Editor’s note: This piece contains mentions of sexual assault.
UPDATED: This piece was updated on April 24 at 9:48 a.m. CDT to include a statement from the university.
When I reported that I had been drugged and assaulted, I expected support. Instead, I was institutionalized.
I am sharing this article to bring awareness to the countless barriers that survivors of sexual assault face. While society often shames survivors and advises us to forget, there is beauty in being able to tell our stories on our terms, especially when my experience involved so many choices taken away from me. In recognizing the painful realities that survivors experience, I ask the current and next generation of leaders to craft a society in which systems better support survivors.
That night
Last semester, I met a sophomore — “J” — in our shared classes. After winter break, he started texting more and asking to hang out. One Friday, he came over and brought me a drink that tasted bitter. I didn’t think much of it at the time — I trusted him. I should not have.
That night, I started feeling entirely off. I could not fully process what was going on. Around 2 a.m., I called J, and he offered to come over. While in this incapacitated and vulnerable state, J violated me, knowing I was unable to resist or even understand what was happening. But the assault was not just physical; it became psychological. He told me bizarre, threatening confessions. I felt disoriented and silenced. He talked about witchcraft, hazing and people watching me. He weaved paranoia in my brain, making me question reality. This went on for hours until his girlfriend called, and he jolted up in fear, getting ready to leave. As my brain attempted to make sense of all of this, I pleaded for him to explain what had just happened.
“Am I going to forget what happened?” I asked.
“Yeah, you probably will,” he said.
When J took off, I was left in disarray. As my brain began to realize what had happened, I blocked J’s phone number. Then, he texted me from another platform, saying, “I can explain it, unblock me, I’m going to explain what happened.” I waited for an explanation, but he never gave one.
The fallout
That Saturday morning, I could not sleep. I was intensely traumatized, had bruises on my legs and could not fully understand what had happened. My mind dissociated, and I began questioning everything — my surroundings and the people around me. J offered to come over, and my roommate let him in despite how incapacitated I was. While there, he looked through my stuff, climbed into my bed and took some of my belongings. He continued to play mind games on me — hinging, I assume, on his idea that I would not remember the incident. And for a while, I did not remember.
The following Monday, J invited me to eat. After eating, he told me to go with him to another building. Upon realizing how odd his requests were, I called VUPD and asked them to drive me back to my dorm. The officer saw how alarmed I was and sent a Student Affairs Coordinator to speak with me in person. As I explained the situation to the coordinator, my memory of the Saturday early morning incident came back. The coordinator asked if I wanted to be evaluated at the hospital. Hoping to be evaluated for the assault I had experienced, I said yes.
The silencing
When I got to the VUMC emergency room, I told the staff about how I suspected I had been drugged and assaulted. They placed me in a secluded room, where I waited for hours to be seen by a doctor. Thinking about how I had class in the morning, I tried to leave. Soon, doctors came out and told me to sit back down, but I kept exclaiming that I had been assaulted and I had been waiting hours to be evaluated. That’s when security officers came in and threw me down on the bed. Not understanding why I was being restrained, I tried to wiggle out of their hold.
I kept saying, “I have class tomorrow. What’s going on? I am a Black woman! Why is this happening?”
Even though I told them about the assault and the details regarding it, they interpreted my cry for help as a hysterical episode. Security officers pinned me down, ripped my shirt open and injected me with sedatives. I woke up hours later due to the brightness of the lights under the MRI scan they had placed me under. While sedated, I was involuntarily transferred to the Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital.
Instead of my report of assault being prioritized and being given the support I needed as a survivor, I had my freedom once again taken away from me. Unfortunately, many survivors — especially those of color — are dismissed and labeled as paranoid. In my case, I wasn’t just silenced: I was punished. I was institutionalized because of the crime that was committed against me.
Locked away
I spent eight days at the Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital. The drugs they gave me tranquilized me so much that I did not even remember the first half of my stay. When I woke up in the hospital, I did not even know where I was. I did not have access to my phone, laptop or any internet. I had virtually zero access to the outside world. I was forcibly placed into solitary confinement if I refused the drugs the hospital was giving me, despite how the medication they gave me worsened the state I was in. Not only that, but I had to beg for a police report regarding my assault to even be filed.
The hospital and Student Affairs were in communication, and they notified both my parents and the Vanderbilt Posse Scholar Program of my hold. I was held involuntarily at the hospital and pumped with powerful drugs that further debilitated me.
My parents found out I was hospitalized only after I was admitted to the psychiatric hospital. They flew down from New York to visit me. As medical professionals, they saw how neglected I — and my story — was under the hospital’s care, and they worked hard to get me out. After their uphill battle, the hospital finally discharged me into my parents’ care after eight days. I lost 10 pounds during that week.
Realizing the horror
When I was discharged, I saw paperwork for medical leave. My scholarship advisors and the Student Affairs Coordinator recommended I take it. By then, I had already missed two weeks of school; I would spend two more withdrawing from the heavy sedation the hospital gave me. Due to the Student Affairs Coordinator’s gross miscalculation of how to support me and VUMC taking my freedom, I had no choice but to take medical leave.
Coming back home to New York City, I tried my best to put the situation behind me. Despite having unadded J on all of my platforms, I saw that he was still watching me through his accounts. I also saw that people from school, even my own roommate and friends, were spreading gossip. While I was institutionalized for eight days, my assaulter and his associates had time to spread lies about the situation and damage my credibility and reputation. Eventually, I decided to go to my Instagram page to set the record straight on my terms while keeping details of the incident, including my perpetrator’s identity, private.
I only realized that everything that happened to me was entirely horrific when I explained the story to a friend back home.
He said, “So you reported that you were assaulted, and they threw you in a psych ward?” That is when the horror of the situation registered with me.
The retaliation
One of my friends invited me as a plus-one to the Commons Ball, and I told four people from my scholarship that I was planning to visit campus. After that, one of those people reported me to the dean. I was sent an official letter telling me I was not allowed back on campus and would face further consequences if I did. He cited my medical leave, even though I had not submitted paperwork at that point. What hurt the most was not the institutional response, but the betrayal by people I had trusted in my cohort. Throughout all of this, my perpetrator was still allowed to walk the campus and hold student leadership roles despite the ongoing criminal investigation.
When I continued to speak up on my Instagram about the repeated injustices I was facing, the Posse Scholarship student president told me to take down my posts. He said that Vanderbilt had given me an opportunity and that I was squandering it. He continued to harass me in my DMs and used racist rhetoric to try to silence me. The very communities that were in place to support me all betrayed me in their allegiance to a system that chews up survivors and leaves us behind. Vanderbilt and its programs, such as Posse, love to emphasize their “diversity” and “inclusion,” but when it is time to support those students who have experienced deeply traumatic situations, we are discarded.
Going public
My friends from back home told me I should take my story to TikTok. When I did, my videos went viral, receiving up to 1.7 million views. I received an overwhelming amount of support and resources and saw that I was not alone in this fight. While dealing with this intensely traumatizing situation, I used my platform to advocate for myself and other survivors.
As I shared more about my experience through social media, I learned that the situation was bigger than me. Multiple people from Vanderbilt contacted me regarding how their reports of assault were handled poorly. I also read articles from The Hustler that detailed Vanderbilt’s long history of not taking assault claims as seriously as many survivors deserve.
Through sharing my story, I built an online community of supporters, including alumni and survivors, who stood by me and spread awareness. One former patient who had been hospitalized at the same time as me commented that she had overheard her nurse casually discussing a “recent assault on campus” — what the commenter put together was my assault — with another nurse. That moment confirmed what I already sensed: the staff heard my story yet treated me as if I were delusional.
Refusing to be silenced
I became a voice for every woman who has been ignored or called “crazy” for coming forward. No one chooses to be drugged; no one chooses to be taken advantage of; no one chooses to be assaulted; and no one chooses to be silenced. As I continue to heal from all that happened to me, I hope that Vanderbilt and other institutions learn to navigate sexual assault cases with more care. Survivors need support — not to be ignored, and certainly not institutionalized. I call on the Vanderbilt community to support peers who report assault. Support is not just saying, “I’m sorry this happened.” It’s asking, “How do we make this right?” Survivors don’t just need words — we need action.
As I live in this permanently altered reality, I have found solace in creating a broader conversation about how systems of power continue to fail survivors. While I wish my situation could have turned out differently, I must live with the fact that my dream university became my worst nightmare. But I refuse to be silenced — not just for myself, but for every survivor still waiting to be heard.
In response to The Hustler’s inquiry about Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital protocols and procedures, a VUMC representative offered the following statement on April 8: “Federal privacy laws (HIPAA), along with a Tennessee statute, Title 33, covering mental health, substance abuse and intellectual and developmental disabilities, preclude VUMC from answering questions about the care of patients receiving these services.”
Statement from Vanderbilt University: “[Muñoz] remains a student at Vanderbilt; however, [she] is voluntarily on leave and not enrolled in classes for the remainder of the spring 2025 semester.
Through training and consultation, Vanderbilt strongly encourages any student who experiences sexual harassment or misconduct to file a complaint with the relevant offices, supports the complainant if they have any questions about the process for filing, and protects the student from retaliation. While applicable privacy laws restrict our ability to address the status or result of a specific complaint or investigation, students on leave retain the option to engage with the Title IX Office to address allegations of sexual misconduct.
Vanderbilt takes our responsibility to prevent and respond to sexual misconduct extremely seriously.
We have robust staff, policies and programs in place, including: our Project Safe Center, which manages programs for prevention and support; our Title IX office that investigates formal reports to its office of sexual harassment and/or misconduct; and our Student Affairs office that provides additional programs to support awareness and training in these areas.”
