OPINION | ‘Vigilante Justice’ does not solve sexual violence at Tulane
December 1, 2021
In January of 2015, a 22-year-old woman, who was later identified in her memoir, “Know My Name” as Chanel Miller, went to a fraternity party on Stanford University’s campus and was found later that night unconscious, being brutally assaulted behind the fraternity’s dumpster.
Sexual assault on college campuses occurred countless times before Miller’s attack, but the grueling circumstances of the assault, the prestige of the university, the identity of the perpetrator and the case’s verdict illuminated the unnerving frequency of sexual violence on college campuses.
The Stanford sexual assault case was the tipping point for national recognition of the prevalence of sexual assault across American universities. In 2017, Tulane University conducted the Tulane Climate Survey which collected data on sexual violence, but the results of the survey were not released until January of 2018.
All the while, in October 2017, countless allegations against the now disgraced Hollywood Mogul, Harvey Weinstein, catalyzed the #MeToo movement.
These two movements, one centered around combating sexual violence on college campuses, and the other centered around encouraging women to speak up and hold their assailants accountable in a justice system that often fails victims, merged in the creation of “Vigilante Justice.”
“Vigilante Justice” is the name of an unverified list of alleged sexual assailants that was circulated throughout Tulane on Nov. 17 but has since been removed. The list contained the names of both past and present Tulane students.
Many of the names on the list were compiled from the now-deleted instagram account, @boysbeware.tulane. The Instagram account served as a platform for Tulane students to anonymously recount their experiences of sexual misconduct and expose their alledged assailents by name in a supposed effort to keep other members of the community safe from sexual predators.
However, several names on the list did not originate from @boysbeware.tulane, leaving the source of said names unknown. The list itself was created anonymously as a Google document and was spread through the anonymous messaging board, Yik Yak.
As the name “Vigilante Justice” suggests, the list was created out of collective frustration regarding the general lack of accountability that exists surrounding sexual violence at Tulane, and more particularly, Tulane’s reluctance to sincerely address the issue and hold perpetrators responsible.
Tulane’s “Vigilante Justice” was not the first of its kind. In October 2017, Moira Donegan — an American journalist who is currently a columnist at The Guardian — anonymously published the highly controversial “Shitty Media Men” list. Donegan’s list contained the names of men in the media alleged to have engaged in a wide variety of inappropriate behaviors from “weird lunch dates” to “rape.” Donegan was sued for creating her list.
Similarly, in December 2017, Middlebury College student Elizabeth Dunn posted a “List of Men to Avoid” on Facebook in which she accused Middlebury students of behaviors ranging from “emotional abuse” to denoting them as “serial rapist[s].” Dunn received a sanction on her permanent record as a result of disseminating her list.
A survey assessing Tulane students’ reaction to “Vigilante Justice” found that 96% of research participants do not believe that Tulane is responding appropriately or to the best of their ability to sexual violence on campus.
This frustration may be tied to the “Shifting the Paradigm” webinar, which occurred a few days prior to the list’s release, in which Tulane reported an increase in sexual misconduct cases from the 2019-2020 academic year to the 2020-2021 academic year. However, student dissatisfaction with sexual misconduct can also be traced to The Hullabaloo “Letter to the Editor” from the spring of 2018. In this letter, an anonymous female student detailed how, after reporting her rape to Tulane and deciding to go through the formal investigative process, she was victim-blamed.
All of this is to say, the student body is fed up and with good reason. However, “Vigilante Justice” was not the solution, and it is evident that the creator of this list put little thought into the repercussions of their actions.
The list only contained students’ names, offered zero context on the alleged acts of misconduct, made no indication of severity and, at one point, had Danny Devito listed as a perpetrator. The vagueness of the list, while striking to readers, completely undermined the efforts of those trying to combat sexual assault, individually and wholistically.
The list’s complete lack of context was problematic because the severity of one’s alleged crimes matter. It is reasonable to assume that while that while sexual harassment and sexual assault are both wrong, one deserves more severe penalty than the other. There are also gray areas of sexual assault that we must acknowledge if we want to progress as a community and as a society without dismissing the discussion as counterintuitive to the movement.
In an article in The Atlantic this September, Helen Lewis describes the new conversations feminist theorists are having in the wake of the #MeToo movement. She explains how one of these theorists, Amia Srinivasan, notes that “our language still lacks the words to describe the many varieties of bad sex that do not rise to the criminal standard of rape or assault.”
Correspondingly, there are conversations we need to have about the “varieties of bad sex.” For example, if society has established that an individual cannot consent to sex when they are intoxicated and encounter a situation in which two intoxicated people have sex, how are we to determine who is responsible? Are both of them culpable or neither? Context matters and the creator of the list did not provide any.
Many of those surveyed found @boysbeware.tulane to be a useful resource for women on campus as it had a “controlled audience” and provided in-depth details on the allegations, as one surveyee put it. 72% of students surveyed found the instagram account to be fair. However, as one surveyee said, “The instagram account was supposed to be a safe space and instead [the list] stole the privacy, freedom to report on their own, and security of people who had already experienced having their free will ripped away from them.”
A commendable product of the #MeToo movement and of highly publicized sexual violence cases such as Christine Blasey Ford’s was the campaign to believe survivors. This was necessary in a society that often fails to do so. However, in a situation such as the one presented to Tulane, there appears to be an unreasonable conflation between being inclined to believe the stories of survivors and assuming automatic guilt of the accused.
Believing survivors and due process are not mutually exclusive. It is distinctions such as these that we need to be able to have honest conversations about, without politicization.
70% of those surveyed found the release of the document to be unfair, 86% found the release of the document to be problematic and 58% of students would have rather it not been published. The list compromised the credibility of the allegations, which practically all sexual assault cases rely on, and by doing so, hindered the effectuality of the movement.
Doing something provocative like releasing a list of assault allegations was certainly an effective way to grab the student body’s attention, but that is all it has done. Whoever the creator is, if they think of themselves as a vigilante or hero, they are gravely mistaken.
There is no justice for survivors in the distribution of a list of unsubstantiated claims, in subjecting them to harassment and in taking away even more of their sense of privacy then that which has already been stolen from them. There is no justice in ruining the reputations of the accused without providing any proof or giving them the chance to defend themselves.
Yes, Tulane has not adequately addressed its sexual violence problem. Yes, Tulane does not dole out sufficient consequences to assailants. However, instead of stooping to reactions such as these, students should be calling on the school to take specific actions, such as levying harsher punishments to those found guilty.
Instead of demanding the school take action against those named on an anonymous list circulated through an anonymous messaging board, which they have no jurisdiction to do, the Tulane community should be creating spaces for students to openly discuss rape culture at Tulane and the steps the community can take to achieve reform.
At the end of the day, parents are sending their teenage daughters off to college every year to attend “one of the most well-respected” universities in the country for what is often exalted as the best four years of their lives. But, 15% of them will be raped at least twice, 24% will be raped at least once, 40.5% will be sexually assaulted and all of those girls will become women in the worst possible way.
These same women will “grow” even more once they are confronted with the bleak reality that there is no justice. Instead they’ll see their rapist “buying pizza at the Boot” after enjoying a night out partying with their friends, existing in the luxury of blissful laxity that will never be afforded to the person they irreparably harmed.
Steve White • Dec 3, 2021 at 1:02 am
The author says Chanel Miller was “being brutally assaulted behind the fraternity’s dumpster”
This is very misleading – the entire “Stanford Rape Case” was largely a narrative put out by Stanford Law Professor Michele Dauber, who, before that incident, had advised Leah Francis, a Stanford undergrad who claimed “Stanford is protecting my rapist” – but in fact, the man she accused was a sometime lover, who she sought out, went home with, and got into bed with, after taking off her clothes, and only accused about two weeks later – in other words, Professor Dauber was known to take on the most spurious of complaints .
Chanel Miller had a serious drinking problem – she told Stanford police – almost certainly before she was taken under Dauber’s wing – that she had experienced blackouts while drinking many times – she also admitted, in her book that she had been promiscuous at that time in her life “I slept with one guy because he had cool socks”. While Miller probably did lose consciousness at some point, it is not at all clear Turner had noticed it when the Swedish grad students came along.
The claim it was “behind a dumpster” is highly misleading – as you can imagine, Stanford campus is a pretty nice looking place- the dumpster are enclosed in fences – so, when the cops came, the cop approached from one side of the enclosure, and said Miller was passed out behind it – in fact, it was free standing – so, if you are on the north side, anyone on the south side is “behind” and so on – the point here being, there is an implication Turner got Miller out of view to molest her – but I have been at the site – before the memorial was built – “behind” the dumpster was actually “in full view” (Professor Dauber’s words in a Democracy Now interveiw, before she realized the other way had more propaganda value) of the partygoers – since it was a warm night, likely dozens of people – Turner was not trying to hide what he was doing -at all, I went there one Sunday morning, and there were beer cans and other party detritis with a few feet of where they were.
Finally, the “brutal assault” _ again, Professor Dauber told us Miller was “gravely injured” by Turner – but in fact, in her second talk with cops the following day – she went to get her phone back – she said she felt fine had no pain or discomfort whatever, and no injuries at all were seen by the EMTs = she was just passed out from drinking. The claim Turner “jabbed pine needles” inside her was false – there was nothing found, and since she said she remembered nothing, that claim was made solely for dramatic effect – Miller was a Spoken Word major at UC Santa Barbara and she was accustomed to writing scripts for herself – look up Spoken Word to understand.
She also went on an on about bandages, and blood on her hands – but, again, the EMT’s saw nothing – IF there were any bandages or blood – probably a complete fabrication – but if there was, it was because they took samples for toxicology and put an IV in for hydration. There was no “brutal assault” – there MAY have been Turner rubbing against her, fully clothed, after she passed out, to get himself off, knowing she had passed out on him but not caring.
The media repeated Miller’s famous “Emily Doe” Victim Impact speech as though it reflected the evidence, or was sworn testimony, if inaccurate, defense lawyer would have objected, and so on = NONE of that was true, the most inflammatory parts were made up = and she also lied to mislead people about her significant binge drinking history – for example, when she woke up in the hospital, she later claimed, she “thought I had fallen and was in an administrative office of the school” – Nope. She told the cop when she got her phone she thought she was in the Stanford drunk tank – which was a very reasonable guess – but it gives rise to the question – how many times had she been in campus drunk tanks before?
it is interesting to note – when she got the phone, the cops asked her to check and see if she’d gotten any texts of calls during the black out – so, she looked at it – then lied to claim there was nothing except her sister’s attempts to reach her – (very puzzling in themselves, that place is not that big- and the cops came – if your sister was missing and you saw the cops – wouldn’t you check to see if they had her ? )
In fact, she had multiple calls to the boyfriend back at Wharton – Lucas Daniel Motro – but she lied to the cops about that- why? All indications are she was scared he would think she had been cheating on him – and it is interesting, besides not really searching for Chanel, Tiffany, who claimed she assumed Chanel went home – then went home herself – but did NOT find Chanel there. THAT should have been extremely alarming – but does Tiffany call the cops? The Stanford cops? The hospitals? Does she even wake up her parents and say “I do not know where Chanel is?” does she call Motro to ask him if he knows anything? (I am not positive Tiffany had Lucas’ number) – NO, she does not raise the alarm – she leaves Chanel alone to come home wagging her tail behind her – that does not make any sense – unless you think Chanel picked up someone from the party.
And Chanel very helpfully supplied her motivation for going along with Professor Dauber making this the crime of the century, when she said the “most hurtful thing” Turner did was claim she enjoyed being masturbated. In other words, claiming she was cheating was the worst thing he did= my guess is, after some scary alcoholism and promiscuity, Motro, a straight arrow type guy was her savior and nothing was more important than keeping that relationship.
Alumni that is so proud of the students behind this movement • Dec 3, 2021 at 8:32 pm
The fact that you took the time to write paragraphs defending Brock Turner and discrediting a victim of sexual violence who has been a beacon of hope for so many in this climate is absolutely despicable. This comment is filled with the victim blaming rhetoric that is plaguing Tulane’s campus and that this movement of brave students is trying to combat.
Steve White • Mar 20, 2022 at 12:11 pm
I tried to post a Replay to you – and it does not show – I will try again but much shorter this time. Two questions:
1. Is any part of what I wrote above untrue? ANY PART. Of course, you can draw your own conclusions about the facts I gave, but are the facts themselves wrong? When I say there is no evidence of Tiffany trying to find Chanel – is this wrong ? When I say she reported blacking out “4 or 5 times” to the cops -is that wrong? When I say she thought she woke up in Stanford’s drunk tank – is that wrong? When I say she reported, ” I slept with one guy because he had cool socks” – is that wrong?
You can not dismiss it as “victim blaming rhetoric” – I mean, YOU can, but people who base their beliefs on facts and logic will regard it as relevant.
Stop and Think • Dec 2, 2021 at 3:43 pm
I am disappointed that this article is being given space in a public forum. While the list should not have been distributed, it is not because the claims were unsubstantiated. It is because it was released without the consent of some of the survivors affected by these abusers. Due process arguments can only be raised in a world where the system serves survivors, not abusers. The use of gendered language also undercuts the meaning of the article. Please avoid publishing victim blaming pieces in the future.
Feelings wahhh • Dec 2, 2021 at 9:09 am
This article …says literally nothing of use. I don’t care that people find the list unfair I care about the girls being assaulted?? Why would I care about the feelings of anyone but them?? Rapists can’t be rehabilitated we are all better off without them around and Tulane isn’t going to do anything it’s literally the high slap on the wrist to be socially isolated.
read it • Dec 2, 2021 at 9:54 am
where in the article does she say rapists should be rehabilitated please let me know?? i think this is important and represents a silent majority
There is no “justice” under tulane • Dec 2, 2021 at 6:37 am
As you say, there was no context for this list – including that there was no assertion of potential legal or conduct (or other) action against those included on the list. It was merely a resource listing men who you might be better off avoiding, in lieu of any sort of help from the university and after boysbeware (which, as your survey says, many saw to be a helpful resource) was shut down after criticism and threats. There was no suggestion of how one should respond to this list – and while it obviously wasn’t the best way to deal with such a sensitive topic, the “right ways” are continually made out of reach by the administration. Focus on those in charge rather than on students trying to keep themselves safe in the absence of action/support on the administration’s part.