Here's a crazy case involving an allegation of sexual harassment. It involves two Michigan State University students who were on-and-off lovers.
Laura Berman writes in Bridge, an online magazine:
The couple, who did not want their real names used, had met up on Memorial Day weekend in 2014 for a sexual rendezvous near the young woman’s home in Canton.
A few hours after having sex, “Nathan” reached under her blouse and attempted to touch her breast. When he was rebuked, he removed his hand immediately. Both students agree that’s what happened.
What followed wasn't pretty, Berman recounts:
For more than two years, the parents of a male undergraduate student had waged an expensive legal battle to clear their son’s disciplinary record at MSU. He’d been found in violation of the university’s sexual misconduct policy for touching his on-and-off girlfriend’s breast in the hours after the couple had engaged in sex.
For that, the student had been put on “indefinite” probation, restricted in visiting the campus after graduation, and endured the stigma of a sexual misconduct violation on this record ‒ a blot that threatened his ability to get a job after leaving school. It was not until late February of this year, after being threatened with a lawsuit, that MSU quietly agreed to clear the student’s record.
The female student saw it as intimate touching without explicit consent – a betrayal, and potential violation of MSU sexual misconduct policy. Fifteen months after the incident, she registered a formal complaint with MSU. By that time, Bridge writes, the female student was transitioning to become a man, and was taking male hormones.
The findings of MSU investigators were riddled with legal inconsistencies, Berman writes.
“It was a mistake that was easily correctable. I just think it was a dysfunction,” attorney Deborah Gordon, who was hired by the parents of the accused student to clear his record, tells Bridge. “Maybe part and parcel of a bigger picture… I’d say it was an extreme over-correction. But even more than that, it was just bizarre.”
Finally in a Feb. 22 settlement, MSU expunged the man's disciplinary record reimbursed $10,000 in legal fees – a fraction of what the student’s parents said they paid.
The male student's mother sees an expensive ordeal that hurt her son’s grades, his self-confidence and his “entire senior year. “He will never get that time back,” she tells Bridge.
