Daniel Kopin told his story in a recent exclusive report with Cathy Young at The Daily Beast.

Exclusive: Brown University Student Speaks Out on What It’s Like to Be Accused of Rape

“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.”

Stories like these are currently at the center of an intense national campaign, unfolding in the media and on the political stage, to publicize and combat the problem of campus sexual assault. In the past two years, dozens of young women have come forward with shattering accounts of being abused both by their assailants and by indifferent or unsympathetic school administrators—and, more and more often, with federal civil rights lawsuits against the institutions. The alleged perpetrators in these accounts nearly always remain shadowy figures, their names protected by anonymity and their version of the events unknown. In a rare exception, Kopin decided to speak with The Daily Beast.

“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.”


 
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