@nwbar We’re never going to know any facts.

From the Spec coverage going through all the court documents (hey, sometimes Spec gets it right) it doesn’t look like there’s any paper trail , so it boils down to he-said, she-said. Of course, later there will be accounts from classmates and professors she’s close to which give support to her story, and accounts from those professors and students close to Prof. Martin which undermine it. It’s back to square one, and there’s never going to be anything more than that. She’s suing GSAS Dean Henry Pinkham and Assistant Dean Darice Birge as well, so this is big enough that Columbia, even if it’s not a specific plaintiff, is going to step in and engineer some kind of settlement with a gag order just to get it out of the news. It’s then going to conduct an internal investigation designed to find out nothing one way or the other. That investigation will succeed in it’s task, and it won’t be too hard, because there’s nothing concrete. No one will know anything more after this, except what everyone already believes they know because they believe women use their sexuality as leverage or would never, ever lie.

The Justice System falls on its face when it comes to sexual harassment and sexual assault. Rape is common and rarely reported. While the statistics you hear about rape don’t have any scientific basis (they’ve just been requoted from a few massively flawed studies in the 1950’s enough that they’re conventional wisdom, and in any case you’re never going to be able to get accurate reporting on something people are too ashamed to admit). The basic theme hold true: lots of rape, little reporting. I’ve had a number of friends confide to me that they’d been a victim and none ever pressed charges because they just didn’t want to deal with it, were ashamed, and felt like nothing would come of it if they did.

That said, even though you don’t want to put the victim on trial, and it’s terrible to accuse a woman of lying about something like that, it still happens (see: Duke Lacrosse). That can’t be brushed off as a one-time exception to “no woman would ever.”

In almost any case there can’t be any real justice. Unless there’s massively more evidence, you’re stuck believing in either a victim denied justice or an innocent man’s reputation forever ruined. The solution isn’t to blame the victim, or to presume guilt (a fate which Prof. Martin has avoided somewhat, simply because he’s respectable and likeable. Try imaging him as a TA you don’t like accused of the same thing). I could maybe put up a wall of cliches about changing the culture here, and everyone would think it was great and there would be thumbs up aplenty, but “changing the culture” is a cotton-candy solution, wonderful and appealing to everyone but without any real substance.

No, the first step is to keep the basic fact raw in your mind for as long as possible without trying to fit it into a big sweeping narrative: the fact that there will be no justice for anyone in this, or for just about any trial involving sexual harassment or assault (let alone the victims who don’t bring charges), and that no one has any idea what to do about it.

@Wow I hate that some girls will go to such extreme lengths to flatter themselves even if it means they must discredit and sully the reputation of a man of actual importance in the process. A man who has contributed so much to society should not have his entire career discredited by an utterly invented claim from a sexually repressed student, let alone a SIPA student of all things. Wow, Laura Williams, get over yourself. And thank you for tarnishing the career of an honest man just for your own self-validation.