Mattress Girl - A Saga of False Sexual Assault Charges and Blind Faith (Part 1)

Sexual assault is a real, and serious, issue. Sometimes accusers are not taken seriously enough, but that doesn't mean that all accusations are true, or that the accused should be punished without a fair judicial process. The following is one such case where a witch hunt ensued and seriously damaged an innocent young man's life.

It began in the frigid winter of 2013, when an article came out in a Columbia University school magazine, the Blue and White, when they published the article "Accessible, Prompt, and Equitable? An Examination of Sexual Assault at Columbia". In this article there were descriptions of two different accusations of rape, although for now all of the names were hidden behind pseudonyms. The woman was known as "Sara" and the man "Tom". This particular account described a couple who had been friends with benefits and had hooked up multiple times in the past. One particular night, the accusation goes, they ran into each other at a party and went back to her room together. When they had sex, he supposedly grabbed her hands to hold her down and began engaging in anal sex with her, even though she had only consented to vaginal sex and did not want to engage in anal. She says that she told him to stop, but that he kept going anyway and simply left the room when he was done.

She never went to the police or a hospital to have a rape kit done, only telling a couple friends about what had happened. She said that the emotional strain of making a report, or even talking to a therapist was too much. However, she did eventually file a report with the University against "Tom" in April of 2013 after she learned of another girl, called "Natalie" in the story, who claimed to have been raped by "Tom" as well. In Natalie's case Tom apparently held her down during sex throughout their months long relationship, which often upset Natalie. Natalie felt months later that their relationship had been unhealthy and she had been manipulated. Eventually both women made reports to the University's Title IX office.

Although the University opened an investigation, after only a couple weeks they concluded that there was not sufficient evidence to take any sort of action. So that's the end of the story right? It's just one person's word against another. In reality, that was when all Hell broke lose.

A group calling itself "No Red Tape Columbia" began to go around covering their mouths with red tape to symbolize how "Sara", who by now had revealed herself to be a woman named Emma Sulkowicz, was being silenced by Columbia. It is still unclear how launching a two week investigation was a way of silencing her, but the campaign persisted none-the-less. It gained steam in part because in 2016 U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York (a likely contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination) was seeking $100 million in federal funding to help enforce rules regarding sexual assaults on college campuses. She was soon joined by the more moderate Democratic Senator from Missouri, Claire McCaskill. Looking for a national story to help get her cause into the public eye, Gillibrand soon found the Columbia Rape Case. Gillibrand went to Columbia to give a speech, and although she did not mention Sulkowicz at the time, a the local CNBC affiliate covered the speech and interviewed Sulkowicz. In that interview she claimed that Columbia had thrown out the case entirely without hearing what she had to say, which is most unlikely, and failed to mention the multi-week investigation. That platform, given to a woman whose case had been thrown out for lack of evidence, reignited the whole controversy and highlighted it as a national issue. Sulkozicz' platform would only grow as mainstream and feminist media picked up on the story.

Soon, hundreds of media stories were published covering these accusations, and feminist media in particular was demanding action. The New York Times noted that many of these activists were working together, particularly in regards to sharing their own experiences trying to get their own schools to act and to figure out how to best pressure Columbia to re-open the investigation. Soon, bathrooms and public spaces on campus were being graffitied with "rape lists" of supposed rapists. One of the names was Paul Nungesser, the man falsely accused by Sulkowicz, so it isn't too hard to guess who might have been writing these lists. Soon a student publication published one of these lists. One would think that a bunch of Columbia students would be smarter than to publish an article based on names scribbled on a bathroom wall, yet here we are...

After Sulkowicz finally took the case to the police, and the police responded by not doing much due to the lack of evidence, the decided to launch what is now known as the famous "Carry that Weight" endurance art piece. This is when she carried around the mattress that she was supposedly assaulted on and became known colloquially as "mattress girl". She began this to fulfill a requirement for her senior art thesis, and said that she would continue carrying it around until her "rapist" was gone. Soon she was getting interviews about her new art piece, and there was talk of putting a display of her carrying the mattress, or even just the mattress, in a museum. In January of 2015 she was invited to attend the State of the Union address. She was the personal guest of...Senator Gillibrand.

To be continued in part 2.