Chapter 1: What are the content warnings for this episode?
Something Was Wrong is intended for mature audiences and discusses topics that may be upsetting. This season discusses sexual, physical, and psychological violence. Please consume the following episodes with care. For a full content warning, sources, and resources for each individual episode, please visit the episode notes.
Opinions shared by the guests of the show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of broken cycle media. The podcast and any linked materials should not be misconstrued as a substitution for legal or medical advice. Thank you so much for listening.
Every day on college campuses across the United States, students wake up hoping to learn, grow, and redefine who they are, often living away from home for the first time. But for far too many young people, these same campuses become the site of trauma that will alter the course of their lives forever. Sexual violence on college campuses is sadly not a new issue. It is not rare.
And despite decades of advocacy, federal reform, educational campaigns, and supposed institutional safeguards, students continue to be harmed at staggering rates. Yet the systems we are told will protect students — Title IX offices, student conduct boards, campus police, and administrators — often end up protecting institutions, not survivors.
This season of Something Was Wrong is one of the most urgent investigations we've ever produced. Because behind every statistic is a young person, someone's child, navigating one of the most vulnerable moments in their life in a system that was supposed to protect them and didn't.
We've spent months speaking with students, parents, witnesses, professors, and experts, reviewing transcripts, Title IX documents, legal filings, and university communications. What we found was not a series of isolated incidents, but a pattern.
A pattern of minimization, of institutional self-protection, of re-traumatization disguised as procedure, of students being harmed not only by their perpetrators, but by the very systems designed to ensure their safety. And when survivors did come forward, many faced scrutiny, disbelief, or retaliation, while the alleged perpetrators faced little to no accountability.
Something Was Wrong Season 25 is about what happens when universities fail to uphold civil rights protections. It's about what happens when young survivors try to do everything right and are still left to fight alone. It's about the parents who receive the call that they often feared and the systems that responded with bureaucracy instead of care.
It's also about the power of speaking up and the courage it takes to do so when the cost is high. But before we begin this season, it's important to understand the law that sits at the center of so many of these stories, Title IX. Title IX was passed in 1972 as part of the Education Amendments. The law states, quote, End quote.
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Chapter 2: What is the impact of sexual violence on college campuses?
Research cited by the American Psychological Association found that 50% of college sexual assaults occur during the red zone. LGBTQIA students face even higher rates of harm. Quote, students who identify as sexual minority men are nine times as likely to have experienced sexual assaults as heterosexual male students and students who identify as sexual minority women
are twice as likely as heterosexual female students to have been sexually assaulted." And yet, more than 90% of students are estimated to never formally report their assault. Survivors frequently describe feeling overwhelmed, confused, or afraid they won't be believed. Others fear retaliation, social backlash, or the emotional toll of a lengthy bureaucratic process.
For the students who do step forward, their experiences can be inconsistent and, at times, deeply retraumatizing. Many survivors end up leaving classes, changing majors, moving off campus, or even withdrawing from school entirely, while the alleged perpetrators often continue their education without interruption. An analysis by American Sports News program Outside the Lines
illustrates that in recent years, quote, end quote. In 2021, 16,754 students across eight academic campuses participated in an online study that included questions about sexual harassment victimization by a faculty staff member or by a peer since enrollment at their institution of higher education.
Across institutions, 19% of students reported experiencing faculty-staff perpetrated sexual harassment and 30% reported experiencing peer-perpetrated sexual harassment. This isn't just painful. It undermines the core purpose of Title IX itself. For most students, the first time they hear the term Title IX is after something traumatic has already happened.
They're 18 or 19, away from home, terrified, and suddenly confronted with deadlines, investigators, and policies they've never seen before. But Title IX does give students rights. They have the right to a fair and timely process. They have the right to supportive measures, things like counseling access, academic adjustments, or a no-contact directive.
They have the right to have someone with them in meetings, and they have the right to report without fear of retaliation. The challenge is that each school is required to adopt and publish their own Title IX policies and procedures. Some are clear and survivor-centered. Others are confusing, outdated, or written in ways that make the process nearly impossible to navigate without help.
Knowing your rights isn't just important. It can be the difference between receiving support and being pushed out of your education entirely. But those rights do not exist in a vacuum. They're shaped and sometimes limited by court decisions. the Department of Education adopted new Title IX regulations that took effect in August of 2020.
The rules required live hearings with cross-examination in collegiate-level sexual misconduct cases, narrowed the definition of actionable sexual harassment, and added more due process protections for accused students.
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Chapter 3: How does Title IX function and what are its limitations?
She also really spoke very highly of y'all. And I think that having y'all's support, it sounds like, has meant a lot to her and really helped her throughout this process. And not everybody has that. I'm very honored that I get to connect with y'all as well. I'm curious what your guys' hopes were for her as she left for college.
Lots of hopes that she would really flourish, meet incredible people and learn how to be independent. Beginning of her young adulthood, it was just so exciting and it was devastating. She's our only child. Being empty nesters was really hard. But luckily, she chose a school which is only about 45 minutes from home. So that was great.
We were just so excited for her to begin this journey of her life.
to have the whole college experience.
Yeah. You prep yourself their whole life for this moment. They pick their school and you're so excited for them, but also you feel this hole in your stomach, like, oh my God, they're leaving. It's really hard. It's a hard time.
I think you took it harder than I did. To me, it was, this is what my goal was for her whole life, was for her to graduate high school and go on to college and to get a degree and to be able to be self-sufficient and not have to rely on anybody ever, be a strong, independent woman. That's what I wanted. I was very happy for her when she left.
The transition from high school to college was very emotional. More than I thought it was going to be. I thought I was going to be able to tough it out a little more than I did. But I'm a very sensitive person and I knew it was going to be a challenge. I actually remember that two nights before I moved into college, I had a complete mental episode. I was bawling and I was like, I can't do this.
I don't want to go. I ended up sleeping in my parents' bed with them that one final night. I think that was my way of letting go of the past 18 years and flying the nest. I was definitely homesick the first few days. I didn't know anybody. I was the only one from my little boonies town and nobody even heard of the town that I came from.
That was kind of isolating in itself and they couldn't even find me on the map. Do you feel like it impacted people's impression of you? Definitely. The small town girl is definitely a very real stereotype. And I think I was placed into that subgroup without even realizing it. I had never even met my roommate until I got there. Like a blind date, but a lot worse because you're living with them.
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Chapter 4: What challenges do survivors face when reporting assaults?
I was exhausted and I woke up and he was in my dorm with my roommate. I've seen him on campus in passing, but I've never talked to him. But he was really nice. He talked to me for a second. He said that he was sorry for disturbing me in my nap. He was from Florida, so I thought that was interesting.
I didn't necessarily think it was odd, but I was like, why would he come from Florida to this little town and this little college that is really only known for nursing? But other than that, I thought he was really friendly and really warm and outgoing. Maybe the guys in college are a little different than the ones you deal with in high school.
He left the room and I was like, oh, that was a good interaction. Because of my roommate, we started to be affiliated with each other a little bit more and everything unfolded from there. I definitely interacted with him a lot more on a regular basis after that first interaction. He came up to me a couple times while I was having dinner with my friend and he would be like, hey, how's it going?
And he'd sit with us for a few minutes and we would eat together. He would sit with me in the library once in a while and we would do homework together. I lived on a girl's floor during my first year and his floor was the first floor and I was on the third floor. He would be up on our floor a lot because he had befriended a lot of the women on our floor.
So I just kind of got used to him being around and on the times that I would talk to him, he was very emotionally open. He would tell me things about his personal life that I wouldn't normally tell somebody.
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Chapter 5: What are the statistics on sexual violence among college students?
He immediately told me that he had three sisters. And I was like, wow, this guy has grown up around a lot of women and no wonder he's befriending all these women. He's very sensitive, very emotional, very gentle. He had talked to me a lot about spending a lot of time with his grandparents. That was part of the reason that he came up to where he is.
We spent a lot more time together, not really so much one-on-one leading up to the assault and then the night of, but anytime I had hung out with him, he was always really fun and he would dance a lot. He was loud. He was very flamboyant. I liked him a lot.
What did your other friends think of him?
My roommate actually really had a thing for him. So she always spoke really highly of him and she would talk about him a lot and she would talk to me about him and I would just be like, yeah, he's really nice. A lot of my friends thought the same thing. We all really liked the fact that he was around women and grew up with sisters. That made us feel a lot more comfortable around him.
My friend and I, we would go to the communal showers together and we would talk while we were showering and she'd come back to my room in like her bathrobe and I'd be in my towel and he would be in my room or he'd be on the girl's floor and we'd walk past him in our pajamas and nobody ever felt unsafe around him. We all thought he was like one of the girls.
As the end of September approached, my school does something called the First Year Seminar. It's a thing that we do where all the first year students get together and we get paired into these groups and we have to come up with some kind of project. It was an education program working with students with special needs and making special needs education more accessible. That was our group.
He wasn't in my group, but his group had been right next to my group. Proximity-wise, we were very close to each other during those couple of days that our groups were working together. One night, he had invited me to come hang out in his dorm with my friend and his roommate. Her and I were like, okay, sure.
After we spent the day doing our project, we went to his dorm and we just hung out in there and it was really fun. I remember sitting on his bed. He's very tall and I'm very not tall. He had kind of like put himself between my legs while I was sitting on the bed. My feet were dangling off the bed and he was standing like between my legs talking to me. Looking back, I'm like, what the heck?
But I never thought that was weird because he was very friendly, very warm. And I'm kind of the same way. The four of us were hanging out and my friend was really hitting it off with his roommate. He was asking me about my personal life, my home life, if I had had a boyfriend before. I didn't really think anything of it because he had been so open from the his girlfriends in the past.
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Chapter 6: How do universities respond to reports of sexual misconduct?
And then he did this weird thing. Him and his roommate used to smoke a lot in their room together. Anytime one of the friends would come into the dorm, they would have them like shake the doorknob so that they knew it wasn't an RA trying to come in or something. So I texted him, do you want me to like knock on the door? Just come in. And he was like, actually, if you could shake the doorknob.
And I found out later what that was about. I just come down with my phone because my phone has my ID in the back of it where I scan into my floor because all of our floors are keycard protected so that no random strangers can get into our dorm building. So I go down there and I like wiggle the doorknob and he opens the door and I notice that his roommate's there. And so I'm like, okay, cool.
And he's like, hey, come on in. But then I noticed that his roommate was putting on his coat to go somewhere. I was like, oh, is he leaving? And he's like, yeah, he's going out with some of our classmates. And I was like, oh, okay, whatever. Didn't think anything weird about it. I don't think he would do anything wrong.
This is when it all started to get really weird feeling and my stomach started to feel kind of funny because he said to his roommate, can you lock the door on your way out? And I was like, why would you lock the door? The way that the door is set up in our dorm room is there's no lock on the outside at all.
If somebody was outside and I was in there locked in, they would not be able to get me unless they had the key. And I would have to physically get up and unlock the door to get myself out of there. I think that's really important because I knew that that was the way the door worked. And so that felt a little weird for him to be locking us in his room.
And I was like, oh, I hope this guy doesn't think we're going to do anything because it's not going to happen. We hop up on the bed and he's like, you can get comfortable. The TV was propped up on one of like the built-in closet things. So it was in a good spot where it was angled towards the bed. And the way that the room was set up was his bed was pushed against the wall.
It's a little twin extra long mattress dorm bed. And then there was a space in the middle. And then his roommate's bed was on the other side, the same kind of setup pushed against the wall. At the foot of the bed, there was a desk with a big built-in shelf. The only way to get off the bed is to physically get off the side of the bed.
You can't go off the head of the bed because it's against the wall. You can't get off the foot of the bed. And then he had this rolling shower caddy thing at the head of the bed off to like the side. And that's where he would keep his TV remote and put his phone in there, his snacks and whatever else. The room was pretty set up where the only open space was in the middle.
So he tells me to get comfortable. And I'm nervous because last time I was on this bed, he told me he liked me. I'm like, what is tonight going to hold? He had the LED lights on. So it was kind of dark in there. But I was like, we're watching a movie. I don't need the lights on anyway, whatever. He puts me on the inside of the bed. Now I'm squished against him and the wall.
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Chapter 7: What happens when the Title IX process fails survivors?
Which is the craziest thing that anybody could ever say in that moment. Why in God's name would I ever come back to this room? I think he was trying to make it seem nonchalant, like that was not as bad as I had made it out to be. But I was in tears. My makeup was down my face. My neck was red. I had a huge, giant bruise on my chest from him biting me.
And I was like, this is the last place I would ever come back to. But I didn't want to say that because I don't know this guy at all anymore. So I went back upstairs and my roommate got one look at me when I walked in the door and she was like, What the hell happened to you? I told my roommate the entire story in as much detail as I could, but I was reeling and I was crying and hyperventilating.
I don't really remember what I told her, but I know that she had the full story because she ended up helping me with the rest of the situation and telling me what to do. And the first thing that my roommate encouraged me to do was go to the bathroom and I used the bathroom and I was actually bleeding. It looked like I had started my period, but I had not been due for it at all.
So that was really scary. That shocked me back into reality. Something is terribly wrong. That was not okay. I'm physically injured and internally now I'm injured. That made me completely spiral. And so I started panicking and my roommate was like, why don't we go downstairs to the RA and just tell her what happened so that even if you never do anything about it,
you have told somebody else that's not me because I want you to know that you were assaulted that is 100% an assault I'm here for you and I want you to go share this with somebody else so that there's another person that knows what happened to you and see where we go from there but I'd never been assaulted I'd never even come close to that hearing that come out of somebody's mouth that cares about me was so I don't even have the word for it it was such a surreal experience
I had already been talking to my RA on and off because the heater in our room was broken. So I had gone and talked to her a few different times and her and I had a really nice relationship and I trusted her. She happened to be the one that was on duty, like supervising the whole building for the night. Thank God.
My roommate and I went into the RA office and we asked her if we could talk and she was immediately super welcoming. I remember sitting in this really big chair that was really uncomfortable. I was uncomfortable just in general. I was cold. I was crying. I told her as much as I could in between like sobs and gasping and snot bubbles. My roommate, she was able to fill in the missing pieces for me.
The RA ended up writing it all down and taking a full report. She drafted up an email just in case I wanted to share it with the dean of students, who I found out was the Title IX deputy also. But at that point, I was just completely not myself. I was reeling. I was sick. I was anxious. I was hurting. I don't want to do anything right now. I told you my story. Now I'm going to bed.
And they were like, okay, yeah, that's fine. Go to bed. And then my RA was like, but I want you to come back here tomorrow and check in with me and see if you want to go forward with making a report about this because this is 100% an assault on our campus and we want to handle this appropriately. And I was like, okay.
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