Fall 2017 Main Street Magazine
count with her. Spann then told Fox to leave so he could speak with her in private. When he left, Spann again had sex with the woman on the landing. According to a Boston Globe article from October 4, 1987, after speaking to several friends and dorm counselors over the weekend, the 19-year-old survivor, unable to recall the events of Feb. 19, went to the campus health center for an exam who notified the university police. After being interviewed by officers, Spann and Fox were indicted for aggravated sexual assault by a grand jury, a charge that can result in fifteen years in prison, while Williams was charged with misdemeanor sexual assault. When the three men vehemently denied any wrongdoing to campus police officers, the mechanisms for an internal hearing commenced. With no internal precedent for handling sexual assault cases differently than run of the mill disciplinary violations, a system designed to address minor offenses and overseen by a combination of students and faculty quickly proved to be ill-equipped to handle a case of such gravity. “Some students have criticized the university for allowing the accused to attend classes and, until a week ago, to remain in their room in Stoke Hall, the coed dormitory where the alleged rape occurred. Students have also accused the university of trying to hush up the matter”, said a Boston Globe article from March 15, 1987.
The Public Responds Two weeks later, in the middle of a March that still felt like the dead of winter, students and faculty crunched through frozen early-morning snow on their way to class. It’s easy not to lift your eyes when rushing between heated buildings on well-rehearsed but precariously icy routes, but that
icy morning in Durham, students cutting through the center of campus classes stopped in the cold. Dangling from a ledge of the picturesque, white-columned Hamilton Smith Hall were two effigies, their faces painted and nooses strung around their necks. A third sat on the ledge under a six-foot by fourfoot banner. It read “Beware Boys, Rape Will Not Be Tolerated.” Graffiti scrawled on the path leading to then-president Gordon Haaland’s residence read “Gordon, why do you allow rapists to stay on campus.” “We’re not trying them for rape, we are trying them for respect for others,” the Associate Dean of Student Affairs told the Boston Globe that March. Standing by their innocence on grounds that the woman was a consenting and willing participant in their sex acts, a cunning legal defense team representing Spann, Williams, and Fox aimed to turn public opinion, succeeding in making the normally private disciplinary hearings public. Held in the middle of the day in the largest lecture hall in Hamilton Smith, the disciplinary proceedings unfolded to a capacity crowd, with both the victim and her family in attendance. “Linda [Black], who was one of the witnesses who recognized Sara when she emerged from the room, is transferring to another school. Last spring she took one look at the huge crowds at the Judicial Board hearings and walked away,” Keegan wrote in his article, “The next day she was convinced that telling her story was the right thing to do; now she’s not so sure. Fraternity members are mad at her, and she’s disillusioned about the social life at UNH. “I guess rape happens all the time here,” she says, sitting on the bed in her dorm room, wearing shorts and a UNH sweatshirt.”
Despite New Hampshire — 36 —
and many other states instituting so-called “rape shield” laws designed to bar slut-shaming court testimony about a victim’s prior sexual conduct, student advisors at the internal UNH hearing tried time and time again to elicit testimony about the Stoke assault victim’s sexual history on campus. According to the Globe from May 10, 1987, “The advisers’ persistence with questions about the victim’s prior behavior angered other women at the hearing, who said in a letter to Sanborn that the alleged victim was put on trial. The woman’s father, who declined to be interviewed, made his objections known too.” Preparing for the Grand Jury trial that would follow, the defense attorneys of the accused assailants hired a stenographer to record each witnesses’ testimony. Despite not being allowed to directly advise their clients during the proceedings, they used the internal conduct system as a dry-run for criminal proceedings in superior court. On May 6, to the shock and dismay of sexual assault prevention activists, the hearing announced that it had cleared all the accused men of sexual misconduct charges. Citing a breach of a mutual respect policy, the judicial committee suspended Spann and Fox for a Summer and dropped all charges against Williams, who wept with joy upon hearing the verdict . . .
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