When a little education combines with a lot of blissful ignorance there's alway trouble. It's difficult to believe it wasn't this womans intention to totally and completely destroy Shaw-Fox starting with the first little private gathering. She can alabi it with innocent intentions, but it was clearly a gathering of the she-wolf pack with intent to do harm of some type. Did Shaw-Fox do this and deserve this? Now we'll never know because it got snatched from the hands of rational law enforcement and mishandled badly. This girl -- and she is certainly a girl and not a mature woman -- should worry about more than a little libel suit, like whether she'll be the next campus scapegoat. And maybe rightfully so...
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The campus of Lewis & Clark in Portland, Oregon was shaken by a sexual incident publicized via Facebook.
CRIME
The Morning After
A Facebook group blasted unproven allegations of sexual assault across campus. Is what happened at an Oregon college rough justice--or reputation assassination?
Jan 25, 2008 | Updated: 9:22 a.m. ET Jan 25, 2008
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Anyone who Googled Morgan Shaw-Fox's name two months ago would have learned that the 21-year-old junior at Portland, Ore.'s Lewis & Clark University was the director of a play, a baseball player, a hip-hop fan and the founder of an a cappella group. Google Shaw-Fox today, and the results are starkly different. On dozens of blogs and Web sites, the theater and music major is branded with an indelible, life-altering epithet: "rapist."
Campus sexual-assault allegations are always confidential, but in the Internet age, nearly anything can go public. Even before a 19-year-old sophomore filed a complaint with university officials accusing Shaw-Fox of sexually assaulting her in October, his name had become mud online. The charge came in a forum that requires no jury and demands no corroboration: the social-networking Web site Facebook.com. When the accuser told some female students about the alleged assault, several women students launched a Facebook "group," an online bulletin board that connects members with a common interest. Their goal was to protect others from a person they considered potentially dangerous. The group's not-so-subtle title: "Morgan Shaw-Fox is a piece of s--- rapist."
The group was supposed to be private. But within in a week, 80 students had joined, and "it spread like wildfire over campus," according to Caitlyn (Calli) Bishop, who helped create the forum. (The accuser had no part in creating the site, Bishop told NEWSWEEK.) The online allegations shook the campus; the accuser brought formal charges to school officials. Shaw-Fox was suspended for the spring semester "for violating the College Sexual Misconduct policy," as school spokeswoman Jodi Heintz told NEWSWEEK in an e-mail that did not refer to him by name. But Shaw-Fox's name and that of his accuser were prominently featured in a cover story in a local alternative weekly, Willamette Week. In that article, which described the episode at length, the accuser granted the paper permission to use her name and photo. (NEWSWEEK does not publish the names of victims of alleged sexual assault; the accuser declined to be interviewed by NEWSWEEK, even anonymously.) Bloggers picked up the story, publicizing the incident far beyond the bounds of the private liberal-arts school of 2,000 students nestled in the wooded hills of southwest Portland. The saga has provoked discussion about how to handle sensitive allegations on campus, the power and regulation of social-networking sites—and the eroding distinction between public and private in the Internet era.
Shaw-Fox has not been arrested or charged in the case. In a Facebook posting thanking friends for support, he wrote, "I am innocent of all sexual assault on any level." In an e-mail exchange on Facebook, he told NEWSWEEK he's hired lawyers and is appealing his suspension but declined to discuss the case in detail. "I have an appeal in the process, so I'm not talking to anyone besides my lawyers until that is complete," he wrote. He did not deny that he was the unnamed student whom university officials say they suspended in December. But he seemed anxious to tell his version of events. Shaw-Fox (who obscured the default picture on his profile and changed the designation of his gender on the site to female) said, "I would like to get my story out there because what is said in [Willamette Week] is far from the truth and very harmful to everybody who is involved and who would like to make some progress in the problems with sexuality in our culture."
Shaw-Fox and his accuser were not strangers. The two had dated briefly in 2006, but hadn't seen much of each other until Oct. 10 of last year, when the alleged victim text-messaged him out of the blue, and he invited her to his room. In an anonymous letter the woman sent to the campus newspaper a week later, which didn't name Shaw-Fox, she said she "initiated" the interaction, and that both of them had been drinking when the visit turned sexual. But when she changed her mind, she said she tried to push away, only to have the man she described as a "seemingly charming junior" force her to proceed. "When he began to cause me physical pain, I told him I wanted to stop, and he ignored me, holding me in place and, at times, hindering my ability to breath [sic]," she wrote, claiming that she was able to flee only when the male left the bedroom to vomit. She said she had not alerted authorities because "I thought that no one would believe me, since I had also been drinking and I had chosen to go to his room."
The publication led university officials to request that the accuser come forward to file a complaint, and generated heated speculation among students. It was in this climate that a group of women heard Shaw-Fox's name second-hand and decided to set up the private Facebook group in hopes of protecting other women. Bishop, the student who helped create the group, says she acted because "it was horrifying to know he had done this and was still walking around on campus not facing the consequences. So we made a really rash decision to create what I thought was going to be a secret Facebook group."
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