seduce Joseph, who has been enslaved by her rich husband, and cries rape after Joseph resists her advance. In Greek mythology, Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, does the same to Hippolytus. These stories, and the many others like them, are framed as obscene anomalies. Rape itself, though, is sanctioned in the same texts. In Numbers, Moses commands his army to kill all the men and the nonvirgin women, and save all the virgin women for themselves. In Greek myth, Zeus rapes Antiope, Demeter, Europa, and Leda. Poseidon rapes Medusa. Hades rapes Persephone. For centuries, rape was viewed as a crime against property, and offenders were often punished by the imposition of a fine, payable to the victim’s father or husband. Until the 1980s, most rape laws in America specified that husbands could not be charged with raping their wives. Rape, until very recently, was presented as a norm.
This extends to UVA, which for many decades expelled students for plagiarism while refusing to consider rape a serious offense. From 1998 to 2014, 183 students were kicked out of UVA for honor code violations: one of them had, for example, cribbed three phrases from Wikipedia while on study abroad. When, in the late nineties, a student was found guilty of sexually assaulting another student, named Jenny Wilkinson, UVA punished him by adding a letter of reprimand to his record, which could be removed after a year if he completed an assault education program. Because of student privacy laws, Wilkinson could not protest this outcome in public. “In fact, in a crazy twist, I could have faced charges from the university if I had talked about them,” she wrote in the Times in 2015. Her assailant, meanwhile, was allowed to keep one of UVA’s top honors: he lived on the Lawn.
In the decades that followed, things got microscopically better. After Erdely’s story was published, I interviewed one of my former UVA classmates at Jezebel, referring to her with the pseudonym Kelly. In 2006, Kelly filed university charges against the student who sexually assaulted her. After ten months, UVA found him guilty. (Again, the rarity of a guilty finding can’t be overstated: at the time when I interviewed Kelly, there were only thirteen other guilty findings in the school’s history—one of whom was Wilkinson’s assailant.) Kelly was assaulted, as many college women are, in the fall of her first semester: she went to a frat party, where a guy she knew poured her drinks until she passed out. In the university’s investigation, it came out that a witness had seen Kelly’s limp body being carried up the stairs. A nurse visiting her younger brother in the frat that night testified that Kelly’s pulse had been “low, in the 20s and 30s.” At the hearing, a male faculty member asked Kelly if she’d ever cheated on her boyfriend. But her assailant was found guilty, and suspended for three years.
This was, in the context of UVA’s long record of apathy and inaction, an extreme success story. In the year prior to the Rolling Stone piece, thirty-eight students had reached out to Dean Eramo to report being sexually assaulted. Only nine of those incidents resulted in formal complaints, and only four resulted in misconduct hearings. And, as at most colleges, those thirty-eight reports were the visible fraction of a vast and unseen iceberg. Though I rarely back away from difficulty, I feel sure that, if I had been traumatically assaulted in college, I wouldn’t have had the courage—or the stamina for the inevitable bureaucratic humiliation—to report.
Erdely noted, in her piece, that “genteel University of Virginia has no radical feminist culture seeking to upend the patriarchy.” And it’s true that the school is far from radical. But, though I never thought to learn about this while I was on campus, UVA’s women have been agitating to change the institution ever since it went coed. “The fact that none of us here are afraid to pursue the truth wherever it may lead,” a woman wrote in the Cav Daily in 1975, referencing a much-used Thomas Jefferson quote, “pales alongside the fact that many of us have good reason to fear pursuing a midnight snack on the Corner.” That fall, a local committee surveyed the local statistics—rape was almost twice as prevalent in the town as in Virginia as a whole—and labeled Charlottesville “rape city” in a widely shared report. At the same time, a Jack the Ripper–themed Corner bar called the Minories English Pub put up a