The Department of Education pushed out a letter to universities across America in 2011, giving college bureaucrats the legal ability to determine the guilt or innocence of people accused of sexual assault. Today, a slew of men who were allegedly wrongfully found guilty of rape by reckless college administrators are retaliating with lawsuits against the universities.
As of this month, there have been 50 known lawsuits filed by men found guilty of rape looking for justice to clear their names and legal record, according to A Voice For Male Students’ website.
“Predictably, a wave of lawsuits soon erupted as young men wrongly accused of sex crimes found themselves hustled through a vague and misshapen adjudication process with slipshod checks and balances and Kafkaesque standards of evidence,” the men’s advocacy page reads.
The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights sent out a Dear Colleague letter, in April of 2011 to every college and university in America that receives federal aid, outlining how schools must judge rape or sexual assault cases. The letter leaves the legal cases in the hands of school bureaucrats who have no proven knowledge of the criminal justice system, to investigate and prosecute students.
The government agency launched a set of rules that determines whether a student is guilty or innocent with the “preponderance of evidence” standard which relies on absurdly low proof of evidence. This preponderance standard proves that a student is guilty of assault if an administrator feels there is a 50.01 percent chance the attack or rape actually happened. (RELATED: Duke Student Expelled For Sexual Misconduct Sues For Diploma)
This government requirement has thus resulted in a slew of men filing federal lawsuits claiming they have been wrongfully found guilty of rape or sexual assault, citing government’s policies are unfairly stacked against men.
The legal cases come from across the country, including pot-loving, granola-crunching Brown University, which has had two lawsuits thrown at them by men found guilty of rape by the university. Most recently, student athlete William McCormick fired off a lawsuit against Brown after the school found him guilty of raping Marcella “Beth” Dresdale — the daughter of billionaire Richard Dresdale, a vital donor to the school. In 2011, the case was settled after McCormick was offered about $1 million dollars, according to The Brown Spectator.
And at Columbia University, a student going by the surname John Doe filed a federal case against the school claiming that administrators deemed Doe guilty because they were too afraid to dissatisfy a group of student activists who rallied around an alleged rape victim. His case, which was filed in May, is currently pending.
Even Catholic schools like College of the Holy Cross have had legal battles after wrongfully labeling students as rapists. Student Edwin Bleiler was wrongfully found guilty or raping a girl by Holy Cross school administrators, and kicked off campus. Bleiler filed a suit against the school in 2011, and was later acquitted of his charges and allowed to return to school, according to a court ruling.
Most of the other 46 of the 50 court cases have yet to be decided, or have already reached confidential settlements.
“This page is dedicated to cataloging their [male student] legal challenges against schools which — they allege — have violated their rights to due process, unjustly destroyed their names, deprived them of educational opportunities, and committed various other injustices against them in the name of ‘just following orders,'” the men’s advocacy webpage reads.
