Cornell faces lawsuit for gender discrimination in assault investigation
According to The Cornell Daily Sun, Cornell University is currently facing a lawsuit alleging that Sarah Affel, the University’s Title IX coordinator, failed to investigate a complaint by a student who was involved in a sexual assault. Cornell is already in the middle of five open Title IX investigations.
Two students — referred to in the Sun article as "John Doe" and "Jane Roe" — accused each other of sexual assault and the lawsuit states that the University opened investigations into both complaints, but Alan Sash, Doe's lawyer, says Cornell’s investigators only considered the female’s complaint and ignored the male’s because of his gender.
The Cornell Daily Sun reports that the suit claims the investigator conducted biased interviews against the male student in favor the female student, did not handle the male’s complaint properly and used an unrecorded interview that could not be fact-checked by the male student as evidence.
Furthermore, the suit claims that the male student was denied opportunities to speak with his lawyer before answering certain questions and refused to request that the female student preserve certain pieces of evidence that she possessed. The male student filed a complaint, but the complaint was overlooked.
The Cornell Daily Sun states that since this is an active case, Cornell did not comment other than to say that it will “vigorously defend against this litigation,” according to the Senior Director of Media Relations John Carberry.
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