Dr. Nicole Bedera

This is written by design.

Into the Trump administration's 2020 regulation, I actually co-authored an article about it with Sage Carson, who was the director of Know Your Nine at the time, and Seth Galanter, who had worked for the Obama administration's Department of Education, raising a red flag about this.

But one of the things that was written into the Trump administration's regulation around cross-examination is that it is absolutely required.

The victim does not have to attend in person, but they have to at least be there virtually.

And if they don't attend, then none of the other statements they made through the Title IX process can be counted as evidence.

Their written statement about what happened, their interview with the Title IX officer, all of these things disappear immediately.

down to text messages they sent to someone else saying they were sexually assaulted and asking for help.

All of that is cleared out of the evidentiary record.

And the same is true for perpetrators.

So if a perpetrator doesn't attend, all of the evidence that they have given to the Title IX office using their own words is cleared out of the evidentiary record, including things like confessions.

And one of the things that I think really surprises people and surprised me from my work for On the Wrong Side is perpetrators confess all the time.

I would venture to say that perpetrators confess in most cases.

And so the reason we're seeing survivors have to go through this cross-examination, but perpetrators aren't showing up, is because it gives perpetrators a massive advantage to skip their hearing.

And it gives survivors a massive disadvantage to skip the hearing.

then it functions the exact way you're describing, which is that it feels like the victim is the one on trial.

Because in the eyes of the Trump administration and the eyes of the men's rights activists who they tapped on the shoulder to help write this regulation, that's what they want the Title IX process to be.

That is exactly what we warned would happen in the moment the regulation passed.

And it was so egregious that people wrote to the Department of Education and said, surely you don't mean us to enforce it this way.

There must be a misunderstanding or you're going to make a revision.

And the Trump administration doubled down and said, no, that's exactly how we mean it to function.