The search for Hannah Graham was still in full swing when another series of events began to roil the campus. Emily Renda, who had graduated from U.Va. in the spring of 2014 and taken a job at the university as the project coordinator for sexual-misconduct prevention, would find herself in the middle of them. Renda had arrived at U.Va. in August 2010, planning to major in religious or environmental studies. “I thought I was going to be a pastor or a park ranger,” she recalls. Her path was deflected by a sexual assault six weeks into her first year. Those first three months of college are a period that some experts refer to as the Red Zone, when new students are most vulnerable to sexual assault as well as accidents due to alcohol abuse. Renda told me she had let her perpetrator walk her home after a party, and he suggested they go back to his room until she sobered up. She agreed, and what happened next shaped the rest of her college experience.

Renda’s assault involved “pushing, hitting, and punching,” elements that, she explained, later helped her realize that the incident was not her fault. She didn’t report the assault initially, and listed for me the reasons why not: “I didn’t want to ruin someone else’s life. It was a mistake. This person had parents, too. It wasn’t worth it.” She became an intern at the university Women’s Center and an advocate for sexual-assault survivors. She also became involved in the school’s annual Take Back the Night events, whose centerpiece is a candlelight vigil during which sexual-assault survivors can speak out about their experiences. By the time Renda was ready to report to the university what had happened, her alleged attacker had transferred to a different school and the issue was moot. Under federal Title IX legislation, colleges and universities are required to have procedures in place to adjudicate all such complaints. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, in 2015 U.Va. was one of 106 colleges and universities across the country with open Title IX sexual-violence investigations. Renda never considered going to the police or the courts, believing that she didn’t have the kind of evidence she needed for a successful prosecution.

In the spring of her final year, 2014, Renda was nearly finished with her major in sociology and had been accepted to a joint law-school and master’s-in-public-health program at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins. That was when, through her work with the sexual-assault-prevention community, she met a young woman at the university named Jackie. It was a fateful encounter. Jackie told Renda that she had been raped during her first year at U.Va., in 2012, by multiple assailants. Renda says that the conversation between the two women focused primarily on the unsupportive reactions that Jackie said she had received from friends and family, not on the alleged assault itself. Renda elected to stay at U.Va. as an intern in the Office of Student Affairs. In June 2014, Renda testified before a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and used Jackie’s story to underscore the need for increased reporting of sexual assault. She referred to Jackie anonymously and told lawmakers that Jackie didn’t report her assault until almost a year after it happened “because immediately after the attack she confided in peers who did not believe her,” a reaction that meant that the young men she claimed had attacked her “went unpunished and remained a threat to the other students throughout that year.”

Another young woman drawn into Jackie’s orbit was Alex Pinkleton, who had come to the university in 2012. Pinkleton sailed through the Red Zone with no problem, but in November of her second year, she says, she was sexually assaulted at a party. She had been drinking, and all she remembers is eventually coming to, naked, with a friend’s friend on top of her, and asking him what had happened. She put on her clothes and walked out. Afterward, she tried to joke about it but grew increasingly uncomfortable. She says the young man she had had sex with later told her, via a private Facebook message, that she had been so drunk she had forgotten his name four times in the course of the evening. The two ran into each other at parties and were, in Pinkleton’s telling, hostile to each other. Eventually, she says, she talked about the incident with Nicole Eramo, U.Va.’s associate dean of students and the school administrator responsible for handling sexual-assault complaints. Eramo asked Pinkleton if she felt safe, how she was doing emotionally, and if she wanted to pursue a formal or informal complaint through the university system, or instead wished to report the incident to the police. Pinkleton told Eramo she didn’t know what she wanted to do and deferred any decision.