A row of solitary confinement cells.
ara, a recent graduate of Stanford University, is a survivor. During her freshman year at the school, she says, a
male student she was dating turned violent after she refused to have sex with him. He choked her and threatened to kill her, whispering in her ear that no one would care if she died, she says.
Sara reported the attack to Stanford administrators, who then spoke with Robert, the alleged assailant. University administrators told Sara that he didn’t contest her story.
The school imposed a no-contact order on Robert, meaning he had to keep his distance from Sara or face punishment. Sara says she was told to focus on her recovery. She agreed to the plan, and says she asked the school to notify her if other victims of his ever came forward. It is not clear if anyone at the university agreed to her request, though Sara says she was under the impression the school would let her know about any future allegations against Robert.
Two years later, in November 2014, Sara was horrified to figure out that two other female students, including a woman she taught as a graduate student, had told the university they had been assaulted by the same man. Despite the allegations, he had been allowed to remain on the Palo Alto, California, campus, and to graduate.
"To find out that all this time, the university just sit by and let it happen, it was deeply, deeply disturbing and horrifying," Sara told The Huffington Post.
Colleges and universities have faced mounting claims from women in recent years that they mishandled sexual assault cases, in violation of the gender equity law Title IX. The White House launched a task force dedicated to the issue. Despite this national attention – and the growing understanding that a relatively small number of people are responsible for a majority of sex crimes – Stanford, one of the most renowned universities in the world, apparently did not immediately connect the dots when separate women came forward, two years apart, to allege that they had been assaulted by the same male student. Even after a third woman came forward with a similar claim against the student, he was allowed to graduate.
After Robert graduated, a fourth woman, Annie, told the other women that she had been assaulted by him as well. She has never reported the alleged attack to the university.
It's not uncommon for victims of sexual assault to wait weeks or months to approach authorities. Many victims, researchers say, never report their assault at all.
Sexual violence is depressingly common among collegiate women. Studies show that around 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted over the course of their college experience. Research released last year that examined male college students who carry out these attacks suggests that about 1 in 5 perpetrators are repeat offenders. A study of military cadets and men in Boston found that serial offenders may actually be responsible for a majority of sexual assaults.
Regardless of whether an assailant is a serial attacker, each report of an assault is "an opportunity to remove the alleged perpetrator from campus and remedy future hostile environments," said Tara Richards, who researches intimate partner violence.
Stanford declined to comment on specific cases, citing federal privacy law. The university said some of the facts of the women's allegations, as presented to them for comment, were incorrect, but declined to say what was wrong.
Sara and Celena, another alleged victim, each filed a federal complaint against Stanford with the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights in July. Two other students have also filed federal complaints against the university, according to a list of active cases maintained by the Department of Education, obtained by HuffPost. The Education Department has not made public any details about these other cases.
This account was assembled though a HuffPost review of Sara and Celena's complaints, which also are not public; of hundreds of pages of letters and emails acquired by HuffPost and by interviewing the women involved and people on campus who have intimate knowledge of the incidents.
The names in these cases – of the women and the man, "Robert," they've accused of sexually assaulting them – have been changed to protect the alleged victims of sexual violence. In addition, the man whom they've accused has not been charged with a crime.
These cases come to light as Stanford students and faculty are already protesting how the school has portrayed its data on sex offenses committed on campus, and over controversial reforms to its sexual assault policy.
Jennifer Reisch, legal director at the California nonprofit Equal Rights Advocates, said students expect their universities to investigate sexual assault claims swiftly, and to remove people who are a threat from campus.
Stanford, she said, appears to have missed several opportunities to act.
"We are entrusting our daughters and sisters to universities," Reisch said, noting that schools aren't doing enough to ensure the basic safety of their students.
"And that's not OK," she added.
S
Florida Governor Jeb Bush in 2006, his last year in office. Associated Press
Bush Email Archive
In a recent interview with The Huffington Post, Bush recalled breakfast meetings with Catholic bishops at which the issue would come up. “The last thing they always talked about – after feeding the poor, and dealing with homelessness, and giving parents school choice, and protecting the lives of unborn babies – was the death penalty,” he said. “It is a tenet of my faith and there was a conflict there."
In July of his first year in office, Bush oversaw his first execution.
Allen Lee "Tiny" Davis had been convicted of brutally killing a pregnant woman and her two daughters. He spent 17 years on death row, exhausting appeals and receiving stays from two earlier dates with the electric chair. During his entire time on death row, Davis' weight concerned officials. As his execution neared, it became an urgent matter. The electric chair had a 350-pound limit. Davis came in at 349. The prison put him on a diet and spent $706 for red oak lumber to build a new chair that was wider and less rickety. The electrical current remained the same.
On the day of his execution, July 8, 1999, an arthritic, 344-pound Davis had to be wheeled to the chair by his guards.
At approximately 7:01 a.m., leather belts were strapped around his arms, chest and legs and a 5-inch-wide leather strap was placed across his mouth, forcing his nose upward. A mask was then lowered over his face.
Witnesses said that at this point Davis began issuing muffled screams or moans. When the switch was flipped, blood started to drip from under the mask, over his chin and neck, forming an 8-by-12 inch puddle on his white button-down shirt. Then-state Sen. Ginny Brown-Waite (R) claimed to see the shape of a cross in the blood – a sign of God forgiving Davis for his sins. Brown-Waite, who was in the room, recalled the execution as "pretty gruesome,” but just.
Davis' muffled screams quieted. But he still appeared to be breathing. After the electrical current was switched off, his chest rose and fell 10 times.
“It took a few moments, seconds really, to realize what was going on, that this was not the normal, quiet, efficient execution that the state wanted portray,” said veteran Tampa reporter John Sugg, who also witnessed the execution in person. “He wasn’t dead. You could hear him. I heard him.”
By 7:15 a.m., Davis has been declared dead. His body was covered in burns – on his head, his groin, and behind his right knee. Photos taken shortly after showed his face had turned purple, likely the result of partial asphyxiation.
GRAPHIC PHOTO
(Tap to Reveal)
Bush was unapologetic. In the days after the execution, he insisted, as prison officials would too, that the bleeding started before the electricity, and he pleaded that sympathy be directed toward Davis’ victims. The controversy, he said, was “an argument over a nosebleed.”
Following the Davis execution, another death row inmate challenged the state's use of the electric chair. In September 1999, the Florida Supreme Court ruled, 4-3, that the chair was legal. In a scathing dissent, Justice Leander Shaw wrote that Davis was “brutally tortured to death by the citizens of Florida” and described the state’s record of bungled executions as “acts more befitting a violent murderer than a civilized state.” To make his point, he included photos of Davis’ body in his dissent.
"Execution by electrocution – with its attendant smoke and flames and blood and screams – is a spectacle whose time has passed," Shaw wrote.
The sorry state of the death penalty in Florida was on the mind of Stephen Hanlon, then the partner in charge of Holland & Knight’s pro-bono department, when he spotted Bush in the law firm’s Tallahassee office shortly before Bush took office. He knew what he needed to do. He dug out his copy of Von Drehle’s book and handed it to Bush.
The book detailed what Hanlon knew all too well: Florida struggled to find and fund qualified lawyers to defend the condemned and qualified judges to oversee the trials. The judicial system, as Von Drehle wrote, was “a slapdash machine designed in confusion, built of spare parts and baling wire.”
Between 1973 and 1995, the Florida Supreme Court reversed 49 percent of the state’s death sentences after analyzing trial transcripts and finding errors, a 2000 Columbia University study found. That count didn't include inmates who were freed based on new evidence, faulty witness testimony, or coerced confessions. Florida led the country in death-row exonerations during this period.
Hanlon had worked death penalty cases and knew how overburdened appellate lawyers were. He needed Bush to know that the system was hitting a crisis point. “This is the brain surgery of our profession,” he said, “and we were throwing people at it who just had no idea what they were doing."
At some point early in his first year in office, Bush returned to Hanlon’s office with the Von Drehle book full of passages underlined in red ink. In their conversation, Bush acknowledged that there were problems with defense lawyers and questions about whether the death penalty even deterred crime, according to Hanlon.
“My general impression was this was a very smart guy,” Hanlon said. “He was very much into policy. He knew there were very serious problems.”
"I didn't expect a fellow student from Stanford to be so violent. I've never seen anyone turn that violent, even in a drunken state."
— Ashley
But Bush and his staff didn’t see a broken system. They saw instead an activist Florida Supreme Court that gummed up the appeals process and needlessly prevented executions from taking place. Writing for the conservative Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies newsletter in August 1999, Reginald Brown, Bush’s then-deputy general counsel, lamented the high percentage of death sentences the court reversed – at that point, 79 percent.
“Jeb believed in the death penalty and wanted to enforce it,” Brown told HuffPost. “He thought that the Florida Supreme Court was trying to do a pocket veto of the law.”
In October 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take up a case from Florida asking whether the electric chair amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Two months later, Bush called a special session of the state legislature and pushed a bill that designated lethal injection as the main method of carrying out executions while leaving the chair as an option. The bill quickly passed through the legislature. The threat of a U.S. Supreme Court decision gutting Florida's death penalty was averted.
During the same special session, Bush called for legislation to severely limit the ability of death row inmates to appeal their sentences. He and his allies promised that the bill, known as the Death Penalty Reform Act of 2000, would reduce the average time between sentence and execution from 14 years to five years or less. "What I hope is that we become like Texas: Bring in the witnesses, put them on a gurney, and let’s rock and roll," Bradford Thomas, Bush's top adviser on the death penalty, chest-thumped to the St. Petersburg Times. (Bush would later appoint Thomas as an appellate judge.)
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, left, addresses members of the House Republican caucus on death penalty legislation during a special session in 2000.
Associated Press
Raquel Rodriguez, Bush's former general counsel, told HuffPost that the governor "felt the system was being abused and that those delays were an abuse of the system and a disservice to the victims, who were forced to live for years and years knowing that the person who killed their loved one was still sitting in prison even though they had been sentenced to death."
But members of the state legislature's black caucus objected strenuously, even inviting Freddie Pitts, one of the state's most famous exonerees, to testify. Pitts and another man, Wilbert Lee, had been wrongly convicted of the murder of two gas station attendants in 1963 after police beat them into confessing to the crime. Pitts recalled to HuffPost that the sheriff at the time bragged, “This will be two n*****s that won’t be in that March to Washington.”
Pitts said he and Lee were pressured to plead guilty. An all-white jury sentenced them to death. The entire proceeding took less than a day. They remained behind bars even after a white man confessed to the murders. They would not be exonerated until 1975.
A quarter-century later, Pitts addressed the Florida House of Representatives. Republicans had allowed him only one minute to speak, he said. He explained that had Bush’s law been in effect when he was on death row, he would be dead. Then he walked off the floor.
“It was dead silence for a good minute, maybe longer,” Pitts remembered.
It wasn't enough. The bill passed by a single vote after the second-ranking House Democrat defected to back the measure.
Bush heralded the bill as “a historic piece of legislation” that would be "respectful of family members and victims" and “bring a semblance of justice to this very complicated issue.”
Others were shocked. “It just doesn’t make any sense for a guy who was that bright,” Hanlon said. “The one word I would use is inexplicable. That wasn’t the Jeb Bush I thought I knew.”
The Florida Supreme Court had another word for the legislation: unconstitutional. A few months after the governor signed the bill into law, the court ruled that it violated the state constitution’s separation-of-powers clause and the rights of defendants to due process and equal protection. The court voided most of the new statute, but warned that the capital punishment system's problems would endure unless the state provided proper funding "for competent counsel during trial, appellate, and postconviction proceedings."
Bush was unbowed. Bush was unbowed. In his short time in office, he had already seen a botched execution and legal setbacks with the state Supreme Court rebuke, yet he pressed forward. “The problem isn't the means of execution," he wrote in one email. "It is the delays created by a system of excessive appeals.”
As Bush attempted to hasten death row appeals, he sought to calm critics by setting up a task force to analyze whether race played a factor in the state’s capital cases. For those familiar with the death penalty in Florida, it was entirely redundant.
“You didn’t need a task force to know looking at the simple numbers that the race of the victim played a major role, especially in Florida,” said state Sen. Chris Smith (D). “The dirty little secret in politics is the task force was only set up to muddy the waters."
Ultimately, Bush’s task force recommended that the issue of race be studied further. Neither the governor nor the legislature established an initiative or set aside funding to examine the issue again. Instead, executions in Florida continued without pause.
On June 7, 2000, Bennie Demps, a racial justice advocate within the prison system, was put to death by lethal injection. Demps had been convicted of killing a fellow prisoner. He never stopped professing his innocence, claiming he had been set up by corrupt officials. Before his execution took place, Pope John Paul II sent a letter to Bush seeking clemency. The governor declined to grant it.
The execution went awry shortly after it began. Technicians struggled for more than a half-hour to find a vein. When the curtains in the chamber finally opened, Demps screamed out that what was about to transpire was nothing more than a "low-tech lynching."
In a narrative of events he wrote after the fact, George Schaefer, one of Demps' attorneys, recalled the anxiety building in the witness gallery during the delay and remembered hearing “some strange drum beats or perhaps even music while waiting.” That anxiety turned to shock once Demps appeared and delivered his last words. Schaefer wrote that his client “went on to ask that I request an investigation of what had just happened to him. He said that the officials had cut into his groin and into his leg and that he had bled profusely. He said that it was very important that his body be examined because it would show where there were sutures. He mentioned he had been ‘butchered.’”
Schaefer had nightmares for a month after the execution, he said. He eventually moved to San Diego, where he currently works as a lawyer for the city handling civil litigation. “It was very traumatic for me,” he said.
At the governor's office, there was a different reaction. Asked for his thoughts after the Demps execution, Bush replied that the procedure was done "according to the textbook."
"There was no botched nature to it at all."
Tap here to read the rest of this story.
Opener: Getty Images/Shutterstock
Annie And Sara
Annie had been at Stanford for less than a week in the fall of 2010 when she met Robert. She says he supplied her with plenty of alcohol and then forced her to have sex with him in his room. Like many young women who are assaulted on college campuses, she didn’t report the episode. She described being unfamiliar with the social norms on campus, and didn't want an investigation to drag through the beginning of her Stanford career.
Maybe sex without consent is normal for a drunken hookup, Annie thought. "I blamed myself for what had happened," she said. "I blocked it out of my mind and tried never to think about it again, but eventually came to realize it was not my fault, because I had been assaulted."
Sara began dating Robert later that year. She said the relationship escalated to physical, sexual and emotional violence, and culminated in the choking attack in February 2011 after she told Robert that she didn’t want to have sex with him anymore. "No one is going to notice when you die," Robert said as he wrapped his hands around her throat, according to the account she shared with HuffPost and the federal government. He abruptly stopped, leaving her gasping, she said.
Sara wasn't sure what to do. She sought counseling on campus, but was told there was a three-week wait, she said. When Sara did get an appointment, she said in her federal complaint against the school, the university counselor suggested Sara may be partly to blame because she'd been wearing a revealing sweater. Sara told HuffPost she also talked to an academic adviser, who told her to focus on survival – not to press charges.
The experience with Robert stayed with her. "I thought about the possibility of him attacking another student," Sara said. So in January 2012 she reported the attack again, this time to a residential director.
When Stanford confronted Robert with the allegations, he said he was intoxicated at the time and didn’t remember the incident, according to a letter the university later sent to Sara. But he "did not question the account because he believed you were an honest person," the letter reads. Stanford imposed a no-contact order, essentially forbidding him to approach Sara.
The no-contact order apparently wasn’t shared widely enough with other departments on campus. In May 2013, Sara and Robert were assigned to live in the same campus housing. Stanford offered to move them, emails Sara provided show, but she feared retaliation from Robert if he was forced to move. She eventually moved into other on-campus housing.
The Flint Water Plant.
Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California, is the subject of investigations into four federal complaints over how it handles sexual assault cases. David Madison via Getty Images
Ashley
Ashley met Robert around the same time that Sara was trying to arrange new housing to avoid him. Mutual friends introduced them, and they decided to get drinks together a few days later. Later, they went back to her apartment. At 4:22 a.m. on Aug. 4, 2013, Ashley sent a Facebook message to a mutual friend: "Wtf. Hw hit me [sic]." She followed up a moment later with, "He's crazy. My lip is bleeding."
A series of frantic late-night messages from Ashley to that friend described Robert throwing a table and busting Ashley's upper lip after she said she didn't want to have sex. The friend replied in surprise, but said, "the three other times I know of him blacking out all ended badly. and throwing stuff sounds about right."
The next afternoon, Ashley confronted Robert over text messages about what he'd done. Robert said he didn't remember any of it because he had been blackout drunk, copies of the texts show. He apologized repeatedly and said, "that's not me." He offered to pay for Ashley's broken property.
"My initial thought was shock," Ashley said. "I didn't expect a fellow student from Stanford to be so violent. I've never seen anyone turn that violent, even in a drunken state."
Ashley would later recall in a June 2014 letter to Stanford administrators that she held off from reporting Robert to police or the school, even though some of her friends urged her to, because she believed him when he apologized and said he had never done anything like that before. Their social circles overlapped as well, and she worried about causing trouble.
Ashley took time off from school after the incident.
celina
Celena started dating Robert in late 2013. She broke it off a few months later, but stayed "cordial" with him, she said. On Feb. 27, 2014, she says she and Robert had a few drinks and started making out. Robert then asked her to perform oral sex, Celena said, and grew angry when she refused.
He pinned her onto her stomach, but Celena got to her feet after a brief struggle, she later reported to the school. "Kill yourself," he said to her, and they argued more, she recalled. He grabbed Celena's left hand and began twisting her arm, she said. She says she left and tried to push the experience from her mind.
The next day Celena's roommate told her that someone had broken their window and torn down some decorations. They suspected Robert, and reported the property damage to the school. A few days later, he texted her to say he’d gotten an email from a Stanford dean. "I feel terrible that I made you feel unsafe in anyway," he wrote. He promised not to communicate with Celena again.
A few days after Robert smashed Celena’s window, in March 2014, Sara met with Stanford's interim Title IX coordinator, Sallie Kim. She hadn't even known before that a Title IX office existed, Sara said. They were meeting about something unrelated to her own case, but Sara mentioned her experience with Robert during the conversation.
Kim emailed Sara a week later to say she was going to further investigate the case. Sara wasn’t aware anyone else may have come forward, so she told the university she wasn’t interested in participating in an investigation two years later, so close to her graduation.
While Stanford wouldn’t comment about individual cases, the university said as a general practice, "we always advise students who believe they are a victim of a crime to report it to police, and report it in a timely manner, as we strongly believe that such crimes should be reported and prosecuted by law enforcement authorities." Further, Stanford said, it always investigates sexual violence cases when it has cooperation from an alleged victim. But without participation from the complainant, "it is very difficult to verify allegations," the school said.
Celena, meanwhile, was pondering whether to tell Stanford administrators that Robert had assaulted her. The broken window incident turned out to be revealing. Students began talking openly and sharing stories about Robert. Celena heard for the first time that he had also apparently assaulted other women on campus. Soon after, she saw him walking with a female freshman, and decided to act.
"I've spent a lot of time underselling my experience, that 'Oh, he only twisted my arm back, he didn't succeed in raping me,'" Celena said in an interview. "But every time I hear about how he would be violent with the other women, it was just a punch in the gut."
The fact that other women allegedly had abusive experiences with Robert but never reported him had "facilitated" his behavior, Celena felt, and she wanted to explore a student misconduct process or police report against him. She decided to reach out to the school.
"I don't fear for my personal safety, but for that of other women on this campus," Celena wrote to a dean on April 11. She passed along names of other women she'd heard were assaulted by Robert, including Sara.
Stanford opened an investigation into her allegations. That same month, the university told Celena it was also opening an investigation into a "sexual coercion" counter-complaint Robert had made against her, according to a letter the school sent her, obtained by HuffPost. The university later dismissed his complaint.
When contacted this week by HuffPost, Robert said through email that he maintains his innocence and denies the claims, but declined to speak further about the allegations against him.
When a female student reported a male student severely choked Stanford issued a no-contact order, but then assigned them to live in the same housing a year later.
David Madison via Getty Images
reviewing the evidence
By April 2014, two women, Sara and Celena, had come forward to tell Stanford officials that Robert had assaulted them. He hadn’t challenged Sara’s earlier claim that he had choked her, and the school was apparently examining her complaint again. After the broken window incident, the university told Robert he had to stay away from Celena's house, according to her complaint. Stanford could have involved police, or given Robert an interim suspension given the seriousness of the claims. That didn’t happen.
On June 4, Ashley reported the incident from the previous summer, when she says Robert hit her and threw her table.
Stanford folded allegations from Celena and Ashley into one case. University administrators began floating options for a resolution to bring it to a close. Catherine Criswell, who had become the Title IX coordinator that May, wrote in an email to the women and another school employee involved in the case that Robert wanted to wrap up the investigation by July 7. He had already participated in a commencement ceremony, but the university would not release his diploma until the investigation was resolved. If it dragged on, Robert would not have it in time to show his future employers – endangering the job he had lined up.
On July 11, 2014, Stanford released its findings in a letter to Celena, Ashley and Robert. The school determined that Robert physically assaulted and attempted to sexually assault Celena, and that he violated the school's policy against relationship violence and sexual harassment with Ashley. The letter also noted the university had found Robert's claim that Celena attempted to sexually coerce him to be not credible.
The school punished Robert with a minimum 10-year campus ban. The university said Robert must undergo sexual violence and alcohol abuse counseling in order to lift the ban after 10 years. Even if and when the ban is lifted, Robert must get permission to go to campus events – to make sure that Ashley and Celena are not also in attendance.
Robert received his diploma that month.
Lisa Smith, a former prosecutor in Brooklyn, New York, who has been briefed by HuffPost on the case, said she was surprised the school apparently wasn't able to detect a pattern and act more quickly to connect prior cases as reports came in against Robert.
Stanford first got an official report that a male student had assaulted someone in 2012. Two more women came forward in 2014 leveling similar allegations against the same male student. CGIBackgrounds.com via Getty Images
coming together
In October 2014, Sara was a graduate student at Stanford. As a teaching assistant for a class, Sara chatted with a student in the course about why she’d recently taken time off from school. The student was Ashley, who explained she was coping with an investigation into a student she said assaulted her. Sara quickly realized that Ashley was talking about Robert. Sara hadn't known of any other allegations against him or about the 10-year ban.
Sara reached out to the university, this time asking for a full investigation into her initial allegations. On Dec. 15, 2014, the school sent Sara a letter saying it found her claims credible: Robert’s punishment would be extended to a 15-year campus ban, and he would be barred from alumni events. Should that ban be lifted, he will have to first verify with the school that Sara won’t be at the event he wants to attend. Stanford also offered to reimburse Sara up to $5,000 for counseling services.
Sara left Stanford after that quarter.
Annie never filed a formal complaint. She said she didn’t learn about Robert’s history with other women until she spoke with a mutual friend of Celena's in 2015, after Robert had graduated.
"When I found that out, I was devastated," Annie said. "I went into my friend's room and cried for two hours. What had happened to me freshman year wasn't something random or some mistake. This guy was a serial predator."
Annie and Celena met in fall 2015, just as Celena and Sara worked with the nonprofit Equal Rights Advocates to file two complaints against Stanford with the U.S. Department of Education.
"It's one of the saddest clubs out there, as far as what brings us together," Celena said.
UPDATE: Jan. 25 -- In a follow-up email, a Stanford official reiterated that the school would have shared more about the cases in advance of publication, but could not because the victims did not sign legal releases under a privacy law.
"The university would be very pleased to share information with the Huffington Post if your sources will provide a waiver to allow us to do so," said Lisa Lapin, an associate vice president with the school.
The students mentioned in this story declined to sign those releases because they felt the language was overly broad, and posed the risk of eventually revealing their identities. In other sexual assault cases, universities have, in fact, responded to allegations put forward by alleged rape victims without apparently violating any federal statutes.
Tyler Kingkade covers higher education and sexual violence, and is based in New York. You can reach him at [email protected], or find him on Twitter: @tylerkingkade.
Opener: Shutterstock