SWBTS responds to sexual abuse lawsuit

You just keep saying how bad Patterson was. So what? What did he legally do wrong?

You’re acting like Patterson’s sole responsibility is to follow the law, and he doesn’t even pass that test. You’d know that if you read the PDF I linked to.

To be completely honest, it seems like Patterson got advice on how to handle sexual assault and then determined to do the exact opposite of it, which is borne out in the complaint.

Here are things he could or should have done:

• “Wow, that’s awful. Let me make sure you get some help and that we get the police involved” would have been a great starting place. (#86, pg. 18)
• Not attacking her mother as “crazy” when they called to report a rape would also be a good starting point. (#76, pg. 16)
• Limited his discussions to only the pertinent people that had be involved, not his Chief of Staff, not the VP for Strategic Initiatives and Communications, not Dorothy Patterson and her assistant / the Assistant Professor of Women’s Theology, not anyone else other than those that absolutely needed to know (#91, pg. 19).
• Not telling her that being raped was “a good thing” (#79, pg. 17)
• Not telling her that he was “too busy” to deal with this (#80, pg. 17)
• Making sure that the police officers involved were not related in any way to anyone on the SWBTS staff, posing a clear conflict of interest.
• Not talking with her alleged assailant after he had been expressly warned by the FWPD to stay out of it so that he could ‘get his side of the story’ (#96, pg. 20).

I’m not even trying hard and this is shooting fish in a barrel. Shall I continue? It only gets worse.

This isn’t hard. The second great command is to love your neighbor as yourself. Patterson failed that, failed to uphold the law, and failed to protect the students at both schools.

Let me ask you this. Let’s say I accept as fact you list of bullet points (which are only claims of the claimant and not facts in evidence). What is illegal about any of that list? What civil wrong has he committed.

Is is illegal to call a mom crazy?
Is it illegal to say you are too busy?

etc…

You act like his failure as a pastor makes him financially liable.

And I am still waiting for your comment on the real person here who should be presecuted, the alleged rapist!

No one that I have read has called for the alleged rapist to be prosecuted, but they all want SWBTS to pay major money. Why is that?

No one that I have read has called for the alleged rapist to be prosecuted, but they all want SWBTS to pay major money. Why is that?

Because there’s no significant motive to change the practices at SWBTS / SEBTS / within the SBC until there’s a big hit to the pocketbook. Bert talked about this in the context of MSU / Larry Nassar. It’s not the same, but CJ Mahaney has largely escaped the consequences of covering up child abuse at SGC.

It’s also because there are serious costs involved with rebuilding after rape / trauma like this. Lost income, costs of therapy, etc.

As for not prosecuting the rapist - that argument is so dumb that I’m not going to justify it with an answer.

Since Patterson has released a fair number of documents contesting the plaintiff’s version of events (again, illegally if my understanding of Title IX is correct), but has not challenged the notion that he knew of the perpetrator’s criminal record, I think it’s safe to assume that this part is true.

No doubt the rapist should be prosecuted, and had the Title IX portion of the matter been handled well, he very well might have been before the evidence got cold. Just sayin’.

Regarding the rest of the evidence, keep in mind that it follows closely the string of evidence the SWBTS Board of Trustees used to fire Patterson. I would be very surprised if much of it was refuted during discovery or cross examination, and my best guess is that Patterson and SWBTS are in a world of hurt, legally speaking.

And yes, the plaintiff wants to be compensated for her injuries. When one is raped, post traumatic stress often occurs, and quite frankly it ain’t cheap to get could mental health care, and it ain’t cheap to have great difficulty holding down a job because of flashbacks and the like.

When we went through the BJU / GRACE discussions, much was made about how BJU acted in loco parentis and had broad authority in the lives of their students. I believe you agreed with that at the time.

Now all of a sudden the school / president isn’t liable for wrong done while they exercised that authority? And we are just supposed to ignore wrongdoing because “no laws were broken” (despite credible evidence that they actually were). Do I get to escape the consequences of wrong or sinful behavior simply because I “kept the law”?

Make up your mind, people. You can’t have it both ways.

No doubt the rapist should be prosecuted, and had the Title IX portion of the matter been handled well, he very well might have been before the evidence got cold. Just sayin’

He might have been prosecuted if Patterson hadn’t meddled with the investigation against the orders of the Fort Worth Police Department (and, for whatever it’s worth, basic common sense). I mentioned that in the last two bullet points in a previous post.

-What does Title IX have to do with Ft Worth police prosecuting a guy for rape? The victim testifies. The jury hears it and decides for themselves? At worst, Title IX would be used to say that SWBTS didn’t cooperate with the investigation. But again, if the woman has evidence that she was raped, and reported it fully to Ft Worth PD, what is the problem? The thing is, she didn’t (apparently)! That is the problem and why the guy has not been prosecuted.

-Again, firing Patterson for being a poor president does not mean the school is financially responsible for causing a rape. I have seen no evidence yet that SWBTS or Patterson contributed anything significant to a man raping a student. Could they have treated the victim better? We have not heard Patterson’s defense, so I will be careful. But, the board did fire Patterson, so I suspect his actions were not what they expected. HOWEVER, Patterson being a bad president is not the same as what the claimant has said, ie that Patterson gave the perpetrator cover to be on campus, handed him the keys to the university, and said “have at it”.

-Epstein… seriously. At worst, Patterson hired a guy to be a janitor and neglected his oversight of him. AT WORST that is what he did. Epstein on the other hand ran an entire “business” that found underage prostitutes and used them. Yeah, sounds the same to me…

It shifts the blame for rape and sexual assault from the perpetrator to the school. The reasons are manifold. Rather than go through the terrible ordeal of reliving the rape or assault, getting evidence to make it clear the relationship was non-consensual, etc, you go to the school and tell them. They then with little due process throw the alleged perpetrator out of school and ban him from campus.

Often, this does not happen, for whatever reason. The victim then sues the school, which likely has access to millions of dollars. The result is the school looks bad, the victim has money, and the perpetrator walks free. What is just about any of that?

Perhaps I am old-school in my thinking, but if I was raped, I would care little what the university president, or the HR department, or any such thing thought. I would go to the police and the DA. Only they can prosecute the assailant. Only they can seek justice. If I win there, then the school has to recognize what the perpetrator did and kick them out (well, they’d go to jail!).

The problem is, all too many sexual assault cases are murky… the evidence for prosecution is not there. So, Title IX was set up to avoid due process and make it easier to kick the accused out of school. Its as simple as that.

[Jay]

As for not prosecuting the rapist - that argument is so dumb that I’m not going to justify it with an answer.

Jay, you can say its dumb all you want, but why is it the alleged perpetrator has not been charged? And don’t blame it on Title IX like Bert.

This is an older thread that most people have moved off of, but Rachael Denhollander linked to this story in the Atlantic the other day and I think it’s well worth noting and asking others to read. It’s a long story of how the criminal justice system generally fails rape or assault victims and gets into the psychology behind victims, the police, and those charged with investigating the medical kits and how criminals usually get away with it. I also wanted to call out this section in particular, because there are parallels with how we handle ‘sexual sin’:

In some cases, police didn’t believe that sex had occurred at all. Consider this report by a Detroit detective, after a 14-year-old girl claimed she was abducted by two men and raped inside a burned-out house. “This heffer is trippin,” the detective wrote. “She was clean and smellin good, ain’t no way that –- happened like she said … The jig was up. She didn’t want to talk no mo. So her mama took her to the hospital, but they got the –- outta here.” That investigation warranted two pages, which ended: “This case is closed: UTEEC.” Unable to establish the elements of the crime.

To police officers who haven’t been trained to spot signs of trauma, many rape victims appear to be lying. Why was she laughing when she gave her statement? Why was she so flat and unemotional? One Detroit detective told Campbell that a victim should be “a complete hot mess. They should be crying. They should be very, very traumatized.” But research finds that many victims don’t respond in a predictable fashion. This goes for their behavior during the assault as well as after: Why didn’t she fight? Why didn’t she run? Liz Garcia used to tell people that she would fight like crazy if a stranger ever came into her house. “I don’t say that anymore. I could have had all the weapons in the world in my house. But I couldn’t grab a weapon. He was taller, bigger; there was no fighting him.” One survivor told me she offered her assailant a glass of iced tea, hoping her courtesy would dissuade him. Another tried to politely decline the assault: You don’t have to do that. It’s fine. Yet another pretended she was enjoying herself, hoping he wouldn’t kill her afterward.

Michael Sauro, who headed Minneapolis’s sex-crimes unit and oversaw Amber Mansfield’s case, says the unit thoroughly investigates “99 percent of the time.” (Jessica Dimmock)

If detectives blame or disbelieve a woman, their next step is to close the case by persuading her to withdraw the complaint. In Detroit, Campbell says, detectives sometimes opened interviews by noting that the victim would be charged for false reporting if she said anything that was untrue or couldn’t be corroborated. Worried about being prosecuted, the woman would withdraw the allegation, and the officer would walk her to the door. One survivor told Campbell that the entire process seemed aimed at “culling the herd.”

But even when the victim does everything right, even when the police build a strong case against a suspect—even then, a prosecutor might decline to bring the case to trial. Prosecutors, particularly elected ones, are measured by their wins and losses and may be unwilling to spoil their record with problematic cases. “They only allow certain victims to go to trial, where they feel they have really rock-solid evidence,” Campbell says. “They’ve got to have the perfect victim, the perfect crime, the perfect witness—and anybody who deviates from that is not going to have their day in court.” Maybe the woman has a checkered past. Maybe she had too much to drink that night. Maybe she knew the suspect, triggering the nearly bulletproof defense of consent.

Sometimes, even a confession is not enough…

Perhaps it would be good to explain why colleges are, per Title IX, required to investigate these things at all. In a nutshell, it is because allowing a sexual free-for-all on campus tends to tell women they might as well not bother coming. Hence, for both criminal and non-criminal (many sexual harassment cases) cases, colleges that receive federal money are required to comply.

It is, really, simply the federal government insisting that colleges apply misconduct policies equally to both men and women. And in that light, it’s worth noting that even without Title IX, a college is going to want to take steps to make sure that criminals do not victimize students. That’s why college application forms generally have the question “have you ever been charged or convicted of a crime?” It’s also why colleges will suspend or expel students whose behavior, while not criminal, shows extraordinarily bad judgment.

In this case, it wasn’t just inadequate supervision, Mark, and if you’d (AHEM) read the complaint, you would know this. Let’s not misrepresent things; Patterson and SWBTS did not just fail to supervise the guy. He admitted a criminal and gave him a job that gave him the key to the womens’ dorms with a ready-made excuse to be there at any hour of the day or night. Then, when predictable results followed, he appears to have “guided” the “investigation” in a way that the police (despite their connection to SWBTS) recommended against, tried to “break her down”, coming to a meeting to which he was not invited and then diverting its topic to the rapes. Then when he was called on it, he released (illegally) documents mixed with false claims to his friends, who leaked them to the public.

This is all documented, Mark. These documents—the Sharayah Colter blog, statements by Patterson’s lawyer, etc..—all exist. They are backed up by multiple named witnesses to the events in question. There are police reports which (ahem) make very clear why she didn’t proceed with sexual assault charges.

Really, I’m troubled by the apparent fact that either you have never read the complaint, or you’re dismissing it out of hand. Read the complaint carefully, Mark. Your response displays the same attitude that Patterson did; when a report is made, make sure you disbelieve it, and don’t trouble your mind with a close look at the evidence. Definitely don’t expend any energy to make sure a complainant is safe while the investigation is done.

Somewhat related thought; maybe it’s time for universities to work with community organizations to make sure they can refer complainants to safe houses so they’ll feel safer actually going forward with sexual assault charges.

So wait… SWBTS admitted a criminal, so clearly they are responsible for everything the criminal does… Yeah, that’s clear. Thanks.

So now no school or employer should ever hire a criminal because you are then guilty by association with anything they do. Got it.

As for the janitor job, being a janitor on a campus does not mean you have all the keys and can go anywhere at any time. Besides, if you are a woman at a dorm and a guy opens the door without permission. CALL THE POLICE.

Let’s just accept Patterson violated every Title IX statute there is. Let’s just say that. What does that have to do with Doe calling the police and reporting that X raped her? NOTHING.

The problem here is the victim has shifted all blame for the rape from the raper to Patterson, and apparently so have you.

As I said repeatedly in earlier posts, I read every word of the complaint. I just accept it for what it is, Doe’s lawyer’s version of events. They are not the sole truth.

To be clear, I have no reason to doubt that Doe was raped. My complaint is all the lambasting of Patterson and SWBTS like they are the thugs that practically sponsored the raper.

Also, what do these police reports say are the reason there was no charge?