A true story of forgiving a false accusation of sexual harassment
7 years later, I still have sleepless nights. Time to share what needs to be shared for my forgiveness to be complete.
This is not a story that will fit neatly into anyone’s political agenda. It is a story about the things people do when they get scared, about what happens when you try to shortcut due process, and ultimately a story about love.
In order to understand why this experience was especially traumatic, you need the context that I am a gay woman who, at age 14, was outed in a conservative Indian high school by someone I had trusted. I felt so ashamed, so despised, that it led to my first suicide attempt. The person who outed me eventually apologized, and we are still friends today; I think she is a wonderful human being. But I have come to realize that the trauma of being branded as a creep has lingered all these years.
Fast forward to 2015, early in my PhD career at Stanford, and a colleague I will call Jade. The funny thing about Jade: we had crossed paths (literally, as in on the street) before coming to Stanford, and we had an uncanny tendency to run into each other. If you have read my previous writings on what the evidence says about consciousness and “randomness”, you’ll understand why in hindsight I see these as signs of a larger plan at play.
Jade and I were very different people. I was open, vulnerable, prone to sharing my feelings and a people-pleaser. Jade was closed off, terrible at feelings, and frequently snapped at colleagues if she felt they were wasting her time. I am an introvert and find social events with strangers tiring; Jade loved meeting people and was a community builder. We both had an intensely goofy, playful streak, but Jade hid hers from people she did not know well, while I proudly displayed mine. We were both ambitious and wanted to do something that actually helped the world. Underneath, I believe we had very similar core values — only, when push came to shove in the events that followed, she abandoned her’s while I chose to preserve mine.
I don’t want to make it easy to identify Jade, so I will share the minimal things that are necessary to contextualize our relationship: (1) she grew up in a homophobic environment (she told me that the “one gay boy” in her high school was “not treated well”) (2) she dropped very pointed hints around me that she wasn’t straight (e.g. talking about how the research shows that no woman is actually straight), but if you asked her directly she would nervously say she was straight (3) we had a very strong pull to each other, to the point that friends of mine who saw us interacting at parties, and who didn’t have it in their head that she was straight, told me that they thought we were flirting with each other (4) we wound up as very close friends (she opened up to me about things she had never told anyone else).
It is not uncommon to have unspoken romances between queer women, particularly when one or both are in the closet. Jade knew that I had a crush on her, and it only brought us closer. We began working on multiple projects together, without anyone asking us to. For ambitious people like we were, having a friend that you worked well with was wonderful. We felt unstoppable.
Things started to fray when my work started to get a lot of recognition. Even though I always highlighted Jade’s contributions, Jade admitted to me that she felt jealous of this (yes, she used the word “jealous”). In hindsight, that jealousy led her to frequently disregard my feelings; it’s hard to empathize with someone you are resenting. Unfortunately, because I was a people-pleaser, I failed to call out the ways in which I felt taken for granted, until things reached a bioling point.
What triggered the false accusation
The long story short is that at some point, Jade crossed a line in the ways in which she took me for granted. By “crossed a line”, I mean that her mistake was bad enough that she was plausibly afraid that I was going to make a disciplinary complaint against her (I was never going to do that, but I can see why, given the evidence I had, she was afraid that I could have done that). The reason it got so bad was mainly because there was another extremely greedy individual involved, and Jade’s oversight was in going along with what this other person did without considering how it would seem to me. When I discovered how far things had gone, entirely by accident, I became furious at what it revealed about how much she was willing to use me. Worse yet, she was unwilling to apologize, and was instead telling me that I shouldn’t be upset.
Aggravated by her gaslighting, I reported what was happening to people who were acting as references for the venture in question (it was a startup that never got off the ground because of what unfolded here). When I did so, I made sure to focus the blame squarely on the other individual involved, because I did not want to negatively impact Jade’s reputation. I still loved her, even though I was furious at her. I reavealed to Jade that I had “done something”, but I made the mistake of not saying what I had done. I wanted her to experience how unsettling it is when you are not getting straight answers. I never imagined that she would think I was capable of doing something as severe as what she did to me in retaliation. This was my mistake.
The false accusation of sexual harassment followed shortly after I revealed to Jade that I had “done something”. She made the complaint jointly with the other guy who was involved in the incident, and his complaint got thrown out because it literally made no accusation of sexual harassment — it was all along the lines of “she defamed me to colleagues”, to which I responded that for it to be defamation it has to be untrue. Still, the University procedures mandated that he was protected from “retaliation” even if his complaint was found to be without merit, and Stanford’s process was such that there was no penalty for false accusations against students. That is why I suspect that the whole purpose of their complaint against me was simply to secure the anti-retaliation provisions.
The closest thing I got to an apology from Jade was a conversation we had, after she had made the initial complaint to a supervisor of mine but before I had learned of it, in which I told her that I had shielded her from responsibility when I had reported what she and the other guy had done. Jade cried out, visible distressed: “I didn’t know that, Avanti — can’t you see that I didn’t know that?”. I knew from the tone of her voice that she had done something to harm me, but I didn’t care — I just wanted her to understand that regardless of how angry I had seemed, I was never going to hurt her.
How the system failed
The core failure was that Jade changed the story she was telling, and the change in the story was not caught because the information was spread across two different people.
Jade’s central complaint concerned an incident the previous year in which we had shared a hotel room together, and I came out of the shower in a bra and boyshorts. When she made the complaint, Jade told the person in charge of handling the case— someone named Catherine Glaze — that I had been “naked” in the hotel room, and this severely coloured how Glaze treated me throughout the case. However, the official investigation was conducted by someone who was different from Glaze, and during that investigation, Jade admitted that I was clothed. Because I did not dispute the core facts of this hotel room incident as they were presented to me during the investigation, Glaze would have been informed by the investigator that there was no major disagreement of the facts, and so she seemingly got the impression that I admitted to having been naked in the hotel room. I had expected the case to be dropped, but Glaze deemed it worthy of proceeding to a hearing.
Had I allowed the case to proceed to a hearing, I have no doubt that this discrepancy would have come to light sooner. However, because we had no idea why Glaze was treating me as though I was guilty, I was pressured by my family to settle the case via a non-hearing resolution in which I agreed to stay away from campus until Jade graduated, in exchange for no official finding of guilt (Glaze had a history of righteously impulsive behavior in her previous job too, and recklessly disregarded what I had to say when subsequent conflicts with Jade came up, even when I had witnesses to back up my story; it was terrifying to experience that the truth did not matter). When my family first pressured me to settle via a non-hearing resolution, I…did not react well. In fact, [brace yourself] I attempted suicide. Looking back, I understand now that this happened because the trauma of being treated as a creep in high school was still unhealed, and I felt a non-hearing resolution was an admission of guilt.
What ultimately caused me to settle was that my mother’s health came under threat: she had developed a mole that looked concerning, and in the past her body tends to respond to stress by growing tumors (luckily the biopsy was benign). It felt like my spirit was being crushed, but I gave in and signed what they wanted me to sign. My pride was not worth my mother’s health.
Luckily, the facts did come to light. In a conversation that Glaze had with my psychiatrist after the case was settled, Glaze revealed that she was under the impression that I had been “naked” in the hotel room. When I learned about this from my psychiatrist, I told the supervisor of mine who had been interviewed as part of the investigation that Glaze was evidently making up accusations. He was the one who revealed to me that Jade explicitly used the word “naked” when making the initial complaint to him. My guess is that Jade knew that if she had stuck to the objective facts, no one would have believed that her case had merit.
The part I never told the investigators
Here’s the part that I never told anyone: when I came out of the shower in my underwear, I was secretly testing whether Jade was attracted to me. She had said that she was accustomed to seeing naked women in gym showers. If she had no sexual feelings towards me, seeing me in a bra and boyshorts would not have affected her. Instead, as soon as she saw me in underwear, she left the room. So quickly, in fact, that I found myself struggling to believe that she had actually left because of me; in my mind, the most I was expecting to happen was that she would become flustered and struggle to look at me. Leaving the room altogether was not on my anticipated list of outcomes. It was the kind of reaction you expect from a horny straight man who has to contain himself. My own sex drive is nowhere near that high, so it had simply not occurred to me that another woman could feel that way.
I want to pause to create some empathy for Jade. She grew up in a homophobic environment, and being physically active was a very big part of her life. She would have no doubt grown up hearing women talk about how they would be uncomfortable sharing a locker room with a lesbian. She would have internalized that in order to be welcomed in some of the spaces that were most important to her, it was absolutely, critically, necessary that no one ever saw her as anything other than straight. That kind of repression requires conscious control. When I appeared before her in my underwear, I left her with no time to prepare herself to suppress what would have naturally come up. Of course she was upset. Of course she felt harassed — by unwanted sexual thoughts. And she also knew that I knew that she had failed my test.
I later learned that the guidelines in place under the Obama administration for dealing with such complaints were such that it didn’t matter whether particular behavior would objectively be considered harassment; all that mattered was whether someone felt harassed. Or at least, that is what I got told when I reported that Glaze had failed look at the evidence gathered by the investigator. I don’t really believe this was a valid justification for the way I was treated — I think the Stanford administrators were just trying to avoid a lawsuit — but all the same, it is good that those guidelines were revised; people can “feel” harassed for all sorts of reasons, including internalized homophobia.
And to further explain why Jade may have felt justified in her complaint, all of this occurred in the context of another misunderstanding in which she had interpreted an unexpected encounter as me “waiting for her” (like I said, we had a somewhat uncanny tendency to cross paths). I assured her that I hadn’t been waiting for her, but in hindsight, I should have provided proof (in the form of a screenshot of me telling a friend shortly afterwards about the unexpected encounter, pictured below). At the time, I never imagined that she had not believed me; as strange as it sounds, I didn’t realize then how common it is for people to lie.
Towards healing
The way things panned out, I ended up with smoking gun evidence that Jade had lied. At one point in 2021, I was on the verge of going public with a version of this story that was written from a place of intense anger. Although that version of the story was focused on the failures of the system, anyone who was able to connect the story to Jade would have come away thinking that she was a monster.
But I didn’t go public with that story, because deep down I knew that everything that had happened happened for a reason, and I could not convince myself that the people who would suffer from that story going public actually deserved to suffer. Even Catherine Glaze, the person in charge of the case — ultimately, what was her crime? Her crime was giving Jade the benefit of the doubt and failing to check whether Jade had changed her story. And Jade, what was her crime? Her crime was being scared and doing what she thought she had to do to protect herself.
Because I didn’t go public with that story, my actual story with Jade had a chance for a better ending. Last year, Jade and I managed to reconnect. I don’t really want to reveal my intimate and somewhat elaborate communications with her, so I will just say that even though it was brief, and as far as I know she is still in the closet, what we had became undeniably sexual and intensely romantic…until I sabotaged it.
And this brings me to why I am writing this piece. It took until now to understand why I felt compelled to sabotage the very delicate reconciliation that we were experiencing. As soon as things began heating up (think: talk of soulmate connections and nsfw pictures sent and opened), a part of me began panicking. Only last night did I finally understand why I panicked: the part of me that was traumatized in high school, the part of me whose worst fear was being branded as a creep, never forgave her for putting me through that again. I even remember that part of me saying, at a critical point in which I was debating telling Jade that she was still a PTSD trigger (which I knew had a high chance of making her doubt whether I actually loved her): “she put us through hell — she does not get to waltz in and have a fairytale romance with us without knowing how horrible it was”.
Now that I finally have a name for that part of me (I call it “the part of me that was created by the trauma of being branded as a creep”), I can call upon it and understand what it wants.
It wants something very simple: it wants me to share how traumatic it was to be branded as a creep.
In modern society, we do this a lot, particularly to men. In fact, it is not uncommon for men to feel like they are sick because of their sexual attraction to women. It is a pain that straight women do not seem to understand, but is a pain that queer women understand, because it turns out that the demonizing of male sexuality is so strong that women who are attracted to women feel demonized too:
The number of people who have experienced my particular situation — queer women who was the target of a false accusation — is probably vanishingly small. But the larger and more painful experience of being branded as a sexual pervert for completely normal behavior is something that happens to men in our modern society every day. I understand that it is an enraged overreaction to a long history of genuinely predatory behavior from men, but that doesn’t make it harmless or correct, any more than it is harmless or correct to murder members of an ethnic group because people from that group abused you in the past.
We need to stop demonizing male sexuality. We need to stop underestimating how harmful it is to label fellow human beings as “creeps”. We need to stop using our trauma to justify traumatizing others. That is all for now.
