The truth about what unfolded the night Natalie Plummer found her drunken boyfriend sleeping naked with a woman on the floor of his University of Houston dorm room may never be sorted out.

Plummer previously had caught Ryan McConnell lying about another woman. She says she wanted to create hard evidence of his infidelity on the night of Nov. 19, 2011, so she started snapping pictures and soon switched to video. As it turned out, she was creating evidence against herself.

The other woman would awaken the next morning in a hospital room, her body scraped and bruised. An investigation by UH police and, ultimately, a Title IX complaint, would follow. That was months later.

Finally, last month, after sporadic, written correspondence with UH and allegedly one-sided hearings - but little official explanation of what was actually going on - Plummer and McConnell, still a couple, were notified that they had been expelled. That was nearly three years after their role in what the university found to be a sexual assault.

Last week, Plummer and McConnell sued UH, joining a growing number of students who contend universities around the country are running roughshod over due process to demonstrate their commitment to swift justice for sexual assault victims.

Universities - required by federal law to fight gender-based violence and protect survivors - face increasing pressure to crack down on an apparent epidemic of sexual violence on campuses. Multiple studies have shown that 5 percent of college women are victims of rape or attempted rape every year.

In their federal court lawsuit against UH and two administrators, McConnell and Plummer claim they were largely kept in the dark during the lengthy investigation of the complaint against them and were given little chance to defend themselves in an administrative hearing.

Criminal charges were never filed in the case.

Pictures, video shared

The lawsuit represents only one side of the story, but attorneys for the former students provided some university documents that they say shed light on the processes they are challenging. In a statement, UH officials said privacy laws preclude them from commenting but said the university is committed to fairness in sexual assault investigations.

The case is an unusual one involving not a lone male student but a couple accused and expelled together. Pictures and video shared with friends and posted on social media are central to the case, which comes at a time of heightened sensitivity to sexual assault on college campuses.

A February 2012 complaint filed by the female student - who was kicked out of the dorm room that night without her clothes and recorded in the hallway and elevator where she later was found by other students - prompted the university's investigation. The student claimed she didn't remember anything from that night. Her injuries observed in the hospital, and results from a rape kit, led a nurse to conclude she likely had been sexually assaulted.

McConnell met the woman at a campus bar, the last place she remembered being that night. The two drank heavily, and a witness later told UH officials that he saw them kissing, slurring their words and stumbling. McConnell and the woman headed back to McConnell's apartment in the Calhoun Lofts, and that's where Plummer and McConnell's account differs greatly from UH's findings.

McConnell claims the woman fell, which is how he explains her scrapes and bruises.

At McConnell's apartment, the two had sex, which McConnell maintains was consensual. The two fell asleep on the floor, where Plummer found them and took out her camera.

The videos led administrators to "theorize" that Plummer and McConnell were colluding to film a rape, attorneys for the two students say.

Left in elevator

According to a university report, provided by Plummer and McConnell's attorneys, the video from the dorm room shows McConnell "attempting to make sexual contact with the nude female." According to UH's report, the woman doesn't appear to move in the video and Plummer can be heard encouraging McConnell.

In an email interview, Plummer said she took a picture of McConnell and the woman for evidence and only began recording video after the woman woke up and "started asking me for sex."

"In my view, I was documenting my own sexual assault by the girl," she said.

Plummer led the woman out of the dorm room, without her clothes, and into an elevator, where she later was found by other students, who contacted UH police. According to the lawsuit, police determined there was insufficient evidence to support criminal charges. Plummer and McConnell thought the case was over.

Three months later, the student filed her complaint with the university, saying her "Title (IX) rights were violated."

Title IX is the federal law that requires universities to combat gender-based violence and protect survivors. Colleges increasingly must walk a fine line between acting quickly to ensure sexual assault survivors are safe while not rushing to judgment against the accused.

The federal government recently has acted to lower the bar of evidence required to find students guilty in such cases. That's sharpened the tension surrounding how some colleges handle such cases.

A 2011 letter from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights prompted many universities to respond more aggressively to alleged sexual assaults. The letter, in part, urged universities to rely on a preponderance of evidence - essentially, "more likely than not" - as opposed to the more stringent "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard applied in criminal trials.

Federal officials now are investigating alleged Title IX violations at dozens of schools across the country.

The student's complaint required UH to investigate. But it wasn't until more than a year and a half later that the university explicitly told Plummer and McConnell they were being investigated, the lawsuit claims. Instead, the university sent the two letters a few weeks after the complaint was filed, telling them that UH officials were investigating an alleged case of sexual misconduct and they believed Plummer and McConnell "may have information pertinent to the investigation."

The two met with university officials and provided their accounts.

In September 2013, UH sent McConnell and Plummer another letter, this one laying out the case against them. They were accused of violating the school's sexual misconduct policy by sexually assaulting the student, by taking abusive sexual advantage of another student, by recording and transmitting sexual images without the consent of all involved, and by engaging in sexual behavior that was "severe and had the purpose or effect of interfering with another student's educational performance."

The letter said McConnell and Plummer had 10 business days to provide a written defense. McConnell did so through his attorney, and Plummer met with UH officials and brought an attorney with her; she says UH officials tried to keep the attorney out of the meeting. At that meeting, Plummer claims she was confronted with evidence that hadn't previously been disclosed to her.

Several months later, in February, the two received notice that UH found them both guilty.

'Changed us both'

McConnell and Plummer appealed at an administrative hearing where, the lawsuit claims, they were never given a chance to cross-examine witnesses or to bring present defense witnesses. While the students were permitted to have attorneys present, the attorneys were not allowed to speak for or actively defend their clients, said Mike Allen, one of the attorneys now representing the students.

In September, several months after the appeals hearings and nearly three years after the alleged assault, the students were expelled. Plummer said she was nine classes from graduation.

The two are still a couple.

"It turned out that being confronted with his own behavior caused Ryan to realize he was headed down the wrong path," Plummer said. "The entire situation changed us both, and we have both improved ourselves dramatically."