ASHE SCHOW: No such thing as evidence of innocence in campus sexual assault hearings.

If a student has been wrongly accused of sexual assault on their college campus, how are they supposed to prove their innocence?

I’ve asked a similar question to lawmakers and interested parties before — how is a student supposed to prove they obtained consent in a he said, she said situation? — but received no response.

One would think there might at least theoretically exist evidence that an encounter was consensual – outside of a videotape or recording, of course. Witnesses, for example, or subsequent messages between the two students.

And indeed, such evidence does exist in some situations, the problem is that college administrators either ignore such evidence or they twist said evidence to end up being used against the accused student who brought it up.

Take contact between the two parties after an alleged incident of sexual assault. Even if the accuser appears friendly toward the eventually accused, all they have to do is claim their messages didn’t accurately portray their feelings and suddenly, those messages are used against the accused.

This occurred in the Emma Sulkowicz vs. Paul Nungesser case. After what Sulkowicz claimed was a brutal rape in which she was pinned, beaten and choked before being raped, she sent Nungesser numerous messages asking to hang out, even telling him she loved him. Nungesser tried to get those messages introduced as evidence during his Columbia University hearing, but was denied. Nungesser, who has since become the victim of a public campaign of defamation by his accuser, was exonerated anyway.

After Sulkowicz began a mattress-carrying performance art project and publicly identified Nungesser as her attacker despite confidentiality rules, Nungesser released the post-alleged-rape Facebook messages.

Sulkowicz responded to the released messages by claiming she sent them because she wanted to have a “talk” with Nungesser about the encounter. Some people still buy it.

A similar situation played out at Vassar College when Peter Yu introduced Facebook messages showing his accuser apologizing to him for the evening. She apologized for leading him on and said that she had “a wonderful time” with him. But a year later, when Yu produced these messages for the disciplinary panel, his accuser claimed they “did not correctly reflect her feelings” because she was in a state of “shock and disbelief” about the encounter.