Cornell University hired former Obama Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to investigate allegations a female student was drugged and gang-raped by seven students — a case the Ivy League school stands accused of bungling. But if history is any guide, bringing in a high-profile Democrat lawyer to calm campus activists won’t end well.
Eight years ago, the University of Rochester faced a similar firestorm. After Mother Jones reported that two junior faculty accused professor T. Florian Jaeger of being flirtatious and creepy, the university hired ex-Obama lawyer Mary Jo White — a former U.S. Attorney and Securities and Exchange Commission chair — to investigate under special arrangements designed to demonstrate independence.
White conducted 140 interviews and reviewed thousands of documents. Her conclusion: the sexual misconduct allegations were unsubstantiated.
“Despite being labeled as a ‘sexual predator’ by his accusers, there have never been allegations of sexual assault, unwanted groping, any use of force, or exhibitionism outside of consensual relationships, and we have found no evidence of such behavior ever occurring.”
The exoneration didn’t calm the outrage. It supercharged it.
Students and faculty demanded consequences anyway. One undergraduate made international news by pledging a hunger strike until the professor was fired. Seven faculty members and one student filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint.
The EEOC dismissed it. Time Magazine still named the two accusers — Celeste Kidd and Jessica Cantlon — among its “Person of the Year” honorees in December 2017.
White’s report methodically dismantled the women’s claims. Kidd and Cantlon said Jaeger had sex with a particular woman; that woman said it never happened and had told them so beforehand. The pair accused Jaeger of taking advantage of another woman; she said that was false and she’d corrected them in real time.
White found that one of the female complainants “met her spouse while she was a professor and he was a graduate student” — the very dynamic she accused Jaeger of exploiting years earlier when the university had no rule against it. Interviewees said Kidd herself “openly talked about sex with colleagues, including specific, graphic comments about her sexual partners,” and “maintained a list of prominent academics in her field with whom she wanted to have sex.”
The investigation revealed that creepy messages Kidd provided were “heavily edited” and “manipulated in such a manner as to make them essentially devoid of all critical context.”
The department chair changed his view after seeing internal emails in the late stage of the investigation. He said they showed “widespread lying, deceit, and manipulation in the complaints against Jaeger.”
Facts didn’t matter. Activists needed a sacrifice.
The New York Times ran a headline in January 2018: “Exonerated, University of Rochester President Steps Down.” The resignation came the same day White’s report was released — a report the Times admitted “discredited many of the claims against the university and found no legal wrongdoing.”
White’s report explicitly stated “we do not believe that any potential claimant or plaintiff would be able to sustain a legal claim for sexual harassment,” describing at length why such claims would fail.
The university paid the claimants $9.4 million anyway.
Cornell officials now face the same gamble. Hiring a credentialed Obama-era lawyer didn’t stop Rochester’s president from resigning or prevent a multi-million-dollar payout despite findings that cleared the accused. Whether Sally Yates can deliver a different outcome remains an open question.
