‘Haven’t I gone through enough?’

Julia, a former violin performance major at Jacobs, was just a freshman when a Jacobs student involved with the jazz studies department sexually assaulted her multiple times in 2019, she alleged.

Julia met the student on a floor full of Jacobs School of Music students in Read Hall. Though she initially viewed him as a friend in a place where she knew no one, she said the abuse continued throughout her first semester. She alleged he was pushy, wouldn’t take no for an answer and once had sex with her when she was too drunk to consent. For years, she said she thought it was just what guys did.

“You just can’t believe that that’s happening to you,” she said.

Months after the abuse, Julia got a message on Instagram from Anna, a Jacobs voice performance major at the time, asking about her relationship with the same student. The two girls didn’t know each other at the time but would grow to find comfort in talking as they discovered the startling similarity of their experiences.

When Anna met the student on a dating app, he told her he wasn’t interested in sex. Less than a week later, Anna alleged the student pressured her to have sex after she came home from an opera she performed in. She was extremely sleep-deprived and did not want to have sex. But his persistence wore her down — she recalls telling him “fine.”

She said it hurt and firmly told him to stop. He told her it was supposed to hurt and kept going.

The next morning, she left IU to go home for spring break. Though she didn’t fully know why at the time, she started sobbing in the middle of the airport.

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IU defines consent as an “agreement expressed through affirmative, voluntary words or actions, and mutually understandable to all parties involved, to engage in a specific sexual act at a specific time.” The policy says consent can be withdrawn at any time, cannot be coerced or compelled, cannot be given by someone who is incapacitated and cannot be assumed from someone’s silence or the status of a relationship.

The definition of consent is not widely understood, according to Peterson. She recounted a study where male perpetrators would admit to having sex with women who were too intoxicated to consent but were insistent it was not sexual assault. Sometimes, perpetrators think of sexual assault as more severe than what they did.

“They always kind of tend to separate their own behavior,” she said.

As she talked things through with Anna, Julia realized she wasn’t crazy, and that she had in fact been sexually assaulted. When students began protesting Jacobs in 2022, Anna and Julia thought about reporting their assaults, even though it had happened years prior. Julia expressed her uncertainty to a Jacobs professor, who encouraged her to report. If IU doesn’t know it’s happening, the professor told Julia, they can’t fix it.

They officially reported in the spring of 2022, opening two separate investigations. The two women recount wildly different experiences with the process, despite having similar cases within the same timeframe.

While Julia waited over a year for the hearing, she struggled with the emotional burden of the investigation. She had to reschedule her junior recital. Her grades slipped. Still, she was confident her case was strong, assured by her confidential victim advocate and long list of indirect witnesses.

But when she joined the hearing on Zoom in the spring of 2023, she saw the alleged perpetrator had hired a Bloomington lawyer. The lawyer asked her invasive questions, Julia alleged, such as asking if she’d had sex before and what she was wearing, suggesting she had a bad relationship with men because her parents were divorced and implying the alleged assault wasn’t that distressing because she was on track to graduate.

Though federal regulations generally do not allow questions about prior sexual history, nothing prohibits advisers — who are sometimes lawyers — from asking the questions. Instead, it’s up to the hearing chair to determine relevance, University Title IX Coordinator Jennifer Kincaid said.

Julia was on a family vacation when she received the notification that IU had not found the student responsible. Anna received the same notification for her investigation that day.

Both women described the experience as devastating.

Though they had no physical proof, they had text messages and multiple witnesses. Meanwhile, Julia and Anna both said the student’s therapist, mother and a high school best friend sent character letters to the panel, which they thought was unfair and irrelevant.

Julia said she hasn’t seen much change beyond the conduct of individual professors. She said she hates seeing posters asking women to report when her experience left her re-traumatized and tired of fighting for change.

“Haven’t I gone through enough?” she asked.

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