The Last Time A College Hired An Obama Aide To Investigate A Sex Scandal, It Didn’t End Well

Cornell University has hired a top lawyer from the Obama administration to investigate the rape allegation that has gripped the nation. If history is any guide, it won’t end well.

The Ivy League school tapped former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to investigate a female student’s accusations that she was drugged and gang-raped by seven students — an incident which critics say the school did not handle appropriately at the time.

Cornell officials may think that campus activists will accept the findings of a well-regarded female Democrat lawyer. But that’s not what happened eight years ago, when the University of Rochester hired ex-Obama lawyer Mary Jo White to get them out of a similar situation. The university called on White after Mother Jones reported in 2016 that two junior faculty, Celeste Kidd and Jessica Cantlon, accused professor T. Florian Jaeger, an acclaimed scientist, of being flirtatious, creepy, and socializing with graduate students.

White’s review concluded that sexual misconduct allegations behind a media-and-activist firestorm were unsubstantiated. That just set off another round of protests, the school president resigned, and the college paid $10 million to plaintiffs who White said had no case. People who were angry that horrific misconduct had occurred weren’t relieved to hear that the worst of the allegations probably hadn’t. Instead, they just added a new layer to the conspiracy.

The university conducted a three-month investigation that found Jaeger dated at least one graduate student years prior (the school didn’t have a rule against it at the time, but had since instituted one) but did not find sufficient evidence that he had engaged in discrimination or harassment. The women appealed, and a higher official sustained the finding, calling the investigation one of the most thorough he’d ever seen.

“We are highly confident in the integrity of these investigations,” a university spokesperson told Mother Jones, adding that many of the complaints were “hearsay” and that “no violation of the law or University policy was found.”

Students and some faculty demanded consequences anyway. One undergrad made international news by pledging not to eat until Jaeger was fired. (He agreed to go on leave.) Seven current and former faculty members and one student filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint against Jaeger, the university, and its investigator.

The EEOC dismissed the women’s complaint, but the outrage only grew. Time Magazine included Kidd and Cantlon in its group “Person of the Year” in December 2017. Kidd complained again, and the university hired an outside law firm to conduct another investigation. It also didn’t find in her favor; Kidd called the investigator biased despite the investigator having no involvement wth the university.

Facing continued demands for the resignation of university president Joel Seligman, Rochester hired a different, more high-profile law firm led by White, a former U.S. Attorney and Securities and Exchange Commission chair, to re-investigate under special arrangements designed to demonstrate independence.

White and her staff conducted 140 interviews and reviewed thousands of documents. Her report drastically undermined the women’s narrative.

“Despite being labeled as a ‘sexual predator’ by his accusers,” the report concluded, “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.”

Some of the most sensational specifics in the report were provably false, it said. Kidd and Cantlon said Jaeger had sex with a particular woman; the woman said it never happened. The pair claimed another woman had been taken advantage of by Jaeger; that woman said not only was that false, but she had told Kidd and Cantlon as much beforehand.

Although White’s report found that the professor “blurred personal and professional boundaries” years prior, when he was young, it said every current student who spoke with the investigators praised him.

Much of the complaint focused on his long-ago relationships with students, but White found that one of the female complainants herself “met her spouse while she was a professor and he was a graduate student.” When it comes to Kidd being offended by risqué language, 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 said creepy messages provided by Kidd were “heavily edited” and “manipulated in such a manner as to make them essentially devoid of all critical context.” The department chair had tried to play a peacemaking role, but when he saw internal emails in the late stage of the investigation, his view changed: He said the emails showed “widespread lying, deceit, and manipulation in the complaints against Jaeger.”

But when it came to activists, facts didn’t seem to matter. They needed a sacrifice. The New York Times’ headline in January 2018: “Exonerated, University of Rochester President Steps Down.”

The resignation, announced the day the independent investigation was released, was made “all the more extraordinary by the investigators’ report, which discredited many of the claims against the university and found no legal wrongdoing,” the Times said.

By that time, the claimants had filed a lawsuit. White’s report said “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 subsequently paid them $9.4 million anyway.

“We hope this settlement encourages people affected by discrimination and retaliation to seek justice and never give up,” Richard Aslin, a former dean who joined the EEOC complaint and lawsuit after hearing Kidd and Cantlon’s stories, said.

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