Columbia student brings rape protest mattress to graduation: http://t.co/kaVUbpX5JR pic.twitter.com/eOw32yDE3d
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) May 19, 2015
“Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia University student who has carried a mattress around campus as part of an art project for the past year, has graduated. And she carried that mattress across the stage during the ceremony — to much applause,” Ashe Schow writes at the Washington Examiner. That stunt could end up being a very costly one for Columbia:
Paul Nungesser, the man she accused of raping her, and who was cleared by a campus hearing and the police, was forced to watch, having walked across the stage just a few minutes earlier.
Nungesser is now suing Columbia for facilitating a harassment campaign against him. He alleges in his lawsuit that by allowing and even praising Sulkowicz’s mattress project, the school was complicit in defaming him.
On Monday, Columbia circulated an email banning students from bringing large objects to graduation. It appeared at the time that Sulkowicz was being disallowed from carrying her mattress across the stage. But evidently, that was not the case.
Allowing Sulkowicz to carry her mattress may have helped Nungesser’s case in court, as the school made clear that large objects were banned but then did nothing to stop Sulkowicz.
Nungesser’s lawyer, Kimberly Lau, told the Washington Examiner that Columbia’s acceptance of Sulkowicz’s graduation stunt was “absurd” and would help her client’s case.
“This goes beyond mere facilitation; they have now granted a special exception,” Lau said.
Meanwhile, Samantha Power, the ambassador to the United Nations for America’s self-proclaimed “blank screen” of a president praised Sulkowicz’s wacky primitivism in her Sunday commencement address to Bernard College, Paul Mirengoff writes at Power Line, quoting a Daily Caller report that “Power also suggested that Afghanistan is superior to the United States in at least one way in terms of women’s rights because women currently hold 28 percent of the seats in Afghanistan’s parliament.” * As Mirengoff writes:
For context, the Daily Caller’s Owens reminds us that the Barnard students whom Power addressed have just received an education that costs $250,000. This does not include four years of off-campus expenses in New York City or the expenses incurred during jaunts in exciting study-abroad locales such as France and Spain.
In war-torn Afghanistan, gross national income per capita is approximately $1,960, according to Owens.
But maybe college campuses are war zones for females students. Power suggested as much when she invoked the case of Emma Sulkowicz, a student across the street at Columbia University who carried a mattress around campus on her back all year to protest the school’s handling of her rape allegation.
As I discussed yesterday, however, Sulkowicz’s allegation is almost certainly false. A campus tribunal found no merit in it.
Moreover, the cleared male student has produced numerous text messages and social media conversations from before and after the night when Sulkowicz claims he raped her. The messages undermine her claim by showing that Sulkowicz made comments about having anal sex with the male student before the night when she says he anally raped her. She also messaged him several times after that night suggesting that they should meet up.
Is Power aware that Sulkowicz’s rape allegation has been discredited? One hopes not.
Mirengoff describes Power as “the poster child for the smear America, moral equivalence brand of leftism,” but there are plenty of others who vie for that award in Mr. Obama’s far left, radical chic-obsessed administration.
* Shades of HSBC’s ad campaign praising Iran’s pro-feminist film industry!
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