“Women’s rights advocates challenging the Trump administration’s rollback of federal policies on campus sexual harassment told a San Francisco federal magistrate Thursday that the administration revealed its biased mind-set a year ago when a top education official said 90 percent of the accusations came from women who had gotten drunk, had sex and then regretted it.”
Groups representing accusers in cases of sexual harassment and assault filed a nationwide lawsuit in January after Education Secretary Betsy DeVos issued new guidelines last fall calling for colleges to set a higher standard of proof in those cases and strengthen rights of the alleged harassers, most of them men.
The administration wants the suit dismissed, saying the guidelines are neither discriminatory nor legally binding. At Thursday’s hearing on the request for dismissal, a central issue was whether the new guidelines are neutral measures to add safeguards to the system, and thus immune from legal challenge, or an act of discrimination against women.