Miltenberg: “She Said She Was Raped; Now She’s In Jail After Telling Cops It Was A Lie,” BuzzFeed News

On June 5, Nikki Yovino went to jail. She had maintained for the previous 20 months that she was raped by two Sacred Heart University students in the bathroom at a house party. The men she accused said it was consensual, and that’s what prosecutors and police in Bridgeport, Connecticut, believed too. … “That’s what makes this situation so unique,” Andrew Miltenberg, a prominent attorney representing students and faculty accused of sexual misconduct, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s one of the few instances where people can look and say not only are there ramifications for lying, but there really is true vindication.” The month after Yovino’s sentence, the US Department of Education is expected to unveil new Title IX regulations on how colleges should handle sexual assault incidents. Many expect the new rules will increase protections for students accused of misconduct, given DeVos’s past statements on the topic that “one sexual assault is one too many, and one falsely accused individual is one too many.” At a September 2017 event announcing her plans, DeVos cited several examples in which she insinuated colleges bungled investigations, and she lamented “the devastating reality of campus sexual misconduct: lives have been lost. Lives of victims. And lives of the accused.” Yovino’s case could be DeVos’s next example.

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