The Fate of Anna, the Woman Who Was 'Raped' at Hobart and William Smith Colleges

You know, before we had the current fraternity and binge drinking culture (going back decades, for sure), which now includes women as much as ever, common sense and traditional values cautioned against getting drunk out of your mind, especially at a place teeming with dozens of plastered college frat boys.

It's a bad mixture all around.

I tweeted this New York Times story to Robert Stacy McCain last night:

.@RSMcCain Reporting Rape, and Wishing She Hadn’t. #RapeCulture http://t.co/fFTbH5mpI3

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) July 13, 2014

And now at the Other McCain, "How to Get Raped at College":

One wonders how the world could be arranged so that 18-year-old girls can get drunk at parties and “grind” with football players without the players inferring from this behavior that the girls are interested in having sex.

One also wonders why colleges are treated like bubbles where normal rules do not apply. In the normal world, sexual assault is a felony, and is investigated and prosecuted as such. On college campuses, it seems, sexual assault is treated about as seriously as laws against providing alcohol to teenagers, i.e., not seriously at all: “Oopsie! You got drunk. Oopsie! Is that a football player’s penis in your butt?”

See, there is an unspoken agreement involved: If parents are paying $46,852 a year to send their daughter to college, the college isn’t going to kick the girl out (and forfeit $46,582) just because her idea of fun is chugging rum at the Kappa Sig house. If it weren’t for drunk freshman girls “grinding” on the dance floor, why would the guys at Kappa Sig — all of whom represent $46,852 in annual revenue to the college administration — bother throwing parties? And if the football players can’t take turns banging the drunk girl they picked up at the Kappa Sig house, what’s the point of playing football?

These are the implicit assumptions of 21st-century elite college life: Underage drinking and sexual promiscuity, for $46,852 a year...

I was shaking my head through the Times' article, and obviously if a woman alleges she's been raped, the last place she should go is to her college administration (a.k.a. Sham-Investigations-R-Us), but just screw political correctness if I suggest she was practically asking for it. From the Times:

Anna and her girlfriends often joked about how the national rape estimates might affect them. “They kept repeating the statistics,” she said, and “every night we would go out we would be like, ‘Oh, who’s going to be the one?’ ”

It took just 14 days to find out, Anna said.

Whether one believes the accuser or the accused, it would be hard to dispute that what happened was a life-altering experience that ruptured Anna’s nascent friendships, damaged her health, traumatized her family and derailed her college plans....

...on Sept. 7, Anna attended one of the year’s first big social events — a “highlighter party,” where students write on one another’s clothes with a marker that glows under black light.

Later there was dancing. Anna and a senior football player she had just met were grinding to the music, rubbing their bodies together. With so many students packed together in the basement, it became hot, and the football player escorted Anna upstairs, where smaller groups congregated in students’ bedrooms. A friend tried to stop her, but she went anyway.

Anna said she had begun the evening drinking shots of rum mixed into Gatorade. She drank one beer at the dance, she said, and then the rest of an opened beer her dance partner had given her.

Around midnight, a fraternity member tried to enter his room, but found it locked. He opened the door with his key and caught a glimpse of what would become a pivotal episode in Anna’s case: The senior football player was naked, and Anna was sitting on a bed with her top off, covering her breasts. The visitor quickly left.

About the same time, Anna texted the friend who had tried to intervene earlier; she had asked him to hold her keys because she had a hole in her pocket, and wanted them back. A subsequent message was darker, talking of hookups. “He got ten guys to try and hu with me,” Anna wrote and added, “I’m scared.”

She would later tell the hearing panel that she had exaggerated the number to get her friend’s attention. She texted again for her keys, and then wrote, “He won’t leave me.”

Her friend tried calling, but got no response. Around 1 a.m., he asked another student to check Anna’s room. She wasn’t there. “We need to find her ASAP,” he texted, adding, “She is so drunk.”

Eventually he tracked her to a building called the Barn, a dance hall favored by students who do not belong to fraternities. Inside the dimly lit room, a D.J. played music near a couple of pool tables.

Around 1:25 a.m., after 10 minutes of searching, the friend said, he found Anna “bent over the pool table face down with her back towards the wall.” She and the senior football player had their pants down, he said, “and it was clear they were having sex.”

Anna “had a scared look on her face,” he said, as six or seven people, perhaps five feet away, were “looking and laughing.”

Anna’s friend, a freshman who was also a football player, approached his teammate and told him that he was being disrespectful and had “crossed the line.”

“It wasn’t me, it was her,” the teammate replied.

The friend walked Anna back to her dorm. On the way, another student saw her crying.

To this day, Anna says she remembers nothing about the Barn, the pool table or what happened there...

If you read the whole thing, one commentator (Detective Brian E. Choffin, scroll down) indicates that given Anna's BAC, it's not likely she could have blacked out from the amount of alcohol she'd consumed. In other words, she might not be telling the truth.

Of course, some of the statements of the accused were disputed as well, so who knows?

I certainly don't know what to believe, which brings me back to the notion of personal responsibility. Anna got herself into trouble. So many of these "rape" stories I read about are just like this. It always comes down to he said, she said, and alcohol is involved, so the left's meme that "she couldn't have given consent" automatically prejudices the case against the accused. And since men have virtually no due process in these situations, it's a stacked deck. In this case Anna doesn't come out looking good, and her accusers were exonerated. But that's not the usual way these things play out. Parents need to know that before they send their sons away to college, the young men have "rape suspect" targets on their backs.