Fordham University has been accused of remaining tight-lipped about the rape of a gay former Naval training student, who was attacked by his “closeted homosexual” roommate, the son of a high-ranking military officer, according to a bombshell federal lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court last Wednesday.
The alleged victim, Francis Austin, 30, of Illinois, asserted that his flatmate anally raped him at the Bronx college while in a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps program in February 2011, according to the New York Post.
The lawsuit also noted the offender's father, a Fordham alumnus, was a highly prominent legal authority in the U.S. Military.
“[The school] engaged in a Kafkaesque campaign, using stealth, deception [and] fraud,” the lawsuit states. “Each of these misrepresentations was a grotesque lie and calculated prevarication designed to conceal Fordham’s culpability.”
Austin, hampered with fears his sexuality would be exposed, didn’t immediately approach school officials to report the violent sexual assault because of the program's “Don’t ask, don’t tell policy."
He would report the rape a year later but was instead “mocked and scorned” by faculty members and administrators instead of providing much-needed support. School officials reportedly called him “a liar” and decided not to pursue the matter.
The school is also accused of forging documents, including an IQ test, to support their claims that Austin had a disqualifying learning disability. He would be booted out from the program in 2013 for this reason, the same year he graduated.
Austin, however, would only find out seven years later that his rape was never investigated by the university. It comes after phoning the school requesting for the room where he was raped to be blessed by Jesuit priest Father Joseph Michael McShane, the school’s president, to get emotional closure.
He was then informed by a university official that probe reports into his rape were never made, prompting his own investigation into his removal from the training program, which subsequently led to the filing of the suit.
The accused rapist, labeled by the paperwork as an “unrepentant and unpunished serial sex offender," is currently serving in the United States Marine Corps as a commissioned officer. His father was never properly identified in court papers.
Just last year, the Fordham Observer reported that the United States Department of Education launched a probe into the disciplinary actions taken by Fordham University against its student Austin Tong following two controversial Instagram posts that were deemed to violate the university code of conduct.
The university ruled Tong guilty of violating the university regulations relating to bias or hate crime and threatening or intimidating behavior, which the student disputes. He subsequently lodged a lawsuit against Fordham in July last year.
One photo, which captions, “Y’all a bunch of hypocrites,” shows a photo of the retired police captain David Dorn, who died on duty while responding to looting reports in St. Louis, Missouri.
In the post, Tong publicized his strong disapproval that the cop did not get the attention he deserved like other Black men, whose deaths sparked protests globally.
The next day, he would share a photo of himself holding a gun with the caption, “Don’t tread on me. #198964,” referencing the date of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which wounded and killed thousands.
Following public backlash from his posts, the student clarified his intentions behind the shared images.
“This post is my appreciation toward the United States and the privilege in this country to have the right to bear arms, to have a populace that can defend itself from tyranny," he said in a statement.
"The Tiananmen Incident is a huge deal in my motherland and to my ethnicity, and so is civil rights in America, but this post is solely my belief that freedom comes from a strong and armed populace," Tong continued.
He insisted that violence should never be tolerated and that the Second Amendment should be protecting all citizens from these threats.
© 2024 Latin Times. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
