@Umich Collecting Accusations of Assault - Athletes Included
There's a Twitter account formed today, @AtUmich, which is collecting anonymous accusations of rape and sexual assault at the University of Michigan. Some of the accused are athletes.
This is horrifying.
90% of the posts are accusations of minorities which seems a bit fishy
One of the first things I noticed too.
Wondering if it’s a function of who is running the account? Could be a minority woman part of a sorority - as many of the men are in frats - that got the ball rolling by reaching out to her sisters. People are most likely to be assaulted or raped by people of their own race since most assaults and rapes happen by people you know, not strangers.
Whoa. Your thought process here is fu*ked.
I think what Bacon is trying to say is: 1) the account is in its infancy so you’d expect its awareness and contributions in the early days to be skewed toward the social circles of its creator until it gains main stream popularity. 2) given sexual assaults tend to be between people of the same race and with known individual (I.e. not random acts of assault), one explanation is the creator and subsequent early contributions from the social circle of the creator identifies with the black community. I would expect the same relationship to hold if the creator were from other groups. And I would expect the contributions to normalize as well as this account gains steam.
All that said, there are certainly other nefarious reasons for this including intentional sewing of racism, which would be unfortunate because the inference there would be these people are presumably innocent.
It's actually not that strange. Individuals in smaller/underrepresented groups are quickly identified/ostracized if they report and action is taken, so they often don't report at all for fear of having literally no friends that they feel a deep bond with for the rest of their time at the university (not to mention the impact if their families have deep ties or that group will be relied upon for post-college opportunities). Twitter is a rather "ideal" setting to report. The report could be from ANY time the named person was on campus, the pool of people who could have submitted the report "feels" bigger (increasing the feeling of true anonymity), and people are bolstered by seeing other people's experiences (something they would never be able to do normally). Racial minorities, members of the LGBTQ community (especially T), members of the kink community, members of severely under-represented/far away nations, members of close knit clubs/groups, and others would find value in gravitating to that account.
Right. Not sure this is helpful right now. An account created 20 hours ago, where you can’t help but notice that trend.
Calling out sexual predators is important. And preventing future episodes can not wait. But anonymous accusations about past transgressions, on TWITTER where anyone with an email can create an account and you can’t “fact check” these at all...
Clarification for the board because the title made it sound this was a university sanctioned account. This does not seem to be the university obtaining accusations over twitter but someone getting anonymous messages and submitting people’s stories.
We are committed to holding the University accountable. If you are a survivor of sexual assault or have struggled with the reporting process, let us know at [email protected].
— The Michigan Daily (@michigandaily) June 4, 2020
This is a private tip line viewable by a small team of editors.
We want to hear your story.
There were two football players mentioned on this page. One former, one current
There are 4.
3 current.
Looking back I see 2 current one former I must be missing a current
Nah 2 former, 2 current. 1 of the former is ST who graduated this year.
Im seeing Hawkins, Higdon, and Cheeseman. Who's the 4th?
It looks like someone sent something in on Vincent Gray.
If they did its been deleted, and now Higdon is too. Only Hawkins and Cheeseman now for football.
I hope this isn’t true. I also hope we get to a point where people don’t need to do this anonymously on twitter.
Woah.
Not a lawyer, but this seems like it is just asking for a defamation lawsuit from someone.
10,000%.
This page won’t last the week.
UPDATE: The page has already been abandoned.
There are hundreds of unreported assaults at Michigan every year and we need a better way to handle that but this is not that way
The fact that people are willing to share their stories on Twitter in the court of public opinion, but not actually take formal action is so fucked
Anonymity is a hell of a drug
As a 40 year old man I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman. I know women struggle with speaking out of fear of the accused, fear of public opinion, and fear they won’t be taken seriously. Unless it’sa brutal rape with hard evidence it comes down to he said she said. On the other hand anonymous accusations are cowardly. And then, of course, there are false accusations. So I’m slightly torn on this.
Nah what is fucked is how our society treats women who come forward and that has led to people not being willing share their stories or go to the justice system because they know it won't work for them. Our societies approach to domestic violence is fucked and this is the result.
There are multiple accusations for a bunch of people listed here that include explicit details of these alleged crimes. If a trusted doctor at UM can get away with the sexual assault of our athletes for decades, what chance does the average woman assaulted on campus have of getting justice? Women making up stories of rape are 1 in a 100. I sincerely hope a number of these women come forward and go through the proper channels to get their day in court. Most will choose not to because the process is set up for them to fail unless they act immediately, which many are far too traumatized to do.
False accusations are rare because there is normally a formal process you must go through, but when you have a platform like this available that makes it easy to accuse someone and also protect your identity, it's bound to be abused
I agree, but this also isn't the solution. Thinking that you can't get justice from proper authorities so you resort to anonymously publicly accusing someone on Twitter and taking it to the court of public opinion is extremely irresponsible
This seems fucked up. What’s to stop someone with a grudge from trashing an innocent person? Am I missing something?
I'll bet you all my mgopoints that if you were to tweet that at the account they'd accuse you of being an assaulter who doesn't want to be exposed.
I’m not that stupid....then again I do know a few good lawyers.
Defamation lawsuits.
That’s definitely disheartening to read. The fact that the account has 143 tweets in 10 hours tells me that either this was started and spread around to a particular group like a sorority/survivors support group, or something else is in play. New twitter accounts don’t take off like this without some precious ground work. Not saying anything is or isn’t true, but I don’t think this was started by 1 person on a whim.
The Daily appears to be involved, but I really have trouble understanding twitter.We are committed to holding the University accountable. If you are a survivor of sexual assault or have struggled with the reporting process, let us know at [email protected].
— The Michigan Daily (@michigandaily) June 4, 2020
This is a private tip line viewable by a small team of editors.
We want to hear your story.
If the Daily is actually involved in getting these accusations posted on Twitter, the run a real risk of getting hit with lawsuits. Not a wise move, if so.
This post.
I'm very against this account. An account like that is not how you get justice. It's a completely one sided bulletin board that is ripe for abuse since one side stays anonymous and the accused can't defend themselves. I'm not doubting that any of these people are lying, but a platform like this is so dangerous. I highly encourage people to report this account to Twitter as it does break Twitter's Terms and Conditions and is just generally bad
Rape culture is real. It is under-reported, under-investigated, and under-prosecuted. It is a deeply disgusting crime. It exists at every major campus in the US, and we need to do something about it.
But this is not the way. Please, everyone, report this vile account. Anonymously publishing unsubstantiated allegations is reprehensible.
I would be surprised if someone is not lying. With that many inputs someone is getting falsely accused and their reputation could permanently damaged. They could lose a girlfriend, be ostracized from friends, lose a job opportunity. This is not the way.
This will get shut down so fast. If this is truly anonymous, what is stopping a random person from creating a burner account to send in the picture of somebody they don't like?
Absolutely nothing
Okay, I just scrolled through the entire thing and more than half the posts were about black guys. If you know anything about rape statistics, you probably know that black guys do not commit more than half of all rapes. And they especially don't at umich where they are severely under-represented.
Given the context of when this account was created, I'd bet good money this is a hoax perpetrated by a racist.
Wow, This Thread should be deleted and the Twitter account should be suspended. If you have rape allegations they should be taken to the police or an advocate for victims in either the college, police department, prosecutors office or a womens rape clinic/ battered womens shelter. Twitter is not a judge, jury, or Executioner and the public should have no knowlege of accusations or allegations as it may tamper investigations and ruin lives.
> Twitter is not a judge, jury, or Executioner
That's the problem. Twitter is all those things in one, and it doesn't do any of them fairly or with proper fact-finding.
I wouldn't be surprised to see accounts like this start popping up about many schools across the country. I noticed some of the people being accused on the account have multiple accusations. Which is alarming. If these stories are true, it is a shame that our society makes victims live in fear just to even speak out about this.
You can only hope its not true, but if it is, I hope everyone who was affected gets justice.
I'm not sure what comes next for guys like Higdon, Hawkins, Cheeseman, and everyone else who is being accused, but should charges eventually come, they'll get their day in court to defend themselves.
Hard not to draw a correlation to the protests happening all across the country right now. Sexual assault victims are often silent because speaking out comes with more consequences for them than for the people doing the assaulting. When it seems no one is listening, and the people that do listen can't respond in any meaningful way, it's going to boil over into something like this.
Is it the "proper" channel? Probably not, but if the proper channels aren't working can you really blame them?
Football cannot get here fast enough. If the proper channels aren’t working? What a double-entendre!
Basically, every female I've ever dated long enough to get to know well has a story about being sexually assaulted.
I remember calling a sexual assault hotline at one point because I was so pissed off about an ex-girlfriend (we were still friends) being sexually assaulted. They told me not to report it to the police, because the victim should decide what is done. Victims need to take control, not have someone take control for them. That was a big learning experience for me.
I hope these allegations aren't true, regardless of whether it's a football player or not.