Men kicked out over sex assault cases suing colleges

Increasing number of lawsuits claim due process violations during investigations

A rising number of young men who were kicked out of college for sexual misconduct are suing those schools, alleging they were treated unfairly as their cases were investigated and decided, legal data show.

Many are securing settlements that clear the discipline from their record, lawyers and advocacy groups say.

The legal pushback from these men has emerged in response to a wave of campus activism in recent years and a shift in federal enforcement of Title IX, the anti-discrimination law that led to more reports of sexual assault and major changes in how colleges resolve those complaints.

Title IX has become a rallying point for assault survivors who want colleges to pay more attention to the problem of sexual violence. But now more men are using the 1972 law to defend themselves.

Since 2011, more than 150 Title IX lawsuits have been filed against colleges and universities involving claims of due process violations during the course of investigations and proceedings related to sex assault allegations, according to a database kept by a group called Title IX For All.

For the young men who file the suits, the civil courts offer a last chance for justice and an opportunity to clear their names.

SAVE Services, a Marylandbased group that seeks to highlight what it calls “rape hoaxes” and protect the rights of the accused in sexual assault cases, found in a survey that about 70 percent of these types of lawsuits filed against colleges from 1993 to 2015 ended in settlements or rulings that at least partially benefited the plaintiffs.

For survivors of sexual assault, these legal battles can amount to emotional torture.

“It was blindsiding” said a 26-year-old woman who reported that she was sexually assaulted in 2013 on the night before she graduated from a university in New York. The Washington Post generally does not identify sexual assault victims. The woman said that the perpetrator has been tried twice and expelled twice through the university’s process, but is still fighting findings in court.

In April 2011, the Education Department told universities they should weigh sexual violence cases using a standard of proof called “preponderance of the evidence.”

Common in civil law, this standard is less demanding than the “clear and convincing evidence” threshold that some schools had used in disciplinary proceedings and the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard that would be required for conviction in a criminal court.

“It made it easier to find a student guilty whether or not they are guilty,” said Samantha Harris, director of policy research at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. “That doesn’t do a better job of getting to the truth, and that’s where the problem is.”

In the years since, the number of lawsuits filed against universities for due process violations has increased dramatically. Andrew Miltenberg, a lawyer who has represented male clients in such cases, said the guidance tilted the process against the accused.

“It has almost created a new class of victims, and those victims are young men who essentially have been railroaded,” Miltenberg said.

But many plaintiffs are finding success in court with arguments that internal college investigations were flawed or biased.

“Now judges are digging deeper,” said Brett Sokolow, a lawyer who is president of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management. “They are losing trust in the good faith that colleges had when addressing these situations. And that’s a very dangerous position for colleges.”