A Question of Consent

At 23, Feifei Fan was one of the youngest research assistants in the mechanical-engineering lab of Yanyao Jiang, who’d recruited her from China in 2005 to join him at the University of Nevada at Reno. She recalls feeling “nervous and anxious” because of what she described as her boss’s harsh demeanor with students, which softened with her around August 2006.

It was confusing, though. The hand brushing against her leg when he was peering through a microscope at her experiment. The tight hug, the invitations to go outside and watch the moon with him. She would later tell investigators that she thought Jiang’s changed behavior meant he’d come around to realizing she was smart and capable of succeeding in his lab. But she also wondered if her 42-year-old master’s-thesis adviser was developing a “crush on her.”

After driving her home from a late night at the lab, she said, Jiang followed her into her bedroom and placed one hand under her shirt and another down her pants and kissed her on the lips. She said the interaction, which lasted a few seconds, made her embarrassed and uncomfortable. Soon after, he invited her to join him, his wife, and two daughters, along with another student, to tour Lake Tahoe. She enjoyed herself and thought he was “an excellent dad.” That night at the lab, though, she saw a different side to him. Around midnight, she said, he summoned her to his office and locked the door.

According to Fan, Jiang pulled off her jeans, laid her on his desk, and raped her while she tried to push him off. When it was over, he drove her home, dropped her in front of her house, and drove off, she said, before she’d reached her front door.

Fan’s allegations, which Jiang has vehemently contested, are spelled out in dozens of pages of court documents and two investigative reports shared with The Chronicle.

Jiang contends that it was Fan who first “seduced” him and that a sporadic affair that spanned more than 13 years was at all times a “consensual relationship between two adults.” After he tried to break it off, in 2019, he told investigators, Fan retaliated by harassing him and his wife with hundreds of hostile emails, some threatening to kill them.

Jiang and Fan are scheduled to face off next week as they try to persuade a hearing officer hired by the University of Nevada’s flagship campus that their account of their tumultuous relationship is more believable. She filed a Title IX complaint against him in 2021 that’s just now being heard, alongside a counter-complaint he filed a few months later.

At the heart of Fan’s complaint is the university’s consensual-relationship policy, which “prohibits romantic or sexual relations in circumstances in which one of the individuals is in a position of direct professional power over the other.” That includes cases in which a faculty member has authority to assign grades or a supervisor evaluates an employee’s work performance, promotion, or tenure. It also includes faculty members who serve on thesis or dissertation committees. Jiang was Fan’s academic adviser and boss when she arrived at Reno in 2006; later her mentor when she joined the mechanical-engineering faculty alongside him in 2015.

Fan, who is now a tenured associate professor at Reno, said that since she arrived in 2006, the university has failed to protect her from Jiang. In December 2022, she filed a $20-million lawsuit against the Nevada System of Higher Education, representing the university. It accused the university of allowing Jiang, now a tenured full professor in the department, to take advantage of her tenuous status as a foreign scholar by trapping her in a yearslong sexual relationship that she characterized as “sex slavery.” (On November 8, she voluntarily withdrew that lawsuit, saying that she wanted to give her new lawyer, Theresa Mains, time to catch up on the case, which the university had moved to dismiss. Fan said it’s being revised and will be reintroduced, but Mains did not return calls to confirm or comment.)

Fan and Jiang’s dueling complaints illustrate how sexual-misconduct accusations can be complicated to sort out, and raise a host of questions: Can an intimate relationship be consensual when one person has professional power over the other? Why does it often take colleges so long to intervene when abuse accusations arise? Moreover, Fan’s complaint conveys the alarming suggestion that foreign scholars are uniquely vulnerable to abuse because their visa status offers such a precarious foothold in the United States.

Their intimate relationship, which Jiang has acknowledged, began after he returned from a sabbatical in Germany in the spring of 2006. The second time they had sex, Fan said, was a week after the first, when she acquiesced to his third proposal to look at the moon with him. She said they sat outside for a short time, and then he directed her to the back seat of his car, where they had sex.

From that point on, they had sex once or twice a week, Fan said, in his office, lab, or home, as well as at a local casino, where she would book rooms at her expense. She would later tell investigators she was worried that Jiang would fire her from her research-assistant job and that she’d be deported if she didn’t continue having sex with him. She further contended that she cried and told him no in Chinese during several of the encounters, but that he ignored her.

Her emotions were a jumbled mess, Fan has acknowledged. “When the parties engaged in sexual intercourse in October 2006, the complainant did not cry because she thought the respondent ‘fell in love with her,’” according to what Fan told an interviewer for an investigation report prepared for the university. It wasn’t until 2007 “that she realized respondent only used her for sex and did not love her.”

In an emailed response to a series of questions from The Chronicle, Jiang called Fan’s reports of crying and saying no, “a lie, plain and simple. The only time our relationship was ever non-consensual was when I tried to break it off,” he wrote, “and she made her many threats to me to force me to remain in a relationship I no longer wanted to be in.” He said he never threatened, as she had alleged, to have Fan deported or punished.

“The first sexual intercourse occurred in my office at night in October 2006,” Jiang wrote in response to a civil lawsuit Fan filed against him and his wife, Wei Wu. The relationship with Fan “continued through the spring of 2008.” It ended for a time after she graduated in 2008, then resumed intermittently between 2010 and 2015, he said, when she was pursuing her doctorate in Georgia and would occasionally meet up with him. During that period, there was no professional or academic relationship between them, Jiang pointed out.

Nevertheless, to her supporters, most of whom are students, Fan is the latest victim of sexual misconduct to be denied justice by unresponsive administrators. Their persistent protests have accelerated changes the university insists were underway to overhaul the Title IX office and the way it responds to complaints.

TNG Investigation of Jiang’s Complaint

Read the final investigative report (PDF)

Zach Hooker, an undergraduate environmental-engineering student, was among those who urged the student government to pass a resolution last month supporting Fan and calling on the university to fire those found responsible for sexual harassment. Without a more concrete commitment to Title IX reforms, “There’s no way we can trust that the university is taking this seriously, especially with Professor Jiang still not terminated,” he told the student body, which approved the measure. He added that he’s “disgusted that the university has allowed this level of corruption to occur for years, and I’m disgusted with their severe lack of support for survivors.”

TNG Investigation of Fan’s Complaint

Read the final investigative report (PDF)

“Why are we making this so complicated?” another engineering student, Fiorina Chau, asked. “Professor Jiang confessed to having a sexual relationship with a student. This alone provides grounds for discipline, but instead it looks like UNR is protecting him.”

Fan declined to speak on the record with The Chronicle, but she answered questions by email and shared numerous court filings and investigative documents that provide a detailed account of how each of them viewed their fraught relationship. Those include the final investigative reports prepared by TNG, a national consulting and risk-management firm the university hired to help with its backlog of Title IX cases and to recommend changes in how the university handles such complaints. Jiang answered emailed questions relayed by a public-relations specialist he hired.

In addition to the Title IX cases they’ve filed against each other, Fan has filed two lawsuits — one against Jiang and his wife and the other against the university. Jiang also received a temporary protection order against Fan.

The following account has been pieced together from the court documents, investigative files, emails, and interviews with students, faculty members, and administrators with an interest in the case, as well as with outside Title IX experts.

Growing up in China, Fan had dreamed of studying in the United States but thought she couldn’t afford it. Then her undergraduate adviser at Shanghai Jiao Tong University told her that a professor from America would be stopping by the lab where she and her classmates were wrapping up their studies in engineering mechanics.

Her undergraduate adviser, who had worked as a postdoc for Jiang at Nevada, presented it as an opportunity to land a paid research position with an established professor who could oversee her progress on a master’s degree. Fan’s parents, factory workers whose own educations were cut short after elementary school during China’s Cultural Revolution, earned about $300 a month. A paid position was her only chance for continuing her studies overseas.

She recalls being nervous, but excited, when she showed Jiang her work. Six months later, she was on a plane to Reno.

Jiang had been teaching at Reno since 1996. In 1987, while teaching at China’s Zhejiang University of Technology, he met his future wife, Wei Wu, who was taking an undergraduate class from him. They became involved, he said, after he began his doctoral studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the mechanical behavior of materials and structures.

Fan’s lawsuit paints an unflattering portrait of Jiang. She describes him as a demanding boss who spoke harshly to students, questioned their intellectual capabilities, and required them to work long hours, sometimes overnight, tending to machines and experiments that continued 24 hours a day. Her lawsuit against the university contends that other foreign students were overworked and exploited, sometimes expected to babysit his two children or do lawn work without pay. Jiang has denied those accusations.

After they first had sex in his office, Fan said she was worried about what would happen to her. She told the Title IX office, in a statement she shared with The Chronicle, that she called Jiang as soon as she got home and asked him, “What will you do to me?” and “What happened to us?” She said he replied that he would never rape anyone.

Fan said she hadn’t used that term with him, but she felt that was what had happened to her. She also said, in her lawsuit against the university, that Jiang threatened to report her to the police for sexual harassment and seductive behavior. He told a TNG investigator that it was she who initiated the sexual activity.

Fan said she didn’t know where to turn, or even whether to report what had happened. She said she hadn’t received any training on sexual harassment or American workplace customs. Older labmates, she said, advised her to firmly say no to Jiang but not to make him angry.

Fan told investigators that she had no relatives or friends nearby and that she relied on Jiang as her sole close contact in the U.S. She also listed him as her emergency contact when she traveled. The TNG report suggested that the hearing officer should consider Fan’s isolation and determine whether Jiang “leveraged this to his sexual advantage.”

Fan’s lawsuit against the university accused it of failing to adequately train faculty members to avoid abuse and of especially neglecting to protect international scholars who were particularly vulnerable because of their tenuous status in the United States and their lack of familiarity with American laws.

Many foreign graduate students like Fan, studying on F-1 student visas, rely on their stipends for their livelihood and fear getting kicked out of their programs and sent back to their home countries. Those on temporary work visas — her status early in her teaching career at Reno — must leave within 60 days if their program ends.

Foreign graduate students face other obstacles in identifying abusive and exploitative behavior, the lawsuit alleged, “because in their own countries being verbally, physically, and sexually abused by teachers and advisers and running personal errands for advisers were not uncommon and no related statutes or policies existed.” Reporting rapes, “especially perpetrated by married male seniors, was extremely stigmatized across east Asian cultures,” the lawsuit added.

A Title IX expert who has worked extensively with foreign students and scholars said Fan’s case resonates with what she’s hearing on other campuses. “You’re new to a country, you don’t have a support network, and your family isn’t here,” said Adrienne Mathis, executive program director of Title IX Solutions, a service that advises colleges on how to improve their policies and practices for confronting sexual harassment. “There’s not necessarily a trust or familiarity with law enforcement. You’re kind of like a fish out of water.” Students might worry they’ll be punished or deported just for reporting, she added. “For so many students, this is the culmination for their family, coming to the United States to study.”

After graduating from Nevada in 2008 with her master’s degree, Fan didn’t file a complaint. She took a job as an engineer with a pipe manufacturer in South Carolina. In 2015 she completed a Ph.D. at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was then hired, on a temporary worker visa, as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Nevada at Reno. A judge and an investigator would later question her decision to return to Reno to work with Jiang after the abuse she said she suffered there. According to her lawsuit against the university, Jiang encouraged her to apply and recommended her for the job. It’s unclear whether she had other offers.

She told investigators that she considered Reno, her first stop in the U.S., her home. And because she was returning as a fellow faculty member, she felt she wouldn’t have to worry as much about Jiang having control over her. But once again, Jiang ended up in a position to influence her career. All assistant professors in the department are required to have a senior mentor, and Jiang was assigned to Fan. He said it was at Fan’s request, an indication, he added, that she didn’t see him as a threat. Fan did not respond when asked to confirm whether she’d requested Jiang as a mentor.

From 2015 to 2019, Fan and Jiang resumed what Jiang referred to, in comments to investigators, as an “on-again-off-again” sexual relationship that had continued intermittently while she was working and studying outside the state. Now that she was a faculty member, Fan said, it felt more consensual than when she was a student. Still, in her lawsuit, she said Jiang threatened to block her tenure bid if she didn’t please him. Jiang told The Chronicle that he didn’t have that power and that he’d made no such threat.

As time went on, Fan began to resent feeling that Jiang was treating her “like a hooker” rather than someone he might eventually leave his wife for. She told the TNG investigator she wanted more from the relationship and felt Jiang was being rude and disrespectful in their “quick” encounters. She said she delivered an ultimatum: Either he divorce his wife and formally date her “or there would be no more sexual intercourse.” She also threatened to tell his wife about the relationship.

The TNG investigation report describes this as one of the most confounding aspects of the case: Fan “may have threatened or coerced him into continuing the relationship that she alleges was coercive to her.”

Her feelings, Fan conceded, were complicated, which she attributed, in her lawsuit against the university, to a form of “sexual Stockholm syndrome” or “trauma bonding,” an emotional attachment a victim feels with an abuser, especially when there’s an imbalance of power and the abuser is alternately complimentary and berating. Before and after sex, Jiang would sometimes tell her she was smart, she said. At other times, he was harshly critical of her work.

Jiang said that he told Fan in 2019 that their relationship was over and that she threatened to disclose it to his wife if he ended it. He also alleged, in a statement to investigators, that Fan used a short video clip of them having sex as blackmail to try to keep him from ending their relationship.

In April 2020, Fan’s green-card application was approved, cementing her status as a permanent resident of the U.S. Her position more secure, she sent a text message to Jiang’s wife, Wei Wu, informing her that her husband had been cheating on her since 2006. Fan said Wu threatened to contact a friend on Fan’s tenure committee to derail her prospects. Jiang denied his wife ever said that.

That May, Wu went to Fan’s apartment and knocked on her door, Fan’s lawsuit stated. Fan, who refused to answer, said in the suit that Wu made her feel threatened. According to Jiang, Fan then sent both of them a series of menacing emails and text messages. In July, one day after Jiang’s lawyer sent Fan a cease-and-desist letter, Jiang’s office was vandalized. A computer, monitor, and printer were smashed to the floor. Jiang suspected Fan, who was working late and had access to his office. She denied responsibility, but Jiang, feeling unsafe, moved his office to a different building, he said in an emailed statement to The Chronicle.

The threats, he said, continued. “On multiple occasions, Dr. Fan has threatened to kill me and my family,” Jiang wrote to The Chronicle. “This is not only a verbal threat. She purchased two handguns around November 2020 and actively practiced shooting. On her November 29, 2020, post on huaren.us (a Chinese social-media site), she announced that she ‘went to the store to buy a Glock 48.’ The time of the gun purchase was consistent with her death threats.”

Fan has acknowledged buying a handgun for protection, but she has denied threatening to use it against Jiang or his family. She said Jiang fabricated some of the hundreds of threatening messages that she’s been accused of sending him and Wu and mistranslated others. Some of them threatened to harm his family, and others apologized for retaliating because Jiang had chosen his wife over her. Jiang told The Chronicle that the messages, which were in Chinese, were carefully and accurately translated, and he accused Fan of deleting many of hers to hide evidence of her threats.

Despite all the turmoil, in December 2020, Fan learned that she was being recommended for tenure. The following month, she filed a Title IX complaint, accusing Jiang of rape and sexual harassment. She said that he violated a university policy that prohibits romantic or sexual relations when one person has a position of direct professional power over the other. She also said that he coerced her into continuing the relationship by threatening her career.

Four months later, Jiang filed a Title IX counter-complaint against Fan, accusing her of sexual harassment, dating violence, and stalking, starting in April 2020.

In October 2021, Fan turned to the courts, filing a civil lawsuit against Jiang that alleged he sexually abused her. She also accused him of sexual trafficking and forced labor in bringing her from China to have sex with him and occasionally babysit his children without pay. The lawsuit also named Wu for allegedly threatening Fan by knocking on the door of her apartment and sending angry messages.

In September of this year, a federal district court judge granted Jiang’s motion to dismiss the complaint. He found that “Jiang’s alleged conduct, while morally reprehensible, does not meet the legal standard for forced labor and sex trafficking.”

The judge also found that Wu’s alleged conduct “was nowhere near the standard for extreme and outrageous.” Given the context, her actions were “quite reasonable,” the order said. “Fan texted Wu out of the blue informing her that her husband, Jiang, had an affair with Fan for over 10 years. Wu seeking answers is what any reasonable person would do.”

Meanwhile, turnover and backlogs in the university’s Title IX office meant that Fan’s complaint was stalled.

Documents Fan shared with The Chronicle outline some of the issues and challenges Title IX investigators face in sorting through the wildly conflicting accounts of how the relationship between Fan and Jiang played out over more than a decade.

In two separate reports, one responding to Fan’s complaints, the other, Jiang’s, TNG investigators summarized each of the cases, and considered applicable university policies that the ultimate decision makers should consider.

“The power dynamics between the parties during this time frame is a fact that is not in dispute,” one TNG report states. “The respondent was a faculty member with direct supervision over the complainant, a graduate student.”

But what to make of the fact that Fan returned, willingly, to work with Jiang in 2015, didn’t file a complaint against him until 2021, and allegedly threatened to hurt him if he ended their relationship?

The TNG report advises, “The decision-maker may want to explore whether the parties had an ambiguous pattern of consent, established by their long-term actions, what role traditional Chinese culture may play in the expectations of the parties, if any, and whether credence should be given to what complainant almost describes as a 14-year-long version of some kind of sexual Stockholm syndrome.”

Asked whether he had any regrets about getting intimately involved with an advisee, Jiang told The Chronicle only that he regretted cheating on his wife. “I certainly regret involving myself with a woman like Dr. Fan who turned out to be so willing and able to defame me and threaten my life, career, and family,” he added. “But when we first began our relationship, she was smart, sophisticated, ambitious, and knowledgeable about immigration rules. She was an adult woman, not a child. This picture she paints of herself as a child-like naïf when we met is simply not true.”

In his response to Fan’s Title IX case, Jiang said that her success at winning tenure amid the turmoil surrounding their relationship proves that he showed “professional integrity” in not trying to prejudice the case.

Meanwhile, Jiang wrote, Fan “has actively attempted (and continues to attempt through the filing of this false report) to destroy my life and career. Her allegations have the potential to get me unjustly fired, deported, and/or criminally prosecuted by state and/or federal authorities. My 30-year marriage is now ending (although I certainly acknowledge my own primary responsibility with respect to that). Based on her threats to me and my family, coupled with her firearm purchases and vandalism of my office, I now feel unsafe at all times, and in real fear for my safety and more importantly, the safety of my wife and daughters.”

Safety is also a pressing concern of the students rallying to Fan’s defense. On October 12, protesters crashed a groundbreaking ceremony for a new business-school building to demonstrate their frustration over the university’s handling of sexual-assault complaints. The following day, Brian Sandoval, the university’s president, released a statement pledging to improve the visibility, awareness, and effectiveness of the Title IX office.

“Soon after I arrived on campus, I became aware the Title IX office was under-resourced and understaffed,” he told The Chronicle in an interview. “Historically, when complaints are filed with the office, it takes way too long to process them.” The Fan and Jiang cases were filed in 2021. Last year, the Nevada Faculty Alliance issued a letter to Sandoval complaining of chronic understaffing in the Title IX office that had resulted in some cases taking up to three years to resolve.

Sandoval, a former federal judge who was the state’s Republican governor from 2011 to 2019, said he is committed to increasing from three to five the number of investigators in the office and assuring complainants that they’ll hear back within 72 hours on how their cases will move ahead. A new Title IX director, Zeva Edmondson, started over the summer. Last month, the university also unveiled a public dashboard to track and monitor ongoing Title IX cases. “I’ve made it a personal priority that this will be an office that works for everyone,” Sandoval said. That includes embedding more robust Title IX training into the graduate-orientation programs and “making sure not only international students but all students are familiar with the Title IX process.”

In December, her Title IX case stalled, Fan and her lawyer at the time, Ryan J. Cann, took on a more powerful adversary, filing a 49-page lawsuit against the university’s Board of Regents. The original suit, which Fan said is being revised, contended that Fan had become a sex slave, trafficked from China and then from Georgia to satisfy a faculty member the university relied on to bring in research funds.

The university moved to have that case dismissed, citing Cann’s failure to file documents on time and properly serve the university. Cann, who has been penalized for missing deadlines in previous cases, did not return a call seeking comment on accusations by Fan’s supporters that he provided poor legal advice, saddling her with tens of thousands of dollars in legal debt. The judge in her civil case ordered her and Cann to pay Jiang’s legal fees.

Asked what he would say to student protesters who refer to him as a “violent rapist” and demand that he be fired, Jiang responded: “There is a great deal of talk about ‘justice’ in protests like that. But while the students no doubt mean well, justice can never be obtained from a mob.” He added that it requires “careful consideration of the facts, and an understanding that not every accusation is true.”

Jiang added that he’s disappointed “that this small contingent of students is being used by a woman intent on punishing me for ending our relationship. They have been told terrible lies about me. As the truth comes out, I hope these students learn a valuable lesson about the importance of due process, of not jumping to conclusions, and thinking critically about people who may have deeper agendas.”

Two members of a group that calls itself Stand With Feifei said they’ve heard all they need to. “I’m not open to listening to his side because at the end of the day, there is no ‘both sides,’” said Evan Robinson, a sophomore who serves as advocacy director of the Associated Students of the University of Nevada. “He violated university policy. He admitted that they had a sexual relationship. That’s grounds enough for termination.”

If Jiang isn’t fired, “What message does this send to the university?” Robinson said, emphasizing that he was speaking as an individual, not as a representative of the student government. “If you are the perpetrator, we will protect you. If you are a victim, we will silence you.”

On October 17, the university’s student newspaper, The Nevada Sagebrush, reported that Fan had closed a GoFundMe campaign that had been started to help pay more than $100,000 in legal fees she owed. She told supporters she was refunding their donations, posting a cryptic message: “I appreciate your support, but I’ve deeply disappointed myself. I am unable make any better changes; instead, I’m just dragging myself into an abyss, deeper and deeper, being severely tormented by reality. I hope that one day, when I’m strong, I can share all my painful struggles with you.”

Starting Monday, in proceedings that could last through Wednesday, Fan and Jiang will each try to persuade a hearing officer that they’ve been wronged by a colleague who continues to work alongside them in the same academic department. In his last correspondence with her, in 2020, Jiang said he warned Fan to back off. Physically, though, they’re already miles apart. Fan was on sabbatical last year and hasn’t been teaching this semester; Jiang has moved to a different office. But within the department, both of their reputations have taken a hit. They are eager to clear their names.