Emma Sulkowicz said she knew it would be awful to go before a disciplinary panel and describe being raped by a fellow student, but nothing prepared her for what came next. She said one of the two women on the panel, a university official, asked her, repeatedly, how the painful sex act she described was physically possible.

Already anxious and queasy, Ms. Sulkowicz, a junior at Columbia University, said she felt her body freeze up and her heart race as she tried to answer questions that seemed to her to reveal not just skepticism about her story, but also disturbing ignorance in someone who had supposedly been trained for this role.

“The fact that I had to tell an embarrassing story and then teach them an embarrassing subject on top of that felt really gross,” she recalled in an interview. Worse still, for her, was the outcome: The panel dismissed her accusation — the same result, she said, from sexual assault complaints against the same man that year by two other students.

Ms. Sulkowicz was one of a group of women, identified then only by pseudonyms — she had not yet decided to go fully public — who became the talk of Columbia this past winter, when an article in a student magazine, The Blue and White, described in detail their accounts of being sexually assaulted, and their frustrated searches for aid and justice from the university.