The disputed sexual encounter began late on a Friday night, when Jones, the accuser, and Doe were sophomores. He had been dating her roommate, who was out of town, for a month.
According to accounts by the accuser and witnesses given to Allyson Kurker, the outside investigator brought in by Amherst, Doe arrived in a fourth-floor dormitory lounge where several friends had gathered. He was very drunk. She was tipsy.
Within minutes, they were “making out’’ in front of the others, and then left and went to her dorm room.
In her initial written complaint, Jones said that in the dorm room, the entire encounter was forcible. But in her interview with Kurker and during the hearing, she said the oral sex was initially consensual; then, after Doe boasted about “hooking up” with both her and her roommate, she told him to stop. He refused to do so, she said, according to the hearing transcript.
In his defense, Doe said he was not the kind of person who would do such a thing. But he told the disciplinary board he was so drunk that night he had no memory of the encounter.
During the 2013 hearing, Jones’s roommate testified that she had learned Jones had exchanged text messages with a resident dorm counselor just after the alleged rape. But the school made no effort to contact the counselor or obtain the texts, according to the hearing record.
When a hearing officer asked Jones about those texts, she replied: “I didn’t want to address what had happened to me and I was in no position yet to accept that it had been rape. So in my text messaging [to counselor] I only said things about the hook-up as if it had been consensual.”