Recently, my alma mater Harvard Law School asked for a donation for my 15th reunion, a class I’ll always share with the guy who sexually assaulted me when I was a teenager and completely got away with it. THREAD

It’s a part of my life that I wanted to keep buried forever because it filled me with such shame, not just the fact that I was sexually assaulted, but the fact that the faculty of Harvard Law School actually voted on whether to take away my degree for speaking up about it.

I was only 18 when it happened, having skipped several grades, gone to college at 13, a first generation immigrant, a young woman of color who had overcome poverty & beaten the impossible odds to get in. The last thing I expected to happen to me at Harvard Law was sexual assault.

When I told the school about it, Harvard Law School required me to write and sign a document saying I would not bring a criminal complaint with the police. I signed it, thinking that the institution that stands for justice would find justice on my behalf.

The Harvard Law School “trial” required me to sit in a room w my attacker & listen for hours as he called me a liar — a traumatizing + soul-crushing cross examination process, which Secretary DeVos now wants to make mandatory on campuses, along w other devastating changes.

Still, I presented my evidence as best I could, including emails and health services records. In the end, Harvard Law School found my attacker not guilty.
Then, the other shoe dropped: the university was now investigating me for “malicious prosecution.”

The days that followed were the darkest ever as I waited for the faculty to vote on whether to yank away my own diploma. The law school told me that I could make the whole thing go away if I just dropped the charges. But I refused to drop the charges. My voice was my armor.

The day I was found “not guilty” was one of the most heart-wrenching days of my life. I was relieved; and gutted in my relief that the only justice I got for being sexually assaulted was I was allowed to keep the degree I earned.

A faculty member actually came up to me afterwards and said, “Congratulations! You get to graduate! Let me give you a bit of advice. Move on!”

I did move on. I moved away from law, having had my entire legal education hijacked bc of this experience. I started writing. I finally found the courage to write what happened to me in PARACHUTES, my YA debut about two girls navigating sexual misconduct, publishing on May 26.

While I can never get back those 3 years of law school, I hope that in telling my story, more schools will prioritize protecting the students, not the brand. I hope what happened to me serves as a cautionary tale for DeVos’s new rules on campus sexual assault.

If implemented, DeVos’s rules will make us go back to a system which in my opinion works against the victim. They will dilute the courage of so many women in coming forward + speaking out — myself included. They will make it THAT much harder for victims to seek and find justice.

My full piece on Medium: https://medium.com/@kellyyangauthor/harvard-law-school-came-after-me-for-speaking-up-about-my-sexual-assault-779a27fd0195 Pls read + share & together, let’s make some noise! Our voice is our armor! #Parachutes #MeToo #TimesUp

I am completely overwhelmed by all the responses! So many folks tweeting this also happened to them in school and when they spoke up about it, their school mishandled it. Thank you for speaking up! Tweet #MySchoolToo if you had a similar experience! Stronger together!