Sarah says Corbitt grilled her on certain details: What was she wearing? Had she flirted with him or given him mixed signals? “The entire line of questioning was basically like, ‘Did you make it up? Or did you deserve it in some way? Or was it consensual and now you’re just lying about it to make him look bad?’ ” recalls Rachel Leon, Sarah’s roommate who had accompanied her to Corbitt’s office for support.

Listening to Sarah from across her desk, the dean was as polite as ever. But she didn’t seem to believe Sarah’s story at all. “If you were telling the truth about this,” Sarah remembers Corbitt saying, “God would have kept you conscious to bear witness to the abuse against you.”

Sarah and Rachel then told Corbitt that Ryan had come by their dorm a few days after the incident and rapped on the windows, trying to get in. They talked about the barrage of e-mails, calls, and text messages Ryan had sent them, saying what he did was wrong and that he was sorry.

Corbitt told Sarah and Rachel to forward all of Ryan’s e-mails to her and delete them from their inboxes. The dean then asked them to pull out their phones and show her Ryan’s text messages. Corbitt said to delete those, too. The dean explained that they weren’t allowed to speak of this matter outside of her office. She also forbade Sarah from seeking outside counseling. Both Sarah and Rachel feared they would be expelled if they disobeyed.

A few days later, Sarah returned to the dean’s office to write up an official statement. Sarah still believed what her Christian homeschooling upbringing had instilled in her: that you shouldn’t question adults in positions of authority, because they’re looking out for you and probably know best. So when Corbitt strongly encouraged Sarah not to go to the police—to trust Patrick Henry College to handle this situation—she did as she was told.

The incident Sarah reported to Dean Corbitt took place at a friend’s family home in Norfolk, Virginia, over Thanksgiving break. She was with a group of friends from Distance Learning, the online PHC program she had participated in as a senior in high school. Saturday night, they played games with their host parents, before buckling down to do homework.

The students had dumped their bags in the room where Ryan was staying. Sarah retrieved a book she needed for Western history class and plopped down on the floor, hoping to crank through as much as she could. The others eventually went to sleep, but Sarah remembers that she and Ryan stayed up working. He invited her to get more comfortable and join him on the bed, which she did. At some point, Sarah fell asleep while reading.

Sarah remembers waking up in Ryan’s arms. “I think you should go back to your room now,” Ryan told her, according to a copy of the statement Sarah says she wrote in Dean Corbitt’s office. “My jeans were unsnapped and unzipped, and my shirt was pushed up,” her statement continued. The clock read 5:30 a.m. She was disoriented, nauseous, and her head felt heavy. With her pants falling down, she made her way down the hall. In the bathroom, she threw up.

At first, Sarah didn’t remember what had happened. But in the hours that followed, bits and pieces started coming back to her: not being able to breathe with Ryan on top of her. His face pushing up against her neck, her cheek, her hair. Her arms and legs feeling heavy and useless. The overpowering smell of Old Spice. His hands down inside her underwear, groping her butt. Somehow being able to summon the strength to push his hands away when he pushed them down the front of her pants. And somewhere in the haze, her prayer: “Please, God, make it stop.”

Sunday night, back on PHC’s campus, Ryan asked Sarah to meet with him. “I wanted to apologize for taking liberties,” he told Sarah, according to her statement. He asked her to keep this between the two of them. Feeling dirty and ashamed, blaming herself—“What was I doing in his room, anyway?” she thought—Sarah agreed. (Ryan did not respond to multiple interview requests.)

But the next day, Sarah told her roommate Rachel. Rachel, in turn, angrily confronted Ryan by e-mail, who then began contacting Sarah, Rachel, and their third roommate (who asked to remain anonymous) to say he was sorry.

Sarah was having nightmares and screaming in her sleep. After her first meeting with Dean Corbitt, Sarah returned to her office alone to write up her official statement, dated December 1, 2006. As part of the investigation, Corbitt summoned Sarah for several rounds of questioning. “It’s my job to poke holes in your story,” Sarah remembers Dean Corbitt saying. “I have to make sure that you’re not lying to me. ... I don’t think you’re wholly innocent in this situation.”

Corbitt recommended keeping the sexual-assault proceedings informal due to the “strange nature” of her testimony, according to Sarah. She says that Corbitt never mentioned the option of a hearing before a faculty committee, as provided for in the student handbook.

When they talked about going to the police, Sarah remembers that Corbitt asked her, “Well, what evidence do you have?” and discouraged police involvement, arguing that PHC could seek God’s truth and justice, but outside authorities don’t share that worldview. Don’t you trust God? was the implication, Sarah says.

Meanwhile, the administration questioned Ryan separately. “Ryan was very angry about being accused,” remembers Sarah’s second roommate. Sarah feared that Ryan would try to get back at her for reporting him. On such a small campus, he was impossible to avoid. They had classes together. When they passed one another on the sidewalk, it always seemed like he made sure to walk a little too close to Sarah, and the smell of Old Spice would bring everything back.

“I hate walking alone,” Sarah wrote in a diary entry that December. “He is a vindictive person with violent tendencies. ... He scares me. I’m constantly afraid.”

Dean Thornhill, the dean of men, had the task of questioning Ryan and taking his statement. Corbitt informed Sarah that she and Thornhill agreed that “Ryan has the right to face his accuser.” (Sokolow, the attorney, said giving the accused this opportunity was “unorthodox and outside the best practices of the field.”) The deans brought Sarah and Ryan into a room together and gave him a copy of her handwritten statement, which included a bulleted list of memories: “Ryan laying on top of me”; “he pushed up my shirt and ran his hands all over my back and stomach”; “him grabbing my butt, not thru my jeans or underwear but actually my butt. I remember pushing his hand away.”

The deans asked Ryan to go through the statement and mark any inaccuracies. He gave it back to them untouched, Sarah says. Ryan told the deans that he “crossed a line” and realized he’d “taken liberties.” According to Sarah, he confirmed everything she said except one key detail: He said he didn’t realize that it wasn’t consensual.

The deans went off to deliberate. Corbitt determined that Sarah had made an “error in judgment” by being alone in a boy’s room in violation of PHC rules. “You are in part responsible for what happened, because you put yourself in a compromising situation,” Corbitt said, according to Sarah. “Actions have consequences.”

Both she and Ryan were to receive “growth contracts,” Sarah says. This meant counseling sessions—Ryan with Dr. Steve Hake, a literature professor, and Sarah with Corbitt. With that, the investigation was over. “Ryan acted as though not being expelled were synonymous with exoneration,” says Sarah’s roommate. “He positively gloated.”

Sarah’s weekly counseling sessions began after winter break. Corbitt opened the first session in January 2007 by saying Sarah would have to bear with her, because she’d never handled anything like this before. For each session, Dean Corbitt had Sarah read a chapter from Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul, a popular evangelical self-help book about proper femininity and modesty. In one chapter, co-author Stasi Eldredge tells a cautionary tale of studying abroad in college, saying she was a “rebellious, unwise woman” who “put myself in a dangerous position”:

After enjoying a few too many drinks at a local bar, my girlfriend and I accepted a ride back to the hotel from the men we had been drinking with. You must be shaking your head as you read this, knowing what was coming. I am. Their offered ride did not lead us back to the hotel, but instead to a private location where I was raped.

Sarah, like most any sexual-assault survivor, was struggling not to blame herself. But Corbitt’s focus, she says, was on making her “pure” again. Corbitt set out to teach her about appropriate behavior and the kinds of clothing that are tempting to boys, like short skirts and low-cut shirts. That semester, Sarah began to fail classes. When nightmares woke her up, Sarah would pad downstairs to a friend’s room and curl up in bed with her. Other students weren’t so understanding. Hearing what had happened with Ryan, classmates repeatedly asked, “What were you wearing?” or “Why were you in his room?” or “Were you giving him mixed signals?” In May 2007, at the end of her freshman year, Sarah dropped out.

Shortly before the end of the school year, Sarah says she made an appointment to talk with PHC Provost Gene Veith to complain about Corbitt’s handling of her case. Sarah was accompanied by her friend and future husband, Josh (who asked to be identified by his first name only). The provost said he was unaware of the sexual-assault accusation, according to Sarah and Josh. Veith was polite but dismissive. “It didn’t seem like he was taking it very seriously,” says Josh, who graduated from PHC in 2010. Josh told Veith he wanted to research sexual-assault policies at other schools, so PHC could reconsider its own. He remembers that Veith seemed open to the idea at the time. Later, Josh followed up by e-mail. “I never heard back,” he says.

Officials from Patrick Henry College declined interview requests. Citing student privacy, the college would not comment on many of the particulars of Sarah Patten’s (who asked to be identified by her maiden name) or Claire Spear’s accounts, or the incidents involving the other students who asked not to be named. “Our policy is to immediately report to law enforcement any potential criminal conduct on our campus of which we have actual knowledge, and to encourage any apparent victim to file a complaint with law enforcement,” PHC wrote in a statement. “Our investigation of these incidents did not reveal information that gave PHC reason to believe that a criminal offense had occurred.”

In response to a seven-page list of questions, PHC sent The New Republic a five-page statement, emphasizing, “We do not seek to elevate one gender above the other, but rather esteem all students as being made in the image of the One who created the world.” PHC objected to the nature of The New Republic’s questions, saying they wrongly assumed that “the College views women who, sadly, have experienced sexual abuse or harassment as somehow having been deserving of their fate.” The school categorically denied engaging in victim-blaming: “We believe it is offensive to suggest that a person who has been assaulted was somehow ‘responsible’ for the crime that has been perpetrated against them.”

While declining to discuss the specifics of Sarah’s case, PHC disputed several points. The school denied that Corbitt said the “strange nature” of Sarah’s testimony about the incident was a reason to keep proceedings informal and that Corbitt said Sarah’s alleged perpetrator was “ ‘a nice boy’ (or words to like effect)” and discouraged her from filing a police report. PHC also denied that “anyone in PHC’s administration or leadership suggested that if a person had been sexually abused, God would have kept that person fully conscious to bear witness to it. Such a statement would be theologically indefensible, biblically inaccurate, and offensive”; that Corbitt instructed Sarah and her roommate, Rachel, “to delete potentially incriminating e-mails, text messages, and voice mails from the alleged perpetrator”; that Ryan was allowed to correct inaccuracies in Sarah’s statement; and that “anyone in PHC’s administration or leadership suggested or implied that Sarah was either lying about the incident or somehow ‘deserved it’ because she ‘seduced’ the alleged perpetrator.”

“In summary,” the statement read, “the College believed then, and believes now, that the incident reported by Sarah was handled appropriately and that proper steps were taken to address the allegations.”

Similarly, PHC disputed several details of Claire’s account. The school said Corbitt never told Claire that PHC could not do anything about her allegation because her claim could not be proven and that PHC was more concerned with the fact that Claire had violated the school’s alcohol rules than her sexual-assault report. The statement continued, “Any assertion on your part that the College somehow protected male students or its own reputation at the expense of its female students is simply false.”

This past May, I called Dean Sandra Corbitt at her office. A woman answered the phone, saying, “Hello, this is Sandy.” But when I identified myself as a reporter with questions about PHC’s handling of sexual assault, the woman responded in the third person about the dean’s availability. “She’s getting ready to head out of town for vacation,” the woman told me. In a statement, PHC confirmed that the woman on the phone was Corbitt, who “was obviously surprised by having a reporter bypass normal telephone protocol in the Office of Student Life by securing her personal phone extension and dialing her directly.”

Before Sarah dropped out of PHC in 2007, Corbitt was promoted to dean of student affairs. Rachel Leon wrote about her former roommate’s ordeal for a journalism class at PHC—or tried to, rather. The professor, Les Sillars, pulled her aside after class to tell her she was “making something out of nothing,” Rachel remembers. “He said he’d talked to Dean Corbitt and that there was no story.” (Sillars did not respond to a request for comment.)

John and Ryan have both continued about their lives. Now married with kids, John went from Patrick Henry to the U.S. Army. Ryan married a young woman from a Quiverfull family. They saved their first kiss for their wedding day, Ryan’s mother-in-law announced on social media.

Sarah, meanwhile, says dropping out of PHC wasn’t the end of the world. Home in Fort Myers that summer, she finally saw a real therapist. Within a few months, with $900 in her bank account, she packed up all of her belongings into suitcases, put her trust in God, and—in the ultimate act of disobedience—left her father’s house for good.

Sarah moved up to Virginia to be closer to her friends at PHC, including Josh. The two married in May 2010—when she would have graduated. Sarah is still trying to finish her college degree. Her PHC credits didn’t transfer, so she had to start all over again. She takes online courses while working full time in Fort Myers in communications, her bubbly predisposition perfectly suited to the job. The week I visited, her husband, Josh, was doting, fetching her Chapstick and glasses of water, teasing her sweetly about her Taylor Swift notebooks. One day, Sarah and Josh plan to have children and homeschool them.

If all had gone according to plan, Claire would have graduated this past spring from Patrick Henry College with a degree in international politics and policy. Instead, she moved to a small town in Vermont and began attending Lyndon State College, working toward a degree in social work. Last February, when we met for dinner at a local pub, she wore purple leopard-print suspenders and tight black pants. There is an “EAT MORE KALE” bumper sticker on the back of her car, whose radio was tuned to Vermont Public Radio. She explained that she hadn’t eaten meat since her high school Christian youth-group days, inspired by a fast in the Book of Daniel. Looking for the passage, Claire reached for the Bible in her purse and then remembered that it has been quite some time since she has kept a Bible in her purse.

She wonders if she’d still call herself Christian if Patrick Henry’s administration had treated her differently, or if she would have stayed at PHC and gone on to the successful State Department career she once thought to be her destiny. “I honestly can’t even imagine how different things would be if I had been supported at that institution instead of silenced and ostracized,” she says.

In September, Claire left Vermont with her boyfriend, Raven, and hitchhiked through Florida, working with Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms. She acquired a puppy along the way and named him Manna, after the bread of life. As of January, Claire and Raven were living off the grid in the woods with a collective of campers who call themselves the Rainbow Family. She calls her parents with the cell phone her father gave her when she left, wishing her well on her journey. She seems at home on the road, like it may have been the right life for her all along. Claire plans to stay south for the winter, and eventually head west.

Kiera Feldman is a member of the Ochberg Society for Trauma Journalism and has written for The Nation, Mother Jones, and elsewhere. This story was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.