"I lost," Clara recalls. She chugged the bitch cup.The rest of the party unfolded like college parties tend to: It got bigger as the hours wore on. Drinking games turned to tequila shots, and tequila shots turned to chugging from bags of cheap wine being passed around the room. Clara remembers that someone threw up in the front yard. After she, Krista, and another friend—who asked to remain anonymous for this story—saw UP Public Safety officers pulling up, they scurried off into the North Portland neighborhood. At another house, Clara swigged directly from a bottle of Fireball whiskey. Her friends told her that part later; she has no recollection of it.Krista remembers. Her roommate was tanked. "I stopped drinking just to make sure she was OK," she recalls.Back at the dorm, Krista sat Clara down on the floor and fed her snacks before leaving again. Clara has flickers in her mind of sitting on the floor eating, and that she had her iPhone in her hand when, at 1:57 AM, it buzzed. It was a friend, Jack (not his real name). "Hey," he said. A few minutes later he added, "I hope you're doing well Clara, goodnight."Read more: Elizabeth Smart Is Standing Up for Rape Victims—And Tearing Down Purity Culture
Krista says that she and another friend went to Jack's dorm room after the incident, confronting him. Later, Krista fought with Jack over text. "I didn't go over there to do anything," Jack wrote. "I thought I might kiss her or something.""She's just so drunk," Krista replied.I wasn't there when she was drinking so I don't know how much she's had. Do you want me to carry around a breathalyzer?
Dude. She was way drunker than you were. She was not in the mindset to give you consent.
Over a month later—after a formal student conduct hearing—the University ruled in Jack's favor. In a letter explaining their decision, administrators detailed that on the night in question, the 150-pound, then-18-year-old Clara was intoxicated, but not incapacitated. Clara had insisted that she was too drunk to recall the assault and that she'd never had sex with her attacker before (Clara says Jack told the school otherwise, claiming they had sex previously, but he would not speak with Broadly for this story to confirm). Still, the University told her the sex was "consistent" with "past physical contact," and that "the hearing panel has concluded that it is not more likely than not that [Jack] engaged in sexual activity without consent."Sometimes people have asked me, 'What if we're both drunk? Are we sexually assaulting each other?'
Kristina Houck served as the Wellness Education and Prevention Program Coordinator at the University of Portland until 2015, and supervised a $159,000 grant from Department of Justice's Office on Violence Against Women. She says she consulted with national experts to weigh in on the school's definitions of consent and incapacitation—definitions that were "recommended to us by national experts," she adds.In the school's handbook, consent is defined to be "informed, freely, and voluntarily given mutual agreement understood by both parties and communicated with clearly understandable words or actions, to participate in each form of sexual activity." (The school also details in its handbook that it is formally opposed to sex outside of marriage.) "Consent will not be assumed by silence, impairment due to alcohol or drugs, unconsciousness, sleep, physical impairment, or lack of active resistance," the handbook reads. "A current or previous dating or sexual relationship is not sufficient to constitute consent."Rape myths allow us to believe that a 'real rape' is one in which a victim is raped by a stranger who jumps out of the bushes with a weapon.
Clara argues that when she told Jack not to come to her University of Portland dorm room with her "tonight is not the best idea" text, she was clearly not giving consent. "He knew I was drunk and he came over even though I told him not to," she continues. When she let him into her dorm room, she adds, she wasn't capable of giving consent, evidenced by the fact she had already said no. And the condom? "I kind of just knew what was going to happen," Clara explains. "We were alone… There would be no way I could resist what was going to happen."If your policies say 'only if they are under the influence of alcohol,' every student who has one glass of beer and has sex could say they are sexually assaulted.
Clara had spent her entire life as an enthusiastic Portland Pilot: As an infant, her first home was her parent's dorm room in the brick, two-story men's residence hall where her father worked as an hall director. Her parents were alumni of the Oregon Catholic university, and her grandfather, a great aunt and uncles and her older brother were, too. The day she was born, her arrival into the world was announced over the loudspeaker at the University of Portland men's soccer game as they pummeled the Santa Clara Broncos on their own turf.When she wasn't on the UP campus as a kid—for soccer camps, basketball games or Mass services—Clara was in its backyard. She was raised in the tree-lined neighborhood of bungalows and ranchers that surrounds the picture-perfect campus, high up on a North Portland bluff overlooking the Willamette River. Clara considered colleges all over the world, but nowhere felt as perfect—as safe—as the campus she already considered home.This fall, as she waited for a judgment on her case, Clara says she felt suicidal. "I was just kind of dead," she says. On the tiny campus, her home away from home, she would find herself looking over her shoulder, watching for Jack, who attends classes in the same building as her. She thought about transferring to a different school.It's also not a mistake that's like, 'Oh, here is your consequence: Someone is going to sexually assault you.'
The next day, Clara was reeling. She says before the protest, UP administrators had asked the organizers to stay on side roads and off sidewalks to allow ADA accessibility. The protesters respected their request, but then noticed the donors avoiding the student protest altogether. They were being directed into a different door.And even more, Clara was confused. After she told her story to local television stations and the University newspaper, one of the witnesses who testified on her behalf about the night of her assault—the anonymous friend who aided Krista in helping her home from the party, and later walked into the room—changed her story.In a phone interview, the witness—who was paranoid about Broadly identifying her—says she feels bad for Jack. "He really didn't do anything," she adds. She claims Clara wasn't as drunk as she says. And even if she was, Clara's description of her and Jack's sexual encounter didn't sound like what she thinks of as sexual assault. It sounded "just like a normal drunk-ish hook up.""What she's describing as sexual assault is the majority of the encounters I've had," she says.Broadly made one final attempt to speak to Jack for this story through the anonymous witness. She passed along a message in response, which she said was from him: "If the reporter decides to publish a one-sided story protecting an individual's false allegations, the publication will suffer for her lies," the message read. "It isn't beneficial to any party for this story to be published. Clara will be in deeper shit, the publication will lose credibility, and I'll be more infamous. It's a lose-lose."The end of the fall semester brought Clara more heartache. Having her friend change her story is confusing. "I've been truthful," Clara says. She says she if continues to question the events of that night, that she'll "victim-blame myself.""What if I had just gone to bed like I was supposed to instead of being on my phone? What if I had just never texted him back in the first place? What if I had never opened the door?" she says. "It's hard when I feel shitty not to blame myself."Despite measures the University put in place to keep Clara and Jack separated, Clara says she practically ran into him as she walked out of one building on a December morning we spoke. He was walking in. "We made eye contact," she says. "He definitely saw me." She says every time she sees him, she feels sick. She remembers being friends. She recalls the text he sent after the night in question—how it felt like he was blaming her. Over holiday break, the campus was empty. Clara was at home. We talked several times over the holiday break, and she appeared to be waffling about returning to school in the winter.The winter semester resumed in mid-January, and it seems Clara's difficulties defending her case have only compounded. Clara says the anonymous witness who changed her story recently accused Clara of sexual harassment—"she is claiming I set myself up to be caught with my assailant in order to make her jealous"—and Clara had to make an official statement to the school.What she's describing as sexual assault is the majority of the encounters I've had.
On the first day back to campus, Clara and every other student, faculty, and staff member at UP received an email from the president of the school announcing a re-evaluation of Title IX procedures. "I am personally committed, as I know all of you are, to ending sexual violence on our campus," it read. But Clara says she hasn't gotten any answers from the University. She says the administration was handed a petition with 2,300 signatures at the end of the semester, which calls for an overhaul of the student conduct process. The school hasn't responded to it.Earlier this week, Jack challenged a sexual abuse protection order Clara had filed against him in a county courthouse. The judge ruled against him, meaning Jack will have to keep his distance from her until October 1. "For now I'm just very glad that something has finally gone my way," she says.It was the first victory she's felt this entire time. After the holiday break, she feared people might have forgotten what happened to her, that her voice would be too quiet, or her story considered too unimportant. "I think the University's hope is that this will all die down," she says. "That's not gonna happen."Read more: When a Woman Is Raped in Rural Alaska, Does Anyone Care?