Exclusive: Brown University Student Speaks Out On What It's Like To Be Accused Of Rape

Article here. Excerpt:

'“We were friends.”

Over the course of a nearly two-hour conversation, Daniel Kopin returns to this point again and again. Ten months after an evening that irrevocably changed two young people’s lives, Kopin, a 21-year-old former Brown University student, still sounds genuinely shaken as he recounts his reaction to an August 8 email that confronted him with a stark accusation: “Dan, you raped me.”
...
“I was in shock—total disbelief,” Kopin says, growing visibly agitated as he recalls reading the email. “I couldn’t—I mean, I called my mom. Being accused—something must be wrong, something must be off. That was my initial thought. But it became clear, as I looked over my facts, the text messages I had—as I racked my memory—it became clear that this was not true. What she was saying was not true.”
...
One irony of this particular story is that Kopin and Sclove share a common background of progressive activism—an interest that helped form a bond between them after both transferred to Brown in January 2013 (Kopin from NYU, Sclove from Tufts). Kopin, the younger of two sons of physician parents, attended the Rashi School, a Boston-area Jewish school that has a strong social justice orientation; both at home and at school, he was raised in an environment where “believing the victim” in a sexual assault case is a widely shared principle. Today, he speaks earnestly of his gratitude for the support he has received from friends who are “who are a part of this feminist community that I’d like to consider myself a part of.”

A mild-mannered young man with a self-effacing smile and a preppy manner, Kopin sometimes sounds as if he still doesn’t quite believe all of this is real. “I don’t why this is happening,” he says, more than once. “I don’t understand.” He says that, after the night of the alleged assault on August 2, he had no inkling that anything was wrong until receiving Sclove’s email several days later.
...
In many ways, the current system of campus trials—in which claims of sexual assault are investigated by gender equity bureaucrats with no background in criminal justice and judged by professors, students, deans, and campus activists, with no clear rules of evidence or protections for the participants—does a grave disservice to both the wrongly accused and to victims who are misleadingly promised a friendlier alternative to law enforcement channels. On at least one point, Sen. Gillibrand is right: if Daniel Kopin is a violent rapist and near-strangler, he should be doing time in prison, not getting suspended or even expelled (the toughest disciplinary sanctions still leave a rapist free to find other victims off-campus). If he is innocent, he has been effectively branded a criminal without any of the safeguards normally accorded to criminal defendants. In the end, nobody wins.'