Hollywood producer-director Judd Apatow tweeted Friday that the Trump administration’s decision to end the Obama-era campus sexual misconduct policies amounts to “com[ing] through for their rape base.”
“They have to come through for their rape base,” Apatow wrote in a tweet that has since been deleted.
Apatow received blowback from social media users in response to his tweet:
https://twitter.com/fletcherninja/status/911322657664139265
Indeed, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced Friday the end of the Obama-era campus sexual misconduct policies that were issued by the former president’s deputies without the opportunity for public comment.
The secretary also announced an “interim Q&A” until the department solicits comments from survivors, campus administrators, parents, students, experts on sexual misconduct, and members of the public as it prepares new rules for the handling of sexual misconduct cases in schools.
“The withdrawn documents ignored notice and comment requirements, created a system that lacked basic elements of due process and failed to ensure fundamental fairness,” the education department states.
Earlier this month, DeVos asserted the Obama administration’s heavy-handed policy – that forced colleges and universities to conduct “kangaroo courts” in dealing with accusations of sexual assault – has “failed.”
DeVos said, “Acts of sexual misconduct are reprehensible, disgusting, and unacceptable. They are acts of cowardice and personal weakness, often thinly disguised as strength and power.”
Unlike her predecessors in the Obama administration, however, she gave significant attention to the problem of those students who are accused of sexual assault and denied their due process.
“We need to remember that we’re not just talking about faceless ‘cases,’” the secretary said. “We are talking about people’s lives. Everything we do must recognize this before anything else.”
Other Hollywood stars slammed the end of the Obama-era rules as well.
House of Cards creator Beau Willimon tweeted the now debunked statistic: “At least 1 in 5 American women are sexually assaulted in their lifetime, many during college.”
“You are abetting these assaults @BetsyDeVos,” he added.
To promote its campus sexual misconduct policies, the Obama administration engaged the media by consistently pushing the myth that “one in five” college-age women in the U.S. will be sexually assaulted before they leave college.
“The agency’s figures are wildly at odds with the official crime statistics,” nevertheless, began a fact-check video with American Enterprise Institute resident scholar and former philosophy professor Christina Hoff Sommers, who studies the politics of gender and feminism.
According to the Bureau of Justice, the real rate of rape on college campuses is actually closer to 1 in 500. However, armed with the false “one in five” statistic, the Obama administration threatened to cut funding to colleges and universities who did not implement the guidance in its Dear Colleague letter.
In her usual colorful way, comedian Rosie O’Donnell tweeted, “Trump and DeVos THE MOST TWISTED FUCKED UP HUMANS calling 4 a Historic Rollback in Discrimination Law.”
Comedian Sarah Silverman also tweeted, “Has she articulated why? Because this sure looks like a piece of shit move.”
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