Senator Kristen Gillibrand's Chubby Case Against Paul Nungesser Falls Apart

Paul Nungesser is the man charged by the so-called #MattressGirl, Emma Sulkowicz.

If you know the case, you know that two (or three?) additional people stepped forward to accuse Nungesser after Sulkowicz began making these allegations.

Let's deal with two of them.

Let's deal with the male accuser.

From Cathy Young: Oh my.

Several days after my Daily Beast piece, which featured not only Nungesser's account of his relationship with Sulkowicz but social media messages tending to support his version, the feminist blog Jezebel ran a purported rebuttal titled "How to Make an Accused Rapist Look Good." Much of the story, by Jezebel editor Erin Gloria Ryan, dealt with Sulkowicz's not entirely convincing explanation of her friendly messages to Nungesser days after what she says was a terrifyingly violent rape. But the piece also contained a new revelation meant to bolster the claim that Nungesser was a serial sexual predator: the existence of a hitherto unknown male victim, identified by the pseudonym "Adam."

Adam, who also graduates this week, told Jezebel that "he was close friends with Paul during his freshman year in 2011" and that "one fall night, in the midst of an emotional conversation in Paul's dorm room...Paul pushed him onto his bed and sexually assaulted him." He claimed that after much self-doubt and internal struggle, he finally reported this incident, first to a student society to which both he and Nungesser belonged and then in a formal complaint to the university in the fall of 2014. Adam rather melodramatically lamented that my Daily Beast piece "invalidates and completely erases [his] experience."

Oh my -- it invalidates your experience. WHY DIDN'T YOU SAY SO SOONER?!!

There's a girl on Twitter calling herself "NachoSarah." Hot chick, actually. But she tosses off lots of crude jokes.

One oft-repeated joke is about how effeminate the men she sees around her are.

It goes like this:

i was out with a guy on a date and he ordered a quinoa salad and i was like hey remember when men used to carry swords

But that joke probably invalidates Adam's experience, so forget I said anything.

This gets better.

...

According to Adam, during this conversation Nungesser asked him to sit on the bed, rubbed his shoulder and back, then "gently" pushed him down and proceeded to stroke his leg and finally massage his crotch "for approximately 2-3 minutes" while Adam froze in shock. He was finally able to muster the will to get up and leave.

Long story short, external evidence -- Facebook posts, texts -- tended to support Nungesser's denial more than Adam's charges. For example, "Adam" claimed that Nungesser kept bothering him. But the record shows that it was Adam who kept seeking Nungesser out after this dubious incident.

And then "Adam" says Nungesser really turned up the heat of harassment:

...

Adam's credibility was further sunk by his rather fanciful complaints of "retaliation" by Nungesser in a class they shared. These "deliberately aggressive acts" consisted of sitting too close to Adam or to his friends, which left Adam "distraught and traumatized," and complimenting some points Adam had made in a class discussion (which "felt like he was claiming a collective sense of power").

And thus Paul Nungesser carried out his continued Campaign of Erotic Terror.

hey adam remember when men carried swords

I am happy to report that, even on the trauma-happy modern campus, such claims of harassment are still recognized as, in the words of the report, "hyperbolic and illogical."

In the end, the investigators concluded that Adam was "unreliable" and that his story simply did not add up, and recommended that Nungesser be found "not responsible."

A woman charged him with "sexual assault" too, and now writes, anonymously, at Jezebel, that Nungesser was actually found guilty of this "sexual assault" before he "appealed it away."

Let's look at this allegation of a "sex assault" -- from the complaining witness herself:

At this point, I should be used to seeing backlash against Emma Sulkowicz, but I still wasn’t fully prepared for what came this week: endless tittering of people around me in real life and in my social feeds saying they "weren't sure" about Emma’s choice to carry her mattress to Columbia’s graduation; the insistence that Emma's alleged assailant Paul Nungesser had been "proven innocent" by Columbia and exonerated by the NYPD; the posters someone put up around Columbia with Emma's picture on them, calling her a "PRETTY LITTLE LIAR."

Every time I read another version of this narrative--that Nungesser merely "picked the wrong friends," that the complaints against him were a calculated vendetta--my stomach flopped. Don’t forget: before he appealed away the conviction, Paul Nungesser was found responsible for sexually assaulting a woman at Columbia. And I'm writing this because that woman was me.

When I filed the complaint against Paul, I didn't know it would turn into a national event. It was over a year before Emma started carrying that weight, months before what happened at Columbia helped sparked a national dialogue about rape on college campus. I was just trying to do the right thing.

The incident happened my junior year at Columbia, when Paul followed me upstairs at a party, came into a room with me uninvited, closed the door behind us, and grabbed me. I politely said, "Hey, no, come on, let's go back downstairs." He didn't listen. He held me close to him as I said no, and continued to pull me against him. I pushed him off and left the room quickly. I told a few friends and my boyfriend at the time how creepy and weird it was. I tried to find excuses for his behavior. I did a decent job of pushing it out of my mind.

You managed to push it out of your mind? What a soldier.

Now you may be thinking, "Okay, well in the Second Part of this story, Nungesser creeps into her room and rapes her!"

Um... nope. That's the whole story. He pulled her against him for a few seconds, tried to entice her to have sex, and then did nothing more when she pushed him away.

This is the "sex assault" he was found guilty of -- and here she quotes, pedantically, Columbia's definition of "sex assault," which includes "Any intentional sexual touching, however slight, with any object without a person's consent." [Emphasis added -- but I feel that emphasis is implicit in her breathless delivery.] She defines this sloppy, drunken hug as a "sexual touching;" apparently Columbia later realized how insane that was.

Now, don't get me wrong, Nungesser was plainly trying to get sex here. And it is uncomfortable as hell to be manhandled by a drunk (or at least heedless) guy looking for sex.

I hate being hugged or touched and when people hug or touch me it's almost always in a non-sexual, innocent manner.

But I don't like it.

I do think she has a complaint -- but not a legal one.

She has a thing she can justifiably complain about to her friends. "Oh my, this sloppy horny douche hugged me and thought he could sleep with me."

And that's all she has.

But apparently she thinks she was "raped" just like Emma.

But here, let her tell you:

Then, a year later, a friend approached me and asked if we could speak privately. She told me she'd heard that Paul had apparently raped someone, and that the story had reminded her of what he had done to me a year before.

He hugged me for three seconds. It was exactly like that anal rape that Emma Sulkowicz described to me.

This woman writes anonymously because she says she fears the pushback and mockery she might get if her name is connected to this Tale of Hug-Rape.

Good Bet, Sister.

Irresponsible Accusations from Drama-Seeking Children

I saw Goodman Nungesser dancing with the Devil by the well by the north path. Then they made the beast with two backs.

Then Chuck Norris raped me.

posted by Ace at 06:42 PM

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