An expelled Yale College scholar who was acquitted of intercourse assault fees in 2018 is now suing 15 girls’s advocacy teams and an legal professional for defamation after being referred to as a “rapist” in a courtroom transient that they filed in a 2022 continuing.
Saifullah Khan, a 31-year-old Afghanistan native, mentioned the organizations, which embody the Nationwide Alliance to Finish Sexual Violence and the Nationwide Girls’s Legislation Heart, repeated his accuser’s allegations as truth, akin to writing, “When Jane Doe was in school, the Plaintiff raped her” and referring to Khan as “her rapist.”
Whereas that language was amended, Khan says his repute was harmed and that he has suffered “financial and non-economic damages.” His lawsuit, which seeks monetary damages, mentioned the unique draft transient “stays revealed, indefinitely” on the Connecticut Judicial Department web site and was additionally revealed on-line by the ladies’s advocacy teams and for donors.
“We want for them to grasp that there’s hurt to somebody while you simply label them,” mentioned Alex Taubes, Khan’s legal professional. “Nobody may complain about it if he had been discovered responsible. However he needs to see that while you truly are discovered not responsible, is there any vindication? Is there any option to get up for your self at that time?”
Additionally Suing Yale
Though Khan was acquitted of 4 sexual assault fees by a jury in Could 2018, he was expelled from Yale in November 2018 following a college investigation and sexual assault disciplinary continuing. He sued each Yale and his accuser, and that case is pending in federal courtroom.
As a part of that case, the Connecticut State Supreme Courtroom was requested to weigh in on the query of whether or not the accuser ought to be immune from a civil swimsuit for feedback made throughout the college continuing. Varied girls’s rights teams argued that such immunity is essential to forestall rape victims from being discouraged to return ahead.
The courtroom, nonetheless, dominated 7-0 final 12 months that as a result of Khan had fewer rights to defend himself within the college continuing than he would in prison courtroom, his accuser couldn’t profit absolutely from immunity granted to witnesses in prison proceedings. As in lots of U.S. universities, Yale’s procedures don’t topic accusers to cross-examination and don’t require witnesses to testify beneath oath.
Messages looking for remark have been left with Nationwide Alliance to Finish Sexual Violence and the Nationwide Girls’s Legislation Heart, in addition to Jennifer Becker, the previous authorized director on the girls’s advocacy group Authorized Momentum who submitted the unique software to file the amicus transient with Connecticut’s highest courtroom. In a response to an ethics grievance Khan filed towards her, Becker wrote that when she drafted the transient “I wholly believed that my statements have been absolutely supported by the report.”
Becker mentioned she did “admire that the language drafted was overzealous and unnecessarily forceful.” However she famous in her assertion how the transient was refiled, “shorn of all info not supported by the report,” as ordered by the justices, and the courtroom by no means admonished her for the language she used within the authentic one or made any discovering that it was inappropriate.
“Moreover, any overzealousness on my half was ameliorated by the Courtroom’s order and there’s no ensuing hurt to Mr. Kahn,” she wrote, noting the language he had complained about has been stripped.
Authorized specialists have mentioned the Connecticut State Supreme Courtroom’s ruling final 12 months may very well be a significant precedent cited in different lawsuits by college students accused of sexual misconduct in challenges to the equity of their faculties’ disciplinary proceedings.
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