The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Laura Dunn Is an Evil Liar

Posted on | January 29, 2018 | Comments Off on Laura Dunn Is an Evil Liar

 

When she was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin in 2004, Laura Dunn got drunk and had a ménage à trois with two guys. More than a year later, she decided she was a rape victim and filed a complaint with the university, and also reported the alleged rape to the campus police:

The investigation did not go well for Dunn. Because she reported the assault nearly a year-and-a-half after the event, one of the men had already graduated. The other insisted the encounter had been consensual, and since there were no witnesses or evidence, both the police and the university dropped the case. . . .
[Dunn] filed a Title IX sexual discrimination complaint with the [federal Education Department’s] Office for Civil Rights. Dunn accused the University of Wisconsin of multiple violations, including subjecting her to a hostile environment and failing to provide a “prompt and equitable resolution” of her case.
But in 2008, four years after the original incident, she received an 18-page letter from the Department of Education with the verdict: “Based on its investigation, OCR determined that there is insufficient evidence to substantiate the allegations made in the complaint.”

If you haven’t yet read Christina Hoff Sommers’ account of this case, read the whole thing now, because it is central to understanding why and how the Obama administration effectively abolished due-process protections for university students accused of sexual misconduct. Dunn’s story was featured in a 2010 National Public Radio report that portrayed her as a trustworthy and sympathetic victim. The NPR story inspired the infamous 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter to U.S. universities that was interpreted as a mandate to impose extreme policies that in effect denied due-process to accused students, so that any accusation of sexual misconduct was treated as tantamount to proof of guilt.

All because Laura Dunn was a drunk teenage slut. Excuse me if I seem a bit judgmental, but didn’t I just tell you to read the whole story?

Dunn agreed to make her records public as a condition of being a part of the NPR/CPI investigation. The 18-page letter (PDF) she received from the OCR is publicly available. It gives a detailed summary of notes taken by University of Wisconsin deans as well as the local police detective. As freelance reporter Derek Rose has pointed out, it tells a very different story from the one we heard from [Joseph] Shapiro on NPR’s Morning Edition or from the [Center for Public Integrity] report.
To wit: When Dunn first spoke to the dean (15 months after the alleged rape), she said that “a portion of the sexual encounter was consensual.” (p.5) A few days later when she spoke to a campus police detective, Dunn said twice that she did not remember being raped by one of the men (the one still on campus). She found out about it only when the men told her what happened the next day (p.6). She also told the detective that in the months after the alleged rape that she went — twice — to one of the men’s residence, where they engaged in consensual “physical contact.”
On one of these occasions both of the alleged assailants were at the apartment and they all watched television together. (p.6) None of these details were mentioned in the NPR/CPI report.

Simple question: How can Laura Dunn know she was raped if, the morning after, she couldn’t even remember what happened? This is where it is necessary to explain the difference between “passed-out” drunk and “blackout” drunk. If you get so drunk you pass out, and someone sexually molests you while your are unconscious, obviously that’s a crime. But that’s different from “blackout” drunk, a term describes how alcohols impairs your memory of what you did when you were extremely drunk. Anyone who has ever gotten extremely drunk is familiar with this phenomenon. Thursday night, a college boy goes to a frat party, gets totally hammered and wakes up Friday morning in some random girl’s bed, not knowing where he is or how he got there. His memory of Thursday night is a blur, and he may not even remember the name of the girl he’s with. As to whatever sexual activity they engaged in, this is likewise lost in the alcoholic blur, and this kind of “blackout” drunk sex happens routinely on college campuses.

Or at least, that’s how it used to happen, back when feminism meant that women were believed to be responsible for their own sexual behavior, rather than being helpless victims of “heteropatriarchy.” Nowadays, when a college boy and a college girl get drunk and hook up, this is automatically considered sexual assault, because being drunk negates consent. The drunk girl is a victim, and the drunk boy is a rapist — even if both of them were so drunk they barely remember anything.

This is a problem inherent to so many “he-said/she-said” incidents on campus that result in sexual assault complaints. It is hardly controversial to say drunk teenagers behave irresponsibly, but the effect of policies implemented pursuant to the “Dear Colleague” letter is to say that drunk teenage girls have no responsibility for their behavior, while drunk teenage boys bear 100% responsibility. All it takes is for the girl to experience morning-after regret — even if it’s more than a year later — and the male student finds himself caught in the machinery of campus disciplinary proceedings where he is deprived of the due-process protections that any common criminal would have in a court of law.

Under the Trump administration, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has repudiated the “Dear Colleague” letter and acted to restore some semblance of fairness in the treatment of sexual misconduct claims, and guess what? Laura Dunn has filed a federal lawsuit objecting to this:

Laura Dunn, a victim of sexual assault while at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is taking a strong stand to protect students who come forward to report their own experiences of sexual misconduct on campus.
Dunn went on to earn a law degree and create SurvJustice, a nonprofit that has helped scores of college women report sexual assaults. She also worked with Vice President Joe Biden to craft laws and guidance for universities that protected victims and improved campus sexual assault investigations. . . .
On Thursday, Dunn’s SurvJustice and two other women’s rights organizations filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Department of Education and Candice Jackson, acting assistant secretary for civil rights.
The suit, according to the plaintiffs, is an attempt to strike down the Trump administration’s unconstitutional Title IX policy harming student survivors of sexual violence and harassment. . . .

You can read the whole thing, if you can stomach the shameless bias. First of all, contrary to what this article says, every investigation of Dunn’s complaint has failed to find evidence that she was ever “a victim of sexual assault.” Second, there is nothing “unconstitutional” about the Trump administration’s policy, nor is there any reason to believe that this policy is “harming student survivors.” Most importantly, notice that this lawsuit is being filed in the Northern District of California, where nearly all the judges are liberals appointed during the Clinton or Obama administrations, and where any appeal of their ruling will go to the ultra-liberal 9th Circuit. What the plaintiffs are clearly seeking is for the district court to issue an injunction to block DeVos’s authority, with no hope to reverse this without taking the case all the way to the Supreme Court, a process that could take years. Why? Because drunk sluts now believe they have a “right” to punish any guy they hook up with when they’re drunk. This punitive regime is necessary for women like Laura Dunn, enabling their belief that they’re victims of “heteropatriarchy,” instead of having to accept the ugly truth about their own immoral behavior.



 

 

Category: Crime, Education, Sex Trouble

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