Pirate's Cove

A few days ago I wondered in a tweet to someone (not digging through all those) how Democrats would attempt to smear Barrett in a similar way to Kavanaugh, some sort of sexual assault thing. I figured someone would directly accuse her of assaulting them, and, unlike Joe Biden, we were supposed to Believe All Women. The Washington Post went a different way (via Twitchy)

Amy Coney Barrett, potential Supreme Court nominee, wrote influential ruling on campus sexual assault https://t.co/ix2njR38kY

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) September 21, 2020

Let’s see

Amy Coney Barrett, a leading contender for the Supreme Court seat held by the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, wrote an influential appellate decision last year that made it easier for students accused of sexual assault to challenge universities’ handling of their cases.

Barrett led a three-woman panel of judges that said Purdue University may have discriminated against a male student accused of sexual assault when it suspended him for a year, a punishment that cost him his spot in the Navy ROTC program.

“It is plausible that [university officials] chose to believe Jane because she is a woman and to disbelieve John because he is a man,” Barrett wrote in the case, in which the accuser was identified as Jane Doe and the accused as John Doe.

The interesting thing is that so much of the rest of the article actually shows that this was a good ruling for protection of Constitutional Rights of the accused

About 600 lawsuits have been filed challenging decisions in campus sexual assault cases since 2011, of which about 30 have gone to federal appeals courts, said K.C. Johnson, a Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center history professor who tracks these cases. The decision Barrett wrote for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in John Doe v. Purdue University is the “single most consequential ruling in this area,” he said, because it set a fair, simplified standard that has been adopted by three other circuit courts, covering 22 states, as well as the federal district court in D.C.

“This case was a trendsetter,” said Brett Sokolow, a consultant who advises schools and universities on compliance with Title IX, which bars sex discrimination by institutions receiving federal funding. Sokolow, who also serves as president of ATIXA, an association of Title IX administrators, called the opinion “revolutionary” and said it would make it easier for accused students to bring civil litigation against universities to a jury trial.

The lawsuits brought by male students accused of sexual assault generally argue that universities denied their due process rights, or discriminated against them on the basis of sex in violation of Title IX, or both. In many decisions before the Purdue case, Sokolow said, courts upheld accused students’ due process claims but rejected their Title IX arguments on the grounds that the students had failed a complicated series of legal tests first established in 1994.

But, see, most won’t bother reading beyond the headline and first three paragraphs, getting the idea that Barret is Extreme and defends sexual assault. People have Rights. And students accused have rights, and can sue schools for violating those rights.