The way Melandy saw it, there wasn’t enough room for both of them.
The College of the Holy Cross has fewer than 3,000 students. Months after she says she was raped by another student, Jordan, in a men’s bathroom on campus, Melandy feared running into him on the paths of the Worcester, Mass. college, at parties, and at the dining hall where he worked. The sight of him would make her shake, cry, and lose her appetite.
“I was tired of having to change my whole life,” said Melandy, a slight, soft-spoken psychology major. (She asked that only her first name be used to protect her privacy; Jordan is a pseudonym.)
So when she undertook the often painful process of filing disciplinary charges against the other student, Melandy knew that one of two things would happen. Either he would be expelled, or she would leave the school.
In the end, it was his life that would be upended. The college hearing board found Jordan responsible for the school’s most serious charge of “sexual misconduct” — sex without consent — in December 2008. The school dismissed him, revoking his full-tuition scholarship and derailing his academic career and plan to study in Europe, he says. He went back to his native Jamaica, feeling betrayed by his former friend, and “traumatized,” his mother says, by the knowledge that college officials did not believe him.