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Christina Hoff Sommers & Stuart Taylor: College rape culture & the death of due process | VIEWPOINT — Transcript

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0:00Christina: Stuart Taylor is with me today and he is one of our nation's most distinguished
0:04legal journalists.
0:05He has a law degree from Harvard, where he graduated at the top of his class and served
0:10as an editor at the "Law Review."
0:12He's written for "The New York Times," the "National Journal," myriad of other prominent
0:16news outlets.
0:18His new book, co-authored with Brooklyn College professor, KC Johnson, documents an alarming
0:24assault on justice and reason on our nation's campuses.
0:29It's titled "The Campus Rape Frenzy."
0:32Stuart, welcome to AEI.
0:34Stuart: Wonderful to be with you.
0:36And if I might make an editorial comment, I love your moniker, the Factual Feminist.
0:39Christina: Yes, I am...
0:40Stuart: We need more factual feminists.
0:42Christina: Yes, we do.
0:43Well, you are the deputy factual feminist because your book is so good.
0:48It's so thorough.
0:49It's an exposé of the campus rape frenzy.
0:54Tell us about that.
0:55What is it for those who may not know?
0:56Stuart: Yes, well, driven largely by the Obama administration...although it's a phenomenon
1:01that started in the '90s really...there's been a huge misleading frenzy, to the effect
1:09that there's something called a rape culture on our campuses, that rape is rampant, that
1:15it's an epidemic, that it's increasing, that the colleges don't care about it and won't
1:19do anything for the victims.
1:22And the Obama administration has driven this by aligning itself with left-wing academics,
1:28by suddenly in 2011, on April 4th, 2011, proclaiming a whole bunch of decrees, the purpose of which
1:36was to destroy the due process rights of young men in college who are accused by young women
1:42in college...sometimes it's a man and a man or a woman and a woman...but in general, men
1:46accused by women of sexual assault, although really it doesn't really have to meet the
1:52definition of sexual assault to get you in trouble these days.
1:55It's morphed into a comprehensive system of federally directed regulation of all sex on
2:02campus.
2:03Christina: Oh, my.
2:04That's quite...
2:05Stuart: Now this doesn't mean every time anybody does anything, it gets regulated.
2:07But it potentially reaches just about the most ordinary consensual sex you can imagine.
2:14If somebody decides, usually the woman, a day, a month, a year, two years later, "Gee,
2:19I didn't like that.
2:21I wish I hadn't done it," that's all.
2:23The guy can get kicked out over that alone.
2:25Christina: One of the things I've noticed is that the definition of sexual assault is
2:31very elastic and it's constantly changing.
2:35Now most people think of some kind of aggressive, violent attack or they think of rape.
2:42But what does it encompass now when they use it?
2:45What can a young man be brought up on charges for?
2:47Stuart: Well, you've got to distinguish the criminal law from the campus situation.
2:50Under the criminal law, the definition has expanded over the years but it's still pretty
2:57reasonable.
2:58If there's sex without consent...it doesn't even have to forcible in most states...if
3:03there's sex without consent and the male is the initiator, as they usually presume, that
3:10is rape.
3:11If there's an unwanted touching, over the woman's objection, any intimate part, that
3:17is sexual assault.
3:19It might be a very small case, but it's sexual assault.
3:24On campuses, on the other hand, if...and also I should say, in the criminal law, if the
3:31woman is passed out drunk, that's rape.
3:34On campus, she doesn't have to be passed out or drunk to make it rape.
3:37She just has to be a little bit intoxicated.
3:40It varies from place to place.
3:41The federal government has not defined rape or sexual assault for purposes of the campuses,
3:47but the campuses have defined it and they've done their definitions with the federal government
3:51looking over their shoulder with the general attitude saying, "You'd better kick a lot
3:54of people out because we know there's a lot of unpunished..."
3:57So they define it very broadly and often when I say that almost all sex that goes on campus
4:05is potentially within this, there are campuses where if the woman...it's usually the woman...much
4:11later decides she didn't really wanna do it and she wishes she hadn't, even if she doesn't
4:17claim that she resisted or said no or pushed...
4:20Christina: But someone saw her drinking a margarita.
4:22Stuart: Yeah, somebody saw her drinking a margarita, that will get you kicked out if
4:26you're the young man at a lot of campuses and I could tell you stories, including the
4:30Yale basketball captain who's been kicked out on stories like that.
4:35Christina: I saw at one college, they had defined assault to include coercion.
4:40And coercion means did anyone ever try to talk you into sex or tell you lies, manipulate
4:47you in some way.
4:48Now that might not be gentlemanly behavior, but we're not in the Victorian age and we
4:54don't call that assault.
4:55Stuart: Right.
4:56Christina: But they're implying that it is punishable, as if it were a violation.
5:02So this is also, people should understand that it's just, you send a young man to college
5:08and any parent should warn him to be absolutely careful.
5:13Now some people will say, "Well, that's good.
5:14Maybe we should go back to an age where young men were taught to be protective of women."
5:20And actually, in a way, I'm thinking maybe this is a reaction to the hook up culture,
5:27where there was so much promiscuity.
5:29Maybe this is sort of the liberals' way of bringing some moderation to the campus hook
5:34up culture and they call it the rape culture.
5:36But I think there's probably a better way to do it than setting up kangaroo courts.
5:41Stuart: Yeah.
5:42Especially since the same universities that are setting up the kangaroo courts are also
5:46distributing condoms, sex manuals on how to have fun sex, encouraging rampant sex...
5:53Christina: And doing nothing about the binge drinking.
5:55Stuart: And drinking.
5:56Doing nothing about the binge drinking and then after all the things the university helped
6:00happen, happen and the woman complains later on, it's the man's fault and they go after
6:07him.
6:08Now sometimes...
6:09Christina: What if they're both drinking?
6:10They both have two glasses of wine, they have sex, and for whatever reason, she brings charges.
6:18Can he show that he had the same amount and he could be exonerated or can he take her,
6:23if he puts in the charge first, does he...
6:26Stuart: Theoretically he could.
6:28But not in the real world.
6:29First, if she files a charge and the guy then says, "Well, then she did it, too," they will
6:34often say, "Well, that's retaliation.
6:36We're not gonna listen to that."
6:38And the dean of students, Sue Wasiolek's her name, at Duke University, was testifying and
6:45she was asked, "Well, what happens if both of them are drunk?"
6:48And she said, "Well, in that case, it would be the fault of the male and he's a rapist
6:54or whatever."
6:55Now campuses aren't always quite as frank as that in saying what their attitude is,
7:00but that's their attitude.
7:01Christina: You know, you've described some very unsavory individuals, they sound to be.
7:08I think there are probably a lot of campus Title IX officers and people that, they wanna
7:13do the best but they're given a lot of misinformation, there's pressure from the government to hand
7:19over guilty verdicts, and so they end up being part of something, these mock courts or these
7:30kangaroo courts, without ever really thinking it through.
7:35And where could they go without risk of losing their jobs?
7:38So all the incentives are in favor of just going along with the system.
7:43Stuart: Yeah, especially because they're reporting...I mean, the federal government is looking over
7:46their shoulder.
7:47They are appointed largely to appease the federal government by doing to the campus
7:51males whatever the federal government seems to want them to do on a case by case basis.
7:56And also, think for a minute...I'm sure some of them are great people...think for a minute,
8:01who would want that job, knowing that you are an agent of the federal government in
8:07all but name, you know, there for the purpose of administering biased judges against young
8:13men and that's your job and that's your responsibility and you're gonna be in trouble if you don't
8:18do that.
8:19Who wants that job?
8:21I don't think it's the type of person we want to be exercising that kind of power over our
8:25young people.
8:26Christina: Well, there they are.
8:28We have this elaborate bureaucracy, these campus sort of sex apparatchiks marching around,
8:34and what happens to people that oppose it, to dissidents, and anyone, a professor who
8:40questions it, or a student who organized against it?
8:43Stuart: Very few do.
8:44But, for example, when the Yale basketball captain who I mentioned was railroaded out
8:48of Yale based on a bogus charge of sexual assault or sexual misconduct or whatever they
8:54called it, the basketball team rallied around him and they wore his number or something
9:00like that.
9:01They were hammered by the Yale administration, trashed by the women's center, attacked by
9:09kind of a mob of activists, and unfortunately they could see that this was gonna end badly
9:16for them and they basically backed off and apologized.
9:21That's what usually happens and most people, including professors these days...we haven't
9:26gotten to the threat to freedom of speech so called harassment that this administration
9:31has increased and it was already there...but most professors, even tenured professors,
9:37know perfectly well that if they speak out against this sort of thing, they're gonna
9:41get picketed, they're gonna get attacked, there's gonna be a social media campaign against
9:45them, the university's gonna be looking to whether to bring a Title IX charge against
9:48them.
9:49I know personally some professors who would just say, "You know, I could get," tenured
9:54professors who say, "I could get pushed out of my job if I speak out against this."
9:59Christina: Well, as you know, I've written about this myself.
10:02I'm very alarmed, what's going on.
10:05And in your book, you and KC Johnson make it clear that you're concerned about victims
10:11of sexual assault.
10:12Any reasonable, fair-minded person is.
10:15But even at that level, what's happening on campus isn't helping assault victims.
10:20It's just created this, as you say, a kind of moral panic and they're rushing to judgment
10:26and it looks to me as though they're replacing our tradition of the presumption of innocence
10:33with guilty because accused.
10:35Stuart: Exactly.
10:36Now I should make it clear, we hate sexual assault.
10:39We hate rape.
10:40We are very much champions of victims of them and we know that there's a lot of it that
10:44goes on on campus, off campus.
10:47Always has, probably always will.
10:50But at least we'd like to reduce it.
10:52What we oppose is injustice her.
10:56Lots of people hate sexual assault.
10:58They didn't need us to make that point.
11:00What we see happening is a presumption of guilt, a rush to judgment, an effort to presume
11:05that all males are guilty, if accused of anything they're guilty of, that when a woman's an
11:11accuser, and to brand them rapists and to kick them out of college or suspend them.
11:18In many cases, ruining lives, PTSD, suicide attempts, the whole bit.
11:23The kinds of things you hear that happen to rape victims, and they do, also happen to
11:28falsely accused young men.
11:30Christina: Well, so someone argued that things are so bad on campus, there's this epidemic,
11:36a plague of violence, and we need to take strong measures.
11:40And while it's too bad that some innocent will suffer, overall, it's just better this
11:46way all around if we have these strong measures.
11:49What would you say to that?
11:51Stuart: Two main points.
11:52A, there's not an epidemic.
11:53There's not a rape culture.
11:54And B, this huge effort is not making things any safer for women.
12:01Christina: Okay.
12:02You say there's not a rape epidemic.
12:04Explain that because people here, one in four, one in five women, will be...
12:08Stuart: Right.
12:09An epidemic suggests something that's huge and growing.
12:12Now is it huge?
12:13Well, I guess if it's always been huge, it's still huge.
12:16There's way too much sexual assault and way too much rape.
12:19But it's nothing like one in five.
12:21At the time the administration acted, the rape rate on campus, the percentages, according
12:26to best federal statistics, had plunged by more than half over the previous 15 years.
12:32Plunged, not increased.
12:33It's not increasing.
12:35Some of the numbers are increasing lately because they've been basically tampered with
12:39by...
12:40Christina: Advocacy research.
12:41Stuart: By advocacy research.
12:43Let's take the one in five idea.
12:44The best federal research bureaus, the justice statistics, which has been the best federal
12:48crime research for many years, would tell you about 1 in 40, maybe 1 in 50, sexually
12:52assaulted, maybe 1 in 100 raped.
12:55Sexual assault would include a pat on the rear end.
12:58It's technically a crime but there are degrees.
13:02The way these surveys get to one in five, and the president of the United States has
13:06embraced this number, is by phonying up the statistics.
13:12First they get very small sample sizes, women motivated to complain tend to be the ones
13:17who answer the samples.
13:19Second, they define all kinds of activity that's perfectly legal, that's not thought
13:23of commonly as sexual assault at all, and they define it as sexual assault.
13:27You know, "Has anybody ever had sex with you when you had been drinking?"
13:31"Has anybody ever had sex with you when you really didn't want them to, whether or not
13:35you told them you didn't want to?"
13:37And so forth.
13:40And so there are all sorts of things.
13:41And this is quite revealing, they never, these survey takers...and there are kind of a group
13:46of them and they all do the same game and "The Washington Post" has done it and Pew
13:51Research has done it and the American...you know, they never ask the people being surveyed,
13:57"Have you been raped?
13:58Have you been sexually assaulted?"
14:01Because they know from history...
14:02Christina: It yields a low number.
14:04Stuart: Very low number.
14:06You know, I hesitate whether to call these surveys highly misleading, which is an understatement,
14:13or fraudulent, which might be an overstatement.
14:16Somewhere in that spectrum.
14:17Christina: But these numbers would make it seem...if we took them seriously, it would
14:22mean that when a young woman enters the campus, Wesleyan or Brandeis or Stanford, she's at
14:29as much risk as she would be, or more risk, than she would be in Detroit.
14:36Or more than that, maybe in war-torn Congo.
14:38I mean, these numbers are so high and yet people send their daughters to college and,
14:43you know, who would send a child to college if you thought they had a one in four, one
14:48in five chance of being victimized by a serious felony assault?
14:52Stuart: Exactly.
14:53Christina: You wouldn't.
14:54Stuart: You know, the evidence that the administration and the colleges that jump on this bandwagon,
14:59they don't take these numbers seriously themselves.
15:02They use them as propaganda.
15:03If they took them seriously, there would be cops all over the campus.
15:07There would be security guards everywhere.
15:09Christina: They wouldn't allow alcohol on campus.
15:10Stuart: They would not allow coed dorms, let alone coed bathrooms.
15:15There would be no alcohol on campus.
15:17You know, maybe they'd go back to single sex schools.
15:22They're not doing any of those things.
15:24They're not doing anything that shows real seriousness.
15:26It's all a big misleading panic that's...
15:30Christina: It's a panic...Well, before we get to this, what is like to be a young man...or
15:37it could be a young woman, I read some terrible cases of young women falsely accused as well.
15:41But tell a typical case of, you know, a picture of what happens to a young man today when
15:48accused on campus.
15:49Stuart: Okay.
15:50I'll give you a real case, not a hypothetical one.
15:52And I can give you 40 probably, except my memory's...
15:54Christina: Well, there are about 100 young men suing right now.
15:56Stuart: Right, yeah.
15:57Christina: And to read through these cases is to go to Kafka's trial, but go on.
16:02Stuart: Here's a case at Amherst and one thing that's striking about this and somewhat unusual
16:06is that the young who was ejected from Amherst on a charge of sexually assaulting a young
16:11woman was in fact a victim of a sexual assault by the young woman.
16:16That's what really happened and the evidence that proves it, text message evidence, was
16:20readily available to the college if they had bothered to look for it.
16:23Christina: Yeah, she was sending texts to her friend saying, "Oh, I just did that,"
16:26and he had been passed out.
16:27Stuart: Yeah, it starts with them making out in a very sexual way in front of other people
16:33in some common area in the dorm and somebody says, "You know, why don't y'all go get a
16:37room?"
16:38So she takes the guy back to his room.
16:39By her account, she was a little bit tipsy.
16:41By all accounts, he was passed out drunk or very close.
16:46She gave him oral sex.
16:48For whatever reason, she wanted to.
16:49It's not clear he was even aware this was happening.
16:52He doesn't remember anything.
16:54And then she sent him away and she called in another guy who she'd been flirting with
16:59earlier in the evening and had more sex.
17:02And then she began to feel bad because, "Oh, that first guy was my roommate's boyfriend.
17:10My roommate's away, but she's gonna find out and it's gonna be very socially awkward with
17:13our friends."
17:14So she started telling people she'd been sexually assaulted.
17:17She joined a feminist anti-rape group on campus and many, many, many months or a year later...I
17:23think it was more than a year later...she actually filed a claim of sexual assault.
17:27The investigation by the college was ludicrous.
17:30Her testimony was incoherent.
17:32The whole thing was a giant fraud and apparently driven by Amherst's fear that the federal
17:38government would say they're not being tough enough on sexual assault.
17:41And they kicked him out, he hired a lawyer, the lawyer asked around, "Anybody got any
17:48text messages," got some text messages, and the text messages prove the facts that I've
17:52just told you conclusively.
17:55The guy took the facts back to the college, Amherst, and Amherst said, "Sorry, too late.
18:00You're kicked out and it's final."
18:01Christina: And he's kicked out.
18:03Stuart: He's kicked out.
18:04Christina: And marked as a predator.
18:06And these people that got kicked out of college, they have a hard time getting into another
18:10school.
18:11And it's also devastating psychologically to be accused.
18:15You're seen as a pariah.
18:17I've read reports from psychologists, what it's like to treat falsely accused people.
18:22Stuart: Exactly.
18:23Christina: And it's just psychically devastating.
18:26Stuart: And we have, too.
18:28And there's two aspects worth mentioning.
18:30One, these things are almost always done in secret.
18:33Federal privacy laws and so forth, which means it's impossible usually until the case gets
18:38into court...and this Amherst guy sued in court, which is how we know all the facts
18:42we know...to know what went on.
18:44And so the guy usually doesn't get on Google as a rapist, but everybody on the campus knows
18:50who he was and the word gets around and there's a movement to put it on transcripts and when
18:55he tries to apply to another college, they tend to turn him down.
19:00And so it has a lifelong effect, potentially a horrible lifelong effect.
19:07It leads to depression, it leads to post traumatic stress syndrome, it defeats career opportunities.
19:12You know, it's often regarded by people who are anti-rape activists as, "Oh, well, the
19:18guy just picks himself up and moves on."
19:20No, he doesn't pick himself up and move on.
19:22And I just should add, the vice president of the United States, Joe Biden, has admitted
19:28unwittingly that this has done absolutely nothing, all this, to reduce the number of
19:33rapes on campus.
19:34Christina: As far as I can tell, the numbers, even their advocacy studies, they've been
19:39doing them for years, the numbers never change.
19:42Now they're saying one in five and they still have studies that it's one in four.
19:48Stuart: And what Biden recently said was, "It was 1 in 5 20 years ago."
19:52And it's still 1 in 5.
19:53Christina: Right.
19:54Stuart: Okay, you can do the math.
19:56It's done.
19:57Your program, Mr. Biden, has done no good at all.
19:59Christina: In your book, you cite the words of a congressman, Jared Polis from Colorado,
20:07and he said, this is in a 2015 congressional hearing, "If there are 10 people who have
20:13been accused and under a reasonable likelihood standard, maybe 1 or 2 of them did it, it
20:19seems better to get rid of all 10 people."
20:22A congressman said that.
20:23Now this...
20:24Stuart: One would hope not for long.
20:26Christina: We have this venerable legal principle, presumption of innocence.
20:30Is it being replaced by guilty because accused?
20:33Stuart: What this guy Polis said just takes one's breath away.
20:36You know, you have to wonder if he was hallucinating.
20:39The old Blackstone thing was, you know, "Better 10 go free who are guilty than 1 being imprisoned
20:47who's innocent."
20:48Christina: And there's a reason for that, that we have such a revulsion towards the
20:54innocent being punished.
20:55Because all of the machinery of the State comes down and they have resources and all
21:01sorts of powers and the individual's alone.
21:07And the cases we hear about are the ones that are brought to trial where the young man,
21:12usually a young man, has the money to get a lawyer.
21:15Think of all the cases we don't hear about.
21:16Stuart: Yeah, you're right.
21:18And all of this...
21:19Christina: And so anyway, there are now judges that are looking at these cases and you've
21:24cited them in the book.
21:25They go through them and there was one judge in Massachusetts, I think he was looking at
21:30a case at Brandeis, and he looked at it and he said that it reminded him of Salem, Massachusetts.
21:36Stuart: It did.
21:38Christina: And not the United States or America in 2015 or '16, whenever he said.
21:43And you do see a lot of talk about Salem or sexual McCarthyism.
21:49People talk about kangaroo courts.
21:52And do you think that that's...having written this book, you've seen enough to agree with
21:58those strong assessments.
21:59Stuart: Very emphatically.
22:01I would not have believed that so much injustice, committed by people with great credentials
22:07or Ivy university people, committed for often cynical reasons or ideology, I would not have
22:13believed that it was possible for this to happen in the United States until I became
22:17immersed in the facts.
22:18My co-author, KC Johnson, knows more about these cases than anyone alive and a lot of
22:24the ones in the book, he's read all the court records, and you just read these cases and
22:29you think, "How could this possibly have happened?"
22:30And one way it happens is that, although the judge, Judge Saylor, in the Brandeis case
22:35you mentioned was good and the three democratically appointed federal appeals court judges in
22:41New York were good in that case, they basically...in another case, I think they basically said,
22:48"This looks like discrimination against men.
22:50What's going on?"
22:51Not all judges are good on this.
22:53Some judges, there were a couple of judges in California in an appeals court who heard
22:56a case from the University of California, San Diego, where one of them said during the
23:01argument, "This looks like a kangaroo court."
23:05And then they upheld it.
23:07And then they said, "Well, it's not our job.
23:08We're just federal judges.
23:09We're not supposed to tell disciplinary campuses what to do."
23:10Christina: Yeah, I think they don't yet understand how much suffering and anguish is involved.
23:15And it's because, yes, rape is a heinous crime and a victim of a rape suffers horribly.
23:20But it's because it's such a serious crime that we have to be very careful about branding
23:25someone as a sex predator, as a rapist, and we've lost that concern.
23:31Now how did this happen?
23:33Who are players?
23:35Not that I don't have my own ideas, but in your book, you mention all sorts of, a kind
23:41of axis of madness.
23:44You have risk-averse administrators.
23:49You have academic activists.
23:52You have the federal government coming in.
23:55And this whole sex bureaucracy that's built up in the campuses and it's all come together.
24:01The media...
24:02Stuart: Oh, boy, yes.
24:03Christina: Wanting...let's talk, how has the media handled all this?
24:07Because there should have been a book like this, "60 Minutes" should have been on this,
24:11there should have been "Frontline" about, you know, witch hunts on our college campus,
24:17and we really haven't seen that.
24:18Stuart: The media have been shamelessly biased, "The New York Times" leading the pack.
24:22Every time "The New York Times" ever writes about campus sex cases, as far as I've seen...I
24:26might have missed one...but every one I've ever seen, they grotesquely distort the facts
24:31to make it look absolutely clear that the male was guilty and the woman was pure and
24:35virtuous and honest, even when the evidence is either much more conflicted or even when
24:41it clearly proves the innocence of the male.
24:43They did it in the Duke lacrosse rape fraud case in 2006.
24:45Christina: Yes, "The New York Times" was horrible and after everyone was talking about this
24:50travesty at Duke with the lacrosse team falsely accused, the "Times" was saying, "Well, no,
24:56the case still makes sense."
24:57Stuart: That's right.
24:58Christina: No, it didn't make sense.
24:59Why did, what's...
25:00Stuart: And KC Johnson and I exposed in our Duke lacrosse book how bad they were and one
25:04of their editors at some point said, "Well, we're gonna be more careful about these things,"
25:07but they haven't improved a bit.
25:09And they are not unrepresentative.
25:11If you look at, you know, remember the "Rolling Stone" case, article about University of Virginia?
25:15Christina: Well, yes, there's another example.
25:16Stuart: Well, not only was "Rolling Stone" outrageous...and they're losing libel vases
25:22now and basically it was a fraudulent article that they fell for...the entire media, they
25:28printed this ridiculous claim by a woman that she had been gang-raped over broken glass
25:34by seven or eight guys at the University of Virginia fraternity.
25:38All of the evidence, it was implausible on its face.
25:41Every bit of evidence that's ever emerged shows that it didn't happen.
25:44And yet the news media as a group all credited immediately, raised the clamor, "This shows
25:51we have a rape culture," and all through the process of it being proved false, you know,
25:57kind of some of them quieted down a little bit, but none of them ever said, "We're sorry."
26:01Except maybe "Rolling Stone," without really saying it seriously.
26:06Christina: Right, and eventually there were some journalists working in the background,
26:11at "Reason" and there was a blogger, what was his name?
26:16Bradley?
26:17Richard Bradley.
26:18Stuart: Robby Soave, if I pronounced it right, at "Reason" and Richard Bradley, who was a
26:23blogger, exposed it quite early, saying, "Wait a minute, this doesn't have..."
26:26Christina: And they were just being good journalists who had a sense that something was amiss and
26:31it didn't add up.
26:32Stuart: And then the "Washington Post," which has by and large been part of the...
26:36Christina: Hysteria.
26:37Stuart: ...hysteria, they to their credit, the credit of one of their reporters, to be
26:40exact, printed some facts that showed that it couldn't have happened the way the woman
26:46said and the story fell apart.
26:49And yet, not only did the national media never really set of the University of Virginia,
27:03even the student body at the University of Virginia, more or less, all rushed to judgment,
27:07too, and none of them ever changed their attitude, even as the facts were proved false.
27:11Christina: Well, I've noticed that, that journalists just credulously repeat the false statistics
27:18and they repeat stories.
27:20For example, at Columbia University with mattress girl.
27:24That was told from her point of view.
27:27They didn't seem to be concerned that the young man had been found not responsible by
27:32one or two tribunals, sex courts, on campus.
27:36That didn't seem to matter.
27:37And she was actually carrying out a vigilante action against him.
27:42And she got class credit.
27:45Or, you know, maybe credit towards her degree.
27:47Stuart: She did.
27:48Christina: And she was treated as a heroine by the media.
27:53Stuart: And all the evidence isn't quite clear there.
27:56One thing's very clear.
27:57She was sending "I love you" emails to the supposed rapist weeks after the supposed rape.
28:05Christina: Right, right.
28:06Stuart: You know, she has no credibility and all and yet Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a
28:10Democrat...
28:11Christina: Oh, Senator Gillibrand is...
28:12Stuart: ...took her to the 2015 State of the Union address and made her into a heroine.
28:18Christina: Shouldn't Kirsten Gillibrand and the other legislators, everyone really, care
28:23about due process?
28:25What has happened to due process with these young people who are accused?
28:30Do they get a lawyer?
28:31Do they get to cross examine?
28:32Do they have the right to, you know, once they're found innocent, they're not put on
28:38trial again?
28:40Or is it the reverse?
28:41Stuart: The reverse.
28:42And this takes me back to the Obama administration's very major role in this.
28:46In the April 4th, 2011, directives, they dictated procedures for these cases.
28:52And one was the lowest possible standard of proof.
28:55Not clear and convincing, certainly not a preponderance of the evidence, 50.01%.
29:00Another was you'd better not let these guys cross examine the women or let anybody cross
29:05examine the women.
29:06Christina: Because they'll be re-traumatized.
29:07Stuart: Re-traumatized.
29:08Right.
29:09Christina: So they're presuming that she's a survivor and that he's the perpetrator.
29:10Stuart: Yeah, and the relevance of that is, first, the Supreme Court has repeatedly said
29:14cross examination is the best legal engine ever devised by the law for getting at the
29:20truth.
29:21They've said it more than once.
29:24And we're talking about he said-she said cases often, where if you can't really test the
29:28veracity of the woman, it's pretty much over.
29:33The guy doesn't get to have a lawyer in the proceedings.
29:36He doesn't get to see all the evidence that's gonna be used against him.
29:39He doesn't get to see the evidence that's in his favor.
29:43The procedures are all completely rigged to maximize the point of accusers and the people
29:48who do the deciding, if there's a board, they're often coached by so-called trainers...
29:54Christina: Oh, these trainers.
29:55Stuart: ...to presume guilt.
29:56Christina: And the trainers come in believing all of the advocacy statistics.
29:59They believe that one in five is a victim of assault.
30:02They believe that women never...or rarely lie.
30:04There's another false statistic and you expose a number of them.
30:08Stuart: Right.
30:09The trainers at Stanford, for example, said, among other things, two things that don't
30:13coexist well.
30:14One is if the man's story is articulate and persuasive, that's a sign of guilt.
30:22Christina: And if he's being too logical.
30:24Stuart: If he's being a little bit...yeah, if he's too logical.
30:27Christina: Right.
30:28Stuart: If he's vague and kinda wanders around, why, that's a sign of guilt, too.
30:31In other words, everything he says is a sign of guilt.
30:34Christina: So they're using the lowest standard of proof.
30:38They have no way to defend themselves, none of the usual means.
30:42And the committee is just arbitrary.
30:45It could be a librarian, it could be a dean, a couple of students.
30:52They're the sex court.
30:53They're not trained, except by these experts that come in.
30:57And they will be told that women rarely lie.
31:00Sometimes some of the materials say only in what, they cite a 2% of cases and that goes
31:07back to a book in the '70s by Susan Brownmiller.
31:10She just stated it, I don't think she had a source for that.
31:13There is no source.
31:14Stuart: She said she'd heard some judge said it based on some study that was never made
31:17public.
31:18But it's nonsense.
31:19Christina: It's nonsense.
31:20Stuart: Lots and lots of women are victimized and lots or lots of other women make it up
31:26for various reasons or lie or...
31:27Christina: And, you know, I think women sometimes lie about being raped, not because they're
31:32women but because they're human beings.
31:34Human beings sometimes lie, especially about sex.
31:37There are many, many reasons we've seen already in the notorious cases, the Duke lacrosse
31:42and the UVA case.
31:43Stuart: Also on the campuses, with the administration pushing it...I'm thinking of a case called
31:48Occidental and a woman named Danielle Dirks, who is a professor, a radical...
31:52Christina: Very radical, very hard-line.
31:53Heartless.
31:54Stuart: A young woman who had had a drunken tryst with a young guy, two freshmen, and
31:58she was complaining to her roommate or somebody like that, "Gee, he didn't call back."
32:02It wasn't very good.
32:03Somebody directed her to Danielle Dirks and Danielle Dirks said, "Well, you know, this
32:06guy is like the typical campus rapist.
32:09How do I know that?
32:11Well, he's from a good family.
32:12He was a high school valedictorian.
32:14He had good grades and he was an athlete.
32:16Well, those are the guys who are obviously guilty."
32:20So that is the attitude that goes into a lot of the campus adjudications.
32:23Christina: Gender profiling.
32:25Stuart: Yeah.
32:26And the one thing that the administrations have been pushing people to do is to have
32:33a single person be the investigator, prosecutor, judge, and jury.
32:40You know, let's not put this in front of, say, a panel of students who might actually
32:44find the guy innocent.
32:45Let's make it very clear that he's totally at the mercy of somebody who's looking over
32:52her shoulder...it's almost always a her, by the way...at the other hers in the Obama education
32:59department who are saying, "You'd better bring us some heads."
33:03Christina: I think that the...By the way, it's not only the Obama administration.
33:07There are a number of Republicans who have joined with this campaign, this crusade, about
33:16the campus rape culture and are very poorly informed.
33:18It's unfortunately bipartisan.
33:21However, I think that what led the legislators, as well as the journalists, originally they
33:29were the academic feminist.
33:32And this all started, I saw it happening way back in the last century, you had gender studies
33:40professors who believe that American society is a patriarchy and that women are held down
33:46and held back.
33:47And then you had very radical figures like Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, who believe
33:52that we were captive to a culture where rape was an instrument of oppression used by men
33:58to keep women in their place.
33:59It's part of the structure of society.
34:02So they feel that we need to go outside the American legal tradition, which was after
34:08all created by men invested in a violent patriarchy.
34:13So they have no inhibitions about throwing aside due process and freedom of expression
34:21and even punishing an occasional innocent person because they think they're dealing
34:26with this patriarchal oppression so they don't care.
34:32Now these ideas were half-baked and it's just a lot of twisted, paranoid theories that have
34:40no basis in reality which almost anyone could say.
34:43But if you challenge their theories, that just proves you don't understand them and
34:47that proves that you're an apologist for the rape culture.
34:51Somehow these theories, which were not taken seriously by anyone outside these sort of
34:56esoteric departments in the academy, they've moved into the mainstream.
35:01And suddenly I'm seeing them in women's magazines and I think it was the statistics, these false
35:07statistic came to be believed, these dubious statistics, they got to a point where they
35:13were beyond the reach of rational analysis.
35:16So we do have the makings of this panic and do you see a way out of it?
35:24Stuart: It is like the Salem witch trials and, in a different way, it's like the McCarthy
35:28era and it's like the daycare scares of the 1990s.
35:31Christina: Yeah, Satanic cults in daycare.
35:33Stuart: Yeah, when babies were being thrown into streams beheaded and so forth, except
35:37nobody could find the bodies.
35:38Christina: And people believed it.
35:39Stuart: People believed it.
35:41And Catherin MacKinnon, who you mentioned, has been lionized by academic feminists.
35:47I think one of her famous quotes is, "I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels
35:53violated."
35:54I think that's almost verbatim.
35:56So this has become an ideology that's swept the campuses with huge expansion of gender
36:02studies programs.
36:03They're sort of in the business spreading this ideology.
36:06And frankly because of the state of the campuses, it's hard for me to be at all confident that
36:12we're ever gonna see the end of this.
36:14Or at least see it anytime soon.
36:16I hope that the new Trump administration...and I'm certainly not a pro-Trump person...but
36:22I do hope that his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, if she's confirmed, and the rest of
36:28his administration will do at least one very good thing for America, which is dismantle
36:32this sex bureaucracy machinery, at least in the federal level, that the Obama administration
36:38has created.
36:39But that would only be a start, a little bit of a start on fixing this because the sex
36:46bureaucracies in the universities, the feminist kind of biases in the universities, they've
36:51swept over universities from coast to coast, with a few exceptions, and they're full of
36:59ideas that the average American, if he heard them or she heard them, would consider laughable.
37:04The average woman who considers herself a feminist would consider them laughable, but
37:09because they're in the academic ghettos, they kind of persist.
37:11Christina: Well, a lot of feminists have come out against this.
37:15People like Wendy Kaminer and Janet Halley at Harvard.
37:19Nadine Strossen, the former president of the ACLU.
37:23They've been some of the most outspoken...
37:25Stuart: Nadine wrote a very nice...
37:26Christina: Nadine is fantastic.
37:27Nancy Gerston, the...
37:29Stuart: Gertner.
37:30Christina: Gertner, sorry.
37:31Nancy Gertner in Massachusetts.
37:33They've been wonderful.
37:34But they're not listened to.
37:36Stuart: No, and Harvard Law School professors have been better than most academics.
37:41Most academics have their head in the sand.
37:44Twenty-eight Harvard Law faculty members signed a statement, an eloquent statement, denouncing
37:49what the federal government was forcing Harvard to do, what Harvard in fact did, although
37:54they got an exception made for the law school.
37:56And very eloquent and, you know, these are pretty liberal folks and five of them, you've
38:01mentioned three of four, but five...another that comes to mind is Betsy Bartholet...
38:05Christina: Oh, she's been wonderful.
38:06Stuart: ...are leading feminists.
38:08Christina: Yes.
38:09Stuart: And, you know, every serious civil libertarian I know and every feminist who
38:14I respect, and I respect a lot of them, who've seen what's going on realizes how pernicious
38:21this is, but it persists.
38:23Christina: Well, maybe it's gonna take a famous academic feminist to find her son brought
38:27up on charges and taken through a kangaroo court.
38:30Or maybe it's going to...what will it take for, you know, I think back to France in the
38:36Alfred Dreyfus case and Emile Zola writing "J'accuse," it was the most famous headline
38:45of all time in newspaper and he accused, well, the French military, the press, everyone,
38:49of taking part in convicting an innocent man.
38:53And it just became a famous symbol of people becoming aware that we had committed just
39:00this heinous injustice, all of us somehow were guilty and Zola conveyed that in "J'accuse"
39:07and I see your book as possibly doing that.
39:10I hope so.
39:11I mean, I don't think anybody, any journalist that writes about the sexual assault on campus,
39:18anybody on a committee, any dean, if they don't read this, I think it's malfeasance.
39:22I mean, they're not doing their job.
39:24You've done such a good job.
39:26It's meticulous.
39:27It's careful.
39:28The tone.
39:29All of it is really, really fine.
39:32So let's hope it makes a difference because this can't go on.
39:35Stuart: Well, having Factual Feminist on our side...
39:38Christina: Oh, yes.
39:39Well, I will do what I can.
39:40I urge people to buy...
39:41Stuart: It makes me feel much more optimistic than I would otherwise.
39:44Christina: I'll do my best.
39:46Let's stop the madness.
39:48Stuart: Thank you.
39:49Thank you so much for coming.

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