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To: Lawrence Biondi, S.J.
President, Saint Louis University
biondi@slu.edu
Undergraduate Admission
admitme@slu.edu
Transfer Student Admission
transfer@slu.edu
International Student Admission
international@slu.edu
Adult Education Admission
sps@slu.edu
Graduate Student Admission
gradadm@slu.edu
Graduate Business Student Admission
gradbiz@slu.edu
Law School Student Admission
law@slu.edu
Medical School Student Admission
slumd@slu.edu
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Greetings All:
My name is Paul Elam. I am a men’s advocate in Houston, Texas. I am writing you after being contacted by a SLU student who expressed concerns about your policy on sexual assault. After reading that policy I not only agreed with the student’s concerns, but I honestly found your recently amended policy to be rife with the potential for abuse, perhaps even designed for it. Either way, it is wrought with such injustice that it warrants your punishment for it. I intend to administer that punishment in my own way.
I have some questions to pose first. They are purely rhetorical. I understand the nature of most of the sanctimonious pricks and virulent gender ideologues that govern modern university settings, and don’t dare to imagine that you would stoop to answer my questions, or indeed that you would even imagine your choices should suffer scrutiny. But for the purpose of this missive I will ask them anyway.
Your policy states that “It is the responsibility of the person initiating the sexual activity to obtain the affirmative consent of the other party throughout the duration of said activity.”
Let us take on this particular part of your policy in two steps, the first being the use of the term “person initiating.” Just how does one define this in the social setting? If a young couple go on a date and engage in mutual kissing and other forms of foreplay, then who is the initiator? Is it the first person who leans inward for the first kiss? What if the person who initiated the first kiss is not the first person to initiate more kissing or the touching of sexual areas? What if the first person to initiate the touching of sexual areas is not the first person to start disrobing? How do you even pretend to identify a primary initiator at all? It certainly is not addressed in your posted guidelines.
To be more pointed here, isn’t your use of the term “person initiating,” just code speak for “target the male”? Of course it is. Like I said, the questions are rhetorical.
The second part of this section stipulates that your surreptitiously designated male student must, “obtain the affirmative consent of the other party throughout the duration of said activity.”
“Throughout the duration of said activity”? Some questions come to mind here, the first one of course is what on earth you mean by that? Does this mean that consent must be obtained for each kiss, or is consent for one kiss deemed to cover any future kisses during that interaction?
If consent is given to fondle one breast, must “the initiator” then obtain a separate verbal consent to touch the other one? If so, must consent be given to return to the breast that was originally touched?
I will spare you the possible confusion of addressing all the possibilities that come with touching the vagina, but have to ask about the matter of penetration and intercourse. I assume that after a woman has fully disrobed and pulled an equally naked and sexually aroused man to lay in between her legs, that he must still obtain verbal consent to enter her. That is a given, at least in your world. But must consent be obtained for each thrust into the vagina? What if the woman is on top and is literally in control of penetration? Must she get consent each time she raises up, before she lowers herself down again?
And finally, if the woman clearly is the one who initiated sexual activity but fails to get an articulated “yes” at any given point of sexual activity, does this mean she has committed a sexual assault?
More importantly, though, is the part of your policy regarding incapacitation, or, to wit, that “[V]alid consent cannot be obtained from a person whose ability to make decisions is substantially impaired by alcohol, drugs, or other intoxicants…”
Of course, this begs some important questions. What is the BAC (blood alcohol content) at which a woman is incapable of informed consent? Has such a BAC been established? How will you measure the BAC of an alleged victim after a sexual assault on those grounds has been alleged? Should male students carry portable breathalyzer test kits?
Will evidence that any amount of alcohol was consumed suffice, or will you only require the alleged victim to allege she was drinking? What if the man was drinking as well? Does this mean that a man who is intoxicated is also not capable of making informed decisions and thus has any accountability removed, as you have with women?
Are you concerned that your policy facilitates the ability for any young woman on your campus to act in a sexually impulsive way, choosing, however poorly, to engage in sex with a male student, and then decide later that the two beers she (might have) ingested gives her the option to literally destroy the academic life and future of her sexual partner simply by claiming she was incapacitated, and thus raped? Or was this, perhaps, your intent when you drafted the policy?
These questions may appear facetious to you, but are they not precisely the types of questions you should expect when you issue a vague and incomplete policy that attempts to micromanage the personal sexual activity of every student on your campus? And should they not be asked, especially given the devastating sway this policy gives you over the young lives you are entrusted to protect?
I have read that policy thoroughly and find none of these areas have been addressed. In fact, it seems not so much like a policy as it does a distorted and dangerous edict, written in the form of highly flexible Orwellian twaddle, designed specifically to allow the criminalizing and entrapment of decent, law abiding young men – with the aim of ruining their lives and scoring points among a back slapping group of corrupt and disingenuous university officials.
Couple all this with the recent federal instructions you have been given to honor standards of evidence in these allegations that comply with the “preponderance of the evidence,” vs the more stringent and credible, “reasonable doubt,” standards, and you have just devised a policy that resides mainly on “he said, she said,” with the distinct subtext that what “he said,” really doesn’t matter.
Just ask your own star basketball players, Kwamain Mitchell and Willie Reed Jr., both of whom you summarily booted from your school based only on an accusation, and one that did not have enough merit for a prosecutor to pursue. Your own investigations also turned up exactly squat on these two young men, but it was too late for them. The damage, that you inflicted, was done. Even before your recent, even more insane policy changes, your school administration proved that it operates with malice in these areas.
This, of course, brings us back to your policy again, which states, with such authoritarian brio, “even if criminal justice authorities choose not to prosecute, the university can pursue disciplinary action.”
Of course you can. Indeed, you systematically start the disciplinary actions before any investigation has been done at all. And you write policies that justify this kind of over-the-top reaction. Indeed, that is precisely the purpose of this message.
And lest you think that my rhetorical questions about your policy formed the thrust of this letter, I assure you otherwise. Your university has already taken these kinds of Gestapo policies beyond the pale and the time has come for citizens concerned with this type of institutionalized persecution and bigotry to take some action.
Unfortunately, given your insulated positions and the current social Zeitgeist that favors rape hysteria, I am not in a position to do everything that needs to be done. What I can do, however, is expose most anyone searching for information on the internet about your school to a growing collection of articles and commentary that expose what Saint Louis University is up to.
This email is also serving as the first of those articles. It is possible that by the time you have passed this around and discussed it you will find that a search engine query on your school will return this piece in a relatively high ranking, positioned for effective exposure. My next article, “Will Your Daughter be the Next Rape Victim at St. Louis University?” will be out within a week or two.
That will be followed by many more of similar, more focused content, and as they increase in number, so will their presence in search results, until the average query will return the link to your schools website, and nothing else but damning commentary advising parents not to send their children to your school, warning them both of the danger of rape (using your words), and that of false allegations leading to abuses by SLU (using the actual news stories that cover them). I know, it is a small step, but it has been remarkably effective in some ways.
If, for some reason, you think this is a bluff, or that I can’t follow through, then do a search on a prosecutor for the state of Maine, Mary Kellett. Kellett is a corrupt prosecutor of the Mike Nifong variety that has made a career of prosecuting innocent men. She would love your school, I am sure. But now anyone that does a search on her will find the truth. I spearheaded the actions that made that happen.
Kellett was so frustrated and angered by this that her fellow prosecutors sought to get a gag order on me to prevent all the bad press I was giving her. Of course they failed. Not that I would have complied anyway.
You might also do a search on Mount Royal University. The one article I did on their school appears quickly in search returns, near the top, above the return for their wiki page. That single article has resulted in a steady stream of traffic to my site since the day I posted it. Articles on your school will provide even more.
To be clear, this is not an attempt at blackmail. One, I know your policy will not change, and two, even if it did, it would not alter my course in the least. As I said, this is punishment, not dialogue. I have no reason, nor any interest in, talking to you. In fact, the only reason I sent you this in an email is because I know that arrogant academicians loathe, above all else, dissent they are powerless to silence. So I did it for the pure pleasure.
Just be advised that while I cannot stop you from forming corrupt policy, or from dragging more young men than you already have into Kafkaesque nightmares, I can make sure that a very healthy number of people find out about it, and grow my website at the same time. I love a win-win, and I hope you do as well.
