The Harassment Case That Has Berkeley at a Boil

Ivonne del Valle said she was considering Joshua Clover as a participant in a forthcoming conference when she sat in on his panel presentation at the University of California at Berkeley in the spring of 2018.

Clover, a professor of English and comparative literature at UC’s Davis campus, studied class struggles and had written a book about riots and worker revolts. Del Valle’s colleague thought he’d be a good fit for an event they were planning on the student and worker uprisings of 1968 in Mexico and elsewhere around the world.

After the presentation, del Valle, a tenured associate professor of colonial studies in Berkeley’s department of Spanish and Portuguese, approached him and suggested they get together to talk about the conference. Clover agreed, and two weeks later, they met at the Prizefighter Bar at the northwest tip of Oakland. She had beer; he had wine.

Clover would later tell investigators he felt “uncomfortable with the interaction” with del Valle and ended the conversation early. She began talking as though the meeting were a date, he said, and became “visibly flustered” when he mentioned his partner. Del Valle remembered it differently. She considered it a social meeting with a colleague, she said, and she’d suggested wrapping it up because Clover had said he had a reading group to join afterward.

From there, things went rapidly downhill.

Del Valle, who had been following Clover for a few months on Twitter before they met, thought afterward that he was obliquely insulting a few of her colleagues on the platform without naming them. He was becoming irritated with what he described as “confusing” messages she was sending him privately about how someone was bothering her.

In May, according to investigative reports Clover shared with The Chronicle, del Valle messaged him that he was making her “uncomfortable as hell” — a reference, she said, to how she felt he was disparaging her colleagues. The next day, Clover wrote back: “I will not respond to further communication — Please do not write to me any further.”

Neither could have predicted that five years later, they’d be embroiled in a messy and complicated case, with del Valle banished from campus after being found responsible for stalking and harassment, and Clover reportedly fearing for his safety and moving to a different home. Nor could they envision that Berkeley would find itself facing pressure to reverse its decision from dozens of students, alumni, and faculty members who have rallied in the banished professor’s defense, in protests, marches, and an online campaign.

sites.google.com/view/justice4ivonne

On Saturday, 15 protesters delayed the start of Berkeley’s football game against the University of Southern California by about 15 minutes when they sat down in the middle of the field shortly after the coin toss, wearing “Justice for Ivonne” T-shirts. They were led off the field, at least some of them in handcuffs, and arrested.

The dispute, which has jolted the lives and careers of two scholars highly respected in their fields, began where so many of higher-education’s fiercest fights have been waged, on the platform formerly known as Twitter. There, del Valle became convinced that tweets from Clover’s account, and another one she felt was associated with the professor, were delivering a series of coded — and deeply personal — taunts. By the time the dispute spiraled off the computer screen, del Valle was delivering messages instead in silver spray paint and mashed pineapple.

The events that followed raise difficult questions. Among them: At a time when much of academic culture is lived on social media, where identities can be masked and threats veiled, how does a university respond to a professor’s seemingly far-fetched allegations about what happens there?

The Chronicle has pieced together the following account based on extensive interviews with del Valle, hundreds of pages of documents, including letters, correspondences, and screenshots she shared, along with reports Clover provided from three Title IX investigations. Del Valle’s supporters have also offered testimonies from 48 current and former students, many of whom spoke with The Chronicle, about the professor’s contributions as a mentor and scholar. Efforts to reach Clover’s supporters were less successful, since he hasn’t been speaking publicly about the dispute. The Chronicle reached out to several of his colleagues in the English department at Davis, as well as to a few supporters who weighed in on social media. The only one who responded referred the email to the university’s public-relations office.

When del Valle first approached The Chronicle in late August to urge a reporter to look into her case, she declined to identify the person she accused of hacking her phone and laptop and electronically stalking her. She identified him only as a professor at another University of California campus. The Chronicle later identified him as Joshua Clover.

A tenured professor with appointments in English and comparative literature, Clover is well known in literary circles as a poet, columnist, and political theorist who directs the university’s Marxist Institute for Research. Del Valle is also well known in her field, as an expert in colonial Latin American studies and as a mentor to students who, like herself, are immigrants and the first in their families to attend college.

UC-Berkeley’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination conducted three separate Title IX investigations on the case — in 2019, 2021, and 2022. All found that she had either harassed Clover or violated orders not to contact him. Del Valle is on paid administrative leave, banned from teaching, advising, and entering nonpublic parts of the campus. Clover told The Chronicle that Berkeley’s interim Title IX officer has said Clover is not prohibited from sharing the reports from those investigations. He confirmed that he was the complainant but declined to comment further for this article.

In an email to a handful of del Valle’s supporters, he wrote that the charges included “multiple instances of stalking, sexual harassment, retaliation, and violation of no-contact directives directed against me, my family, and my students; many many charges across many many years.”

Del Valle said that, to the contrary, she’s the victim of sexual harassment by Clover. None of the investigations found evidence that Clover had stalked or harassed del Valle. She contends that’s because the university never gave her complaints the attention they did Clover’s, or fulfilled her request to perform a forensic evaluation of her phone and laptop to see if they’d been hacked.

That her university is punishing her as a harasser is “an ironic reversal of the reasons for which Title IX regulations were created,” she wrote in notes she prepared to explain her side of what would become a tangled, yearslong dispute. “Not a single thing I have done or supposedly done is romantic or sexual in nature. The opposite is true. They have all been defense against humiliating abuse and sexual harassment.”

Janet Gilmore, a campus spokeswoman, said privacy policies prevent her from discussing the specific complaints. As a campus, she added, Berkeley is “committed to ensuring that individuals are treated fairly.”

But both Clover and del Valle have accused UC-Berkeley of mishandling the investigations by not responding promptly and consequentially to their complaints.

In the weeks and months after Clover told del Valle to stop contacting him, she said, she became unsettled by what she felt were similarities between what she was communicating on her cellphone and laptop and tweets she attributed to Clover. She would message a friend, she said, and within hours, a post would pop up on Clover’s Twitter feed — or another she was convinced he had access to — that seemed to be indirectly referencing it. She wrote about planning to see a friend named Isis and he posted about a restaurant with the same name, she said. She was searching on the web for a good place for French lessons, and he tweeted, “Moving on to daily vous, daily ils elles.” She had a cellphone conversation with her son about Kendrick Lamar’s song “Humble” and over the next two days, the word “humble” appeared on the two Twitter feeds where she accused Clover of stalking her.

Where many would see coincidences, del Valle saw a pattern of harassment.

By August 2018, she wrote in an email to The Chronicle — after wondering if what she “was seeing was even possible” or whether she “was going crazy” — she concluded that Clover had hacked her phone and was electronically stalking her. “It was not until I kept seeing references not only to what I was doing on my phone (WhatsApp messages, texts, photographs I took, etc.) but also to activity on my computer (web searches, Word documents, etc.) that I realized the extent of the surveillance to which I was being subjected,” del Valle wrote in the summary notes she shared with The Chronicle.

One day she took her phone to the shower to play music. A few hours later, she said, a Twitter account with the handle @toomuchistrue posted, “Are those your two? They’re huge!”

Clover told investigators he had nothing to do with that Twitter account. Its owner is not Clover, but David C. Porter, a writer living in upstate New York. Porter denied that his frequent daily posts (30,700 since 2018, according to his page on the platform now known as X) had anything to do with del Valle, whom he has never met. He also denied posting any references to large breasts. He wrote in an email that he first became aware of del Valle five years ago “when she started replying to random posts of mine with bizarre, cryptic invectives. ... Eventually it became clear to me that she thought my account was just a sockpuppet being run by Prof. Clover, to send seemingly-innocuous coded messages taunting and mocking her.”

Porter wrote that he had nothing to do with Clover either, aside from following him on Twitter in 2018 while a graduate student in cinema studies at New York University. Clover, he said, “was (is) a communist academic, and those are my sort of people.” The only interaction they had, Porter said, was when Clover contacted Porter to apologize “for any stress or anxiety her stalking and harassment might have caused me, and to let me know he was taking steps to counteract it.”

Del Valle said that in the summer of 2018, she messaged the @toomuchistrue account and asked who managed it, and received a reply that said it was Clover. She said Clover, in a private message, confirmed that. Asked whether Clover ever had access to his Twitter account, Porter wrote: “No one but me has ever posted on it. I’m not in the habit of sharing my passwords with others.”

In her many interactions with campus authorities and the police, she’s been trying to convince them otherwise, that Clover’s personal Twitter account and the @toomuchistrue account were simultaneously posting comments that indirectly referred to things she was writing and talking about. When she saw the tweet she described after her shower, she became convinced that Clover had access to her phone’s camera. (The tweet, she said, has since been removed, and she didn’t take screenshots of most of the posts she found disturbing because “I didn’t know the extent of the nightmare this would become.”)

In October 2018, del Valle had her then-husband accompany her to the local police department in Albany, Calif., where she filed a report. She said officers told her cyberstalking cases were tough to investigate and they couldn’t take it on.

She would return to the police department at least a half-dozen times after that, pleading with officers to open a case. She told them that Clover had been taunting and mocking her on Twitter, referring to things she was doing that he could only know if he had hacked her devices.

The police officers, she said, treated her as “delusional.”

2022 Investigative Report

Download the report (PDF)

A spokesman for the police department did not return requests for comment. But the university’s 2022 investigation report quoted an Albany police officer as saying that del Valle had made “outlandish accusations against this UC professor,” including allegations about being hacked: “As I recall, she was saying he was harassing her because she’ll think something, and then he’ll tweet something.”

Del Valle vehemently denied saying that, and she wrote a letter to the police chief calling the officer’s treatment of her “rude, discriminating, and misogynistic.”

At one point, she said, she told the police: “If you don’t do anything, I’m going to have to do it myself. This situation is unsustainable.”

In November, del Valle tweeted to Clover’s partner that he had hacked her electronics and was stalking her.

She said that after she had repeatedly complained to Berkeley’s technology office, staff members switched out her laptop in November 2018. Since her hacking suspicions were first aroused that year, she switched her cellphone and laptop once and her home internet systems three times, a 2019 investigative report said. She also changed her passwords. Still, she said, the Twitter activity she found suspicious continued. She said that she tried to find someone to do a forensic analysis of her devices but that it would have cost $15,000 to $20,000.

In December 2018, according to the investigation and del Valle’s own account to The Chronicle, she entered Clover’s locked apartment building when someone opened the door for her, and she knocked at his door. When he told her through the closed door to leave, she responded that she was going to stay until he explained why he had hacked her. She sat outside his door for at least an hour, reading a book and sliding four handwritten notes under his door. One said: “If you make me leave, it’ll be worse. I’ll keep doing this you can be sure of that.”

Clover, who had a friend escort him past del Valle and out of the building, complained to Berkeley’s harassment-prevention office, which ordered her not to have any contact with him.

“I did things I’m not proud of,” del Valle told The Chronicle. “I’d been asking for help in so many places and no one was paying attention or listening to me. And I’m the one who was turned into the pariah.”

By the time she visited UC-Berkeley’s cybersecurity office in March 2019, “I felt completely violated, stripped of all privacy, and increasingly depressed,” del Valle wrote in her summary account. The person she spoke to there, she said, told her that it was possible, but hard, for someone to essentially create “a sort of replica of her computer.” She said he told her it was also a federal crime.

Matthew Busch for The Chronicle

2019 Investigative Report

Download the report (PDF)

In the 2019 investigative report, a representative from Berkeley’s cybersecurity office said that when del Valle stopped by in March of that year, it was “beyond unclear she’d been hacked by anyone.” He said he advised del Valle to “disconnect from social media for one month” and “seek help.”

Del Valle said she did disconnect several times, but whenever she returned, she was still seeing references to herself. “I can only behave as if the elephant in the room is not there for so long,” she wrote in an email.

Gilmore, the Berkeley spokeswoman, wrote that the university takes hacking concerns seriously, requires all employees to complete cybersecurity training where “they are instructed to alert their manager or campus IT staff if they believe their campus computer has been compromised,” and will fix or replace a computer determined to have been compromised.

Even with the new laptop, del Valle said, she continued to see tweets she attributed to Clover that mirrored what she was writing and talking to friends about. In 2019, she reached out to UC-Davis’s harassment-prevention office, but she was told several months later that there wasn’t enough evidence for a formal investigation of her hacking allegations.

A spokesman for the Davis campus, Bill Kisliuk, said that while privacy restrictions prevent him from discussing the specific complaints, the university deals promptly with reports of inappropriate behavior. “When the allegations reported warrant doing so, the appropriate departments perform comprehensive reviews, gathering statements from parties and witnesses and considering any other evidence brought to their attention,” he added. When university policies are violated, “corrective action” is taken.

The Chronicle reached out to a cybersecurity company, BlueVoyant, to ask whether the scenarios del Valle was describing were possible. Certain types of malicious software or spyware, called keyloggers, can record every keystroke made by the user and send the information back to the individual or group operating it, Austin Berglas, global head of professional services, wrote in an email. Remote-access trojans can take over certain device functions, such as cameras. But Berglas said it was “not very likely” that someone who’d changed devices would continue to be infected “unless the victim has done everything from one account (such as Gmail) and stores everything in the cloud and never changed passwords.”

The more del Valle felt her complaints were being ignored, the more she made her presence known. In June 2019, investigators said, she acknowledged creating Twitter accounts to “denounce” Clover and urged the police to investigate. She impersonated Clover in tweets claiming to be a “dirty old man” and containing sexual references like the ones she alleged Clover regularly made on Twitter.

That spring and summer, del Valle also unleashed a cascade of angry, expletive-laden emails and voice mails at Clover, the investigation said. In one voice mail, the 2019 investigation reported, del Valle said: “You need to still call me and apologize or you’ll see what I’m going to do. I’m not afraid of you. ... I’m not afraid of anything because I am right.” Del Valle keyed Clover’s car, and sprayed messages in silver paint inside the hall of his apartment building and on his front door calling him a “sex addict” and “sick harasser.”

Clover eventually moved out of the building, the report said, at least in part because he feared for his safety.

In the 2019 report from Berkeley’s harassment-prevention office, Clover said that after del Valle’s actions escalated, he started checking outside his doors, parking his car far from home, and leaning on friends for support. “There is a mental toll by being stalked,” he told the investigator. He added that he felt “remarkably unsupported” by UC-Berkeley.

Clover did not call the police when del Valle’s virtual threats turned to vandalism. He has made no secret of his disdain for police officers. In 2019 he took renewed heat for saying on Twitter in 2014 that he was “thankful that every living cop will one day be dead” and in a 2016 interview that cops “need to be killed.” The university’s chancellor, Gary S. May, condemned those remarks but ultimately decided they were protected by the First Amendment. (Clover recently co-wrote an opinion essay in The Chronicle Review opposing colleges’ involvement with police-training academies.)

In November 2019, Berkeley’s harassment-prevention office concluded that it was “more likely than not” — the preponderance-of-evidence standard used in policy-violation cases — that del Valle had engaged in conduct that amounted to stalking, sexual harassment, and retaliation against Clover for his having reported her to the university.

It found “insufficient evidence” that del Valle’s devices had been hacked, and even if they had, it said it wouldn’t justify her actions. The office ordered del Valle to have no contact with the UC-Davis professor. Two months later, Berkeley put her on paid leave for the spring of 2020 semester and banned her from campus. She was told she should have no formal contact with her students.

It probably didn’t help that the Covid pandemic was making everyone feel isolated at that point, sucking many farther down the internet rabbit hole. Twitter was an avenue for connection when — especially for del Valle, who’d been banned from campus — so many other avenues had been blocked. There, in an environment not known for civility or restraint, one could spend hours trying to decipher cryptic conversations and hidden meanings. It was a world where del Valle remained deeply immersed even as she returned to teaching, remotely, for the fall of 2020 and spring of 2021 semesters.

Her academic schedule included three undergraduate classes, a graduate seminar, 13 dissertation committees, and publishing. During that time, she said, she continued to be haunted by Twitter posts that appeared to be referring to her daily activities.

In late 2020 and early 2021, Clover’s mother, Carol J. Clover, an emerita professor at Berkeley, reported that someone had dumped what looked like chunks of rotten pineapple covered with oil at her doorstep and chalked insults about her son on the sidewalk in front of her home. Her security camera captured fuzzy footage of someone investigators later concluded, “more likely than not,” was del Valle.

Del Valle told The Chronicle that she takes responsibility for those actions and that she was punished for them with a nine-month unpaid suspension. And she clarified that the pineapple was from a batch of tepache — a traditional Mexican cider made from fermented pineapple skins. She said she had made it but didn’t like it, then dumped it on Carol Clover’s doorstep because she partially blames her for the discipline that’s been meted out so far.

Carol Clover is described in a Berkeley podcast as “a longtime friend and colleague” of Carol T. Christ, chancellor of the Berkeley campus, and del Valle feels that’s why she’s being punished severely for her escalating actions. (Berkeley officials cited privacy policies in declining to comment on del Valle’s punishment.) Clover’s mother could not be reached for comment, but in the 2021 report, she told Berkeley investigators that she and her neighbors were worried enough about the messages left in their neighborhood that they chipped in to buy another security camera.

Twitter (now X)

In November 2020, feeling increasingly isolated and depressed, del Valle told a few friends, in an email she shared with The Chronicle, that she was thinking about suicide. She expressed her wish “to say goodnight forever.” The next day, the @toomuchistrue Twitter account posted a crude illustration of a woman with her head on a railroad track, saying “half the girls on this website do this every day of the week.” Porter wrote, in an email to The Chronicle, that the illustration had nothing to do with del Valle. He said he was making a joking reference to how, during the pandemic, stir-crazy acquaintances were “equating various forms of taboo violence with mundane everyday experiences.”

Meanwhile, del Valle’s supporters were taking steps to try to get her banishment overturned. In September 2021, a group of her then-current and former students wrote the vice provost at the time, Benjamin E. Hermalin, to express the central role they said del Valle played in the department of Spanish and Portuguese. Describing her as a caring, kind mentor, they wrote that “her presence in the department is fundamental to the success of students currently working with her” on various dissertation projects, as well as securing research grants and internships. In addition to having an “unmatched expertise in Mexico,” they wrote, she connected students and scholars through her interdisciplinary teaching and research.

That same year, at Clover’s request, Berkeley opened a second investigation. In a report issued that November, it concluded that del Valle had violated the university’s 2020 no-contact order on four separate occasions: when she left derogatory messages about Clover near his mother’s house and also at that of a neighbor, sent emails to his peers and colleagues, and created a Twitter account that tried to follow Clover’s students.

“Respondent was forthcoming and credible in stating that her initial and continuing motivation for engaging in the conduct towards complainant was her perception that complainant had hacked her electronic devices and had been surveilling her life since August 2018 and she wanted him to stop,” the report said. At some point, the report stated, her primary motivation “became commingled with her irritation and disbelief” about being reported to the Title IX office when she felt she was the victim.

When she reads the reports of her conduct at that time, del Valle said, “it feels awful.” She described herself as “a very rational person” who has had to work on controlling her temper, which she admits can be “explosive.” “I behaved in a way I never should have,” she said, “but I’ve been punished enough.”

2021 Investigative Report

Download the report (PDF)

In November 2021, del Valle left for Mexico to move in with her mother, whom she partially supports. She said she was offered a four-month teaching position as a visiting associate professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she’d taught before arriving at Berkeley in 2009. That offer, included in a letter she shared with The Chronicle, was later rescinded. She said a representative of Michigan’s anti-harassment office told her in a phone conversation in December 2021 that UC-Berkeley officials had notified Michigan about the investigation against her. The dean who had offered her the position told The Chronicle by email that the offer “was rescinded at the level of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts” and that he could not “attest to the motivation.” Administrators from that college did not immediately reply to a request for confirmation.

In December, 12 faculty members wrote Berkeley’s chancellor and then-vice provost, asking them to reconsider the case against her. “For more than three years, Professor del Valle believed herself to be the victim of sexual harassment and surveillance,” the faculty members wrote, but when she reported her concerns, none of the many law-enforcement and university entities investigated potential evidence on her devices “and thus there was no evidence to support her case, nor, it should be said, any evidence to disprove her claims.”

“After three years of suffering without support, Professor del Valle sought to stop the harassment by writing to acquaintances of the person who is now her accuser,” the statement went on. “This desperate effort — again, one born from her years of suffering cyberstalking and harassment — led to disciplinary actions.” It’s unclear whether the faculty members were aware of the other actions del Valle is accused of committing.

In January 2022, the university put her on involuntary medical leave.

Four months later, del Valle was suspended without pay or benefits for nine months, largely for the pineapple, chalking, and related incidents. During that time, she said, she continued to be unsettled by posts that cropped up on Twitter, including this one, on October 10:

Courtesy Ivonne del Valle

The following day, del Valle said, an administrator from Berkeley’s harassment-prevention office emailed her that another round of evidence in her case was going to be considered.

Clover felt UC-Berkeley wasn’t doing enough to protect him. He told investigators in 2022 that the administration’s failure to take his complaints seriously enough “has only led to more and more dangerous behavior.” He said he and his partner worried that del Valle’s virtual threats could become physical.

The protracted ordeal, he said, had made him “infinitely vigilant in my life about safety in ways that I find corrosive and destructive.” It had also affected his work, he said. Social media is important for disseminating his work as a writer, and his ability to use it “has been cut off to a large extent.”

In November 2022, a third Title IX investigation found that del Valle’s social-media activities had violated Berkeley’s sexual-harassment policy. In February 2023, her suspension was converted to a paid involuntary leave, but she continued to be banned from campus and from any formal contact with her students.

This year, Berkeley’s current vice provost, Victoria Plaut, extended del Valle’s administrative leave three times, according to documents del Valle shared with The Chronicle. But in July, del Valle said, Plaut told her she was recommending her dismissal. She was offered a settlement, del Valle said, of an 18-month unpaid suspension, starting October 1, during which she would not be permitted to visit non-public parts of the campus, except the library; serve on any committees, including dissertation committees; or talk about the complainant. The other possibility that loomed over her, del Valle said, was being brought before the university’s Privilege and Tenure Committee, which could recommend firing her.

Swasti Singhai, The Daily Californian

The university, she said, recently rejected her lawyer’s “counteroffer” of a six-month suspension. As she waits for her status to be resolved, del Valle said she’s in a better place emotionally than she was when she sat outside Clover’s door and dumped tepache on his mother’s doorstep. The professor’s mental health has come under scrutiny throughout the protracted saga. The Albany police officer, she said, treated her as “delusional”; Joshua and Carol Clover have told Berkeley authorities del Valle was unwell and needed help; a friend of Clover’s posted on X that del Valle had formed “a deeply parasocial obsessive twitter fixation ‘relationship’ with him” and needed to be stopped. Del Valle said she’s tired of being diagnosed as mentally ill. She’s been seeing a therapist once a week. She still insists that the online intrusions she described were very real.

Her supporters have continued to stage protests. In August, about 50 students, alumni, and university employees marched to the chancellor’s office. In an open letter to Chancellor Christ, a group of mostly undergraduate students from various Latinx student groups demanded that del Valle’s concerns be taken seriously. “The disciplinary process has gone far beyond any reasonable ‘punishment’ and has turned into a modern-day witch hunt,” they wrote. Given the chancellor’s stated aspiration to have Berkeley join the ranks of colleges classified as Hispanic-serving institutions, the university “needs to start treating our Latinx professors with respect.”

A student-led town-hall meeting on September 14 at the Berkeley campus’s Multicultural Community Center drew about 80 students, alumni, and faculty and staff members, and around 15 more people who, like del Valle, joined by Zoom. “I’m talking here from a place of deep discomfort,” del Valle said, her voice breaking. “This is not easy for me to do, but I have to.” Everything she had worked for, she said, “can easily be taken away by a white person with power.”

Among those who spoke during the September event was Carlos Macías Prieto, who worked with del Valle from 2013 to 2020, when she was his doctoral-dissertation adviser. He said he chose Berkeley because of del Valle, who took him under her wing when he was an undocumented student, wrote a letter of recommendation to get him into the graduate program, and then supported him throughout. He said she pulled money from her private funds to support his research when, as an undocumented student, he qualified for fellowships but not for financial support.

Her mentorship and guidance led to early job offers from prestigious colleges, he said. Even before finishing his dissertation, he was hired by Williams College, where he’s now a tenure-track assistant professor of Spanish.

“I wouldn’t be the scholar I am today if it wasn’t for her,” he said in an interview with The Chronicle.

Last month Clover circulated the three Title IX investigation reports to several of del Valle’s faculty colleagues and supporters and encouraged them to forward the files to anyone “who might find them useful.” Prieto had already seen those reports — del Valle said she shared them with her supporters — and he is unswayed by Berkeley’s conclusions.

So is Alejandra Decker, who calls del Valle “the most inspiring role model and mentor I have ever had.” Del Valle is her primary dissertation adviser and continued to work with her when Berkeley placed her on unpaid leave. “Most of her students come from underrepresented groups and we all gravitate to her,” Decker said.

With their mentor and teacher banned from campus for more than two years, Decker said, “there always seemed to be an expectation that the students would just manage and go on and substitute a committee member and figure it out on their own. There was never an acknowledgment that this had shattered our sense of belonging and set back our academic progress.”

The testimony of Prieto and Decker does not change the facts of the case — some undisputed, some very much contested. But it highlights the breadth of the damage done by the yearslong struggle, and the depth of the challenge Berkeley has faced: one professor left feeling unsafe in his home, another swearing her pleas have gone unheard, and students wondering where they stand.