IF YOU BELIEVE Roslonski’s version of events — and her candor about her own provocative behavior before the alleged assault supports her credibility — it’s clear that the moment she approached school employees (just two days after the November 5, 2000, assault), she met resistance.
Roslonski had spent much of those two days scared and in shock. She was experiencing bleeding in her vaginal area, which was swollen, bruised, and throbbing with pain. Confused and often reduced to tears, she called BU Health Services and made an emergency appointment with Maureen Mahoney, the school’s crisis-intervention counselor — the designated go-to person for students who believe they’ve been raped at the 25,760-student university. She told Mahoney how she had gotten drunk with friends in her dorm that fateful night — so drunk that her friends had to escort her to bed. She said she had awoken, still inebriated, to see a male student she had met hours earlier standing over her bed, coaxing her to come to his room. She said she had engaged in sex acts with this young man — kissing him, giving him a blowjob — but that she didn’t want things to go "too far." Roslonski had told him that she didn’t want to have intercourse. Yet he penetrated her with a vibrator, thrusting it into her while she screamed at him to stop.
Mahoney, Roslonski says, didn’t address the apparent assault. Instead, she fixated on Roslonski’s alcohol use, which seemed serious to Mahoney. Do you drink like that often? Roslonski recalls being asked. Do you think you could be an alcoholic? Don’t you think you should enroll in Alcoholics Anonymous?
The questions stunned Roslonski. "I felt I was being blamed," says Roslonski, now 19 and attending Tufts University. Through BU general counsel Robert Smith, Mahoney declined to comment for this article. "We’re not going to be in the position of having a crisis-intervention counselor talk about her cases," Smith says. "It’s a sensitive and confidential process. I don’t know if it serves the process if one participant unilaterally chooses to violate confidentiality."
Roslonski left BU Health Services even more confused than before her appointment. No one had acknowledged that what had happened to her was wrong, much less rape. But the more she rehashed the evening’s events, the more she realized that she had, in fact, been assaulted. Three days later, on November 10, she reached out for help again. This time, she went to the school’s police department and spoke with BUPD detective Patrick Nuzzi, who recorded her affidavit. Nuzzi suggested she file a complaint with the BU Office of Judicial Affairs (OJA); get a restraining order against her alleged assailant; and get a medical exam at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She followed all his suggestions.
It didn’t take long for the BU process to work against Roslonski. Three months after she filed her OJA complaint, in February 2001, she received a letter from OJA director Daryl DeLuca, who informed her that she must appear for a disciplinary hearing to defend herself against pending sexual-harassment allegations. Evidently, her alleged assailant had filed a counterclaim against Roslonski, charging that she had propositioned and improperly touched him. "I was in shock," recounts Roslonski, who phoned her lawyer at that time. "I thought the whole thing was a joke. I mean, if this kid had felt so harassed, then why did he come into my room that night? The charges were disgusting." She had assumed her lawyer (whom she has since fired) would take care of what she describes as the "completely false" allegations. But then, one month later, Roslonski received a second letter from DeLuca.
That correspondence declared Roslonski would be suspended for two years, until May 31, 2003, because she harassed her alleged assailant and violated the BU alcohol policy. She was also fined $500. In the April 23, 2001, letter DeLuca uses sexually explicit language to explain how Roslonski, the accuser, had turned into the accused. He said that she became drunk, disorderly, and, he wrote, "had addressed others by asking, ‘Who wants a blow job?’ and ‘I want to suck someone’s cock.’" He ticked off one brutally graphic detail of the OJA investigation after another: "You displayed your breasts and buttocks while putting on a show for individuals in the hallway. You pulled up your top and exposed your breasts to these individuals."
The April letter marked the first time Roslonski received any response to the rape complaint she filed with the OJA. But instead of addressing her allegations, DeLuca used statements that she had provided to the BUPD and the OJA as evidence against her. DeLuca seemed eager to focus on one aspect of the case — the hours leading up to the alleged assault — to discredit her original complaint. Says Roslonski, "BU was saying, ‘You behaved this way so you deserved it.’ It was humiliating." More humiliating was the fact that DeLuca found it necessary to send the same letter to her parents and school advisers.
Roslonski appealed her suspension, even though she had decided to transfer to Tufts. Last November, more than one year after she had filed her original complaint, she finally had her day in court, appearing before the university’s Board of Student Conduct. The three-member panel dropped the harassment charges because of what it called "inconclusive" evidence. As a result, the board threw out the suspension and placed Roslonski on probation until May 31, 2002. It did, however, uphold the alcohol violations, thereby mandating that Roslonski pay $250 in fines and attend AA classes.
Roslonski appealed the board’s decision to uphold the alcohol violations to Provost Dennis Berkey. Her appeal is still pending. In a December 14, 2001, letter, she urged Berkey to dismiss the lesser violations from her otherwise-pristine academic record for one simple reason: had she not reported her assault to officials in the first place, she never would have faced disciplinary action. (According to Roslonski, none of the other students who imbibed with her that November evening has been punished.) "As a victim," she says, "I feel I had no rights. BU put me through hell."
To hear BU officials tell it, the university handled her case properly from the start. Roslonski, they say, went to the police, who investigated her complaint and turned information over to the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office. It was the DA’s office that declined to pursue the case further. "How does that translate into a claim that anyone at BU discouraged or covered up her rape complaint?" Smith asks, not addressing the fact that the school’s crisis-intervention counselor allegedly failed to take her complaint seriously. "Did one person say, ‘Hey, what are you doing filing a complaint?’" Smith muses. "I don’t know because I won’t violate the confidentiality of the crisis-intervention counselor." At the same time, however, BU officials like Smith have seemed all too eager to sully Roslonski’s character since she went public last fall. In the December 4 Daily Free Press, Smith penned a scathing editorial about the civil-rights complaint and painted Roslonski as a puppet of her attorneys: "It is even sadder that this young woman has fallen into the clutches of lawyers who have chosen to make a public spectacle of her." Days later, in a December 10 follow-up article, he implied that she suffered from grave emotional problems — that she was, in short, a hysterical woman crying rape. "I hope she gets the help she so obviously needs," Smith told the Free Press. "She’s a deeply troubled woman who needs help."
Roslonski is not the only student to feel beaten down by the BU grievance process. In 1995, Jessica Smithers, a BU freshman at the time, was raped and sodomized at the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity by a male student. But when she approached school employees, she didn’t find relief. According to her 1998 lawsuit against the school, the crisis-intervention counselor — Maureen Mahoney, the same person with whom Roslonski had difficulty — urged Smithers not to file a formal complaint. Mahoney, as court documents state, "became verbally abusive toward Smithers and tried to dissuade her from pursuing any action." Smithers alleged Mahoney suggested that she had not, in fact, been raped, and that she should concentrate on college life instead. Court motions show that Mahoney denied these allegations. Still, BU settled the case for an undisclosed sum under a confidentiality agreement in June 2000.
In the words of BU senior Jamie Cerretti, the president of the roughly 200-member student feminist group known as the BU Women’s Center, "Rape comes up again and again at BU. Every year, there’s another Smithers-like story about a woman who sues the school because it tried to hush her up."
If there is, as Cerretti charges, one "Smithers-like story" per year at Boston University, the Phoenix couldn’t find other examples. That said, two such stories in six years is two too many. And it’s easy to find examples of insensitive treatment of alleged sexual-assault victims by BU health officials (see "Nowhere to Go," right).
