Finally, some justice?
The woman’s allegation led to the expulsion of Saifullah Khan, who was acquitted in a criminal trial. His lawsuit is now challenging these disciplinary hearings.
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The hearing at Yale, following Obama-era federal rules, did not allow for a hearing with cross-examination.
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In a 2018 disciplinary hearing at Yale University, Saifullah Khan listened as a woman accused him of raping her after a Halloween party.
The woman, who had graduated, gave a statement by teleconference to a university panel, but Mr. Khan and his lawyer were not allowed in the room with the panel. Nor could his lawyer, under the rules of the hearing, cross-examine her.
Instead, they were cloistered in a separate room, as her testimony piped in by speakerphone. He felt, he said, “there is absolutely nothing I can do to change my situation.” As he feared, Yale expelled him.
Mr. Khan’s criminal trial, months earlier, was markedly different. His lawyer cross-examined the woman in ways that horrified women’s rights advocates: How were you dressed? How much did you drink? Did you send flirty texts? And unlike the Yale hearing, the prosecutors had to prove his guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
After barely three hours of deliberations, Mr. Khan was acquitted.
The difference between those two hearings — in process and outcome — led Mr. Khan to make an unusual move: He sued his accuser for defamation for statements she had made during the Yale hearing. That lawsuit, filed in 2019, is challenging the way universities across the country have adjudicated such sexual assault hearings.
Khan is not playing around. He’s going scorched earth.
But his larger mission is to abolish campus Title IX hearings, he said, and he is traveling the country, conferring and strategizing with other students accused of sexual assaults. If he wins the defamation suit against his former classmate, he said that he will disseminate her name and facts about the case online. His name will always be connected to this case, and hers should too, he said.
He’s also filed a $110 million lawsuit against Yale.
Godspeed, Mr. Khan.
Original Story: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/17/us/yale-rape-case-defamation.html
Archive: https://archive.vn/TlNbM
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