The other side of Title IX: Alleged abusers lose in school but win in court

Ryan Schiffilea’s suit against USC demonstrates a bigger flaw in the Title IX system.

As the day winds down, the row lights up. A cocktail of beer, sweat and perfume fills the air on 28th Street, in between Hoover and Figueroa in Los Angeles. Walking down the block, the blare of house music blasts from individual fraternity compounds.  

“Will you be the sober sister for the mixer tonight?” One sorority girl asked another. It is common practice along the row for sororities to elect women to be the “sober sister” or someone who doesn’t drink at the function to look out for the other girls. 

One of the houses they enter is Sigma Nu, a fraternity that just a few years ago, was boarded up by protest signs and spray paint. 

Ryan Schiffilea was the fraternity’s president in 2021. He seemed to be on top of the world, a popular kid who was about to graduate. Then, it all came crashing down. 

Protests surrounding sexual assault allegations at USC’s Sigma Nu fraternity house raged on from October 20th through the beginning of November of 2021. Students tore the volleyball net and covered the windows of the house in notes ranging from personal testimonies of assault, to cries for retaliation against the fraternity. 

Schiffilea became the subject of the protests, “Ryan Schiffilea Rapes” was painted on the side of the fraternity house. His name echoed in protests and gossip around campus. He had seemingly disappeared from student life. 

Years later, however, he is fighting his former university. Schiffilea is now embroiled in a civil case against USC for unfair expulsion. His case reveals how many young men accused of sexual assault retaliate against their universities in the form of lawsuits. 

And a lot of the time, they win. 

A man and a lawsuit

In early January of 2023, Schiffilea and his attorneys filed a petition for writ of mandate, a suit claiming that his expulsion from the University of Southern California was “improper,” “unfair,” and that the “university’s Title IX sexual misconduct investigation [was] utterly lacking in due process.” Though the plaintiff is referred to as John Doe, Doe is assumed to be Schiffilea based on a statement that he was the president of a fraternity, evidence that included the accusation painted on the fraternity house, and a timeline that matches the Sigma Nu incident. 

The suit tells Schiffilea’s side of the story that the night the alleged sexual assault occurred. The following is what Schiffilea alleged happened that night. The girl in the case is referred to as Jane Roe.

Schiffilea met Roe at a nightclub on Oct. 15 where they danced and kissed throughout the evening. Around 1:00 am, they left in an Uber with Roe’s friend and after being dropped off at her house, the two took an electric scooter back to Schiffilea’s fraternity house. He brought her in, showed her to the bathroom, then they both went into his bedroom where they began kissing and he asked her to perform oral sex on him, she agreed. She then got on top of him, and he put on a condom, and they began to have sex, consensually. He then left the room for another condom and he suggested changing positions, so Roe repositioned herself so her backside was facing him and she was on her hands and knees. He tried to have sex with her again, she told him to stop, and he did. She got up, he asked if everything was okay, she affirmed. He lent her a sweatshirt and got her number and walked her to the front door. Before she left the house, she hugged him and attempted to kiss him, which he rejected, in turn offering a side-hug.  

The next day, he received a phone call from a fraternity brother saying that officers were asking about him. He met the officers at his fraternity house and spoke with a detective who told him that Roe had believed he inserted his penis into her anus, to which he responded that he did not try to engage in anal sex, that it must have been an accident. He went with officers to the UCLA Santa Monica Rape Trauma Center and took a forensic test. The officers said they would contact him in the next couple days, but no criminal case was filed. 

The case was brought to the Title IX office and after an investigation and hearing, they determined that Schiffilea engaged in non-consensual anal penetration of Roe. On August 29, 2022, the Misconduct Sanctioning Panel issued its sanctions which included expulsion, prohibition to be allowed on any University grounds, and the contractual promise that he would not have contact with Roe. He later issued an appeal, which was rejected. 

This is an excerpt from an email to Title IX Coordinator Catherine Spear, written by Schiffilea and his advisor, Dan Wagner, speculating the reasons why Roe might have accused him. Roe is referred to as RP. 

“Perhaps after having her goodnight kiss deflected, it began to seem to RP that we were unlikely to see each other again. And so perhaps RP, on her walk home, began to feel used…And perhaps those negative feelings triggered a flood of emotions from trauma RP had suffered in the past. And perhaps as a result, RP began to put the blame on me for all those negative emotions she was experiencing. And so began the process of creating a narrative that grew and changed over time, as happens when one departs from the truth.”

The lawsuit alleges that the university’s Title IX enforces unfair policies and procedures, that the university failed to protect Schifflea from retaliation, and that evidence he brought forth was ignored in the investigation process. The document includes pictures of the side-hug as captured by a security camera, Instagram posts made by Roe meant to undermine her claims of being traumatized by the hearing, a psychologist’s evaluation of him, among other emails and documents. 

Schiffilea is asking for attorney’s fees and litigation expenses from the court.

Other lawsuits

While looking into Schiffilea’s lawsuit, The Beacon Project came across a series of others filed against USC’s Title IX department. They included one filed in 2019 by Bryce Dixon, former USC tight end accused of sexually assaulting a student athletic director. In 2018, USC was ordered to pay $111,965 in legal fees and conduct a new and fair investigation into a John Doe when the court found that the Title IX office was biased against Doe and that the investigation into his supposed misconduct was unfair. Another was in 2020 when the California Court of Appeal found that USC did not offer the opportunity to cross-examine witnesses in a hearing for former USC kicker Matthew Boermeester.

Each of these cases include the name of the same lawyer in each petitioner’s defense. That lawyer is Mark Hathaway. 

Mark Hathaway is a defense lawyer who is certified as a specialist in taxation law. He has represented over one hundred students and faculty in Title IX misconduct cases. 

Regarding USC, Hathaway said that at any given time, his firm is dealing with about 10 cases relating to Title IX. 

Hathaway believes that the Title IX investigation process is flawed. He pointed out the secrecy around Title IX and the hypocrisy in an educational institution taking away access to education through disciplinary actions like expulsion. In an interview with The Beacon Project, he spoke about the big problems. 

“If you're charged with any kind of sexual misconduct, there's a 23 page SVSH (sexual violence and sexual harassment) policy and there's appendix E, there's appendix F…then there's the policies for sexual prohibited conduct and then there's a separate policy that's the processes for the conduct…it's pretty difficult to figure out exactly what's going to happen and what you're facing if you're an accuser and what you're faced with, if you're being accused.”

USC’s policy on prohibited discrimination, harassment, and retaliation is 34 pages long. There are two resolution processes for USC’s Office for Equity, Equal Opportunity, and Title IX (EEO-TIX). One for just discrimination or other harassment not related to sexual harassment, and one for Title IX sexual harassment. The difference between the two is that the sexual harassment process may include a live hearing with a cross-examination by the parties’ advisors and a notice of outcome distributed to the parties with a determination of responsibility after said hearing. A flow chart with both processes can be found here. 

Hathaway also spoke about what he viewed as a weak investigative process saying, 

“Investigations are usually conducted by people that don't really have an investigation background. They're not like professional investigators.”

The two deputy coordinators for investigation and resolution at USC’s Title IX office, along with many of the other investigators, have law degrees. 

Hathaway believes that sexual assault allegations should be handled by the courts instead of at universities saying, “there's a whole court system set up for all of that. There's a court system set up for restraining orders, for domestic violence, for all those. And rather than setting up a separate whole process, that doesn't do a great job for either side, why not encourage or improve the actual court processes that exist?” 

Another attorney that works with Title IX law is Steven Raiser of Raiser and Kenniff in New York.

“As far as our percentage of our practice, it's probably, you know, up there in the top five of the types of cases we take,” he said about Title IX cases.

He explained that he usually gets at least some, but often most, of the charges dropped against his clients. 

When asked if there was an upwards trend for these types of cases in recent years, Raiser responded, “Yeah, I would say so.”

Susan Stone and Kristina Supler of Kohrman Jackson & Krantz also commented on the trend saying, 

“I would say in recent years, we've seen the caseload continue to climb. What I think will be interesting is when schools have to implement the new Title IX regulation, whether cases increase or decrease as a result of changes.”

New regulations are coming into effect Aug. 1. Among other things, the regulations expand definitions of sex discrimination and harassment, broaden the scope of potential wrongdoing, heighten oversight and promise quicker resolutions. 

Alec Rose of Alec Rose Law Office handles about 50 Title IX cases per year. He says his clientele varies from bisexual men to lesbian women and more. He added that many students do not often know the rules of Title IX. 

“One thing that's concerning to me is whether universities and student organizations such as fraternities and sororities are doing an adequate job of educating students about sexual violence and dating violence and how to stay out of those situations,” Rose said. 

Schiffilea’s attorney, Nia Wahl, is with Werksman Jackson and Quinn. This is the firm Hathaway worked for before starting his own (Hathaway Parker) and the firm that represented Weinstein in his Los Angeles rape trial. In a statement, she wrote, 

“For the most part, Title IX cases aren’t black and white - there are a lot of factors that come into play just like any other case. Title IX cases have increased over the past few years which has become a great avenue for victims of sexual assault and harassment to seek justice. However, on the other side of that, there is also a rise in false or exaggerated allegations. While Title IX in itself is not a criminal trial – it still has severe consequences for those accused which is why these investigations should be handled with the utmost seriousness.”

When lawsuits like these are brought into the public eye, the debate around false reporting is inflamed. Some accuse the women in these cases of fabricating stories of sexual assault or simply overstating certain details, exemplified in Schiffileas lawsuit that alleges inconsistencies and exaggerations in Roe’s recount of their encounter. 

Tracey Vitchers, the executive director of It's On US, the nation’s largest nonprofit college sexual assault prevention education organization, said in an interview that some schools “are basically saying survivors need to be subject to a higher burden of proof then victims of any other type of campus crime. And that is rooted in horrible myths about women and that they lie. And it's also rooted in this notion that we must protect young men from false allegations of sexual assault when we know that false allegations are statistically rare.” 

According to a report by the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, “the prevalence of false reporting is between 2% and 10%,” proving that statistically, false reports are not common.

Criminal cases against Schiffilea

Schiffilea’s suit claims that no criminal case was filed against him. In 2021, LAPD Officer Rosario Cervantes told City News Service that Schiffilea was a suspect in the investigation. Over two years later, we have little more information than just that. The district attorney wrote, “the case remains under review at this time,” in a response to a public records request. Lieutenant Perry Griffith, who oversees all detectives in the southwest division of the LAPD said he had no further details available for the case. Detective Castellanos of the same division said the case is “still pending.” When asked why it had been two years with no decision made yet she said, “these cases are not quick” and that it could take even longer for the DA to reach a decision. As of the publication of this article, The Beacon Project does not have any more information on whether or not Schiffilea has been charged. 

USC and Title IX

There has been much written within the USC community about the school’s management of Title IX cases. In an article, the Daily Trojan claimed that despite changes to the Title IX program, USC is “failing its students” and, “...right now, it feels like Title IX does nothing more than console victims while assaulters run free.”

USC’s EEO-TIX, was created in August of 2020 as a part of USC’s Commitment to Change. They hired the first Title IX Coordinator, Catherine Spear, and started training Title IX investigators. They also introduced the Policy on Prohibited Discrimination, Harassment, and Retaliation, which cemented that live hearings be a requisite for sexual misconduct and Title IX cases.  

Prior to EEO-TIX, there were two offices at USC that addressed discrimination, The office of Equity and Diversity (responding to incidents that involved faculty and staff), and the Title IX office (responding to incidents that involved students). The merger was meant to ensure an equitable response and resources for the whole Trojan family as well as provide timely, transparent, and fair investigations into issues of sexual and gender-based harassment and other forms of protected class discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. The office promises “high quality, compassionate, and fair services,” to anyone who seeks out their office. 

When it comes to lawsuits against the Title IX office, Linda Hoos, the associate vice president and Title IX coordinator at USC says it is all a part of the job.

“There are people who are unhappy with outcomes. It's absolutely part of this. At the end of the day, especially if you have a situation where there are two individuals, one who is saying something occurred and another one who is saying it did not occur either at all or in the way that this individual is describing, and we have to make a determination, someone will be unhappy.”

In the Title IX office, there are a variety of ways to access resources and file a report. A student can alert the office to an incident by making a report or they can seek a formal process by filing a formal complaint. Hoos estimates about 2,000 reports were made to their office in the past year.

Vitchers notes that there may be barriers to reporting, “because of the current climate around Title IX on college campuses, students are even less likely to want to follow a formal Title IX process, because in many cases, the way that the current Title IX regulation is written, it doesn't serve student survivors in their pursuit of justice. It's mostly served schools from a risk management perspective.”

Vitchers has found that students are more likely to go to other students as a first point of contact instead of a formal office when they experience something like a sexual assault. 

Logan Terry, a co-director of SAGE, a group focused on anti patriarchal work and promoting feminist values on campus agrees with Vitchers’ sentiment saying, “students are more comfortable having a one on one approach because, yes, there may be larger resources, but there's nothing that's going to replace a human connection.”

“I think administration follows every single Title IX regulation to a T, they have to. I guess it's a larger question of do we think Title IX is useful in fully presenting issues of sexual violence on campus? I would say historically, who knows?” Terry said. 

The fraternity’s role

Greek life also plays a vital role in the culture of sexual assault on college campuses. At USC, four of the five fraternities that were under investigation for similar charges as Sigma Nu have joined the University Park Inter Fraternity Council (IFC), disaffiliating from USC’s IFC. The University Park IFC was created in August of 2022 in reaction to the deteriorating relationship between the fraternities and the university. This move means that the fraternities are not regulated by the university any more and now have their own governing body and constitution. The differences between the USC IFC and the new University Park IFC are outlined in a Daily Trojan article. 

University park IFC did not respond to requests for an interview at the time of publication.

Sexual assault on greek row is a serious issue. Studdies have shown that fraternity men are three times more likely to rape women than students not in greek life and sorority women are 74% more likely to be raped than other college women. According to USC’s own data, “Over 20% of undergraduate victims of sexual assault reported that the incidents occurred in fraternity houses.”

Some feel like the university did not come down hard enough on the fraternities after the Sigma Nu incident. Mary Ahn is a USC student and the president of an intersectional feminist club on campus called Flow 

“There was like no institutional change, like nothing was done to prevent it…they were very much so like treating a symptom of the actual issue instead of trying to tackle it,” Ahn said. 

Ahn subscribes to the idea of abolishing greek life saying, “it's just like with policing in the United States. You cannot fix a system that is already broken.” But she believes that abolition wouldn’t work at USC because of the power that those institutions hold. 

And universities do have reason to support fraternity members. A 2021 Gallup study found that 54% of fraternity or sorority affiliated alumni say they donated to their alma mater in the last year, compared to the mere 10% of nonaffiliated alumni. 

Resolution

Schiffilea’s hearing on his petition for writ of mandate was held on March 21. The judge, Honorable Curtis Kin denied the petition. Wahl declined to comment on the current status of the case.  

For victims of sex crimes, at USC and beyond, there are barriers to reporting, ineffective avenues to change, and little faith in the system. Those accused feel the same way. Who knows if Ryan Schiffilea is innocent. The courts don’t know, or at least they are “still investigating,” USC said he wasn’t but the lawsuit brings that decision into question. 

There is no single resolution to the issue of sexual assault on college campuses. Vitchers  believes in working with communities to solve the problem saying, “the best prevention education focuses on community specific tactics, which is what we help our chapters do at Its On Us. We know that there is not a one size fits all approach to prevention. There is no silver bullet solution.”  

USC has a history of scandals that have been exposed and left raw for all to dissect. But these court cases, with the potential for creating a stain on the university’s reputation are handled quietly, almost secretively, in the courts, in an exchange of money, making it difficult for students to unearth them. 

The whole thing is almost like a magic act, like smoke and mirrors. On the stage in front of students and alumni, USC suspends and expels young men. Behind the curtain, they settle with the accused and admit guilt. And students are at the mercy of this show, never knowing that it was all an act.