Expelled UNC student says he was targeted by women who falsely accused him of assault
UNC Chapel Hill again finds itself enmeshed in a legal dispute over its handling of sexual assault allegations, this time involving a former honors student who claims he was expelled after a “premeditated and coordinated” campaign by four female students to wrongly accuse him of sexual misconduct.
The plaintiff, a former Morehead-Cain scholar identified by the pseudonym “Jacob Doe,” claims he lost his scholarship and friends, was thrown out of his fraternity and housing, and eventually was permanently expelled from the UNC system in 2021.
He blames his treatment on what his lawsuit describes as a deeply flawed, gender-biased campus investigation that “utterly and completely ignored Plaintiff’s evidence and continuously skewed the investigations and hearings to assist the female accusers.”
Nonetheless, Doe was fully exonerated in two of the four cases brought against him, according to his lawsuit.
His complaint, which was first reported by the Charlotte Ledger, names the UNC system and its Board of Governors; UNC Chapel Hill, Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz, the school’s trustees and seven UNC administrators who either investigated or ruled on the women’s allegations.
They face a host of claims, including violations of Doe’s due process, conspiracy, breach of contract, and negligent infliction of emotional distress.
Doe, who lived in Charlotte during part of the period covered by the lawsuit, calls for a jury trial, damages in excess of $75,000 and a revocation of his expulsion, which occurred after his sophomore year. Doe entered the Honors College at Chapel Hill at the start of the fall 2019 semester.
UNC’s media relations office said the university is aware of the lawsuit. “Due to this pending litigation, we’re unable to comment further at this time.”
Attorney Robert Ekstrand, part of Doe’s Durham and New York legal team, did not respond to an Observer email and phone call seeking comment.
Casual sex on campus
For the past decade UNC Chapel Hill, the state’s flagship public university, has served as one of the country’s veritable petri dishes for the explosive issue of how college campuses treat complaints of student sexual misconduct.
Research consistently finds that about 20% of female students say they have been sexually assaulted during their college years. While false reporting of assault occurs, most studies find that they make up a small share of the overall cases — between 2% and 10%.
Almost all of the previous headlines involving UNC focused on criticism by female students that the school had mishandled their claims of sexual assault.
Doe’s 192-page complaint, which was filed earlier this month in the Asheville federal courts, flips the narrative. In doing so, he joins a growing number of male students accused of sexual misconduct who are taking their universities to federal court.
Doe accuses UNC along with its Title IX investigators and hearing officers of gender bias, which led them to presume his guilt based on flimsy, contradictory or frequently changing accounts from four unnamed accusers.
The lawsuit also describes a fluid campus social scene of casual sex and multiple partners in which Doe estimates he had consensual sex with one of his eventual accusers 40 times over a three-month period. In another tryst included in the filing, Doe agreed to take a post-sex “naked selfie” with another of his future accusers during a Beech Mountain ski trip in January 2021.
Three of Doe’s four accusers were friends — two of them best friends — who filed the assault charges with their school in the spring of 2021 after they compared notes and learned they all had slept with Doe in the preceding weeks, the lawsuit claims.
A fourth woman claimed Doe had improperly touched her, with one of the disputed sexual encounters occurring in Doe’s condominium in Charlotte.
Doe says all the sexual activity in question was consensual or never took place. His complaint says he never forced himself on any of the women or took advantage when one of them was drunk and passed out, as one accuser claimed.
UNC violated procedures, suit says
The lawsuit also alleges that school administrators violated their own procedures by keeping Doe in the dark for months on the details of the women’s allegations, and that he was not allowed to fully challenge his accusers’ accounts at several of the campus hearings.
In two cases, the university went ahead with investigations even after the accusers withdrew their complaints, the lawsuit alleges.
In another, a UNC committee allowed one of the women to change the date of the alleged assault by Doe on the day of the hearing, 10 months after the investigation began, leaving Doe with only his lunch break to gather new evidence.
After Doe’s attorney began his cross-examination, the woman called for a recess and left the building. The committee then allowed her attorney to answer the questions instead, according to the lawsuit.
In the end, the university found that Doe was not responsible for all or some of the allegations filed by three of the women. He was found responsible for a fourth complaint, which was filed by a woman Doe described as a longtime platonic friend, who claimed Doe had inappropriately touched her during a spring break trip to the Alabama coast, the lawsuit claims.
Title IX changes
The events covered by the complaint played out against a shifting nationwide debate over how universities handle sexual misconduct complaints filed by students against their peers.
The provisions of Title IX, the sweeping civil rights law banning sexual discrimination on campuses that receive federal money, have undergone major revisions over the past decade.
One set of amendments about a decade ago increased a university’s responsibilities to guard the rights of accusers. Another revision, unveiled by the Trump administration, amped up due-process protections for the accused.
Doe says his university left him on his own.
Due to the university’s handling of the false allegations, “Plaintiff has been shunned and canceled by most, if not all, of his friends and peers at UNC, his reputation has been permanently destroyed, his scholarship was revoked, he was excluded from his fraternity (Kappa Sigma) and his apartment and, most critically, he has been permanently expelled from the entire University of North Carolina System.”
Precisely, according to the lawsuit, what his accusers set out to do.
This story was originally published March 1, 2023 at 6:38 PM.
