Influenced by the ‘bitter disappointment’ Kavanaugh was confirmed?
It wasn’t hard to foresee that Yale University would find any excuse it could to get rid of Saifullah Khan after a jury quickly cleared the student of sexual assault charges this spring.
All it needed was someone to accuse Khan of something else that would conceivably make the Afghan refugee a campus threat. On a campus that portrays itself as more dangerous than Detroit, that wasn’t a challenge.
What is surprising: The allegation didn’t come from campus. And Yale almost certainly doesn’t have authority under its own rules to intervene.
Now the Ivy League school may face a federal Title IX investigation for its treatment of Khan.
The Yale Daily News published a lengthy feature last week on allegations by one of Khan’s advisers during the trial. Jon Andrews claims that after the trial, Khan “sexually assaulted him during an alcohol-fueled threesome in Washington” and “physically attacked him on two other occasions,” while using him “as a vehicle for facilitating sexual encounters with women.”
The two got to know each other because Andrews, who is gay, was a board member of Families Advocating for Campus Equality, which gave extensive support to Khan.
MORE: What the media didn’t tell you about the Khan rape trial
The News said it obtained a memo to the FACE board from co-presidents Alison Scott and Cynthia Garrett, alerting them that Andrews had a “romantic relationship with a FACE student,” as well as a recording of a FACE conference call about the matter. Andrews resigned from the group this summer.
(Andrews reached out to The Fix as Khan’s representative “in media and public relations matters” after the trial, offering to “try to arrange an interview” with Khan and jurors who disagreed with media reporting on the trial. The interview didn’t happen. Garrett separately contacted The Fix about writing an essay on the Khan trial, which was published. Garrett confirmed to The Fix Thursday that Andrews is no longer a FACE board member or participant in any capacity.)
Andrews and Khan allegedly discovered “their shared interest in bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism” at a FACE conference last fall, after discovering Khan’s profile on the gay dating app Grindr.
Khan allegedly convinced Andrews to recruit a woman, not identified by the News, from a fetish social network. Andrews and the woman claimed Khan beat her with a paddle even after Andrews told him to stop, and that Khan forced the woman to penetrate Andrews. The woman said she didn’t “sense any reluctance” from Andrews and that he seemed “together and alert” after.
Andrews said he drank “about 10 glasses of wine” before the threesome and claims to have passed out and woken up while still being sexually assaulted. He could have overpowered Khan, who is smaller than him, but “our entire relationship was this endless cycle of him making me feel insufficient,” Andrews told the News.
MORE: Acquitted by a jury in four hours, Khan now faces Yale’s whims
Yale's University Wide Committee on Sexual Assault is holding hearings in the case of Saifullah Khan, the student who was found not guilty of sexual assault in a criminal court in March. https://t.co/00tKuQx0yh pic.twitter.com/PG3Iqg0ndV
— NYT Metro (@NYTMetro) May 3, 2018
‘Mr. Khan liked beer; he still likes beer’
Yale issued an “emergency suspension” against Khan, which bans him from campus and attending classes, the News reported Wednesday night.
The university gives its president, or another administrator authorized by the president, the authority to protect the “safety and well-being” of university community members by issuing such bans. The News said the university imposed the same punishment in 2015, shortly before Khan’s arrest preceding his criminal trial.
Khan’s lawyer Norm Pattis, who also represented him in the criminal trial, filed a motion seeking an injunction against Yale in New Haven Superior Court Wednesday.
It said Yale is in breach of its contract with Khan, who is finally completing his senior year, by preventing him from completing his classes and revoking his Yale-provided health insurance at month’s end:
There is nothing in the article by the Yale Daily News to suggest that Mr. Andrews ever set foot on the Yale campus or that he had any affiliation whatsoever with Yale. …
There is no credible evidence that permitting Mr. Khan to attend classes poses a threat of harm to himself or to anyone affiliated with Yale.
Mr. Khan’s suspension is most likely pre-textual, and arises from a combination of factors including his unique history at Yale, the bitter disappointment that Brett Kavanaugh was expected to be confirmed as a Justice on the United States Supreme Court, and prevailing culture of over-heated sensibilities regarding claims of sexual assault shared by many students at Yale.
MORE: Justice for Khan delayed months because of Yale incompetence, bias
The motion says Yale College Dean Marvin Chun imposed the emergency suspension on Khan the same day the student refused to meet with the administration in response to the News allegations.
The suspension letter says Khan is being suspended “for your physical and emotional safety and well-being” as well as the community’s.
Yale has still not convened a hearing on the original allegations against Khan by a female student, which eventually led to his criminal prosecution, the motion says. It speculates that Khan’s female accuser “does not wish to appear on the Yale campus after having been found to be lacking in credibility by a jury of her peers.”
The university continued to subject Khan to “scorn” by preventing him from living on campus after he was cleared by a jury, and denying his request to attend classes “with an escort” for his safety and his classmate’s.
The emergency suspension was issued to “placate a climate of opinion in which allegations of sexual assault are to be believed upon being made” and voices supporting accusers “drown out any semblance of due process and orderly fact-finding,” the motion says.
Alluding to Kavanaugh’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in response to sexual assault allegations, it continues: “Mr. Khan liked beer; he still likes beer.”
Khan intends to seek both “judicial relief” and a Title IX investigation against Yale by the Department of Education, the motion says. The Title IX database maintained by The Chronicle of Higher Education shows Yale is not the subject of any current federal investigation.
Lawyer Pattis told The Fix in a phone call the regulatory complaint would be filed after the state court action had moved further along.
He’s asking the New Haven court to order Yale to let him attend his classes; provide him an “escort and/or bodyguard” to protect him from students, staff and faculty; and direct Chun and other Yale employees to stop harassing Khan over “the highly dubious claims of a disappointed lover in the campus newspaper.”
Read the News report on the new allegations and the legal motion.
MORE: Yale is more dangerous than Detroit? Sex assault report suggests it
IMAGE: Andrey Burmakin/Shutterstock
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