating pressing charges, I decided to hear him out. R told me the story of how he caught HIV and another story about his friend who was going to become a doctor but committed suicide the night he refused to take her call, so he made it his mission to go into the medical field. As such, he couldn’t lose his Ph.D to this incident. Alas, I sympathized with his stories and rejection from other men. And since I felt like I had connected with him, I did not report him and continued to talk with him.
However, after R and I split later down the line, I began to realize the extent of his deception and manipulation. At certain points, he even alluded to the fact that I had an underdeveloped brain compared to his due to my age, which I came to recognize as a major red flag. After being in therapy and talking to family and friends, it became clear that none of them had ever approved of the relationship to begin with. That did it for me: I decided to confront him over text. During the conversation, he denied all the allegations but then slipped up and said he showed me “negative” test results. He then briskly corrected his wording to “undetectable.”
I also tried to confront him in person with the police report, which scared him into filing a no-contact order through the university to keep any consequences at bay.
Title IX Process
Upon encountering him in public a few months later, I instigated a fight with him — and was promptly expelled from Vanderbilt. To make things worse, Student Accountability was not empathetic in the slightest about what R did to me. It speaks volumes about Vanderbilt’s Title IX process that accused sexual predators are often acquitted or let off with a suspension and a record that will disappear after two years. Yet, Student Accountability permanently removed me from the university and gave me a record that follows me forever.
Student Accountability also seemed annoyed when I said I was entering the Title IX process against R, almost as if I were messing with their precious cargo on its way to its destination of graduation.
I finally decided to go to the Title IX office as one last-ditch effort for justice. I hadn’t gone to the police because I did not believe I had enough evidence to put him away. However, the burden of proof is much lower in these Title IX cases, so I felt this would be the easiest manner through which to proceed.
I received the Notice of Allegations letter on Jan. 9. It stated that the office had received my complaint and, for his deceptive acts regarding his HIV status, R had been charged with sexual exploitation.
I later learned that R initially refused to interview me because he was afraid I would “use the information he provided against him.” As such, in February, I received an email stating that R was looking to settle matters through the informal resolution process, a means of mediation where the complainant and the respondent decide upon an outcome together. However, I had heard many stories of this going south, especially with victims being railroaded into unwanted agreements. I also knew that R was not about to take a suspension or withdrawal onto his record, so I promptly rejected it in no unclear terms.
As the investigation ensued, I spent several hours across days and weeks compiling evidence upon evidence. I went digging for old texts, rideshare receipts, my medical records stating he had deceived me, letters from my UCC counselor and even the non-disclosure agreement he had me draft. The school pulled the filed police reports, which indicated R had committed aggravated assault and contained my victim impact statement. I also had six witnesses do interviews. Four friends from back home, the law professor with whom I had discussed the NDA and the police officer on the scene the night when R disclosed his status. Many others provided evidence despite not being able to do an interview.
I was lucky with the duration of my Title IX process. While it didn’t run to completion within the 90-day timeframe promised, it was a lot faster than in other stories I have heard. The preliminary investigative report came out around late March. Contained in it were the key to the redacted interviewee names, the summary of the interviews and a third, excessively long PDF nearing 700 pages. My witnesses also outnumbered R’s by a long shot, which I figured would appeal to my credibility, especially since they all testified to his generally antagonistic character. Moreover, one of R’s witnesses slipped up and disclosed that, during our interaction, I mentioned that R did not tell me about his HIV status. I then had the chance to respond to the evidence with a 10-page document, which was appended to the final report for both parties to read.
My pre-hearing conference was subsequently scheduled for early April to be held over Zoom. We reviewed the decorum for the hearing that would take place at the end of the month and were allowed to call witnesses to the hearing. I did not call any because I thought that all of mine had explained their accounts sufficiently in their investigative interviews, though I regret this in hindsight. I am not sure if the hearing officer read any of the transcripts. Hearing officers are busy, and this is not usually their full-time job. Even if it is, they have multiple cases, each with their own 700-page investigative reports.
The time from my pre-hearing conference to my April 29 hearing was nerve-wracking. I had little idea of what to expect. I did not know if the hearing officer would sympathize with nor understand my case — sexual exploitation is a rare charge in the scheme of Title IX, not to mention even rarer when based on HIV exposure.
When the day arrived, I was ultimately questioned by the hearing officer far more than the respondent throughout the five-hour ordeal. She pummeled me with questions about a single mistake in my testimony that made R’s timing of disclosure ambiguous. Furthermore, R’s advisor interrogated me about incidences where my and R’s relationship seemed healthy, disputing the abusive aspect of our relationship to which my witnesses and I had testified.
However, when we questioned R, he alleged he could not remember the answers to many of the questions. When he wanted to dodge inculpating himself, he would say, “I’m a scientist, so I’ll never say 100% no or yes.” Regardless, it seemed the hearing officer was more interested in R’s account than mine. He also kept trying to use the fact that he likely couldn’t transmit the virus as a means of deflection to the charge. However, this is not a defense to sexual exploitation and should have only further demonstrated the lack of consent involved.
Determination
The determination came out around 15 days later. I’d hoped the hearing officer would see the distress R had caused me and the danger he posed to everyone, but these concerns fell upon deaf ears.
The officer’s rationale was similar to that given in Ellie’s case: too many inconsistencies. However, only one of my misspeakings made the timeline of his disclosure ambiguous. The other inconsistencies that were noted on my part were trivial. For example, one was about whether R had explicitly told me he was clean or answered affirmatively to me asking if he was. There were also “inconsistencies” that I cleared up at the hearing but were still noted in the determination letter as unexplained, such as out-of-context messages that R presented as evidence.
In actuality, R’s inconsistencies were larger in quantity than the hearing officer admitted in her determination document, though those she did mention were drastic. At the hearing, R conveniently couldn’t remember whether he told me he was clean and free from STIs. In addition, he couldn’t explain the texts from right after he revealed his status stating that he had “demons” he had been hiding from me since we first met and that he had been hoping we could get over this whole situation together. Like Fran’s situation, it seemed like during the entire hearing, I had to provide proof and proclamation that what I said was true, but they took R’s statements at face value.
The hearing officer generally made short work of the matter. Others’ determination letters have ranged to about 60 pages, while mine was merely 15. There was also no mention of the witness testimonies, the NDA or any other documentary evidence provided by the parties.
Nevertheless, the hearing officer said the preponderance of the evidence failed to establish a violation, and as such, R was not responsible for the charge of sexual exploitation.
Afterthoughts
Vanderbilt’s Title IX Office not only failed me but also failed the world by letting R walk free with his Ph.D. in biochemical engineering, just like it failed Fran and Ellie.
I do have a partial respectful disagreement with how Ellie alleged the preponderance standard to be too high for victims to meet. I, as someone in legal studies, don’t believe this to be true. Rather, I think it is quite a low bar — the hearing officers are just misapplying it. They focus too heavily on our speech and recollection with hypervigilance for deviations, rather than the documented evidence itself. Furthermore, Vanderbilt outsources its Title IX hearing officers, meaning they likely have different backgrounds, rather than a completely uniform approach informed by campus protocols.
This is reflected in the aggregate statistics released by Vanderbilt's Title IX Office. In more than half of Vanderbilt's Title IX investigations, respondents were found to be not responsible.
With all of that said, I call upon Vanderbilt’s Title IX office to please do better. This article is far from the first calling out the futility of the Title IX process as it stands, and I am sure it won’t be the last if things continue the way they stand. Expel all students found responsible for serious offenses under the sexual misconduct policy. And please create more uniform standards and training on what constitutes the preponderance of the evidence, so there are no discrepancies between how cases are evaluated.
