Under normal circumstances, Erin O’Callaghan would have had no problem taking a required course on violence and victimization at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Then she found out Paul A. Schewe would be teaching it.
“I was not about to take a class about victimization with someone who sexually assaulted me,” O’Callaghan, a criminology graduate student who’s focusing her dissertation on rape survivors’ experiences, said in an interview with The Chronicle.
Being a sexual-assault-prevention researcher, I knew that there was no safer place that she could be.
We’re sorry, something went wrong.
We are unable to fully display the content of this page.
This is most likely due to a content blocker on your computer or network.
Please allow access to our site and then refresh this page.
You may then be asked to log in, create an account (if you don't already have one),
or subscribe.
If you continue to experience issues, please contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com.
Under normal circumstances, Erin O’Callaghan would have had no problem taking a required course on violence and victimization at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Then she found out Paul A. Schewe would be teaching it.
“I was not about to take a class about victimization with someone who sexually assaulted me,” O’Callaghan, a criminology graduate student who’s focusing her dissertation on rape survivors’ experiences, said in an interview with The Chronicle.
Being a sexual-assault-prevention researcher, I knew that there was no safer place that she could be.
O’Callaghan has accused Schewe, an associate professor of criminology whose research specialty is sexual-assault prevention, of assaulting her in November 2017. She did not file a complaint with the university’s Title IX office until the following August, however, after she realized he’d be teaching the course.
ADVERTISEMENT
Schewe has vigorously denied that claim, and Title IX investigators exonerated him after concluding that O’Callaghan’s most serious accusation — that Schewe undressed her and started to perform oral sex on her when she was too drunk to consent — could not be substantiated.
Now O’Callaghan is pursuing the case through another avenue. She and five current and former graduate students joined in September to file a federal civil-rights and Title IX lawsuit against Schewe, the university, and its Title IX investigators. The women are among the many students who, buoyed by the #MeToo movement, have accused their professors of misconduct in recent years. But for the women in this case, as criminology scholars, joining the discourse on exposing once-overlooked misbehavior is more than personal.
Schewe, who is in his early 50s and has worked in the field for more than a quarter-century, regards the implications of the movement differently now that he stands accused.
“I celebrated #MeToo. I thought, ‘Yes! Victims are finally being believed and men are being called out for their shitty behavior. This is fantastic,’” he said in an interview last week with The Chronicle. But the side effect of that, he said, “is that people are now guilty by accusation.”
He said the allegations in the lawsuit are drowning out his side of the story.
ADVERTISEMENT
“The only narrative out there is the one that Erin and the ‘hateful six’ are sharing,” Schewe said. “All Erin has to do is say, ‘Dr. Schewe raped me,’ and everyone will immediately believe her.” He emailed later to ask The Chronicle not to use “hateful six” in this article, saying that it was a term he and his partner privately use to refer to the plaintiffs.
In maintaining his innocence to the investigators who questioned him about O’Callaghan’s Title IX complaint, Schewe used a vocabulary familiar to scholars in the field of sexual-violence prevention, according to documents obtained by The Chronicle.
‘I Would Believe Her’
He told Title IX investigators that he has devoted his life “to preventing violence against women” and is inclined ”to believe survivors” — even as he dismissed O’Callaghan’s accusations as “something she largely created in her own mind.”
ADVERTISEMENT
But in his interview with The Chronicle, Schewe said: “If she would have told me that a professor got her drunk and took advantage of her, I would give her support. I would believe her.”
It’s not particularly surprising that the university’s Title IX investigation determined that Schewe’s conduct — based on a preponderance of the evidence — did “not constitute a violation of the Sexual Misconduct Policy.” Information O’Callaghan requested from the university shows that the campus’s Office for Access and Equity, which oversees Title IX cases, has received 16 sexual-misconduct complaints against faculty and staff members since the 2014-15 academic year. Of those, four were investigated and one resulted in a finding of misconduct. The university declined to confirm those figures.
The graduate students’ lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, echoes another pending federal case, filed last year by a female employee against the university. In that case, the Office for Access and Equity found no evidence to support claims that an official of the campus-run Cure Violence program had repeatedly demanded oral sex from the plaintiff, the Chicago Tribune reported.
The plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit against Schewe each filed separate Title IX complaints against him in August 2018. University investigators pursued only one of the cases besides O’Callaghan’s — that of Katherine Lorenz, a former graduate student who is today an assistant professor at California State University at Northridge. As with O’Callaghan’s complaint, the investigators concluded Lorenz’s months later with a finding that, based on a preponderance of the evidence, Schewe’s actions did not violate the university’s misconduct policy.
Nonetheless, he has been on administrative leave since the start of the investigation, earning an annual salary of $113,410, according to payroll records. The university declined to elaborate on why Schewe remains on leave.
ADVERTISEMENT
“While sexual-misconduct investigations do not always result in a complainant’s desired outcome, we take all reports seriously and are committed to a fair and equitable process for everyone involved,” Sherri McGinnis Gonzalez, a university spokeswoman, said in an email. “The university has invited the current and former graduate students who reported concerns to speak with us about their experiences and to collaborate with us to help address their concerns.”
‘Power Disparity’
The plaintiffs’ federal lawsuit largely repeats the accusations put forth in their individual Title IX complaints, a number of which involve incidents alleged to have occurred on or near Schewe’s boat.
“All of the plaintiffs were on the receiving end of harassment, inappropriate sexual conduct, and in the case of Plaintiff O’Callaghan, sexual assault,” the lawsuit asserts. “All of them suffered through the hostile environment that was created” by Schewe’s presence in the university’s department of criminology, law, and justice, where he served as director of graduate studies.
The suit maintains that as graduate students, the women relied on Schewe “for funding and access to professional opportunities.” The “power disparity between graduate students and professors,” the suit argues, allows people like Schewe “to engage in inappropriate sexual behavior directed at vulnerable graduate students with minimal fear of consequence.”
The suit also accuses the university’s Title IX officials of “failing to conduct a professional and ethical investigation” of the women’s complaints.
ADVERTISEMENT
Among their specific accusations against Schewe:
Lorenz, the Cal State-Northridge professor, says Schewe exposed her to images of “naked, or almost naked, women” on two occasions during the fall 2017 semester. That same semester, at her dissertation-defense party, where several current graduate students were present, Lorenz says Schewe told her partner, “there are so many women here I want to fuck.”
Anne Kirkner, a former graduate student who now is a postdoctoral associate at Rutgers University, says she was with Lorenz on Schewe’s boat in August 2016 when he offered them alcohol and cocaine, while describing the purpose of the outing as an opportunity to “get away from my wife.”
Marlee Fry, a new graduate student in 2016 who hadn’t yet met Schewe, says that when she and two other grad students accepted an invitation to join him on his boat, she arrived to find him and two of his male friends seemingly intoxicated. The men commented on her physical appearance, “including how sexually desirable they found her to be,” the lawsuit alleges, and one of the men “placed one of his fingers into a hole” in Fry’s jeans while laughing. She says that she told him to stop and that Schewe did not intervene.
Sarah Malone, another graduate student, attended a party on a dock near Schewe’s boat in September 2017. She says he told a male grad student in her presence, “I only fuck my students after they’ve defended” their dissertations.
In his statement to the Title IX investigators and his interview with The Chronicle, Schewe dismissed many of the women’s claims outright. No, he did not offer cocaine to Kirkner and Lorenz, nor did he make the remark Lorenz’s partner attributed to him after her dissertation defense. While it’s possible Lorenz saw a nude woman on his desktop-computer screen, such images are common in work on rape prevention and teaching safe sex.
Yes, he unintentionally texted Lorenz an image of two women in skimpy bikinis, not nude, who were at a bachelor party on a neighboring boat, but he immediately apologized. Lorenz — who was two months away from receiving her Ph.D. and had listed Schewe as a job reference — texted back, “Lol sorry I’m missing out on what looks to be such a good time!”
On Fry’s description of her visit to his boat, Schewe was foggier, saying in his interview with The Chronicle that while he “didn’t see anyone touching her,” he is “not saying it didn’t happen.”
“I give credit to four of the girls,” Schewe told The Chronicle. Kirkner, Malone, Fry, and Veronica Shepp — another plaintiff — “did not utter a single lie” in their allegations against him, he said.
ADVERTISEMENT
Yet those four women all signed on to the federal lawsuit, with O’Callaghan’s explosive sexual-assault accusation at its center.
‘Shook My Worldview’
It was November 2, 2017, and several criminology grad students and two professors met for happy hour at the Beer Bistro, a neighborhood bar a mile from campus in Chicago’s West Loop. Martinis were $5 that night, and O’Callaghan, who was new that fall to the department’s Ph.D. program, had five or six drinks, according to the lawsuit. Schewe invited her and the remaining members of the group, including the plaintiffs Malone and Shepp, back to his apartment.
The lawsuit alleges that Schewe sat on a couch close to O’Callaghan, who had been working as his paid research assistant, put his arm around her, and rubbed her back.
Schewe remembers things differently. O’Callaghan “wouldn’t leave me alone the entire evening,” he said, speculating that “she was trying to hit on me.”
ADVERTISEMENT
The lawsuit states that O’Callaghan, who had consumed one or two drinks at Schewe’s apartment, fell asleep on the couch. At some point the rest of the guests went on a late-night food run, leaving O’Callaghan and Schewe alone.
Schewe, intoxicated and “extremely tired,” said he lay down on his bed. He said that O’Callaghan followed him into the bedroom, took off her jeans, and climbed into bed with him.
“Nothing happened, of course,” Schewe told The Chronicle. “Being a sexual-assault-prevention researcher, I knew that there was no safer place that she could be.”
But Malone alleges in the lawsuit that when the group returned, Schewe was near the bedroom, in his underwear and a T-shirt, and O’Callaghan was nowhere to be seen. Malone told the Title IX investigators that she became uncomfortable and left, as the others eventually did except for a male grad student who slept on Schewe’s lounge chair and left early the next morning.
O’Callaghan says in the lawsuit that while she does not recall how she ended up in Schewe’s bed, she remembers that at some point, he “entered the bedroom, laughed, pulled her pants and underwear down, and performed oral sex on her, all without consent.” That’s when O’Callaghan says she blacked out.
ADVERTISEMENT
“That completely shook my worldview,“ she told The Chronicle, recalling her astonishment that “this person who claims to do violence-against-women work just assaulted me.”
Schewe denies that account in the Title IX investigation report, which states that after the other guests left, he removed his jeans and climbed back into bed with O’Callaghan. “They spooned, and she pressed her hips into his hips.” He “may have inadvertently touched her breasts,” but at one point she tensed up. He “took this as indication that she was not interested, and rolled over and fell asleep,” the document reads.
O’Callaghan hurried out the door after waking the next morning. Schewe wrote her an email two days later, expressing confusion about what had transpired between them: “I feel like I should have been more of an adult that night. That I should have shown more restraint. Talked more and assumed less.” She didn’t reply.
‘Nobody Is Safe in the #MeToo Era’
When O’Callaghan moved to Chicago, in the fall of 2017, to start her doctoral program, filing a Title IX complaint, much less a federal lawsuit, against a professor wasn’t in her plans.
She was still processing another incident: A trusted undergraduate classmate, she said, had assaulted her during her senior year at the University of Cincinnati. She reported it to the Title IX office there after graduating. But since neither party was still enrolled, the university deemed the case outside its jurisdiction and did not issue a finding, according to a document obtained by The Chronicle.
ADVERTISEMENT
O’Callaghan saw graduate school as an opportunity to work through that disappointment. Her experience solidified her decision to become a sexual-violence scholar, she said, and at Illinois-Chicago she began seeing a campus therapist.
The experience at Schewe’s apartment, she says in the lawsuit, plunged her “into a deep depression.” Yet she continued working as his research assistant because “It was money — and professional experience — I couldn’t say no to.” Besides, her academic research had exposed her to stories about women who spoke up about sexual misconduct by their professors. She knew it didn’t usually “go well for them.”
But by the spring of 2018, she’d begun sharing her accusations against Schewe with other graduate students. Some responded with stories of their own and, according to the women’s subsequent lawsuit, “a pattern emerged.”
Based on their individual experiences, the six women filed separate Title IX complaints against Schewe in August 2018, right before the fall semester started. O’Callaghan’s and Lorenz’s cases were investigated simultaneously. The other four graduate students served as “witnesses.”
O’Callaghan knew from her own research and personal experience that reporting the alleged assault to the Title IX office “would be difficult,” but “it was worse than I could have possibly imagined,” she said.
ADVERTISEMENT
“They put a lot of blame on my behavior,” she said, referring to what she says were investigators’ repeated questions about her alcohol consumption and other actions in the days and months after the alleged assault.
Schewe’s exoneration after the investigations of both O’Callaghan’s and Lorenz’s complaints in part pushed the six women to file the federal lawsuit in September.
“At this point, we don’t trust the university to respond appropriately. We’ve given them every opportunity. We all came forward, we all reported like we were supposed to,” O’Callaghan said. “We are all out of options.”
Schewe said he can only surmise that the other five women filed the lawsuit alongside O’Callaghan because “they certainly believe Erin and they want to support her.”
“They’ve devoted their lives to supporting victims of sexual assault, as I have,” he said. “They’re thinking this is the way to do it.”
ADVERTISEMENT
The #MeToo movement has had a profound professional effect on scholars who work in sexual-assault prevention. Now O’Callaghan and Schewe are experiencing it more personally.
To Schewe, his ordeal is evidence that it’s gone too far.
“Maybe it’s a warning to everybody that nobody is safe in the #MeToo era,” Schewe said. And his takeaway? “That guys should stay away from any woman because they have the potential to destroy their life with a couple of words with no consequence to them.”
To O’Callaghan, the “difficult” past two years prove #MeToo’s spotlight on sexual misconduct isn’t shining brightly enough.
What the experience has illuminated for her, however, is the limits of the formal systems for investigation and accountability like the Title IX process. That, she said, leaves her “upset and angry.”