Ashe Schow of the Washington Examiner asks a good question here. How does a student accused of sexual assault prove their innocence?

No such thing as evidence of innocence in campus sexual assault hearings

If a student has been wrongly accused of sexual assault on their college campus, how are they supposed to prove their innocence?

I’ve asked a similar question to lawmakers and interested parties before — how is a student supposed to prove they obtained consent in a he said, she said situation? — but received no response.

One would think there might at least theoretically exist evidence that an encounter was consensual – outside of a videotape or recording, of course. Witnesses, for example, or subsequent messages between the two students.

And indeed, such evidence does exist in some situations, the problem is that college administrators either ignore such evidence or they twist said evidence to end up being used against the accused student who brought it up.

Take contact between the two parties after an alleged incident of sexual assault. Even if the accuser appears friendly toward the eventually accused, all they have to do is claim their messages didn’t accurately portray their feelings and suddenly, those messages are used against the accused.

This occurred in the Emma Sulkowicz vs. Paul Nungesser case. After what Sulkowicz claimed was a brutal rape in which she was pinned, beaten and choked before being raped, she sent Nungesser numerous messages asking to hang out, even telling him she loved him. Nungesser tried to get those messages introduced as evidence during his Columbia University hearing, but was denied.