Yale grad student Annie Le’s 2009 murder by Raymond Clark was a horrible, senseless tragedy. It’s understandable that her family would feel compelled to make sense of it, between the angst and gestalt of such a loss, and seek some way that her death, days before she was to be married, wouldn’t seem such an incomprehensible waste. But that doesn’t mean there is sense to be made of it.
Via Walter Olson at Overlawyered, a complaint has been filed under Title IX against Yale University. It alleges that Yale was partly to blame :
Yale University failed to control sexual attacks and harassment of women on its campus, leading to the murder of a med student in one of its laboratories, a new lawsuit charges.
“Yale had long taken inadequate steps to ensure the safety and security of women on its campus,” Joseph Tacopina, the Le family attorney, said in a statement to Reuters on Wednesday.“Sexual attacks on and harassment of women at Yale had been a well-documented and long-standing problem, and there was a widespread belief that Yale repeatedly failed to impose meaningful discipline on offenders,” the lawsuit states.
This raises questions about whether Yale was really a hotbed of sexual attacks and harassment of women, or rather a hotbed of anti-neo-feminism, where women are viewed as so weak and worthless that they were too delicate to handle the normal male/female interaction and otherwise ordinary dealing were transformed into sexual harassment and attacks of sufficient magnitude to complain. But this question is secondary to the gist of the action.
To connect a murder to an atmosphere of sexual tension regardless of how it’s characterized, is absurd. This was a sick act of a diseased person, whether Yale had done nothing to sanitize sexual harassment on campus or everything possible, including chastity belts and random neutering. There are no steps that can be taken that will completely eliminate crime. There are no steps that can be taken that will cleanse a diseased mind from harming another.
Most curious is that the lawyer for the Le family is my old pal, Joe Tacopina. Joe’s a good criminal defense lawyer, with a great way before a jury and a charming smile. Most of his work is on behalf of cops charged with bad things, and he’s had a great deal of success trying cop cases.
This type of case isn’t what one would expect Joe to be handling, particularly given that Joe’s never demonstrated much interest in feminist causes. In fact, his last big case was the acquittal of a couple of cops for having brought a drunk woman home and “hugged her naked.” This was about as far from a “no means no” case as a lawyer gets.
I’m going to engage in some wild speculation here. My bet is that the Le family went to some lawyers whose practice was more directed toward Title IX and sexual harassment type work and were turned away, told that while they are very sympathetic to their goals, they could not represent them because there was no non-frivolous cause of action. Eventually, the Le family found their way to Joe, who saw the potential to make some public waves with this case, and took the case.
Joe isn’t an Ivy League sort of guy. In fact, Joe is more the kind of guy who would beat the crap out of some Yalie for leaving fingerprints on his Maserati. Joe may play in the big leagues, but Joe is very much a regular guy. For some fun, you can read a great article about Joe by our mutual friend, Lisa DePaulo, in GQ.
That said, this case is ludicrous. There is simply no rational basis for connecting a murder to an alleged atmosphere of sexual, how to even characterize it, benign neglect? It’s crazy and, well, crazy.
Lawyers are often challenged to take their arguments to the “logical extreme” to determine whether they bear up under scrutiny. Putting aside the fact that Yale is such a bastion of political correctness that even an inappropriate fraternity prank gave rise to a federal investigation, the leap from a sexually hostile environment to murder cannot be sustained. It’s pure post hoc ergo popter hoc. Lawyers can’t ignore logical fallacies just because they want to make a pitch.
Men, boys really, may have urges that women (whom I will not call girls because that would be taken as offensive) may find objectionable. I’m not talking rape or sexual assault, but normal boy-type urges. That these have been bootstrapped into sex crimes is a problem all its own. But as offensive as this conduct may be, it is a world apart from conduct that produces physical harm to another.
An environment that tolerates boys making nasty, stupid, offensive sexual jokes may well encourage other boys to make nasty, stupid, offensive sexual jokes, but it does not drive an otherwise normal person to engage in forcible rape or murder. Normal people do not do these things. There is no environment that causes, or even contributes, to normal people committing forcible rape or murder. Anyone who does so is not normal, and anyone who is of this bent is not driven by the environment, but by a sick and twisted mind.
To connect such things is not merely mistaken, but dangerous. And there is nobody who should appreciate this more than Joe Tac. It’s not that a lawyer, indeed a human being, cannot appreciate the horror that Annie Le’s family has been through, and will likely endure for the rest of their lives. Her murder was a nightmare. But her murder was the product of one man’s act, one man’s horribly sick mind.
Whether Yale needs to look under rocks for misogynist is an argument to be had among those who walk its streets and paths, who live in gothic colleges and have to decide whether it’s an atmosphere that suits their sensibilities. They can work it out amongst themselves.
It is not, however, a factor in a murder. Not in whole. Not in part. To argue that Yale’s failure to adequately maintain a sexually appropriate environment to suit the delicate sensibilities of some leads to murder is ludicrous. It doesn’t lead down an ivy covered path, but down the road to perdition.
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I’ve worked in the area of employment law on the defense side and not only is there merit to this claim, but it is pretty easy victory for the plaintiffs. Courts have repeatedly held that one extreme incident of sexual harassment is sufficient by itself to create liability for the employer for creating a hostile environment. In those cases the example always used – mainly because it is pretty obvious but also because it was the fact pattern of the leading case – is having an employee raped on the premises. A rape-homicide of a student on campus is sufficient on its own to create liability for Yale for creating a hostile environment for women under Title IX. At this point, that one extreme incident by itself is sufficient to create liability is pretty much black letter law. Regardless about your feelings on whether Yale should be liable in this case, the law is pretty clear that they are.
They maybe have a negligent hiring claim (some more on the law there in my post).
“Maybe” as in “non-frivolous, but unlikely to win.” The Title IX stuff is thrown in there in the hopes they can take a little discovery on it, piggyback on the real Title IX case, and then splash that in front of the jury.
You’ve got your facts/liability backwards. This isn’t about using a rape-homicide to show a hostile environment in an employment discrimination case, but claiming a generic hostile environment to create Yale’s liability for the homicide. If you want to offer an opinion (and it would be helpful to give your full name or otherwise provide a link so we know you’re a lawyer and what background you might have to opine), then you need to come at least reasonably close to the facts at hand and the theory of liability, and at least not get it completely backwards.
From what I know of the negligent hiring, there was only the allegation in high school that he forced his girlfriend to have sex with him, which was dropped. Joe can allege all he wants, but there’s nothing behind it.
And by the way, I agree with you that Yale can and should defend against this nonsense, but to claim ownership of what honor’s Annie Le’s memory is similarly ludicrous and insulting.
They must’ve gone to civil rights lawyers who work on contingency. The civil rights lawyers did their due diligence, decided that the case was too speculative to invest in/pursue, so they told them that there is no case and declined representation.
The family is at least middle class with money to spend, so they probably hired your friend at an hourly rate. As long as the case is not so frivolous that it violates Rule 11, which it isn’t, they get to vent their anger and the lawyer is compensated for his time. Everyone even gets some publicity out of it, which may improve campus security.
You are right about there not being a sexual harrasment problem on campus.
A couple of factual corrections.
This suit is brought by only one member of the family. The other members of the family doubt her motives.
The suit has its origins a long time ago, when that one person sought out Marie Nguyen in LA, who in turn – I would imagine for a finder’s fee – passed it along to Mr Tacopina.
He was on the right coast, and she correctly judged that this was one he would want to get his teeth into.
The