It wasn’t the balancing act high above Manhattan atop a water tower, nor her demands that she be fucked and fucked right this very second, but the moment she suddenly said, “We’re in my apartment, right?” that made Ben Feibleman glad he hit “record.”
What you are about to read is based on court filings, a 30-minute recording, and an interview. The details matter in this case, so we left nothing out. Be forewarned, what you are about to read is explicit.
Last May, Feibleman filed a $25 million lawsuit against Columbia University in New York federal court for expulsion and gender discrimination under Title IX. A female classmate had accused him of sexual assault. He says she assaulted him, not the other way around. Despite the evidence, the school decided he was guilty. His case is now in the discovery phase. In all court filings, Feibleman’s accuser is called “Jane Doe.” Both sides are waiting for a former President Obama-appointed judge, Valerie Caproni, to rule on Columbia University’s motion to partially dismiss the lawsuit.
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| Ben Feibleman very glad he hit “record.” |
The ruling could come any day.
Now, simple defense is no longer enough for Feibleman. No. He wants to bring it all down.
The night in question was fairly routine.
It was a brisk Tuesday night in October 2016 when students gathered in the World Room on the third floor of Pulitzer Hall. Think high ceilings. Exquisite art. Huge picture windows overlooking the city’s Upper West Side and Harlem. Beer and wine flowed from an open bar. Nobody’s getting hammered yet, mind you. This was a graduate reception at a dignified Ivy. Not exactly ripe for sloppy hookups.
A woman plays a starring role in the space. The stained glass panel in turquoise and mossy green is called “Liberty of the World.” Columbia purchased her in 1955 for $1. Joseph Pulitzer handpicked her in 1908.
Nobody expected behavior like this at Columbia University, least of all Feibleman, a Marine veteran in his first semester at one of the nation’s most prestigious graduate journalism programs — a fertile recruiting ground for outlets like the New York Times, NBC and CNN. Price tag: $56K for a year or $100K for a fancier degree.
The 2017 graduate journalism class was already cozy. By September, students had already begun fucking. Now they were busy mingling. Deep into their writing classes. Frenetic stress buzzed through the room. Feibleman was struggling to keep up with the rigorous demands of his classes. His sub-section of 14 students came with its own chaos and ominous beginning. Their assigned professor, David Klatell, died of pancreatic cancer on their first day of class. Professors roamed the reception while students greased for story ideas and kissed a lot of ass to get business cards from Pulitzer Prize-winning guest speakers. It was a weekly ritual.
The large group shrunk until the few who remained were the types to believe Tuesday night itself was good enough reason to keep the party going.
Feibleman knew her a little from orientation, but they had never hung out. On this night, he seemed to hit the jackpot of hookups. At the reception, the complaint says, they sat on the floor and she asked him to put his head in her lap. She later sneaked kisses when her friends weren’t looking. She poured beer down his throat during a drinking game. Then she asked him to walk with her to the roof, where she climbed atop the water tower and beckoned him. She took off her top while he unclasped her bra. He sucked on her breasts. She called him a “pussy” for being afraid when they climbed the tower in the dark and when he wouldn’t go near the edge like she did.
He watched as she did a perfect backward roll off the side of the water tower. She taunted him about being a Marine who was afraid of heights. She straddled him on top of a ladder, then slapped him hard across the face and bit his lip. He hated the lip biting and told her to stop. None of this made him any less attracted to her, but according to him, he was steadily becoming more cautious.
She talked to him in a hot, vulgar way back at her apartment.
“Don’t you wanna fuck me?” she asked multiple times, on tape, in clear words. In fact, she affirmed her desire to have sex with her classmate no less than 29 times. She wanted him to fuck her and she wanted it, her word, “hard.” He wanted that, too. But something in his gut told him he better protect himself. And not with a condom.
After messing around for approximately 15 minutes — kissing, fingering, grinding, throat pressing (or “choking” as Columbia’s filing asserts) — she reiterated her desire for rough sex and he pumped the brakes. He thought of the squeaky bed, paper-thin walls and her roommate. When she refused to take no for an answer he pressed record.
In total, he claims she bit him three times, yanked his pants down, and grabbed his buttocks in an attempt to “force her mouth on his penis.”
Feibleman had already sensed that things might go sideways.
Some things made him nervous. When he first tried to leave, she started to cry. He couldn’t leave a woman in tears. He wanted to leave on positive terms. He liked her. He liked his classmates. He didn’t want to be known as the class scum.
Conversation took the form of a nightmarish loop. She demanded rough sex. He said no. She asked why not. He told her she’s too drunk, but later said he didn’t believe it. She had stopped drinking hours earlier, he recalls. He was just trying to employ what he describes in court filings as the “nuclear option,” which he believed would make the conversation stop. Again, he tried to leave. Again, she demanded that he stay.
“In the morning you’re going to thank me for not taking advantage of you,” Feibleman says on the recording. She didn’t agree. “Or I’m gonna apologize,” she replied.
After many of her pleas and more of his denials, she seemed to snap back into consciousness: “Oh, shit. Fuck…shit.”
And this: “Jesus Christ. Okay. Wait. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No, wait. No. What’s going on?”
He asked if she’s okay.
After her confusion seemed to ease, she returned to her refrain: “I think you wanna fuck me.”
From the recording:
Him: I do want to fuck you now.
Her: So do it, muster the courage.
Him: You know how bad I wanna hold you down and fuck you hard?
Her: I want that.
Eventually, she asked him to “snuggle” her.
He agreed to snuggle her.
For the entirety of the 30-minute recording, she forbade him from leaving.
On tape, he can be heard cooing at her cat and tucking her into bed. He can also be heard declining her relentless demands for sex. He seemed to soothe her by telling her what he wanted to do to her at a later date. Some of his fantasies involved “tying her down and fucking her like a piece of meat…you’ve never been made into a little whore. Bent over and fucked. You ever been fucked like that?” Her response: “No I haven’t. Show me. Show me” His reply: “I’m not gonna show you tonight.”
At no point did she appreciate him saying no.
After a lot of begging and pleading, she asked, “Why not?”
He replied, “Because I’m going home to get sleep. And you’re going to bed to get sober.”
She continued trying to coax him: “I don’t get why you won’t do it now. I want to. Please. Please. Ben, I want you.”
She seemed upset by his refusals, at times questioning her own attractiveness.
“Here, Ben,” she said on the recording. “You don’t want to fuck me and that disappoints me.”
And this: “You think that I’m gross.”
To that, he replied, “I don’t think you’re gross at all. I think you’re gorgeous.”
Just after 2 a.m., Feibleman finally left.
It wasn’t even a day later when she accused him of sexual assault under the university’s Title IX statute. She didn’t seek medical attention or call the police.
“Ben tried to have sex with me,” she told her roommate after he left. She also told her boyfriend, who allegedly questioned how drunk she was. She called him an “asshole” and hung up. That morning she informed the school that Feibleman had sexually assaulted her.
Columbia University allegedly investigated the matter for six months. In June 2017, a panel of three administrators held a Kangaroo-style hearing in which they never used any evidence he provided or asked “Jane Doe” a single question about his side of the story. Neither of the two investigators on the case even showed up. In the end, the school withheld his degree, effectively ending his career in journalism.
At one point, they warned him not to utter a word about a medical report he obtained that addressed her level of capacity based on 700 photographs and the 30-minute recording. According to his legal complaint, a witness “Jane Doe” called to support her in Columbia’s case against him later called Feibleman and told him that she sometimes mixed pills and alcohol to get over a boyfriend. If he mentioned the report, Columbia authorities said they’d throw him out of the hearing and proceed without him.
Feibleman had seven minutes to speak in which he said, “Please please ask me about it,” referring to his allegations against her. School administrators declined. He had no voice — literally.
Afflicted with laryngitis that day, he sat there silently with his lawyer, who also wasn’t allowed to speak. In less than 24 hours, the panel declared him “responsible” for sexual assault “as the result of consensual non-intercourse sexual contact” he had with her prior to her demands for intercourse.
On the other hand, the school treated his allegations of sexual assault like a joke. Citing “insufficient evidence” and the notion that even if it happened, he would’ve liked it, the school declared that “Jane Doe” was “not responsible” for any alleged assaults on him. Columbia University let him graduate in May, but retroactively expelled him in June and ditched the diploma he’d spent the past year-and-half (and the rest of his GI Bill) earning.
Discovery is sticky. Neither side can agree on what should be handed over to the other camp.
Columbia University is demanding Feibleman’s military records. He served in the Marines for six years and left with an honorable discharge. His legal team is arguing against providing them. “They have not stopped asking for it even though it’s irrelevant to the claims of the lawsuit,” his lawyer Kimberly Lau tells me. “This shouldn’t be a fishing expedition.”
Feibleman’s legal team includes Warshaw Burstein’s Lau and James Figliozzi. Both lawyers have expertise in Title IX matters.
Lau says, meanwhile, that Columbia University is being less than forthright, fighting tooth and nail to hold on to relevant documents.
“Things that they’ve been giving are piecemeal and it’s not without repeated requests,” she said. “We’re going to need court intervention.”
In all previous Title IX cases, Columbia University has sided with the woman.
This time they’ve got a fighter.
“I think it’s very challenging to be sort of waiting for your life to be put back together,” Lau says of Feibleman’s state of mind. “Even with a decision on the motion, for better or worse, the case would still...
