Stanford cited “new evidence” in clearing Lonsdale. When I asked what this new evidence was, a spokeswoman pointed me to my own article. When I started reporting, Clougherty forwarded me some of her emails to and from Lonsdale. Lonsdale gave me many more. He also gave the emails to Stanford, asking the university to reopen the case, and then put the correspondence on a website when he filed his defamation claim. In one email, sent five months into the relationship, Clougherty writes to Lonsdale: “Kiss kiss kiss, you are super handsome.” Later, she wrote to him, “You are a sexy man” and “It was so nice sleeping with you.”

By way of explanation, Clougherty claimed in her suit that she “wrote him numerous emails and love letters to let him know how much she cared about him in the hope that it would end the abuse.” But the Stanford spokeswoman told me that Marcia Pope, the lawyer Stanford brought in as an outside investigator, who made the finding of sexual misconduct and harassment against Lonsdale, reversed herself after reading the emails. Unofficially, it seems, he got his appeal, and he won. (I asked both Clougherty and Lonsdale’s lawyers for comment. They both declined.)

In light of what seems to be the denouement of this vexing case, I’ve got two comments. Last December, when Rolling Stone’s account of a brutal gang rape at the University of Virginia began to unravel, some commentators argued that we should nevertheless take claims of sexual assault at face value, on the grounds that statistically, they are very likely true. “I choose to believe Jackie,” Jessica Valenti wrote in The Guardian. “I lose nothing by doing so, even if I’m later proven wrong.” In The Washington Post, Zerlina Maxwell argued: “We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.”

As Margaret Talbot pointed out in The New Yorker at the time: “That’s a position that makes moral and emotional sense for advocates and friends of the victim, whose primary role is to comfort and support. But it’s not a position that makes sense for journalists, whose job is to find out what actually happened.” It’s true that women don’t make a lot of false rape accusations to the police. That’s rare. But rare is not the same as never. Then there are the cases that fall into a gray area, because of uncertainty over the shifting definition of consent, especially on college campuses, or over whether the person who felt violated made that clear to the other person at the time.

These kinds of accusations are more likely to get traction in a campus disciplinary process, which is by design less rigorous than the criminal justice system. In a campus proceeding, no one’s liberty is on the line, and universities are trying to be more user-friendly so that more victims will come forward, as most have long been reluctant to do. But the reputation of anyone accused of sexual misconduct is at stake, and reputation, too, is precious.