exeposé Officially the UK’s Best Student Publication
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ISSUE 713 26 OCT 2020 exepose.com @Exepose
THE UNIVERSITY OF EXETER’S INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER SINCE 1987
Student confessed to University over neo-Nazi posts, abuse victim not told
EXCLUSIVE Pete Syme Deputy Editor
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N Exeter student admitted to the University that they were responsible for “at least one” of the neo-Nazi ExeHonestly posts made in November 2019, Exeposé can reveal. Obtained through a Freedom of Information request, the police incident log
from 6 November also explains that the submissions “appear to come from three different accounts.” UniTruths, who hosted the confessions page, claim that “No personal identifying details are taken or held by the site” but these have been redacted in the report under GDPR legislation. PhD student Neha was closely involved in the investigation after the posts were connected to a series of extreme racist and sexually abusive emails she re-
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ceived, as well as acts of stalking and assault; detailed in her Medium article ‘This is what unpalatable student activism costs’. She had previously been called a racial slur in another post on ExeHonestly, while the page’s administrators signalled her to blame for its shutdown, leading to the Students’ Guild to denounce them for “targeting individual students who first called out the hate speech.” An email sent to Neha by senior management three days after the police noted a
student had confessed said: “it is possible Image: Kamila Bell [the police] may identify names.” It added that if she was “able to log a formal complaint,” then the University would be in a position to deploy disciplinary procedures “if they are students.” A University of Exeter spokesperson would not confirm whether or not the student had faced any disciplinary action, saying “A student did admit to posting an extremist message on ExeHonestly. This information was passed to the police and
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relevant authorities and we followed the University’s disciplinary process. We cannot share further confidential information about the individual. “We are committed to taking all steps necessary to tackle extremism and becoming an anti-racist university.” Following 2018’s Bracton Law Society scandal (BLS), in which students exchanged racist messages in a WhatsApp group chat, the University did announce
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