“They have tended to favor the accusers rather than the accused,” said Adam Kissel of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which focuses on students’ rights issues and has criticized the sexual misconduct policies at Duke, Columbia and other universities. “It’s almost as if guilty when charged is the policy, instead of innocent until proven guilty.”

At a hearing on Monday, Judge William E. Smith of Federal District Court in Providence, R.I., questioned why Brown never reported the alleged attack to the police. “The thought that with all the people involved in this matter at different levels, a determination is made to not tell law enforcement, even the Brown Police Department — I’m having trouble getting that,” Judge Smith said, according to The Associated Press. He also characterized the lawsuit as “a mess” and told Mr. McCormick’s lawyer, J. Scott Kilpatrick, that some of the assertions appeared to be unsubstantiated.

According to his lawsuit, Mr. McCormick arrived at Brown in the fall of 2006 as a star wrestler and straight-A student with a financial aid scholarship to attend the university. He was assigned to live in the same dorm as the female student. In the first few days of school, the lawsuit describes the two as becoming “friendly, but not romantic.” But Mr. McCormick quickly drew attention in the dorm, the lawsuit says: his 250-pound frame cut a “physically imposing figure,” and the woman’s friends began describing him as “creepy” and called him her “stalker.”

The woman first told her resident coordinator that Mr. McCormick was following her. According to an e-mail message from a Brown associate dean that is part of the court record, the student was initially reluctant to name Mr. McCormick and complained that she “did not want to have anything bad happen.” The message also indicated that the woman’s parents had called a high-level Brown official to discuss the matter.

Image The Brown campus in Providence, R.I. A lawsuit raises questions about the disciplinary process used by the university. Credit... Winslow Townson/Associated Press

The lawsuit claims that Brown employees pursued the complaint vigorously, pressing the student to divulge Mr. McCormick’s name and pressing her to add to her complaint. According to the lawsuit, at one point the student felt that the officials were “yelling at her” and that the ordeal was taking time away from sailing practice and studying for a chemistry test. Eventually, with the help of her resident coordinator, she wrote a statement asserting that Mr. McCormick had raped her.