Law School Deans Discouraged And Pressured Students Not To Report Sexual Assault Claims According To Multiple Students

The administration says it did nothing wrong, but the accounts of current and former students suggest a fundamental problem.

The Daily Montanan has a deep dive look at the University of Montana Alexander Blewett III School of Law and allegations from multiple students that Dean Paul Kirgis and Associate Dean of Students Sally Weaver, despite being mandatory reporters under Title IX, pushed law students to not report sexual assault at Montana Law.

The school says it eventually looked into the assault claims with the help of an independent contractor and found no wrongdoing. Given that, and the lack of other law enforcement action, we’re not going to get into the substance of the underlying claims. Because regardless of the ultimate merit of those claims, this is a story about how the school approached calls for help brought by its students. The deans told the paper that they don’t recall ever dissuading anyone from filing a formal report. The worst part about this response is that the deans come across as entirely believable in that they really don’t think they did anything wrong here. And when the people responsible for protecting students don’t even see how they’re eroding those students’ faith in the school, it’s a crisis moment for the whole institution.

One woman told Weaver that her friend who was a fellow law student had been sexually assaulted… and she said Weaver told her the law school would handle the incident in-house. She said Weaver later threatened to report her and her friend to the bar association for being vindictive if they didn’t drop the matter. She said she felt ill after convincing her friend a report to Title IX was not warranted.

Weaver says she’s never done anything to intimidate students out of filing reports. “I have thought long and hard about anything I might have said that a student could have heard in this way, and it simply did not happen.” Despite this recollection, a student told the newspaper that she was told that if she “continued to harass” the alleged perpetrator “it would reflect negatively on her Character and Fitness application for admission to the State Bar.”

I’m actually a believer in the importance of character and fitness to the sanctity of the profession, but between this story and last year’s stories about bar exam authorities threatening critics with character and fitness problems, it’s becoming clear that the process is becoming less a filter to keep ethically challenged folks out of the profession and more a casually invoked cudgel to threaten students into submission. Because even if the administration never used those words, the fact that multiple students had the impression that this was on the table is a serious problem and a failure on the part of the school.

The friend also told Weaver in early 2020 that she was sexually assaulted… and Weaver told her she had the training and authority to evaluate such issues herself, the student told the Daily Montanan. She said the associate dean told her a report to the Title IX office would be “unnecessary.”

That’s not really how mandatory reporting is supposed to work. Weaver said, “I have been trained to go slowly, to allow survivors to exercise as much control over the situation as possible, to repeatedly test understanding.” Placing these accounts next to each other it’s easy to see how the school failed here without even realizing it. It’s one thing to not pressure a traumatized student and another to use a “slow” and “repeatedly testing” approach that communicates to students that action is unnecessary and that they’re probably wrong about their own recollections. Weaver said that she feels if she did anything wrong, “I suspect it was because I went too fast, used terms and concepts that I erroneously assumed they would understand, and failed to test their understanding,” which not only sounds like the opposite of what students are saying happened, but also reflects a troubling “blame the victim” outlook to suggest oh, I was so fast that their puny, addled minds must have gotten it wrong.

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Meanwhile, a report to Dean Kirgis about the same man resulted in this weird account:

Kirgis told Robichaud he did not believe the incident required a report to the Title IX office, which handles sexual misconduct on campus; nonetheless, he said he would inform Title IX, Robichaud recalled. When the Title IX director contacted her, Robichaud said the director said the dean had not mentioned the phrase “sexual assault” in his call.

So we’re going to give partial credit because at least the mandatory reporter called the Title IX office in this story, even if it happened over a gratuitously communicated objection. But that report isn’t supposed to be, “I dunno, call this student and let them explain what their deal is.”

Robichaud and three other students also said they took a classroom management problem to Weaver on separate occasions, and they said she advised them a report to the Title IX office would inhibit the law school’s ability to address the matter. The students told the Daily Montanan a professor repeated slurs for gay people, allowed the class to do the same, and mocked child sexual abuse.

According to the report, Weaver told students, “If they want to go to Title IX, they’re not going to be happy with the outcome.” Which might have been true given everything else in this story about the school’s approach to Title IX issues, but it’s not what mandatory reporters are supposed to be saying out loud.

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The administrators claim they never failed to report or discouraged anyone from reporting, but the paper spoke with 13 current or former law students over the course of its reporting suggesting otherwise. However one parses out the individual exchanges they all had, it’s clear that students got the impression over and over that their concerns didn’t rise to the level of a Title IX issue and that they could face professional consequences if they were to elevate the issue outside of the law school.

Whether this impression was left out of intentional malevolence or abject cluelessness isn’t really important. There’s a fundamental breakdown here.

UM law students: Dean, associate dean discouraged reports of sexual misconduct [Daily Montanan]


HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.