Columbia University senior Emma Sulkowicz, 21, says she was raped in her own bed at the beginning of her sophomore year. This week, two years after the alleged assault, Sulkowicz, a visual-arts major, has made a promise to carry her mattress around campus every day as part of her senior thesis. It is, she says, a symbol of the burden sexual-assault survivors carry with them every day.
“The act of carrying the mattress from inside my room out into the light has mirrored the way my life has changed, as I’ve brought my personal story out into the light,” Sulkowicz told TIME. “This project is a way to heal one of the most difficult things that happened to me. As I will build muscle and get stronger, hopefully I will also build emotional strength.”
Sulkowicz started the performance-art project on Tuesday, and she said she is determined to continue carrying the mattress wherever she goes — to class, the library, the gym — as long as her alleged rapist is still on campus. That means her project could last until graduation day in May 2015 — unless her alleged assailant is either expelled or chooses to leave the school. Last year, Sulkowicz and two other women reported the same person to the university. All three cases were dismissed.
Just got done reading the Wikipedia article on the matter. NYPD and the DA declined to pursue charges and the guy ended up suing Colombia for how they handled the proceedings on title IX gender discrimination violations. That lawsuit was settled.
WaPo is cited in there, it was bought by Bezos in '13.
The details of the settlement are sealed and it doesn’t prove that the rape didn’t happen, only that charges were never pressed against him for rape.
Considering the lengths that these Universities routinely go through to bury these stories, hide evidence, and not give evidence over to the DA and police departments, I have significant doubts that Columbia did the right thing here.
It is also impossible to prove rape didn’t happen. There’s no way you could conclusively prove right now that you haven’t raped me.
Which is why we have this whole innocent until proven guilty thing, which absolutely sucks if you’re a victim, but guilty until proven innocent is an even worse system.
Until either conclusive proof about the rape is presented or she admits to lying, as far as I’m concerned, he didn’t rape her and she isn’t lying about it.
I’m also not entirely sure it should be up to a university to investigate these things. That’s something the police should be doing and you Americans need to start lighting fires under their asses until they finally start taking rape cases seriously.
Given how quickly Columbia capitulated to Trump as well as its abysmal treatment of protestors it is almost certain the administration didn’t do the right thing.