When a man on a college campus stands accused of violent misconduct against a woman, some school administrators no longer even pretend to care about due process. Anyone who has been following Title IX abuse lately knows just how much of a farce that concept has become on campus.
According to a report at The College Fix, this time a woman insisting she wasn’t abused, that a bystander simply did not see the incident correctly, is having both her life and her boyfriend’s life ruined by USC:
Zoe Katz, the captain of USC’s women’s tennis team, is accusing the university of not only ignoring her protestations that her boyfriend Matt Boermeester didn’t assault her, but threatening her for speaking up.
Boermeester, a redshirt junior kicker, was suspended from USC in February after a neighbor saw the football player allegedly assault Katz a month earlier. That claim was repeated to a coach and then to the university Title IX office, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The following “six-month” Title IX inquiry took the form of “repeated interrogations” plagued by “agendas, intimidation and falsehoods,” Katz wrote in a two-page statement dated Sunday given to The College Fix from her attorney.
Remember, folks, we were told that women should always be believed. Apparently, there is a caveat: a woman should not be believed if she claims nothing happened.
Katz argues she was bullied by the administration when she refused to present her boyfriend as a horrible abuser:
“I was told that I must be afraid of Matt, which I definitely was not and am not,” Katz wrote in her statement denouncing USC. “When I told the truth about Matt, in repeated interrogations, I was stereotyped and was told I must be a ‘battered’ woman, and that made me feel demeaned and absurdly profiled.”
Instead she fears “further” retaliation from USC’s Title IX office, which she says isolated her by prohibiting her from speaking with Boermeester and even her own friends:
Terrible and untrue things have been said about Matt by people who don’t even know him, including apparently the third party who contacted Title IX, and these bizarre assertions have been treated as fact in this investigation. Words, including mine, have been incompetently or intentionally misrepresented, misquoted and taken out of context, which should not be that surprising since no statements were recorded or verified.
Look, I get that campuses want to deal harshly with campus rape and dating violence. I also understand that some battered partners don’t want to admit they were abused.
But you know who else doesn’t want to admit being abused? People who were never abused.
This is just one more reason why the United States affords due process, an idea that advocates of using Title IX for such instances actually thought could be improved upon. Anything can happen in these instances: someone well-meaning could see something innocent yet make incorrect assumptions, and then make an accusation that is completely unjust. Innocent until proven guilty is obviously the way to go.
Instead, it appears USC has caused real trauma by abandoning our Constitutional principles. Let’s hope that, if Boermeester is eventually cleared, that USC gets what’s coming to them from this couple.
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