Before she went into therapy, before she spent hours in adjudication hearings – before she heard anything about the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and Georgetown’s disclosure policy – Kate Dieringer (NHS ’05) was a typical freshman.

She occupied herself initially with setting up her dorm room, meeting new people and adjusting to classes. She kept in touch with parents and friends from W. Va. and tried to maintain a long-distance relationship with her boyfriend of two years, who attends another university.

The bustle of the first few weeks of school gave no hint as to how the rest of her year would unfold: that she would enter a long, painful ordeal involving the university’s Judicial Committee and become one of the most avid spokespeople for reforming Georgetown’s privacy policy for student hearings. Though she claims she was treated unfairly throughout the whole process, the university has stood by its policy and its procedures for investigating and sanctioning alleged violators of the Student Code of Conduct.

Dieringer’s story, which has now become almost a point of common knowledge among Georgetown community members, began ordinarily enough. Like many first-year students, she would go out on weekends with friends from her residence hall floor. The third week of school was no exception.

She and some of her Harbin floormates were hanging out at the apartment of a friend of Dieringer’s New Student Orientation adviser, and someone suggested they all go out to a party.

Looking back on it now, with the help of her friends who were there that night, Kate is able to surmise what happened that night.

“He [the NSO adviser] had his buddies hold my friends back, and took me away to his apartment,” she remembers. She had been to parties there before, and so did not think anything of it. But when they stepped inside, no one was there.

“It was completely dark,” she says. “I was feeling really drowsy, really different. It’s like I have no memory. I really don’t know if I just passed out – what happened. I don’t know anything. But I woke up, and he was having sex with me.”

She was confused at first, she says. Feeling numb and sleepy, she lay there wondering where she was, if she was dreaming, why she had no clothes on. Eventually she realized that she was being raped.

“My first reaction was, `Oh my God!'” she says. Barely able to speak or move, she weakly told him `No’ and tried to push him away. With a supreme effort, she finally pushed him off of her and jumped out of the bed.

“I was looking around trying to figure out where I was, and he was like, `Fine, be a stupid freshman bitch,'” she recounts. “I was just crying and trying to find my clothes and all my stuff, and he just ignored me.”

Later, she would be told that the student had probably slipped a Rohypnol, or “date rape” drug, into her drink, which made her drowsy enough to fall asleep for periods of time.

That night, she went back to her room, took a shower and the next day began what was to become several months of secrecy, depression and isolation. She told no one what had happened, ignoring overtures from friends, staying away from public places where it seemed she would always see the student from that weekend and often panicking or crying unexpectedly.

It was only when she began to fear that she had contracted HIV from the intercourse that she acknowledged what had happened to her. When she went to receive her results – which were negative – from the hospital the next week, the counselor there said she had noticed Dieringer had checked “sexual assault” on the test questionnaire and asked if Dieringer wanted to see Carolyn Hurwitz, Georgetown’s sexual assault and women’s health services coordinator. Although she resisted the idea at first, Dieringer changed her mind and ending up talking to Hurwitz.

“I told her what happened to me and when I was saying it, I was like, `Oh my God.’ If someone else told me that, I would get so mad – but because it was me, I wanted to think that there was something that I could have done to stop it,” Dieringer says.

Hurwitz asked her some questions, laid out her options and suggested she visit Georgetown’s Counseling and Psychiatric Services. Dieringer resisted the idea, mainly because “I just wanted to be OK,” she says.

But her depression got worse. The next semester, the student from that weekend was in one of her classes, and Dieringer was plunged back into a whirl of anxiety and depression. She stopped going out entirely, and spent most of her days sleeping, crying or staying at the library.

She finally decided to go on one of Georgetown’s weekend “Escape” freshman retreats. She was comforted, she says, by the fact that Jesuits led the program and that several friends from her floor were going.

That was until she arrived at Healy Circle to board the Escape bus and saw that the student she says raped her was going to be her leader.

“It was only, what, a bus full of kids and they split you up and you tell personal stories and I was like, `I can’t go,'” she says, her voice tinged with urgency. “I left all my stuff on the bus and ran back to my room. And that’s when I started going to counseling.”

She began seeing a psychiatrist at CAPS who also prescribed her medication. Slowly, she began to feel better. Then one day, she was in a bathroom stall in the White-Gravenor Building and saw the student’s name scrawled on the wall as part of a list of Georgetown guys not to date.

“I thought, `I don’t think that’s just an angry girlfriend list,'” she says. “And I was like, `I have to do something’ . I should try to talk about what I can do with this to stop him. I just want him to stop. I didn’t want anyone else to have to feel what I felt.”

After extensive conversations with her friends and with Hurwitz, Dieringer decided to report the incident to the Department of Public Safety. She drafted a statement describing what had happened and brought the case to Officer Cetrina Smith, who began an investigation. When Smith called in the accused student to make a statement, he said he did not remember the incident, according to Dieringer. Dieringer had lined up a number of witnesses to testify about the incident; the student called in his roommates, whose statements ended up hurting his story, Dieringer says.

April 30 was the first day of the hearing. “I knew it was going to be really hard. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy,” Dieringer says. “So I really just studied up on the code of the conduct and I told my parents, and I was like, OK, I’m going to do this.”

Before the hearing, Dieringer met with Director of Student Conduct Judy Johnson several times. Johnson has been at Georgetown since 1995.

“She tried to be really objective, and I used to try to say she’s just trying to do her job, she’s just trying to see both sides equally,” Dieringer says. But she began to feel after a while that her grievances were not being taken seriously. “I [said], `but I’m telling the truth,’ and she [said] `but you’re just a woman scorned, in the eyes of everyone’ . So every time I left the office, I was crying.”

Johnson is prohibited by Georgetown’s disclosure policy from discussing details of specific cases. But she says that she understands that students may not always be satisfied with the way their cases are handled. “I respect an individual’s perspective,” she says, “.even when it is something against me. I may not agree with the perspective, but I respect an individual’s right to say things that I don’t necessarily agree with, knowing I can’t comment on it.”

Dieringer is bound by Georgetown’s non-disclosure policy not to speak of the exact details of the hearing, but says that throughout the hearing, the accused student was granted special considerations and exceptions that she was not. Johnson made Dieringer and her witnesses change or take out parts of their statements before testifying at the hearing, but left the other student’s statement untouched, Dieringer says.

“He just had witnesses coming in on the day of the trial. They didn’t write anything . He was allowed to come in even though he didn’t write a statement. That’s not allowed, but they let him,” she said. Georgetown’s Code of Conduct states that a list of witnesses testifying at a hearing must be submitted to the Office of Student Conduct at least two business days in advance and that each witness must provide a written summary of his or her testimony by the same deadline.

According to Johnson, the adjudication process is conducted according to its prescribed guidelines. “It’s important and critical and vital that the policies be followed, and that, I can assure you, happens,” she said.

Frustration with the Office of Student Conduct led Dieringer to try to contact other Georgetown administrators. “My parents and I would try to say, `Well I don’t understand, you told us this,’ and [Johnson] would say, `I’m not going to play what I said yesterday,'” Dieringer says. “And we’d think, `Oh my gosh, what can we do, who can we talk to, the system is totally ridiculous and wrong.'”

They talked to Vice President for Student Affairs Juan Gonzalez, who told them he did not feel it was “right” or “necessary” for him to intervene, Dieringer says. Next, Dieringer and her parents went to University President John J. DeGioia’s office. His secretary referred them to Associate Dean of Students Jeanne Lord. Lord was not available at the time, and the Dieringers were told to talk to Judy Johnson about their concerns with the adjudication process. “And Judy said, `I don’t think that will be necessary,'” Dieringer recounts. “No one would answer our questions, no one would talk to us – nothing.”

Before the second day of the hearing, the accused student said at 1 a.m. that he had gotten sick and asked the hearing be put off one day. Dieringer says she suspects he simply was not prepared.

“So they broke for him, and we had one day in between,” Dieringer says. On that day, she notes that one of her friends said they saw the student at Georgetown Day, the university’s annual carnival to celebrate the end of the school year. “So he was out there, and I was in my parents’ hotel room, physically sick,” Dieringer recalls. “I needed to bring up all the trauma again. I had to be in the same room with him. I had to hear his voice; I had to see him. I mean, he degraded me and dominated me again the whole hearing. And they let him. All my witnesses were waiting there, then all of the sudden, everyone had to go home and wait for him.”

The second day of the hearing lasted eight hours. It went on much longer than necessary, Dieringer says, because the student would “babble on and on” and constantly make objections. The hearing board would break every time to discuss the objection.

The board reached a decision in the case soon after. According to the Georgetown Student Code of Conduct, the student in question must attend a “mandatory personal conference held with the Judicial Coordinator” in which he or she receives the results of the hearing. In this student’s case, he asked to go home, take his exams at a later date and receive the hearing’s findings over the phone. The university complied with all his requests, Dieringer says.

Dieringer was allowed to know this information only after signing a non-disclosure agreement that prohibited her from sharing the board’s findings with anyone but her parents. She says that, at the time, Georgetown told her that this was because of a federal law called the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which did not allow victims to release information regarding other students’ disciplinary records.

The Dieringers had been told that they would be informed if the student tried to appeal the board’s decision, but weeks passed and they heard nothing. Finally, Dieringer’s mother called the Office of Student Conduct, only to be told that there was an appeal hearing in a couple days.

Dieringer was stunned. “I was like, `OK. Well, do I have to prepare, what am I going to do?’ I mean, it’s my case.”

Johnson told her that she would represent Dieringer in the appeals hearing and that Dieringer would be called as a witness; Dieringer was not given a choice in that decision. She arrived at Georgetown to testify and left the hearing room five minutes later. The accused student was there for about 13 hours.

“They treated me like a statistic,” Dieringer remembers, “not like a person at all . He got to sit there and reargue the case, which you’re not supposed to be doing in an appeal – the board’s supposed to disregard that and stop it.”

When she heard the results of the appeals board hearing, Dieringer was shocked.

“After the appeal, it was just devastating,” Dieringer says. “They told us the answer, and I was just like, `Oh my God.’ I couldn’t believe that they would allow this. They upheld the original findings, but they changed the sanction for no reason.”

She and her family met with Associate Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson and were told that the appeals board findings were “based on statistics,” Dieringer says. “Well, I’m not statistics, I’m a person! And nowhere in the handbook does it say it’s based on that, so why is it behind closed doors?”

Olson confirms that “I had a conversation with Kate, I listened to her and I take her concerns seriously,” but he declined to comment further for the story.

Johnson notes that one ground for appeal in the Student Handbook is “disproportionate sanction,” which would allow a hearing board to reduce an imposed penalty “given either the student’s prior record or the usual sanction for his or her offense.”

At this point, however, Dieringer decided that she had been through enough. “I was transferring,” she says. “I just wanted to leave, I couldn’t take it. I didn’t want to be here, I hated it; I just looked at everyone as representing those people that I met on the fifth floor of Leavey [in the hearing room] that saw this monster and just didn’t care.”

Before she left, Dieringer decided that she should let the school community know what had happened to her. In an Oct. 24 article in The Georgetown Voice (“The Girl Who Whimpered Rape”) Dieringer described her ordeal, from the moment she stepped into the student’s apartment to her painful decision to transfer. In the article, she noted that the FERPA law prevented her from revealing the outcome of the board’s hearing.

It was then that she heard from Debbie and Jeff Shick. In the deluge of e-mails and phone calls she received after the article was published, the one from the parents of the Georgetown student who was killed in a drunken altercation two years ago hit especially close to home. Their son had died as the result of the injuries sustained that night, and his alleged assailant received the sanction of an official warning and the assignment of a reflection paper.

The Shicks informed her that the law did not, in fact, prohibit the university from releasing the information and that it was simply Georgetown’s policy not to do so.

She was also contacted by S. Daniel Carter, the Senior Vice President of Security On Campus, Inc., a national nonprofit agency that has helped both the Shick and Dieringer families.

“He said, `Kate, you know that FERPA says that victims of violent crimes can re-disclose everything,'” Dieringer says. “And the Shicks were like, we’ve been through that, we’ve been trying to get Georgetown to change, they won’t do it.”

Vice President for Student Affairs Juan Gonzalez notes that Georgetown views its hearings process as fundamentally different from a criminal trial. “We do not intend or have the desire to act as a public court,” he says. “It’s very easy and tempting for many people to judge us in the same way they would judge a public criminal court . [but] our first and foremost function is to acknowledge that we are an educational institution . And we really do place an enormous amount of importance of the privacy of student records .We’re comfortable with how we view our commitment to confidentiality.”

During the 2000-01 school year, Georgetown conducted a review of its disclosure policy in student disciplinary proceedings. The university’s Disciplinary Review Committee, a standing committee of graduate and undergraduate students, faculty and Student Affairs staff, spoke with parties from “all perspectives” in campus-wide meetings held during the year, Assistant Vice President for Communications Julie Green Bataille said in a written statement released last week.

“Consistent with the DRC’s recommendations, the university decided to both maintain the confidentiality of individual outcomes, even in those cases in which FERPA would permit public disclosure by the university,” Green Bataille said in the statement. She also noted that the university provides “more composite information to the community about adjudicated offenses and sanctions in a newsletter published twice each academic year.”

Gonzalez says that he adopted all of the DRC’s recommendations, one of which included the publication of the newsletter. He notes that Georgetown also recently changed its non-disclosure policy to allow the victim to release the results of the hearing board’s findings to his or her parents and any adviser who helped them during the case, consistent with the committee’s recommendations.

Johnson says that Georgetown’s current disclosure policy reflects the stance of the Georgetown campus community on the issue. “[During the DRC’s review], we had a few people who said if there’s a student who’s committed this kind of violation, we should know that student by name. There were some people who said no one should know anything about the outcome, that there are any such cases or any outcome,” Johnson says. “But the majority of individuals came down in the center, saying, we think the community should know more. We don’t necessarily need to know the individual’s name. We have to at some point trust in the wisdom of the community boards who hears these cases and trust that if in fact the board determines someone is responsible, that they will in turn impose an appropriate sanction.”

But according to Dieringer and Debbie and Jeff Shick, trusting the Georgetown hearing board was a mistake.

Dieringer notes that she is in close contact with two other students who were allegedly raped by the student in question.

“These people are so upset, they’re so sad, and when they heard someone was coming forward, they were like, `Oh great. I don’t have the voice to do that and the support to do that, but the school’s really going to take care of that,” she says.

But with the sanctions Georgetown imposed, Dieringer says she felt the university failed them. Mrs. Shick shares her sentiment. “The words are there, but the follow-up is not,” she says. “I believe there would have been a public outcry if Georgetown were forced to disclose the sanctions [imposed on the defendant in the David Shick case].”

In a press release sent out nationally last week, the Shicks called for Congress to close the “loophole in FERPA that allows disclosure but does not require it.” They claim that if that type of information were made public, it might have prevented the violent acts allegedly committed by other students that happened to Kate Dieringer and another Georgetown student in front of Wisemiller’s Deli this September.

Carter says that the findings of adjudication hearings should be made public “so students will know if a potentially dangerous student is being allowed to remain on campus. So if you have a pattern of discussion that one way or another is not something the community is comfortable with, that way they can find out about it and petition the institution to change.”

Johnson notes that Georgetown’s policy does not prevent students from warning others about potential threats posed by other students on campus. “It prohibits the individual complainant or victim from releasing information specific to the judicial findings and the sanctions that came of that,” Johnson says. “It doesn’t prohibit an individual from sharing his or her experiences.”

Gonzalez brings up the question of formula-driven sanctions, in which specific sanctions would be tied to specific violations, so that members of the community would know what would happen to a defendant once he or she had committed an alleged violation.

“I resist that because I think every single case has to be looked upon on its own merits,” he says. In many cases, he notes, there are too many shades of gray for a uniform sanction to be imposed automatically. In addition, such a policy would go against Georgetown’s philosophy of being an educational institution, he says, “not just a drive-through processing place.”

The hearings process and the disclosure policy present difficulties for the university as well as students, Johnson adds. “I understand that there’s going to be a conflict there between one individual’s right to privacy and another individual’s sense of having been violated,” she says. “Part of what it means to be in a community is that choices are going to have to be made and compromises are going to have to be made with regard to individual’s preferences. And the Georgetown community said, we will put privacy first. trusting in the wisdom of the adjudicating body. So there’s always going to be that conflict.”

Dieringer says she is no longer thinking of transferring, but still feels uncomfortable on campus. She adds that she doesn’t want to take the issue to the Metropolitan Police Department because she doesn’t think a jail sentence would rehabilitate her alleged rapist. She had hoped for the university to send him a message, she says.

“Especially with our Jesuit code of social justice and respect for the person, they should say, `you violated that.’ And this one girl is important enough for us to say, I’m sorry, I can’t sign your diploma,” she says. “.The [problem is], the people who actually go through [the hearings] have to be absolutely silent. They’re not allowed to say, `this is what’s wrong with it.’ They’re not allowed to say anything. And no one knows what happens to the people who commit violent crimes.”