A student filed a lawsuit against Virginia Wesleyan College claiming that the school's effort to ensure student's safety are not enough to protect female students from sexual assaults on campus and failed to effectively help them after they are attacked. The lawsuit seeks $10 million in damages.
The rape lawsuit filed by an assault victim against Virginia Wesleyan College claimed that the school failed to help the struggling young woman, but took steps to support her attacker. The lawsuit was filed Friday in Norfolk Circuit Court by lawyer Jonathan Halperin.
Virginia Wesleyan College is a liberal-arts college associated with the Virginia United Methodist Church in Norfolk. According to the rape lawsuit, the school found a student responsible for sexual assault, expelled him, then changed his status to "voluntarily withdrawn" to help him get into a new school.
The Huffington Post reported that the victim was attending a school-supported, no-alcohol event on the Virginia Wesleyan campus on the third day of the fall 2012 semester when a peer adviser employed by the college persuaded the victim to a party where alcohol was served. The victim believed that she was served alcohol shots that had been spiked with drugs. The rape lawsuit said that the victim was raped in a lacrosse player's room.
The assaulted victim suffered from extensive vaginal bleeding and bruises and underwent significant pain for weeks. USA Today also reported that the victim also suffered psychological issues after the assault. Two weeks after her attack, the victim first went to school nurses but they did not tell her how to report the attack to school counselors or authorities, as stated in the complaint.
"She felt woozy. She felt like she was going to pass out, then the assailant got her, abducted her, took her to his room and brutally raped her over five hours," said lawyer Jonathan Halperin of Richmond, Va.
A month after the sexual assault, counselors were informed but no one instructed the victim on how to file a complaint with the authorities. Halperin said that his client eventually contacted the police three months after she was attacked.
As stated in a statement by the Virginia Wesleyan spokesperson, she declined to comment on the details of the rape lawsuit but said the school will strongly defend itself. The college will have until the end of October to file its legal response.
Since the 2012 attack, the assaulted victim has dropped out of school and her assailant is now at a new college. However, it remains indistinct whether the new school knew of the Virginia Wesleyan rape lawsuit case.
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