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He said it was consensual. She said she blacked out. U-Va. had to decide: Was it assault?
He said it was consensual. She said she blacked out. U-Va. had to decide: Was it assault?
By T. Rees Shapiro
t.shapiro@washpost.com
July 14 at 3:25 PM
When Haley Lind was found alone in a stranger’s bathroom, she was naked and in a drunken stupor, barely able to stand or speak, a raucous party raging around her. She awoke in her bed hours later, her head pounding, leaves in her hair, soaked in her own urine. ... “I think I got assaulted last night,” she texted a friend the morning after the annual welcome-back-to-school Block Party at the University of Virginia. “Something just feels very wrong.”
In a dorm room about a mile away, a freshman athlete got up that same morning with a clear memory of his first college party, just days into his U-Va. career. At an off-campus residence where athletes lived, there had been the cups of a potent liquor drink and crowds of sloshed students. An alluring, petite blonde had led him into an upstairs bathroom for sex, a rash decision that would end up haunting him.
An epic first weekend at college, he said in an interview, turned into “living with a kind of shadow following you around in whatever you do.” ... For both students, the night of Aug. 22, 2015, had not gone as planned. And their brief alcohol-drenched, party-fueled interaction — not unlike so many others on the nation’s college campuses — would derail both of their lives for much of an academic year and probably beyond. To him, in that moment, it was a thrilling hookup at a party. To her — as she now sees it — it was a terrifying assault. To U-Va., it was another drunken mess with no good answers.
The case is emblematic of the widespread frustrations faced by students, parents and administrators as they confront a problem that has existed for decades: the caustic combination of alcohol, drugs and sex, at times exacerbated by assault and predation. It also highlights the problems the Charlottesville flagship has had with alcohol and partying.
By T. Rees Shapiro
t.shapiro@washpost.com
July 14 at 3:25 PM
When Haley Lind was found alone in a stranger’s bathroom, she was naked and in a drunken stupor, barely able to stand or speak, a raucous party raging around her. She awoke in her bed hours later, her head pounding, leaves in her hair, soaked in her own urine. ... “I think I got assaulted last night,” she texted a friend the morning after the annual welcome-back-to-school Block Party at the University of Virginia. “Something just feels very wrong.”
In a dorm room about a mile away, a freshman athlete got up that same morning with a clear memory of his first college party, just days into his U-Va. career. At an off-campus residence where athletes lived, there had been the cups of a potent liquor drink and crowds of sloshed students. An alluring, petite blonde had led him into an upstairs bathroom for sex, a rash decision that would end up haunting him.
An epic first weekend at college, he said in an interview, turned into “living with a kind of shadow following you around in whatever you do.” ... For both students, the night of Aug. 22, 2015, had not gone as planned. And their brief alcohol-drenched, party-fueled interaction — not unlike so many others on the nation’s college campuses — would derail both of their lives for much of an academic year and probably beyond. To him, in that moment, it was a thrilling hookup at a party. To her — as she now sees it — it was a terrifying assault. To U-Va., it was another drunken mess with no good answers.
The case is emblematic of the widespread frustrations faced by students, parents and administrators as they confront a problem that has existed for decades: the caustic combination of alcohol, drugs and sex, at times exacerbated by assault and predation. It also highlights the problems the Charlottesville flagship has had with alcohol and partying.
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