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Blog and Media Roundup - Tuesday, December 15, 2015; News Roundup
Topic Started: Dec 15 2015, 05:05 AM (425 Views)
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http://www.heraldsun.com/news/concerns-arise-about-transparency-during-forum/article_0d313f24-a2d4-11e5-8f3a-a7dbad8bfc07.html

Concerns arise about transparency during forum

Lauren Horsch 7 hrs ago

DURHAM -- A crowd of nearly 35 spoke at the Holton Career and Resource Center on Monday nightto give their input into who should be the city’s next chief of police.
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http://www.cotwa.info/2015/12/false-allegations-and-ucmj.html

Monday, December 14, 2015
False Allegations and the UCMJ
Reggie Yager, a Major in the Air Force Judge Advocate General Corps, has written an extremely thorough article about false allegations and sexual assault prosecutions under the UCMJ. Before Senators McCaskill and Gillibrand focused on the sexual assault epidemic that plagued universities, they were highly entrenched in the invisible war of sexual violence plaguing the military. I would hope that a military law review would reach out to Major Yager and publish this article.

Major Yager begins his article with a discussion about the mob mentality when it comes to sexual assault and how statistics can be manipulated into creating a solution in search of a problem. He moves on to the consequences that occur when a wrongly accused individual is convicted and how prevalent false allegations are. Once he provides example after example of wrongful convictions based on false allegations, he addresses the studies on the rates of false allegations and shows how the reported false allegation rate of 2% to 10% is unreliable.

Major Yager finishes his article with recommendations on who to improve the UCMJ to protect the innocent wrongly accused. Congress has spent 10 years dismantling the protections provided to accused Servicemembers that helped to ensure that false accusations do not turn into wrongful convictions. This article is a great resource to show the evolution of sexual assault prosecutions in the military and how the lessons learned could be coming to a DA's office or College disciplinary board near you. This is a courageous undertaking and COTWA salutes Major Yager for sharing this informative article on the Social Science Research Network. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2697788.
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http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/12/14/fnc-report-college-sex-crime-courts-dismiss-due-process/

FNC Report: College Sex Crime ‘Courts’ Dismiss Due Process

by Dr. Susan Berry14 Dec 2015115

Male college students accused of rape after casual alcohol and sex hook-ups have been handed over to campus feminist sex crime “courts” that provide little to nothing in the way of due process.

In Fox News Reporting: The Truth About Sex & College, host Martha MacCallum explores the so-called “rape epidemic” on college campuses that has been hyped by President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and other political leaders such as Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)
8%
– who invited mattress-carrying rape accuser and sex tape producer Emma Sulkowicz to the State of the Union address in January.

Militant feminist professors and administrators at schools such as Occidental College have used a “guidance” letter sent out by Obama’s Department of Education, which threatens to strip federal funding from colleges that do not treat accusations of sexual assault according to its own politicized perspective, to form their own tribunals. These “courts,” however, have charged the students facing them without allowing them the advice of counsel of their own and the opportunity to face their accuser or to introduce relevant evidence such as texts that suggest a consensual sexual relationship.

Senior attorney at Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and former U.S. Education Department attorney Hans Bader appeared in the special report.

“The Obama administration is misdirecting federal rape awareness funding by focusing on colleges rather than other settings where the rape rate is much, much higher, based on a fictional campus rape epidemic,” he observes to Breitbart News in an email statement. “The net result is to shortchange rape victims who need help.”

n an April 4, 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR)…declared that schools cannot use a clear-and-convincing standard of proof typical in school disciplinary procedures for sexual harassment or sexual assault cases,” Bader noted in a prior Examiner article, observing the Department’s insistence on the use of the “preponderance of evidence” standard to resolve these cases.

“’Preponderance of the evidence’ means that if a school thinks there is as little as a 51 per[cent] chance that the accused is guilty, the accused must still be disciplined,” he wrote, adding, “The Education Department’s position was based on a mistaken understanding of who is subject to Title IX, the federal law banning schools from committing sex discrimination. Title IX’s requirements apply to schools, not individual students.”

Writing at National Review, Kevin Williamson notes the rape rate – across all age categories, including young people – has actually declined by 64% over the last 20 years.

“President Obama, who gives every indication of being committed to the bitter end to his belief in the omnipotence of his merest utterance, gave a speech in which he affirmed his position that rape is wicked and that we should discourage it,” Williamson writes. “Instead of giving a content-free speech, he should have directed his Department of Justice to put together some definitive data on the question.”

He continues:

The fictitious rape epidemic is necessary to support the fiction of ‘rape culture,’ by which feminists mean anything other than an actual rape culture, for example the culture of the Pakistani immigrant community in Rotherham in the United Kingdom. ‘Rape culture’ simply means speech or thought that feminists disapprove of and wish to suppress, and the concept has been deployed in the cause of, inter alia, bringing disciplinary action against a Harvard student who wrote a satire of feminist rhetoric, forbidding politically unpopular speakers from speaking on campuses, and encouraging what often has turned out to be headlong and grotesquely unjust rushes to judgment, as in the case of the Duke lacrosse team. Feminism is about political power, and not the Susan B. Anthony (‘positively voted the Republican ticket — straight’) full-citizenship model of political power but rather one dominated by a very small band of narrow ideologues still operating under the daft influence of such theorists as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, each of whom in her way equated political opposition to feminism with rape.

The fact that many of these so-called campus “sex crimes” occur after a night of heavy drinking and subsequent poor judgment on the part of both parties is also spun by college campus feminists to favor their politics rather than to finding usable information.

Williamson notes:

For example, feminists energetically protest that advising women to take such precautionary measures as moderating their alcohol intake at college parties is a species of rape-culture victim-blaming (rather than reasonable advice), and so it is no surprise that, as the DoJ notes, many surveys inquire of rape victims whether they believed their attackers to have been under the influence of drugs or alcohol but decline to ask the victims whether they were under the influence. Evidence very strongly suggests that rapists frequently use intoxicants, openly or surreptitiously, as part of a strategy conceived with malice aforethought to render their victims vulnerable. It might be useful to know how often this is the case and how often it works or fails to work, but we will not know if we refuse to ask the question.

“But if your interest were in making opposition to feminist political priorities a quasi-criminal offense and using the horrific crime of rape as a cultural and political cudgel, then you’d be doing about what we’re doing right now,” Williamson concludes.
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http://411mania.com/movies/bill-cosby-sues-sexual-assault-accusers-for-defamation/

Bill Cosby Sues Sexual Assault Accusers For Defamation
December 14, 2015 | Posted by Jeremy Thomas

Bill Cosby is firing back at seven of the many women who have accused him of sexual assault. Cosby filed a defamation lawsuit today against Tamara Green, Therese Serignese, Linda Traitz, Louisa Moritz, Barbara Bowman, Joan Tarshis and Angela Leslie according to his lawyer, Monique Pressley. Pressley revealed the news in a post on Twitter:

The suit claims that the seven women, all of whom have filed suits against Cosby for his alleged assaults, made made “malicious, opportunistic and false and defamatory accusations of sexual misconduct against him” and “knowingly published false statements and accusations.”

Cosby is also being sued for defamation by Janice Dickinson and over sexual assault allegations by Judy Huth, neither of whom were named in the lawsuit. Gloria Allred, Huth’s attorney, told HuffPost, “Bill Cosby appears to be going to war against women who have sued him in Massachusetts and who allege that he has victimized them. Although I do not represent the women in that case, I do believe that in general that such a tactic will not deter courageous women from fighting the battle against him.”

Cosby has been accused by over fifty women in the last year of sexual assault and misconduct over a period of the last thirty-plus years.
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http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/12/14/sexual-assault-campus

Sexual Assault Survivors Are Asking: Campus or Courtroom?

A debate about whether victims and the accused are better served by schools' disciplinary procedures or by the criminal justice system arises.

Dec 14, 2015
Rebecca McCray is a staff writer covering social justice. A former Fulbright scholar, she is based in New York.


When Stanford University released its campus climate survey in October, the school reported that an average of 1.9 percent of students had been sexually assaulted on campus during their time there. Amid numerous high-profile sexual violence cases on college campuses across the country in the past few years, Stanford’s numbers look good at first glance—too good, and too low, according to student activists.

“The report skewed and obscured the numbers to hide the prevalence of sexual assault on campus,” Tessa Ormenyi, an activist and a 2015 Stanford graduate, told TakePart. Because male students experience sexual violence at a much lower rate than do women, by averaging the responses from all students, the survey dragged down and obfuscated the real rate of sexual violence that female students experience, Ormenyi says.
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The reality is that 4.7 percent of undergraduate women respondents reported sexual assault, and another 32.9 percent reported having been subject to “sexual misconduct”—a separate category the university created to encompass all nonconsensual sexual contact, including oral sex, penetration with a foreign object, or groping. Those acts fall outside the scope of California’s criminal rape and sexual offense statutes, which the survey’s designers used to define assault. Victims who experienced repeated attacks were only counted once.

FULL COVERAGE: How 2015 Changed the Future

The Stanford study is just one example of the many factors that make it difficult to quantify the scope of the sexual violence problem on college campuses. While awareness of the issue rose to the forefront in 2015, the hard work of assessing the true scale of the problem has posed challenges for those looking to prescribe a cure. Differing definitions of assault, underreporting by survivors of violence who fear stigmatization, and reluctance by college administrators to accurately measure a number that could damage their reputation all play into the challenge of collecting data that accurately illustrates the problem. Even when the numbers come together, colleges then face the next hurdle: How should these complex and sensitive accusations be addressed, and how can administrators protect the rights of both the accused and the survivor?

Tessa Ormenyi. (Photo: Michael Short)

Activists all over the country organized in 2015 to hold administrations accountable for addressing reports of sexual assault and making campuses safer. As colleges and universities worked to find the best way to respond to reports, a new survey from the Association of American Universities, a nonprofit association of research universities, reported that nearly one in four female undergraduate students had experienced sexual assault since enrolling in college. By mid-July, more than 100 colleges were under investigation by the Department of Education for alleged mishandling of student reports of sexual assault.

Meanwhile, concern for the rights of the accused during campus adjudication processes remained central for an opposing camp, which pushes for reports of sexual misconduct and assault occurring on campus to be relayed directly to law enforcement.

New York state will try a third way that could yield results in 2016 and beyond: Legislation Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed in July allots $4.5 million for a new police unit that will attempt to address the concerns of both sides—those who want school officials to do a better job of addressing sexual violence and those who want to see all such matters referred to the police. Senior investigators in what's being referred to as the sexual assault victims unit will be trained to handle and investigate sexual assault cases and to support survivors on campus, and will be assigned to troops statewide. The unit will offer forensic services to college campus police, and will offer training to college campus communities, according to the new law, called “Enough Is Enough.” (As of early December, the new unit was still in its nascent phases and had not taken on any cases, a state police spokesperson told TakePart.)

We consistently hear that if survivors were required to report to police, most of them would choose not to report al all.
Zoe Ridolfi-Starr, deputy director, Know Your IX

Survivors’ advocates are not optimistic, however, citing the low rates of reporting rape by nonstudents, and of convictions in cases that are reported. Just 26 percent of sexual assaults and 36 percent of rapes are reported to police, according to the National Institute of Justice. Research shows that survivors of sexual violence do not report their experiences for a variety of reasons: embarrassment, fear of stigmatization, and a low degree of confidence in a favorable outcome. Federally funded research found an average of just 14 to 18 percent of sexual assault cases are prosecuted, and 18 percent of incidents reported to police result in a conviction.

Even as schools have been failing at protecting female students, says Soraya Chemaly, a feminist writer and activist who has extensively researched and spoken about campus sexual assault, “The experts in the criminal justice system frankly often aren’t well equipped to deal with this either. We already know how hostile those spaces can be for people who go and report.”
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But it’s equally clear that many colleges are ignoring reports of sexual assault or letting assailants off with a proverbial slap on the wrist. In response, the federal Safe Campus Act, introduced in Congress in July, takes the adjudication process out of schools’ hands altogether and requires alleged victims to go through the traditional channels of the criminal justice system. The bill is under review by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

“I don’t see any evidence that campuses are doing a good job or will do a good job at handling these cases,” Jeannie Suk, a professor of criminal law at Harvard University, says. “If you treat sexual crimes differently than other serious crimes, it sends a message that these crimes are not as important. Just as we would for any other serious felony, we should involve the police.” While Suk does not support eliminating universities’ power to investigate and punish sex crimes, she believes campus adjudication systems are significantly less effective than the criminal justice system.

But many in the survivor-focused advocacy community say requiring schools to share reports of campus sexual assault with police, as the proposed federal bill does, would make the problem even worse.

Zoe Ridolfi-Starr (right) supporting activist Emma Sulkowicz at a 'Carry That Weight' protest. (Photo: Jo Chiang/Facebook)

“We consistently hear that if survivors were required to report to police, most of them would choose not to report at all,” says Zoe Ridolfi-Starr, deputy director of the survivor advocacy organization Know Your IX, which focuses on holding schools accountable under the law that requires them to protect women and minorities from civil rights violations, known as Title IX.

Survivor-focused groups are unilaterally opposed to the Safe Campus Act. Know Your IX instead supports a bill introduced in June by Democratic Reps. Jackie Speier of California and Patrick Meehan of Pennsylvania, which would amend the Higher Education Act to allow students to sue their college or university if they violate the Clery Act, which requires colleges and universities to publish crime statistics and annual security reports. It would also provide $5 million in additional funding to the Education Department to enforce it and Title IX.
Related
Forget the ‘Rolling Stone’ Debacle: At UVA, 38 Reports of Sexual Violence, 0 Expulsions Last Year

In early November, the National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic Violence Against Women organized more than 200 such groups to sign on to a letter to all members of the House of Representatives, arguing that options for survivors should be expanded, rather than limited, to encourage reporting.

Underreporting is unavoidable no matter who handles campus sexual assault cases, according to Suk. “I do not believe these little things around the edges like whether or not the police are going to be called are the things that keep people from reporting,” she says. “There’s underreporting for many crimes.”

But according to Ridolfi-Starr, survivors who work with Know Your IX have explicitly expressed discomfort at the idea of reporting to law enforcement—particularly women of color, LGTB students, and undocumented students.
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Ormenyi, Chemaly, and Ridolfi-Starr all say they can’t point to a single campus that meets all of the best practices they’d like to see.

“When thinking about who’s doing this best, we need to see longevity, and in many places, we don’t have it,” says Ormenyi.

As campuses fumble in the nascent stages of adopting new adjudication processes or coming to resolutions with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights as a result of their investigations, students are left waiting for a solution. The New York special police unit aims to be that solution, but for now, says Chemaly, “there is nowhere [for survivors] to go. The same problems that exist in courtrooms and in the criminal justice system exist on campuses too.”
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http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/14/professors-threatened-with-investigation-for-questioning-rape-documentary/

Professors Threatened With Investigation For Questioning Rape Documentary

Posted By Blake Neff On 9:30 PM 12/14/2015 In | No Comments

A group of Harvard professors who criticized the campus rape documentary “The Hunting Ground” are being menaced with the possibility of a Title IX sexual harassment investigation intended to silence their criticisms.

“The Hunting Ground,” released early this year, portrays American college campuses as hotbeds of sexual assault where administrators routinely allow perpetrators to get off scot-free. The film has attracted a great deal of criticism, though, both for the data it relies on and for the individual stories it uses to portray the campus rape epidemic. (RELATED: CNN’s New Rape Documentary Relies On Myths, Not Facts)

Last month, a group of 19 Harvard Law School professors published an open letter denouncing it as a “propaganda” film in advance of its airing on CNN. In particular, the professors criticized the film for its treatment of Brandon Winston, a Harvard law student whom the film treats as almost certainly guilty of raping fellow student Kamilah Willingham. In fact, a criminal grand jury failed to even indict Willingham of a sex crime, indicating a severe lack of evidence against him. (RELATED: Harvard Profs Denounce CNN Rape Documentary As ‘Propaganda’)

Now, though, activists appear to be searching for a way to have the professors silenced by the federal government for criticizing their film.

The activists’ weapon of choice is Title IX, the federal law barring gender discrimination in education. In recent years, the Obama administration has used Title IX to pressure schools on the topic of sexual assault, on the grounds that if a school doesn’t do enough to prevent sexual violence, it is denying women the equal opportunity to participate in education by creating a “hostile environment.” But activists are looking to be even more aggressive, essentially arguing those who counter their narrative are creating a “hostile environment” that amounts to sexual harassment and therefore violates Title IX.

The first sign of this line of thought emerged two weeks ago in a Harvard Crimson article discussing a website set up to defend Winston and argue he is innocent of the accusations against him. The article includes a statement from Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, the director and producer, respectively, of “The Hunting Ground,” who sharply attack the Harvard professors who signed the letter defending Winston.

“The Harvard Law professors’ letter is irresponsible and raises an important question about whether the very public bias these professors have shown in favor of an assailant contributes to a hostile climate at Harvard Law,” the two write. That precise wording is important, because allowing a “hostile climate” is one way a school can be found in violation of Title IX. In other words, Dick and Ziering are suggesting professors critical of their film should be investigated and potentially punished for their statements on pain of Harvard losing all federal funding.

Last Friday, further evidence that activists are seeking to use the federal government to silence critics emerged in an article written by Harvard professor Jeannie Suk for The New Yorker. Suk, who signed November’s open letter, said a high-level administrator at Harvard told her several people inquired about filing a Title IX complaint against the professors.

“A handful of students have said that they feel unsafe at Harvard because of the professors’ statement about the film,” Suk writes. “If a Title IX complaint were filed and an investigation launched, the professors wouldn’t be permitted to speak about it, as that could be considered ‘retaliation’ against those who filed the complaint, which would violate the campus sexual-harassment policy.” In other words, even if the professors are not found responsible for violating Title IX, a mere complaint could be a potent weapon for activists to silence on-campus critics.

It may seem bizarre, but there is actually precedent for just such an investigation. Earlier this year, Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis authored an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education recounting her own “Title IX inquisition.” Kipnis published an essay criticizing a recent university ban on romantic relationships between students and faculty, and shortly after was subjected to a months-long investigation by the school after students accused her essay of, by itself, creating a “hostile environment.” Kipnis was eventually cleared.
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https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2015/12/14/stgeorges/QBq1IfsItk6relwmPQJbRP/story.html

Former student forces R.I. prep school to confront its past
By Bella English Globe Staff December 14, 2015

Anne Scott entered St. George’s School as a 10th-grader in 1977, just a few years after the prestigious prep school first admitted girls at its campus in Middletown, R.I. She was a good student, and a three-sport athlete, from the suburbs of Wilmington, Del.

But a month after she arrived, a field hockey injury brought her into the orbit of the school’s longtime athletic trainer. He molested and raped her, and threatened to come after her if she told anyone.

For years, terrified and ashamed, she did not. Finally, in her mid-20s, her life a shambles of diagnoses and hospitalizations, she told her parents, who took her to see Eric MacLeish, an attorney who would later gain renown representing abuse victims of Catholic priests. It was his first sexual abuse case.

MacLeish filed a lawsuit seeking $10 million, but when the school pushed back aggressively, Scott backed off — and moved abroad to rebuild her life.

This year, almost 40 years after she first arrived at St. George’s, Anne Scott felt strong enough to pursue her unfinished business with St. George’s.

Reunited with MacLeish, she has sought not money but accountability from the school — an end to what she and her attorney call a pattern of coverup and denial concerning the alleged sexual assaults of multiple students at the school in the 1970s and 1980s. They have urged the school to launch an investigation, to inform alumni of its findings, and to set up a therapy fund for victims.

“This was the school’s dirty secret,” said MacLeish. “They’re an educational institution with a mission statement of respect and compassion, and they acted in a way that is completely at odds with that.”

St. George’s officials didn’t act immediately on Scott’s demand, but they did act. Months after MacLeish and Scott voiced their concerns — and shortly after the Globe contacted the school for comment on the case — officials sent a letter on Nov. 2 to alumni saying they had received “multiple credible reports of sexual misconduct at the school, ranging from unprofessional behaviors to outright sexual assault” by former employees. It also named Scott’s assailant.

It was a breakthrough moment. Scott’s courage has moved others to come forward this fall with their stories and their sorrows. And as the school completes its investigation, the full measure of this dark chapter may soon be known.

. . .
Anne Scott, photographed in the Cambridge office of her lawyer Eric MacLeish.

SUZANNE KREITER/GLOBE STAFF

Anne Scott, photographed in the Cambridge office of her lawyer Eric MacLeish.

Founded in 1896, St. George’s has educated several Astors and Vanderbilts, Howard Dean, and Prescott Bush, father of President George H.W. Bush. Today, it has 365 students in Grades 9 through 12 and charges $56,000 annual tuition for boarders.

It is the latest in a string of New England prep schools that have had to deal with allegations of sexual impropriety, including Deerfield Academy, Fessenden, and the Berkshire School.

At St. George’s, in the fall of 1977, Anne Scott had been sent for treatment of her back to Al Gibbs, the gruff, cigarette-smoking athletic trainer, who began to assault her in his locked training room. He told her that if she reported him to anyone, he would come after her and that she “would be in trouble,” according to court papers. When she objected, “the trainer threatened to send a note to her coach and adviser, requiring that [she] return for ‘treatments.’ ”
Al Gibbs, in a 1980 yearbook photo.

ST. GEORGE’S SCHOOL

Al Gibbs, in a 1980 yearbook photo.

Her grades dropped. She called her parents begging to come home. For a while, she simply stopped talking. “I just kind of stopped caring,” Scott said.

Her sister Liz, who is four years older, recalls those days vividly. “I remember we sent off a happy, healthy, vibrant girl and when she came home for Thanksgiving, she was definitely changed. She was withdrawn, anxious, obviously upset, but we didn’t have any idea why. It was very scary for the family.”

She returned to school and, Scott said, the assaults resumed.

According to her therapist’s affidavit in the 1989 lawsuit, she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociative disorder, anorexia, bulimia, and major depression because of the assaults and was hospitalized several times between 1983 and 1987.

When she filed her suit against the school, Scott faced a different kind of pain, in the tactics of St. George’s lawyers. They told the court that Scott either could be lying or could have had consensual sex with the trainer, who was 67 years old when the assaults began. She was 15.

Court records revealed that four other girls had told school authorities that Gibbs had also molested them, MacLeish said.

School attorneys also sought to change it from a “Jane Doe” case and reveal Scott’s real name. “Maybe people will come forward and say the plaintiff is a, with all due respect to those in the court, has a tendency to lie, and that would be relevant, also,” said defense attorney William P. Robinson III of the Providence firm Edwards & Angell. (In 2004, Robinson was appointed to the Rhode Island Supreme Court. Robinson did not return calls from the Globe.)

But Judge Jacob Hagopian of the US District Court in Rhode Island denied the school’s motion to dismiss and admonished its attorneys that the teenager could not consent to such “detestable” acts. “It violates the criminal laws of the United States,” he said.

In the end, it was Scott who dropped the case. School attorneys had investigated and deposed her parents and were preparing to depose neighbors. “I was 27 years old, I had struggled, and then they came down on my family like a ton of bricks,” she said. “I just wanted it all to go away.”

St. George’s would not agree to the dismissal unless Scott signed a gag order that prohibited her from speaking about the case. MacLeish advised against it.

“The school did everything they could to intimidate Anne,” said MacLeish, of the Cambridge law firm of Clark, Hunt, Ahern & Embry. “It worked.”

. . .
The school has 365 students in grades 9 through 12.

Stew Milne for The Boston Globe

The school has 365 students in grades 9 through 12.

After she dropped the suit, Scott, who had earned a PhD in folklore and anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, moved overseas. She and MacLeish lost touch.

But the case continued to haunt him. Over the years, he tried to find Scott, who was working in maternal health in the West Bank, in HIV/AIDS prevention in Senegal and Bot-swana, and for a nonprofit in Indonesia. Independently, MacLeish, himself an alumnus of St. George’s, contacted the school in 2012, writing current headmaster Eric Peterson about the lawsuit he had filed concerning events at the school under former headmaster Tony Zane.

Around the same time, in 2012 or 2013, Peterson heard from another alumna. “She had been abused by Mr. Gibbs,” he said in an interview. “She asked for help with counseling costs and we gave it.”

In 2013, Scott returned to the United States. She now runs a nonprofit in Virginia. “I’ve worked very hard to get strong,” said Scott, who is 52. “You live with it and you get better at managing it, but the damage runs deep.”

At Scott’s and MacLeish’s urging, the school sent two letters to alumni, in April and August, saying it was launching an investigation into possible sexual misconduct. Scott and MacLeish told the school that the letters failed to give specifics or offer relief to victims.

But the most recent letter, sent Nov. 2 and signed by Peterson and board chair Leslie Heaney, finally named Gibbs, who died at 86 in 1996. It also said there were two other perpetrators who no longer live in Rhode Island, but did not identify them.

The letter apologized for what happened and for the school’s failure to respond. It also said it will establish a fund for counseling costs related to the sex abuse and will arrange victims’ support gatherings.

Scott said that for her, the latest letter resolves the major issues. “I was really heartened by it and sensed a shift toward action and clear, concrete steps,” she said.

But she and MacLeish question the independence of the school’s investigation, which is being conducted by attorney Will Hannum, whose law partner is St. George’s legal counsel. “It’s an inherent conflict of interests,” MacLeish said.

Harvard Law professor Larry Lessig, who has known Scott since they were students at Penn, has signed on as co-counsel to MacLeish. Lessig, who was abused by the choir director as a student at the American Boychoir School in Princeton, N.J., said St. George’s needs to make therapy support “immediately available and not filtered through a lawyer.”

Scott said it took Hannum more than a month to respond to her request for therapy costs, and when he did, on Dec. 9, he said that she “may be eligible” for assistance, and asked for documentation.

Scott was upset. “It’s distressing on so many levels to submit to the school’s authority to make a determination on whether or not they will reimburse me . . . I’d rather pass than place the school in that position of power over me ever again.”

Peterson, who arrived at the school in 2004, said he hopes the investigation will conclude by the year’s end. He told the Globe that the two unnamed perpetrators were male faculty members who had left the school by 1988, and that their victims were male. According to his letter, the school is working with law enforcement “with respect to next steps” regarding them.

“The heart of the issue for me is that the school today is trying to do what’s right and trying to help alumni who need it,” he told the Globe. He declined to say how many victims have come forward since he sent out the letter.

After the school’s first letter in April, Peterson told MacLeish that tens of women came forward to complain about Gibbs, a fact that Peterson confirmed to the Globe, though he says not all were “firsthand reports.”

But one firsthand report came from Katie Wales, class of 1980, who went to see Gibbs after a horseback riding injury. He began to molest her and took photos of her naked in the school’s whirlpool, she says, which he then circulated among the boys at school.

“The taunting by the boys was horrible,” said Wales, 53, who lives in Granby, Conn. She said she went to see Zane in 1979 about Gibbs. “He told me I was crazy, making it up to get attention, and that I had to see the school shrink,” Wales said.

Zane says today that he believed Wales at the time, but thought that she came to him in confidence and “didn’t authorize me to go to Al Gibbs.” He added: “Gibbs declared his innocence until the end, so I was operating on hearsay.”

But Wales said that after the experience, her school life was miserable, and she began drinking and smoking marijuana. By the end of her senior year, she was into heavier drugs, and the week before graduation, she was expelled. “This whole thing kind of screwed me up,” said Wales.

When she got the school letter in April, Wales reported her experience to Hannum and has met with Peterson. She also posted a comment on Facebook. Among the alumnae who responded was Joan Reynolds.

Reynolds, class of 1979, was 13 years old when she entered St. George’s as a freshman. Now 54, she is a teacher who lives in Idaho and shared her story with the Globe — a story she said she had told no one but her husband and, recently, St. George’s.

Her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were St. George’s alumni. Her father was director of development and alumni affairs at the school, her mother was director of day student affairs, and Reynolds lived on campus with them. The Reynolds family has for 35 years sponsored an annual scholarship at the school.

Reynolds played three sports, and sometimes her female coach would send her to Gibbs. “She’d say, ‘Al wants to see you for hamstrings,’ or this or that,” Reynolds said. There was no girls’ locker room; Gibbs’s training room was next to the boys’ locker room. All three women who spoke to the Globe recalled the sound of Gibbs locking the door behind them.

When she was first sent to Gibbs, Reynolds said, he started off by showing her how to “properly dry” her breasts. “He’d talk about what a good athlete I was, how I had to get healthy for these games. He’d tell me to strip down. There was this metal hot tub and he’d hang the towel far away. He would hug you, these suffocating hugs.”

Reynolds refused to take off her underwear; Gibbs never raped her, she says, but groped her on the training table. This went on periodically for two years, she said — until she got her first boyfriend, a strong athletic type.

After graduation, Reynolds moved out west, cutting all ties with the school. When, at her mother’s urging, she returned to campus for the first time in 2006 to be inducted into St. George’s sports hall of fame, she became physically ill.

. . .
The Zane dormitory at St. George’s School.

Stew Milne for The Boston Globe

The Zane dormitory at St. George’s School.

Zane, now 85 and living in New Bedford, said after he heard from students about Gibbs, he fired him in 1980. “He was doing things he shouldn’t have done as a trainer,” Zane said.

He did not, however, report the incidents to law enforcement, as required by law. Asked why not, he responded, “Was that true in Rhode Island in 1980?”

By 1967, MacLeish said, all 50 states had mandatory reporting laws about child abuse, which means Zane was required to call child protective services and the police. “If that had occurred, then Gibbs would have been stopped, treatment would have been provided to children, and a tremendous amount of human suffering would have been avoided,” MacLeish said.

In 2002, St. George’s named a new girls’ dorm after Zane.

Asked about the school’s aggressive response to Scott’s lawsuit, Zane said: “Instead of bringing a lawsuit against the school, she could have called me up and said, this happened to me. Don’t blame us for trying to defend ourselves against a $10 million lawsuit.”

Gibbs would have been 70 when he left St. George’s. According to an obituary in the Providence Journal, he had previously spent 30 years in the Navy.

Though they appreciate that the newest letter names Gibbs, the women who have brought forward complaints are upset that it doesn’t mention Zane. They want Zane Dormitory renamed and his portrait removed from the dining hall.

“At the very least, they shouldn’t be enshrining him,” said Scott. “It undermines the credibility of what they’re doing.”

Peterson has met twice with Scott, who says she is grateful that he apologized to her.

Asked what he apologized for, he said: “I’m sorry she was hurt. I’m sorry she came away from the school with her experience with Gibbs and thereafter feeling the school didn’t care for her, because the school does. I’m sorry she was wounded in all the ways she was.”

Bella English can be reached at isobel.english@globe.com.
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http://www.salon.com/2015/12/15/disturbing_new_twist_in_chicagos_police_crisis_embattled_states_attorney_refused_to_prosecute_cops_who_admitted_to_perjury_obstruction_of_justice/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow


Tuesday, Dec 15, 2015 04:59 AM CST
Disturbing new twist in Chicago’s police crisis: Embattled state’s attorney refused to prosecute cop who admitted to perjury
Documents revealed to Salon show how State's Attorney Anita Alvarez killed an investigation into police perjury VIDEO
Daniel Denvir

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Topics: Video, anita alvarez, Chicago, Chicago Police, Laquan McDonald, police violence, police abuse, Police, Law enforcement, News, Politics News
Disturbing new twist in Chicago’s police crisis: Embattled state’s attorney refused to prosecute cop who admitted to perjury
Anita Alvarez (Credit: AP/M. Spencer Green/Photo montage by Salon)

In a meeting on July 24, 2012, Chicago Police Officer Allyson Bogdalek broke down and cried as she admitted to prosecutors the obvious: She had lied under oath in the case of a man accused of robbing a Back of the Yards liquor store and shooting the owner in the leg.

The victim of the shooting had picked the suspect, Ranceallen Hankerson, out of a lineup. But Officer Bogdalek lied on the stand during an April 13, 2011, hearing when she denied that the victim had been shown photographs of possible suspects prior to Hankerson’s arrest. In fact, the victim had been shown photos, and he had failed to pick Hankerson out—evidence that would have proven beneficial to the defense.

Prosecutors opened an investigation, and recommend indicting Bogdalek for perjury and other felonies, according to Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office files provided to Salon. In February 2014, however, the process came to a screeching halt: State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez overruled her subordinates and instructed them that no charges would be filed. The case, which until now has escaped much public notice, provides evidence to back charges that Alvarez, currently under fire for her handling of the fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald, protects officers accused of misconduct.

“It’s a powerful example of State’s Attorney Alvarez’s refusal to address systemic perjury by Chicago police,” says Craig Futterman, a civil rights attorney and professor at University of Chicago Law School who reviewed the case at Salon’s request.

Bogdalek’s lie had become clear at the 2011 hearing. After she testified that they had never shown the victim photos of possible suspects, Hankerson’s defense attorney played a recording from Bogdalek’s squad car, in which she can be heard asking a sergeant whether they should take Hankerson into custody given that the victim had failed to identify him in a photo array, meaning a group of photographs of potential suspects shown to a witness.


Bogdalek finally came clean more than a year later, after prosecutors asked her about the discrepancy as the case was about to go to trial. Not only had she lied, she stated, but police detectives, multiple superiors and her partner, Officer Dominick Catinella, had encouraged her to do so. She said that she had wanted to inventory the photo array but Catinella “wanted her to forget about it because it hurt the case,” according to the prosecutors’ summary.

Bogdalek and Catinella could not be reached for comment.

Futterman says that the case demonstrates that the “State’s Attorney has prioritized convictions over justice” and “numbers over truth,” a mind-set that deprives defendants of their rights and encourages the conviction of innocent people.

“Police perjury is so common here in Chicago that we call it testilying,” says Futterman. “The state’s attorney has relied on those very lies to win convictions.”

In a statement released to Salon, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office blamed judges and juries, saying that they decided not to prosecute Bogdalek because it is simply too hard to win convictions against police officers.

“This case underwent extensive legal analysis at all appropriate levels of the State’s Attorney’s Office,” emailed spokesperson Sally Daly. “That analysis included significant evaluation of both the strengths and weaknesses of this case and how those strengths and weaknesses would play out at trial.

We face a reality here in Cook County, and around the country, that it is extremely difficult to convince judges or juries to convict police officers of misconduct in the line of duty. The ultimate analysis in this case led to the determination that the State would not have been able to meet the legal standard that is required, which is proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

* * *

Bogdalek, according to the prosecutors’ account, was having a crisis of conscience over the lie—namely that it might get her into trouble. She asked two or three detectives (whom she claimed she could not identify) what to do. She claims they told her to “forget about it.” Bogdalek approached a supervisor, Sgt. John Ward, and asked him how they should handle the situation. She claimed that Ward called Catinella in, and asked if they had shown the victim a photo array. Catinella said they had not. She claimed that Sgt. Ward then announced that “the argument was settled,” and the photo array was not inventoried.

“This had been bothering her since it first happened and even more since she testified,” Bogdalek told prosecutors on July 24, 2012, according to their summary account. “Photos had, in fact, been shown to [the victim] at his home and [the victim] could not identify Hankerson from the photos. When the defendant was placed into custody, she tried to talking [sic] to a Sergeant about the photos but the Sergeant and CPO Catinella told her to never mention the negative photo array again…She has asked several superiors what to do, including two Sergeants and a Lieutenant, and they told her not to say anything.”

Officer Bogdalek CCSAO files

A sergeant, said Bogdalek, finally advised her to tell the truth. She appeared to be under severe pressure. She claimed that she was afraid, and said that she was being called a “bitch” because she kept on discussing the photos.

It is unclear, however, if prosecutors ever mounted a substantial investigation into Ward, or into the unnamed others who allegedly encouraged her to lie. Reached by phone, someone who identified themselves as Sgt. Ward responded, “No comment, thank you,” and hung up.

Futterman says that, judging by the documents, prosecutors did not seem to be interested in investigating the higher-ups’ complicity. Nor did they seem inclined, he says, to investigate Bogdalek’s perjury when it first became obvious, after she was contradicted by video evidence at the 2011 hearing.

Today, protesters are demanding that Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez resign, angry that she took more than a year to charge Officer Jason Van Dyke in the killing of Laquan McDonald—and that she did so only after a judge ordered a video of the killing released. Save for that video evidence, the killing likely would have been covered up: Five officers on the scene gave apparently false statements contradicted by the video and supporting the account offered by the shooter, Officer Van Dyke, according to the Tribune. None of those officers, according to the paper, have been disciplined.

The Bogdalek case, says Futterman, shows why police officers operate on the assumption that they will not be held accountable for their misconduct.

* * *

After Officer Bogdalek admitted to committing perjury in July 2012, prosecutors confronted her partner, Officer Catinella. Catinella initially denied that they had shown the victim a photo array. But pressed by Bogdalek, he relented, putting “his head down and apologized for lying to” prosecutors, “admitting that there were photos shown to [the victim] and that [the victim] had failed to identify the defendant.”

The police lies forced prosecutors to drop charges against Hankerson, and explore filing them against the lying officers.

In a confidential memo dated Dec. 20, 2013, Assistant State’s Attorney Lauren Freeman requested permission to indict Bogdalek on felony charges including perjury, and offer Catinella a deal allowing him to plead to a misdemeanor charge in exchange for his cooperation. The memo, which did note that winning a conviction against Bogdalek would be difficult without Catinella’s cooperation, was addressed to three senior Cook County prosecutors: Jack Blakey, then chief of the office’s special prosecutions bureau and now a federal judge; Mike Golden, deputy chief of the bureau; and William Delaney, supervisor of the professional standards unit.

According to a tersely worded document, Alvarez’s decision to shut down the prosecution was conveyed to Assistant State’s Attorney Freeman on Feb. 26, 2014. No written explanation was given.

“Alvarez gives the direct order not to prosecute anyone,” says Futterman. “Any wonder why Chicago police officers believe that they can abuse poor black and brown Chicago residents with impunity?”

The case did have some weaknesses. Most important, the shooting victim insisted that he had never been shown a photo array. And today’s acquittal of Chicago police Cmdr. Glenn Evans is a reminder that convincing a judge to convict a police officer can be quite tough. Evans was accused of shoving his gun down a man’s throat and pressing a taser against his groin. Judge Diane Cannon dismissed the fact that the victim’s DNA was on Evans’ gun as “of fleeting relevance or significance,” according to the Tribune.

But Officer Catinella, in his discussion with prosecutors, strongly suggested that the victim had been lying at his direction.

Catinella, according to the file, told Assistant State’s Attorney Natosha Cuyler-Sherman “that if he could talk to [the victim], [he] would admit that he was shown the photographs.” The prosecutor told Catinella “that this was unnecessary and would be handled another way.”

Shortly after that meeting, Catinella called Cuyler-Sherman “and again apologized for lying.”

The victim could not be reached for comment. The liquor store where he was robbed and shot is now closed

* * *

Bogdalek is currently assigned to administrative duties, according to the Chicago Police Department, pending the outcome of an investigation that apparently is still not complete more than 21 months after the state’s attorney closed its case.
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Meanwhile, Catinella remains on regular patrol duty. That typically means that an officer is making arrests and testifying in court. It is unclear if the State’s Attorney’s Office has a policy of disclosing Catinella’s admitted lying to defense attorneys in such cases, as would be required by the rules governing discovery.

The documents came to light as a result of separate civil rights suits filed by attorney Jared Kosoglad on behalf of members of a family who say they were assaulted and wrongfully arrested by Bogdalek and other officers in 2008. Multiple family members were accused of physically attacking police; the family members allege that the officers lied to cover up their abuse.

Prosecutors failed to win any convictions. In 2009, the family filed a federal civil rights lawsuit.

In January 2012, a member of the family, Daniel Martinez, was arrested in retaliation for the lawsuit, according to Kosoglad. The State’s Attorney’s Office fought tooth and nail to deny Kosoglad access to other documents, he says, insisting that files on the Martinez family prosecution did not exist. In November 2014, Judge John F. Grady granted Kosoglad a rare sanction against prosecutors, criticizing them for destroying documents from the 2012 case, and for obstructing access to documents from the 2008 case, which prosecutors had falsely stated did not exist.

Kosoglad says the city ultimately settled the family’s case for $650,000. He filed a separate civil rights lawsuit on behalf of Daniel Martinez, who was also found not guilty, last year.

He stumbled upon the Hankerson case by coincidence. Prosecutors, says Kosoglad, informed him that Officer Bogdalek could not be produced for Daniel Martinez’s criminal case. Curious to know why, he asked the city attorneys defending Bogdalek in the civil suit. They revealed the existence of the perjury investigation. He then served a subpoena on the State’s Attorney’s Office, and received the startling cache of information in response.

The State’s Attorney’s “office and Anita Alvarez were complicit in police perjury and the destruction of evidence and conspiracy,” says Kosoglad, adding that “she should be disbarred as an attorney.”

Defense lawyers say that police lying is rampant in Chicago, not just to cover up physical abuse but to secure convictions in ordinary cases like Hankerson’s. In this case, Bogdalek and Catinella may have lied to help win a conviction against someone they thought was guilty. If Hankerson was guilty, however, it was their lies, and the alleged complicity of their superiors, which ensured that he would walk free. If Hankerson didn’t do it, their lies could have convinced a jury to imprison an innocent man.

Either way, the officers substituted their own judgment for the rule of law—and committed crimes in the process. But State’s Attorney Alvarez refusal to prosecute their admitted-to crime is perhaps even more dangerous, sending a strong signal to police officers that lying is OK.

“If she’s not going to prosecute perjury in this case, it’s difficult to imagine any case in which she would,” says Futterman. “It sends a strong message to police officers not only that this is OK but to keep on doing it. This is how we win our cases. She’s not going to bite the hand that feeds her convictions.”

Micah Uetricht contributed reporting from Chicago.
Daniel Denvir
Daniel Denvir is a writer at Salon covering criminal justice, policing, education, inequality and politics. You can follow him at Twitter @DanielDenvir.
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