In spring 2019, Elisabeth Andries, an LSU industrial engineering major, encountered a familiar face in one of her classes: the fraternity member who she said sexually assaulted her two years earlier, when she was a freshman.
It happened on a fraternity bus trip to New Orleans, Andries said. The frat member, who was a friend, had invited her as his date. They drank heavily, to the point that she was vomiting, she said. Although her memory of the night is fuzzy, she recalled her date moving her to the back of the bus, ripping open her shirt and touching her without her consent.
“I remember repeatedly saying ‘stop’ and ‘no,’ ” Andries said. “I think I just kind of blacked out after that.”
Andries said she tried to ignore him in the class they had together two years later, but couldn’t. She started to suffer chronic panic attacks, she said, so she reported the incident to the school.
As it turned out, another female student had already reported the same man for sexually assaulting her in almost the exact same way, the same night, on the same bus trip.
Both women decided to move forward with a Title IX case. They did not file police reports.
USA TODAY is not naming the fraternity member at the request of the women, who fear retaliation from him. He did not return phone and social media messages from a reporter.
The Title IX case dragged on for more than six months, during which LSU rarely gave the women updates, twice extended the frat member’s deadlines to appeal without notifying them, and denied their requests for protection from him during the case, according to the women and their emails with school officials.
Andries requested to swap out of the class she shared with him, or take it online, she said, but LSU refused.
“They told me I had to sit and stay in it,” said Andries, who is still at LSU. “They kept saying there was nothing they could do.”
Andries said she asked the school to notify her professor about the case, to explain her absences. It didn’t.
LSU also declined to issue a no-contact order between her and the frat member; because they hadn’t been talking, “there isn’t any communication to cease,” a Title IX employee said in an email to Andries. Instead, LSU gave her a template for a letter that she could send him directly, instructing him not to contact her.
“For obvious reasons, I did not do that,” Andries said.
LSU in June 2019 found the frat member responsible for sexually assaulting both women, case records the women shared with USA TODAY show. At every stage of the appeal process, LSU upheld the guilty verdict.
Yet even after finding him responsible twice, LSU refused to switch him out of the classes that he and Andries were set to share during the upcoming, fall 2019 semester, emails show. Instead, Andries said she was told that she would have to be the one to switch, because she was “the uncomfortable one,” and he had the same rights as her.
In early September, Sanders – who had served as the school’s Greek life director before becoming student advocacy and accountability director in 2016 – issued sanctions against the frat member: a meeting on anger management and healthy relationships, a course on ethics and decision-making, and a deferred suspension for four semesters.
Deferred suspension, under LSU policy, is a period in which the student must stay out of trouble. The suspension kicks in only if the student commits a second offense, and the school finds him responsible again.
