Anna McNeil & Eliana Singer on Why They’re Suing Yale

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: So can I ask you what exactly – sum up what you’re trying to achieve with your lawsuit, why you’re bringing this lawsuit?

ANNA MCNEIL, STUDENT SUING YALE UNIVERSITY: Thanks so much for having us. We’re really happy to be here. With this lawsuit, we’re really trying to bring about an end of inequality and sexual harassment on Yale’s campus. What’s going on at Yale with fraternity culture rampant sexual harassment and Yale’s hands off approach to fraternities is really a microcosm of what’s going on across the country at many different fraternities. We brought this problem first to our peers, then to administrators. And because we were rejected by our peers and dismissed by our administrators, we’ve decided to file this lawsuit to hopefully help put a stop to the inequality and sexual harassment that we and countless other female students have faced at the hands of fraternities.

AMANPOUR: And it is a class action lawsuit. Ellie, let me ask you to respond to this. Basically, in 2007, the study by researchers at the College of William & Mary, which is in Virginia found the fraternity man with three times more likely to commit rape than other men on college campuses and that is a very, very concerning figure. And it also confirmed according to this study that fraternities provide the culture of male peer support for violence against women that permits bad attitudes to become treacherous behavior. Comment on that and how that is manifested and perhaps both of you can say how you came across this, what happened to you guys that you have brought this class action lawsuit?

ELLIE SINGER, STUDENT SUING YALE UNIVERSITY: So it’s our belief that as it stands when fraternity members are male and they only have to live and interact with other males, they see their peers as male and women functionally just become sexual objects who they have at parties. And that’s what we believe leads that culture of sexual harassment and sexual assault. We believe that if women are to join fraternities, then they become peers and no longer objects. So the experiences that we had where we as many first years do went to fraternity parties early in our Yale career, and experienced leering sexual harassment and even sexual assault. I myself was at a fraternity party when I was a freshman dancing with some girls and a man I’ve never met before decided he could just grab me from behind. When I said no, he didn’t do anything the first time. When I said no the second time, he finally left. That’s the experience that opened my eyes, I think, to the culture of fraternities.

AMANPOUR: And Anna, what sort of experience did you have?

MCNEIL: Similarly to Ellie, my first semester at Yale I had many experiences of being groped without my consent at fraternity parties, sometimes many experiences even over the course of one night where similarly someone I didn’t know and someone I couldn’t see approached me from behind and groped me, groped my breasts, groped my butt without my consent and it was wasn’t until I was able to physically separate myself from them. Which is difficult in such a crowded space that the assault stopped and that happened to me many times