The Adele Smith Narrative

Introduction

Adele’s story deserves to be examined. Adele was the founding president of CASC and is now the president of Dinah’s Voice (the new umbrella group that subsumed CASC). Her story is cited repeatedly in CASC literature as an example of how Christendom has been grossly negligent in handling cases of rape and sexual assault. Indeed, it is the cause celebre of CASC.

The purpose of this piece is not to question whether or not Adele was raped. The purpose is only to show that her story, as portrayed in public forums, used lies and half-truths to manufacture outrage at the college.

Because the narrative she provided to Simcha Fisher is the most complete, public account and because it is the account that precipitated the formation of CASC, we will examine her story as it was reported by Simcha Fisher in “Are Women Safe in the Christendom Bubble -- Part I.”

CLAIM: Christendom PDA policy causes rape by forcing students into secluded places

Simcha writes, “The school’s rigid rules governing male and female interaction weren’t just awkward, though. Adele claims they are dangerous.”

Adele told Simcha,

Just to hold hands, they’d go off campus for a date; and by ‘off campus,’ it could in be in the woods, or in a field down the road. There are not a lot of options if you don’t have a car. So you end up having couples potentially isolate themselves. They should be able to express themselves romantically in a public setting, which is a safer setting to learn how to navigate as a couple. Instead, you’re put into remote, isolated areas where things can get out of hand.

And Simcha continues,

That’s precisely what happened when Smith was raped by her then-boyfriend, a fellow Christendom student.

Except, according to Adele’s own account, this is NOT what happened. The next line:

The rape occurred on Friday, October 2, 2009, on Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, about thirty minutes away from the college campus.

To be clear that is 30 minutes by car. They did have a car; as we later learn in the article, “they borrowed a friend’s car and she drove them up to a scenic point overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains. . . .”

Adele wasn’t forced to go to an isolated place to escape the Christendom bubble and hold her boyfriend’s hand. She had use of a car, and she drove through the town of Front Royal--a small city that has coffee shops, bars, restaurants, a theatre, and multiple public parks--in order to get to a remote spot in a national park.

This is absolutely not to say that going to a national park and getting into the back seat of the car with someone is giving him consent to have sex with you.

It is only to say that the article is wrong to claim that Adele was raped because she was forced to retreat into a remote area in a forest just to hold her boyfriend’s hand.

But that is exactly what the Simcha and Adele are claiming.

CLAIM: Adele couldn’t endure being in the same room as her ex-boyfriend

Simcha tells us that Adele was unable to endure being in the same room as her alleged rapist--a natural reaction to rape:

Smith skipped many classes her sophomore year, unable to endure being in the same room with him. Her GPA slipped to 1.2.

Again, this is at the very least a gross exaggeration. While Adele may have skipped classes to avoid her alleged assailant, this was not the case in other social settings. For instance, Adele and her alleged assailant were both active in the campus debate society--a small fraternal society that meets regularly over the course of the school year (both in public and members-only events). Adele even ran for (and received) a leadership position in the society while they were both actively involved. (She ran for a leadership position in Spring 2011, and served in that position during the Fall 2011 semester.)

In other words, during a time when Adele allegedly couldn’t be in the same room as her ex-boyfriend without suffering severe emotional distress, she freely participated in extracurricular activities in which they were both involved. Publicly available evidence (both written and photographic) places them in the same room at debate society events during this time. In fact, according the Simcha article, it was after one such debate society event that it was first suggested to Adele that what happened to her was rape.

This leads us naturally to the next claim:

CLAIM: Adele suffered severe emotional distress from continued contact, due to the College’s inaction

Adele claims that because of the school’s inaction, “It was up to me to avoid him.”

But this is simply not true. After Adele eventually brought the assault to the college’s attention--between fourteen and eighteen months later--her ex-boyfriend was required to cut off all contact (aside from unavoidable, incidental contact) with Adele indefinitely. (This was as punishment for the charge of harassment.)

Following a disciplinary meeting on July 28 of 2011, Simcha tells us “he could not contact Adele Smith.”

The sentencing letter from Student Life specifically says (in bold), “No Contact with Adele Smith,” and explains, “You must refrain from any contact with Adele Smith until further notice.” And it goes on to mention specifically that this includes any contact either “on or off campus.”

In other words, it is false for Adele to say that “it was up to me to avoid him.” (We presume here that Fisher placed Smith's quotation in its appropriate context by introducing the section with, “After the sanctions were imposed . . . ”) It was clearly up to him to avoid any--aside from unavoidable, incidental--contact with her.

CLAIM: The college had no policy prohibiting rape

Simcha claims: "there was, in 2011, no clause in the student handbook prohibiting sexual assault.” Further on in the article we read,

in . . . 2012, a year after she reported her rape, the school still had not added a policy against sexual assault to their student handbook. "There was nothing to stop this from happening again," Smith said. Smith says the school claimed it “takes a long time” to implement changes in school policy. 

 Her reply, from Simcha’s article: “No, it takes opening a word document and writing it up: ‘Don’t rape people.’ . . .”

But in truth there was a policy prohibiting rape. Since at least 1999 the Student Handbook had contained the following:

. . .

Actions which gravely disrupt the community will normally entail serious disciplinary action, such as suspension or expulsion. The following are examples of such acts, but not an exhaustive list:
1. Any act of physical or emotional violence or harm caused to another
. . .

That policy had been used, before Adele attended, to expel from the school at least one man found guilty of sexual misconduct. The fact that the college had not specifically listed all the possible ways of inflicting “physical or emotional violence or harm” on another does not change the fact that this policy clearly includes rape: it had been interpreted to include rape, and it had been used to punish sexual misconduct in the past.

The school’s reason for not disciplining the accused was not that it was okay under the school’s policy for student’s to rape one another, as Adele ludicrously implies. (It is absurd to even have to write that.) The reason the school didn’t discipline him for allegedly committing rape was that the school determined that there was insufficient evidence to sustain the accusation of rape. It was the same reason the police said it was unlikely that the case would end in a conviction.

Again, the reason her alleged assailant was not punished for rape was not that there was no relevant policy that would allow disciplinary action to be taken against a rapist; it was that there was a lack of evidence to substantiate her allegation. As her father, Scott Smith, wrote in his letter to O’Donnell, the Dean of Student Life, “led us to believe that in the absence of physical evidence and/or witnesses [or a confession] that nothing at all would happen.”

Adele and her parents evidently had the utterly unreasonable--and unjust--expectation of a summary expulsion based on her uncorroborated allegations. Again from Scott Smith’s letter, “we urged [the dean of student life] that . . . [the accused] be immediately expelled from campus.”

CLAIM: The school didn’t pursue the charge because it happened off-campus

Simcha writes: “the rape occurred off campus; and so the school considered itself helpless to respond to it.” She then provides quotations from O’Donnell’s letter to Scott Smith:

"[T]he alleged assault of Adele did not take place on campus. Rather, the incident apparently occurred in a national park several miles away from Christendom’s campus,” O’Donnell wrote in his letter to Scott Smith. “Moreover, both Adele and Mr. [redacted] are adults — meaning that Christendom faculty and staff have inherently limited options for enforcing standards of appropriate (or even prudent) conduct, especially when students leave the confines of campus.”

But these subsequent quotations from O’Donnell are out of context. At no point does he say the school doesn’t pursue disciplinary action against students for actions committed off-campus. He does not write that the school was “helpless to respond to it.” In fact, in the same letter he outlines what the school was doing at the time to investigate this off-campus incident.

Rather, O’Donnell’s point, in context, was simply that the College cannot be held responsible for preventing rape or other sexual misconduct when students are off campus. O’Donnell was speaking of the College’s (in-)ability to prevent off-campus misconduct. Simcha takes his words out of context and makes them speak about responding to off-campus misconduct.

The reason the location of the incident came up in O’Donnell’s letter was that he was responding to Scott Smith’s implied accusation that the college has neglected its duty to act in loco parentis. Scott Smith wrote to O’Donnell that, “It should be the role of a Catholic College . . . to protect its students in the role of in loco parentis. [sic]” (Bear in mind that Scott Smith is a lawyer, in loco parentis is a legal term, and his letter appears to have been sent on letterhead.)

O’Donnell is responding to this accusation by clarifying what the College’s legal responsibility to students is. O’Donnell wrote: “I think that you might be using the term [in loco parentis] more broadly than is appropriate in this matter.” He goes on to speak about the College’s duty (of acting in loco parentis) to students under Virginia law, as it had been explained to him by legal counsel: the duty is to provide a safe campus to students.

His point then is not that the school doesn’t care about what happens off-campus or that it can’t do anything because the incident occurred off-campus (as we have already pointed out, elsewhere in the letter he speaks of the investigation and interviews that the school was conducting into the issue at the time--clearly the school did care about the incident and was prepared to take action even though it happened off-campus).

His point is simply that the school has not failed its legal duty to provide a safe campus to students, because the school is not legally required (nor can it reasonably be expected) to guarantee the safety of adult students when they leave campus.

The context of the quotation is as follows:

. . . Christendom has a [legal] responsibility to provide a safe campus for its students. Christendom College is very diligent in making sure it provides a safe campus for the education of our students. Indeed, as you correctly point out, the alleged assault of Adele did not take place on campus. . . . Moreover Adele and [the accused] are both adults--meaning that Christendom faculty and staff have inherently limited options of enforcing standards of appropriate (or even prudent) conduct, especially when students leave the confines of campus.

What he is saying is, in essence, assuming your daughter was raped as she says, that does not demonstrate a failure of the school to fulfill its legal responsibility under Virginia law to provide a safe environment to students; the school cannot guarantee the safety of adult students once they leave campus. That is altogether different from saying that the school is “helpless to respond” to off-campus misconduct.

CLAIM: Christendom cares more about drunkenness than rape

Based on the previous claim, that the college did not care about the incident because it occurred off-campus, Simcha and Adele next claimed that the school cares less about rape than it does about drinking:

"I always find it interesting they always try to punish students for drinking off campus, if you come back to campus drunk,” Smith said. “I say, if you rape off campus, when you come back to campus, you’re still a rapist.”
. . .
The message was clear.
“We care if you drink off campus, but not if you rape off campus,” [Smith] said.

First, this is based on the prior misrepresentation of O’Donnell’s point about the incident taking place off-campus: he did not say that the school washed its hands of the affair simply because it took place off-campus.

Second, and once again, the article ignores the fact that the reason the college didn’t punish the alleged for rape is that there was insufficient evidence.

As hardly needs to be pointed out, there is frequently manifest evidence of drunkenness if a student returns to campus drunk.

But more than a year after the alleged rape, there simply was insufficient evidence to form a basis for disciplinary action in Adele’s case.

CLAIM: Founding faculty member publicly called Adele a liar and the school didn’t care

Simcha writes,

. . . [Adele’s] friend texted her that Marshner was talking about her in his moral theology class, using thinly veiled language. The teacher gave the class a hypothetical example of a young man and woman who were dating and decided to go off campus to Skyline Drive. In the example, they decide to fornicate, but then the young woman regrets her choice, and decides to claim the young man attacked her. “In what world is this okay?” Smith said. “It was my story. Everyone knew.”

She then expresses outrage, not only that a professor would publicly imply that she was lying, but then that the college would permit him to get away with it. This would be understandable, if this story had actually been about her.

But it wasn’t about her.

Multiple alumni have publicly stated that Marshner had been using this example to illustrate a point in his Moral Theology class long before the incident. The earliest public example of this story being used in the class was volunteered by an alumnus who graduated in 1992.

CLAIM: Christendom refused to refer to the prior accusation of rape when disciplining the accused.

Simcha writes that, “Smith and her family were floored [on seeing the sentencing letter from Student Life to the accused]. There was no mention of her accusation of rape, either in the charge letter or in the sanction letter.”

Of course there was no mention of rape in the sentencing letter. He wasn’t being charged or sentenced for rape, and at this point the accusation of rape was no more than an unsubstantiated accusation: why should it be repeated here? Once again, it must be pointed out that there was a lack of evidence to substantiate the allegation of rape.

The school was doing its best given the cards they had to play; they had a serious accusation with insufficient evidence, so they were disciplining the accused for the misconduct they could substantiate (more than a year after the fact).

CLAIM: Catholic teaching on virginity made her blame herself rather than admit it was rape

Simcha explain that “At first she didn’t want to allow that word [‘rape’], and grew defensive . . .”

She quotes Adele:

“When you’re Catholic you’re taught that your virginity is one of the best gifts you have, a gift you can give your husband . . . I had been a virgin. I had been waiting for marriage. I was that fallen woman, and I didn’t want my parents to see me that way.”

We can’t comment on how Adele’s parents taught her to view virginity, nor would it be productive for us to ask whether what she describes as the Catholic teaching on virginity actually is the Catholic teaching.

But what one can note is that this is not a plausible reason for her reluctance to admit to herself that she was raped, as the Fisher article clearly implies. She had already been open about the fact that she was no longer a virgin. According to the article, the first time the word ‘rape’ was used in reference to the incident was after she confided in a professor that her boyfriend had had sex with her even though she didn’t want to. She admitted to herself and to others that she wasn’t a physical virgin. Whether she was a physical virgin wasn’t in question, the issue was simply that she didn’t want to use the word ‘rape’.

So her reluctance to admit that she was raped cannot be explained as a result of some indoctrinated obsession with physical virginity. This nonsense about blaming herself because of her Catholic upbringing's fetishizing physical virginity simply doesn’t add up. Once you have already admitted (to yourself and to your confidants) that you have had sex, it makes no sense to deny (to yourself and you confidants) that you have been raped on the basis of your fear to admit you are no longer a physical virgin. She’d already admitted that.

Timeline

Adele was class of 2012

October 2nd, 2009 -- The alleged rape occurred on Friday, October 2, 2009

November 24th 2009 -- The alleged makes unwanted physical contact (places his hand on her knee). He was suspended for this and other (undated) acts of harassment.

Fall 2010-- She realizes she was raped. “It wasn’t until the beginning of her junior year [i.e., sometime in the Fall of 2010] that she heard the word ‘rape’ applied to her ordeal.” We can’t pin down the exact date, but this means she didn’t admit even to herself that she was raped until approximately a year after the event occurred.

December 9th, 2009—Adele attends a debate society event on campus, at which her alleged attacker was also present.

January 31st, 2010-- Adele attends a debate society event on campus, at which her alleged attacker was also present.

February 14th, 2010-- Adele attends a debate society event on campus, at which her alleged attacker was also present.

April 25th, 2010-- Adele attends a debate society event on campus, at which her alleged attacker was also present.

Fall 2010--Adele is inducted into the campus debate society. Her alleged rapist was already a member of this small fraternal organization (he had been inducted two years earlier, in fall 2008). The on-campus members of the debate society numbered fewer than 30 at the time.

Fall 2010 – Adele would have taken Moral Theology with Dr. Marshner during the fall of her junior year.

August 29th, 2010-- Adele attends a debate society event on campus, at which her alleged attacker was also present.

September 19th, 2010-- Adele attends a debate society event on campus, at which her alleged attacker was also present.

October 10th, 2010-- Adele attends a debate society event on campus, at which her alleged attacker was also present.

January 30th, 2011-- Adele attends a debate society event on campus, at which her alleged attacker was also present.

February 13th, 2011-- Adele attends a debate society event on campus, at which her alleged attacker was also present.

March 11th 2011--She tells her parents (according to Scott Smith’s letter to O’Donnell, dated May 16th).

March 20th, 2011-- Adele attends a debate society event on campus, at which her alleged attacker was also present.

April 1, 2011-- Adele’s parents meet with Dorman (Dean of Student Life) according to Smith’s letter to O’Donnell. This seems to have taken at least a week to arrange. In this meeting Dorman specifically said (according to Scott Smith) that absent witnesses, physical proof, or a confession no action would be taken. Scott wanted the accused to be immediately expelled. She didn’t approach the school for 18 months.

April 20, 2011-- Adele gives an interview to The Chronicler, a newsletter circulated among Christendom students on a (mostly) weekly basis.  The Chronicler is run by the staff in the admissions office and is well-known to students as a vehicle for advertising and promotion of campus life.  In her interview, Adele details her plans for graduate school and emphasizes how much she enjoys various extracurricular activites: https://christendom.edu/chronicler2011/latest/files/archive-apr-2011.php

April 2011--She reaches out to police, “In April of 2011, Smith decided to tell the police about the rape.” That is, she didn’t approach the police for 18 months.

Sometime toward the end of the Spring Semester 2011 Adele runs for Prefect in the Debate Society, a position she occupied for the following Fall semester. This is a public position, charged with public communications on behalf of the society and providing hospitality at all society events. She began serving in the position on May 1st, 2011, so her election was probably sometime in the previous 3-4 weeks.

May 11th, 2011--the academic year ends and students depart the Christendom campus

May 15th, 2011, according to Scott Smith’s letter, the accused bragged about evading the rape charge.

May 16th 2011--Scott Smith writes to O’Donnell complaining about the pace of the investigation; “In a letter dated May 16, 2011, Scott Smith, her father, wrote to Timothy O’Donnell, the president of Christendom, . . . “

May 23rd 2011, O’Donnell replies. “A week later, in a letter dated May 23, 2011, President O’Donnell responded.”

July 19th, Accused is charged with harassing Adele. “In the charge letter delivered to the young man on July 19, 2011, . . . ”

July 28th, disciplinary hearing. “A disciplinary conference was scheduled for July 28 of 2011. The school determined the young man was “responsible for the violation of Harassment.”

August 8th, 2011, sentencing letter to the accused confirming the finding of the disciplinary hearing.