University student, 19, ‘tried to kill herself after sex attack by international athletes’
A UNIVERSITY has expelled two international student athletes after claims four men raped a 19-year-old woman who then tried to take her life.
The undergraduate alleges the Oxford Brookes University students attacked her at their house when she went to collect her headphones.
One of the men was reportedly admitted on to his course despite being probed in the US for two alleged sex attacks.
An investigation by Thames Valley Police was dropped without charges being brought after ambiguity over consent.
But Oxford Brookes, a centre for elite sport, expelled three of the four after their own probe.
Its misconduct committee upheld the woman’s complaint over a breach of university regulations by relying on “balance of probability” as a burden of proof.
After an appeal, one of the three had his expulsion reduced to a term’s suspension and a letter of apology to the woman.A fourth had a written warning.
The alleged victim then tried to kill herself with an overdose and spent seven weeks in a psychiatric hospital. The men claim the
British woman consented to group sex in texts and she instigated the sex in February 2018. But she said that after popping round for her headphones she laughed off the subject of group sex when it was raised.
She said: “Suddenly it became less of a joke. It was, ‘You’ve said this, you’re all talk, you owe us’. I kept saying, ‘I said that a week ago, I don’t owe you anything’.
“They were like ‘No, you owe us group sex, you’ve agreed to it. We have the proof’.” The police said there was ambiguity on consent
because the woman agreed to some sexual activity before the alleged rape.
But an investigation by Oxford Brookes upheld her complaint and added that the male students “had not taken appropriate care to establish that consent was present throughout the entire evening and this constitutes abuse”.
The university inquiry does not imply any criminal behaviour.
It said: “Appropriate penalties, including the most severe available...in relation to some of the students, were applied.”