Michele Dauber
Trust comes from transparency and as many are now discovering, that has been missing for the last few years in media, in politics and in education at the Title IX offices and at the local police departments handling campus sexual assault cases.
Amber Heard’s Op-Ed which led to the Johnny Depp v Amber Heard defamation suit in Virginia has a paragraph which mentions Title IX. Amber Heard never went to college. The letter was written for her by the ACLU. She was a front person for an agenda. An agenda that is against due process. An agenda which is so myopic that it arguably led to the events and disciplinary process leading to Katie Meyer’s despair and untimely death (see here).
Some have jumped to a conclusion that I’m a rape apologist. I dispute this. I believe in due process and fair and transparent processes. Without these we have no right or means to determine who is guilty or innocent of any accusation or crime. Title IX activists have infiltrated criminal courts, not just campuses and the consequences have been devastating — but millions have been made and paid.
How those have played out in California between Stanford and the Santa Clara County Court can be studied here. Before you throw your coffee at me, I urge you to read this account of the Brock Turner trial — it is not the one you read in the media, but it goes a long way to seeing just how far off the course of reasonable treatment of students Stanford has gone and just how involved Stanford Law Professor Michele Dauber has been (see here).
Nobody sends their child to school or college to be easily prosecuted — and I’m not suggesting for a moment that Katie Meyer was facing prosecution because as far as I know she was not — but shockingly, Rep. Judy Chu of California tweeted in 2020 that new Title IX rules ensuring due process “would make it harder to prosecute”. 104 members of Congress, 36 Senators and 19 Attorneys General share her view (see here, here and here).
Title IX coordinators are frequently in contact with police and criminal prosecutors. In a criminal procedure a defendant has the right to remain silent. In Title IX situations, silence is often assumed to mean guilt, yet a statement could be used against a student to support criminal charges. It’s a deliberate Catch 22 that no student could ever be prepared for (see here and here).
We don’t know why the football player who Katie Meyer believed had allegedly forced an unwanted kiss on a minor on her team was not admonished by the Title IX office or police other than reports that criteria were not met for action (see here).
Already, there are activists jumping on a bandwagon to address “Rape Culture” making an assumption that the football player was guilty, but it would be wrong to assume this young man was a “rapist”. And we should cease throwing the term “Rape Culture” around. It’s divisive and it doesn’t distinguish between an unwanted kiss and forcible penetration. The only thing the word “rape” does is incite reactions — just as it was designed to do when the White House “Not Alone” task force started bandying it around for an extremely flawed and sometimes fatal cause (see here).
Katie Meyer can be conceived as a collateral victim of that flawed cause — she allegedly reacted to someone she believed had sexually assaulted someone else and received a disciplinary letter after a 6-month investigation (what could take 6 months?) which allegedly triggered her suicide — all for “an unwanted kiss” and “a coffee spill”. By any standards, this is absurd and tragic.
It would be wrong to assume that Katie Meyer was or was not faultless in the coffee spill incident as well. What was unforgivable was the disciplinary process and cold letter which crushed her hopes for her career. These letters (or similar ones) have been given out to countless others with varying, often tragic, consequences. Hopes and dreams gone in an instant. Isolation, fear, shame, desperation inevitable (see here and here).
Due process, which has been pretty much non-existent on campuses for the last decade has led to wrongful accusations, wrongful convictions, loss of rights and lives. Stanford, in a ridiculous rebuttal to the allegations in the lawsuit, claims that the Meyers’ lawsuit has misrepresented events. Stanford has zero ground to make this claim about anyone given how they completely failed to correct any representations about other incidents that drew national attention, and which involved Michele Dauber directly (see here and here).
Preponderance of evidence should find Stanford guilty in the Meyers’ suit, using a dose of the standards they use for disciplining students. They appear to be wholeheartedly in the practice of taking students’ money to support themselves while denying those same students their rights and covering up their own administration's and faculty’s misconduct.
How is it possible that Michele Dauber can call for extreme violence on the internet, threaten students with her small world of sexual violence politics but Katie Meyer faced discipline for a spilling a cup of coffee on another student who didn’t want her disciplined?
In my opinion, Stanford has not looked out for the welfare of its students. The named defendants in the lawsuit which include Marc Tessier Lavigne (President) and Debra Zumwalt (Office of General Counsel) have all received letters over the years from various (including myself) about their failures to protect student welfare. By the time someone is driven to suicide, it’s too late. There have been 12 suicides in recent years at Stanford. Stonewalling doesn’t cut it. Heads should roll and there should be a national inquiry — especially given the close relationship between the White House (via Obama and Valerie Jarrett) and Stanford. And the inquiry must go wider — to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Justice’s Office of Violence Against Women.
The irony of Obama’s speech on disinformation at Stanford earlier this year can’t go unnoticed (see here).
Debra Zumwalt, one of the named defendants, has been involved in other cover ups but she’s still there and so is Michele Dauber while Katie Meyers is dead along with several other students who’ve taken their lives at Stanford. How can any student feel good if there is fraud all about them? Especially at an American university with one of the highest tuition price tags in the world? (see here).
Although the lawsuit of the Meyer Family against Stanford University has not been available to read publicly yet, the Los Angeles Times reported that legal counsel for the Meyers is Kim Dougherty of The Justice Collective in Massachusetts. On Kim’s bio, there is mention of her work representing victims of Larry Nassar against Michigan State University (see here).
In 2019, Kim resolved cases against Michigan State University on behalf of athletes abused by Olympic Coach, Larry Nassar, for multiple millions of dollars (see here).
This is particularly interesting because in 2014 at least one victim made a complaint about Larry Nassar to the Title IX office at Michigan State University. The response this victim received from the Title IX coordinator is mind-boggling:
The Title IX complaint — in which the former MSU student Amanda Thomashow described Nassar massaging her breasts and vaginal area during medical examinations — was handled by Kristine Moore, the school’s Title IX coordinator and a full-time MSU employee. Moore, now MSU’s Assistant General Counsel, responsible for protecting the school from legal liability, concluded that Nassar’s behavior was “medically appropriate,” a judgment she reached based on interviews with three medical specialists and an athletic trainer. All four had personal ties to Nassar, and all four were employed by Michigan State.
Over the weekend, The Detroit News revealed that Moore gave Thomashow a different report than the one she delivered to MSU, withholding key information about Nassar’s behavior and clearing him of sexual harassment. The report to MSU, which, until now, had remained internal, also cleared Nassar of harassment but included the assessment that his methods were inflicting “unnecessary trauma” on his patients and putting the university at risk. Thomashow never saw that version of the document.
"There should not be two reports. I’ve never heard of two reports,” said Mick Grewal, the attorney representing 65 of Nassar’s victims. “If there were two, they should have been released at the same time. Not years later” (see here).
What is even more staggering is that in 2014, Michigan State University was one of several campuses under specific investigation by the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights under Catherine Lhamon — Michele & Ken Dauber’s friend (see here and here).
You wonder why coaches at Michigan State, knowing they were under investigation from US Ed OCR, lied — and why US Ed OCR under Catherine Lhamon has remained completely silent on the matter. She was, after all, setting the standards and her standards utterly failed. The taxpaying public has paid for her failures, and they have been catastrophic (see here).
I checked the @KnowyourIX Twitter Handle and @ItsOnUs — nothing about Larry Nassar’s victim’s complaints to the Title IX office in 2014 even though the organizations were active at MSU. But I did find that “Employee X” (Nassar) was listed on reports to US Ed OCR while Lhamon was in charge. The lack of self-awareness is astonishing when you consider that she tweeted that bringing due process to Title IX would take us back to the “bad old days, that predate my birth, when it was permissible to rape and sexually harass students with impunity” (see here).
Had due process been the standard at MSU and for the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights under Catherine Lhamon, Larry Nassar would most likely have been outed at least two years earlier and during the time when MSU was under investigation by the department.
Even more appalling is the fact that the Department of Justice and the FBI have both been accused of cover ups in the Nassar case as well as MSU. This is inexcusable given that Lyn Rosenthal was at the DOJ with the Office of Violence Against Women, working closely with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. She was present at the 2011 launch of the “Dear Colleague” Title IX letter drafted by Michele Dauber. In 2014, the year that victims of Larry Nassar’s went to the Title IX office and OCR to make complaints, Lyn Rosenthal was busy at the Dartmouth Sexual Assault Summit proclaiming that sexual assault on campus was a number one priority:
“It is difficult, and it is challenging, but if we get this right, we will have a cohort of graduating students who know sexual assault is wrong,” she said (see here and here).
With Lyn Rosenthal at the Dartmouth Sexual Assault Summit was Laura L Dunn who’d also been present at the launch of the “Dear Colleague” letter:
Laura Dunn, a survivor of campus sexual assault and an activist against gender-based violence, said she is not fighting for better prevention programs. “My goal is to improve response. When we bring justice, then we will stop the problem,” she said.
Not only did Lyn Rosenthal, Laura L Dunn and Catherine Lhamon get it wrong, they got it so wrong that it has become a danger to lives on campus leading to depression, at least one case of schizophrenia, suicides alongside cover ups, false accusations, sexual and domestic violence incidents ignored and hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuits. Meanwhile student suicides have skyrocketed along with tuition fees to pay for bloated and flailing administrations.
They ignored the true predators like Larry Nassar and spent their time promoting fake stories such as the Rolling Stone UVA “A Rape on Campus” story about “Jackie” and a gang rape at a fraternity at UVA — which was utterly fabricated and then they refused to provide transparency on their own role in it all (see here).
Title IX coordinators were given super-speed training, completely ignorant of prevailing laws for Americans with Disabilities, Title VI (discrimination against race), or even gender discrimination in Title IX (see here, here and here).
Curiously, when Catherine Lhamon was interviewed by the Senate HELP committee in 2021 for the appointment to her current position, I noticed that what had previously been readily available on the Department of Education’s site about US Ed OCR’s failures at MSU was mysteriously suppressed. The Department of Education’s role has largely gone unnoticed. That needs to change. Millions are going towards victims' rights non-profits, millions towards Title IX coordinators and risk management. But what is the point when these all miss or cover up the most heinous rapists in these institutions: Larry Nassar, George Tyndall, Robert Hadden? (see here and here).
In an almost comical coincidence, in March 2015, MSU screened “The Hunting Ground” documentary — the documentary funded by prominent members, associates and their non-profits tied to Stanford University and The White House “Not Alone” task force headed by Valerie Jarrett (a Stanford alum) and “Its On Us” launched by President Obama in September 2014. Viewers of the documentary were asked to take the “Its On Us” pledge. A pledge I now believe was for fundraising for the Democratic Party via Civic Nation (headed by Valerie Jarrett) on whose platform the organization is listed. How do any of these organizations keep their 501 3 c status is baffling.
“The Hunting Ground” was a piece of propaganda. “Mattress Girl” who features in it and whom Michele Dauber supported in the “Carry that Weight” protest at Stanford, was a fraud. Roberta Kaplan defended Columbia University when it was sued over the incident (see here and here).
Lindsay Boylan, one of Andrew Cuomo’s accusers, called my article on Katie Meyer “Word Salad” with a GIF under it. I believe that Lindsay Boylan has used accusations of sexual assault against Andrew Cuomo for her own political advancement. She would have had a PR strategist to get on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar. After all the “credible” accusations and after Andrew Cuomo was forced to resign, the New York AG found nothing to charge him with and revealed the shenanigans of Roberta Kaplan and Tina Tchen behind the scenes (see here).
Kaplan and Tchen were forced to step down from Times Up & NWLC as a result — the same organizations that had put up the PR money for Rapuano & Does v Dartmouth which led to the suicide of Professor David Bucci who was denied the right, by Dartmouth, to defend himself over accusations about professors in his department (see here and here).
Michele Dauber’s motivations regarding Title IX, campus sexual assault and her uber-powerful role at Stanford when it comes to its disciplinary processes appear to be purely political (see here).
She is named in this Jane and John Q Public blog for covering up sexual assault at Stanford University with the help of former prosecutor Debra Medved:
As mainstream media insisted the Emily Doe letter was written by the victim in the Brock Turner case, emails produced to local reporters in March of 2019 show a different story. The emails were circulated to academics and journalists who are reviewing the emails. The Attorney General and the Department of Justice are also involved investigating Dauber and Rosen for election fraud, and improper governmental activity after it appeared Dauber was using her position on the Stanford University campus to cover up sexual abuse cases with the help of former prosecutor Deborah Medved, as the mainstream media was diverted with Dauber’s efforts on Persky. After leaving the Santa Clara County DA’s office Medved landed in family court where kickbacks for her loyalty come in the form of court appointments and fee orders (see here).
I’m not the only one who wants to know what was going on between Catherine Lhamon, Michele Dauber, Laura L Dunn and others. KC Johnson who has kept meticulous records of Title IX and campus sexual assault cases on campuses across the nation has had to sue to get the records (see here, here and here).
Catherine Lhamon, Laura L Dunn and Michele Dauber are wrong: Due Process protects everyone. It creates a level playing field. Preponderance of Evidence is for ambulance chasers and those who want cover ups allowing precisely the kind of situation that led to Katie Meyer’s death: An alleged unwanted kiss that didn’t meet the criteria for a Title IX admonishment or criminal charges but resulted in the suicide of a female soccer star over a coffee spill. But besides due process, these ambitious activists have forgotten the human factor involving feelings, emotions, wounded hearts and souls (see here).
A 20-year-old female wrote a letter in support of Brock Turner in 2016. She’d known Brock from high school. Whatever your opinion is about him or his case (I believed he was a horrific rapist until late in 2019 when I started to look into the facts and now I see that he was framed in the most abhorrent manner which benefited Michele Dauber and the DA of Santa Clara County. Stanford stood by and did nothing to help their student), consider the consequences of speaking up to defend anyone at Stanford or elsewhere. What student can afford to do this? (see here).
We should not let Stanford or Michele Dauber or the White House “Not Alone” task force, “Its On Us”, “Know Your IX”, “SurvJustice”, “End Rape on Campus”, “NCVLI”, “NSVRC” or others get away with using media and social media to stir up witch hunts on our campuses or in our police departments or courts for their flawed causes. Student lives are more valuable than their rhetoric — whether accuser, accused or bystander (see here).
A group of alumni at Stanford have called for a review of the disciplinary process at Stanford. Will they get stonewalled? (see here).
Johnny Depp called on people to stand up against injustice. It’s not activism to stand up for what it right. It should be a constitutional obligation (see here).
Claire Best heads Claire Best & Associates, an international talent agency representing some of the most respected names in the entertainment industry for film, television, and commercials that was established in 2010. She had 16 years of experience in the agency business as an owner, C.E.O. and C.O.O. before Claire Best & Associates. Prior to becoming an agent in 2002, Claire was a production executive at New Line Cinema and Fine Line Features where she oversaw the production of many well-known domestic and international feature films from 1996-2001. Claire has also produced and executive produced a number of award winning and critically acclaimed features, shorts, and documentaries. She is a voting member of B.A.F.T.A. and the Television Academy (see: clairebest.net).
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