Department of Education's Civil-Rights Chief Apologizes for Rape Comments
Source: Associated Press
By LAURIE KELLMAN and CAROLE FELDMAN
Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Education Department’s civil rights chief apologized Wednesday for saying 90 percent of campus sexual assault claims stem from both participants being drunk and that the rights of the accused are too often ignored.
“What I said was flippant, and I am sorry,” Candice Jackson, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a statement. “All sexual harassment and sexual assault must be taken seriously — which has always been my position and will always be the position of this department.”
She was quoted in The New York Times on Wednesday as saying rules imposed under President Barack Obama have resulted in many false accusations under the federal law known as Title IX. In most investigations, she is quoted as saying, there’s “not even an accusation that these accused students overrode the will of a young woman.”
“Rather, the accusations — 90 percent of them — fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right,’” Jackson is quoted as saying in an interview.
Read more: https://apnews.com/02b29624854d491785f07229914eb557/Education-official-apologizes-for-remarks-on-sexual-violence?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=AP_Politics
= new reply since forum marked as read
In her statement of apology, Jackson said she was a rape survivor. “I would never seek to diminish anyone’s experience,” she said. “My words in The New York Times poorly characterized the conversations I’ve had with countless groups of advocates.”
Rape is only an issue when it affects her.
Candice Jackson is Deputy Assistant Secretary for Strategic Operations and Outreach in the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of the U.S. Department of Education, and the Office's Acting Assistant Secretary, a position she was appointed to on April 12, 2017.[1][2] Jackson is an attorney who worked for the conservative organization Judicial Watch, and in private practice in California.[3] Jackson is a graduate of Stanford University, where she wrote for the conservative Stanford Review as a critic of affirmative action and feminism.[3]
She authored the 2005 book Their Lives: Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine, concerning the biographies of Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaddrick, all of whom reported sexual harassment or abuse by former president Bill Clinton.[4] Jackson coordinated the appearance of several of these women in a press conference before the October 9, 2016, presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.[5] She also produced a 2015 video profiling Kathy Shelton, a survivor of a child sexual assault whose assailant was represented in court by Hillary Clinton in the 1970s.[6] She has labeled the women who have accused Trump of sexual assault of being "fake victims".[3]
She served as an editorial assistant on the collected essays of libertarian economist Murray Rothbard during a fellowship at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and wrote two academic papers appraising his work.[3][7]
