Her daughter, a freshman at a college in upstate New York, said she had been raped during her first semester, after she was separated from friends at a Halloween party and a man she’d never met grabbed and forcibly kissed her. She said he repeatedly asked her to go to his room, and she repeatedly refused. Later, when she was drunk, he offered to help her find her friends, but he said he needed to stop by his dorm first. Once in his room, she said, he immediately undressed. The woman doesn’t remember exactly what happened next, but she found herself naked on his bed. Then he raped her. When she got up to leave, she said, he told her, “Now go back to your room and don’t hook up with anyone else tonight.”

Weeks later, when the woman was out at a local bar, she felt someone staring at her and saw the man again, standing alone and watching her. Over the course of the night, as she moved from room to room to evade him, he followed, ultimately accosting her on the dance floor. (The accused man denies this account and maintains that the sex was consensual.)

By most campus standards, it seemed like a strong case. The woman had text messages she sent friends the night of the rape, saying she needed help; a female friend of the accused man would testify that she stopped by his room and saw the woman there, looking terrified. The same friend said the man asked her to tell campus authorities that everything looked fine. And the woman went to law enforcement.

After she filed a Title IX complaint last December, the woman and her family moved quickly to comply with the office’s requests, pulling together documentation in the weeks before Christmas and participating in a Skype interview on Dec. 18. But after the woman took a medical leave of absence — she struggled after the assault and was beginning therapy — the school’s commitment seemed to flag. By late January, the woman and her family say, officials hadn’t contacted any of the witnesses she suggested, and the accused student wasn’t interviewed until mid-February. The family decided they needed an attorney of their own. But they found lawyer after lawyer who represented only the accused; no one would take their case.

Miltenberg’s partner warned him that taking the case would be career suicide. But over the previous few months, he had started telling fellow Title IX critics that he didn’t think the dear colleague letter should be summarily withdrawn; perhaps it merely needed to be amended. Far from his earlier suggestion that women who don’t want to involve the police shouldn’t report to schools, he began to believe there was no easy way out of requiring colleges to take action. The police are too overburdened, he said, and some cops too “hard-boiled,” to respond to campus sexual assault well. Miltenberg’s new opinions made him unpopular. “I’m left out of a lot of email chains and phone calls now, and I used to be the lead guy,” he says.

He instructed the family to copy him on their communications with the school. The college’s own investigator was a woman Miltenberg says he contended with in the past, when she aggressively defended schools from lawsuits brought by men. The school allowed the male student to withdraw voluntarily on the eve of his hearing — informing the woman that meant the case was closed. “In any case I’ve ever done, the first thing parents ask is: ‘Can we just pull him out?’ ” Miltenberg says. Uniformly, in his experience, schools said no: The process would proceed, with or without the accused, and with findings of responsibility put on his permanent record. (The school says cases like this would result in a notation on the student’s transcript.) Miltenberg took the case.

When he met with the woman and her family in early June, he was shaken. “It was the first time I’ve ever sat with someone who’s a victim, at least in this type of setting,” he says. “I’m used to hearing the other side in detail and trying to come up with the parts that don’t add up, or where the story doesn’t make sense.” When the woman sent him a diary she kept in the months after the rape — a stream-of-consciousness account of the aftermath of losing control of her body — Miltenberg was aghast. As he read the diary, he imagined the voice of his eldest daughter, the same age as his client, and felt like throwing up. “I read this and think, My God, what if this is what every woman who feels they’ve been sexually assaulted feels like?”