“He is a humanitarian. He’s the sensitive one. He’s the kind of guy you want dating your daughter. That’s the kind of person he is,” his mother, soft-spoken and weary-looking, told me. “You know, he conducted training in sexual harassment…” He was so proud of his involvement in Compass that he invited his mother to attend a couple of meetings with him.

When Nathan and Melanie began their sexual relationship in October, 2013, Nathan was a self-described virgin. Melanie, a year younger, found him charismatic, high-energy, appealing; it was she who initiated sex. But their relationship, “emotionally close” at first, became more distant and problematic by the time MSU classes ended that spring in 2014. She pushed for more closeness; he declined to call her his “girlfriend.” And he complained to friends that she belittled him, “bullied” him, as the investigator’s report noted.

Even so, separated geographically, they eagerly planned for their Memorial Day weekend encounter. She texted a nude photo of herself, and a succinct description of her mood: “Feeling frisky.” They bantered, by text, back and forth, agreeing to meet in Canton, where she was living with her parents for the summer. Their tryst took place, by necessity, in his car. When a stranger banged on the car window, Melanie was embarrassed and upset.

She cried, and said she had a flashback to an earlier, abusive relationship in high school. Nathan tried to comfort her, but she described her tearful reaction as distressed, “extremely upset.” Later, they met a few of her friends for dinner in Plymouth and, after that, walked along the train tracks for an hour or longer, as he listened, while she talked. He recalls listening sympathetically. She remembers him dismissing how upset she was, and called his reaction “invalidating.”

Eventually, they sat down, his arm around her. A few hours earlier, they had been interrupted trying to have sex in a car. She says she told him she didn’t want to have sex again that night. This time, he reached beneath her shirt and bra, in what he later described as “a momentary touching of the breast,” and she characterized in a text the next day as “a groping.”

“I told you I don’t want to do this anymore,” she recalled saying to him. “And he did immediately stop.” At no time, she said, was he violent or threatening. At no time in their relationship was he ever physically violent or threatening. She dismisses the first official account of the incident — which stated that Nathan “pushed (Melanie) down and pulled up (her) shirt” offered by the Michigan State University investigator — as an exaggeration. “He never pushed me down,” Melanie said.

In his mind, the transgression, on an evening when they’d engaged in intercourse, was redeemed by his immediate response when she asked him to stop.

She was wounded: In her mind, she’d been sharing deep feelings about being abused by men, thinking he was being supportive. Instead, she experienced his touching as an act of betrayal.

According to Melanie, Nathan knew the campus rules of sexual conduct required him to seek voluntary, “unambiguous and willful” consent to touch her sexually, even if she had given sexual consent in the past, such as when they had sex hours earlier.

[Actually, that isn’t quite accurate. As it happens, this more explicit definition of consent wasn’t in effect on that evening along the railroad tracks. MSU did not adopt the policy until 2015, with similar provisions implemented at the University of Michigan and many other universities.]

Nathan’s reliance on a perceived cue rather than explicit assent was, to Melanie, an admission of sexual assault. (She later warned other students in her poetry class to beware of him, telling a circle of students that he had “sexually assaulted” her. At least one of them inferred that Nathan had raped her.)

The next day, she texted him, angrily, saying she had made it clear she believed he had disregarded her feelings and words. “You even went to lay me down and groped me after I’d told you I didn’t want to do anything more,” she texted. He denied, in MSU documents, that she’d told him she wanted no further sexual activity.

In the fall of 2014, a few months after the May 31, 2014 incident and a full year before she reported it, she and Nathan took the same MSU residential college course – Science Fiction and Bioethics. Although it was uncomfortable for them, and they never spoke to each other, they both completed the course.