BOSTON?More than a year after she was allegedly raped in her Claflin Hall dormitory, former Boston University student Kristin Roslonski broke her silence Wednesday.
“I want women to come forward,” Roslonski said Wednesday night in an interview with The Daily Free Press. “I don’t want this to happen to anyone else. You wouldn’t wish this kind of thing on anyone.”
Roslonski said she hopes the attention she’s bringing to her case will change the way Boston University handles similar investigations in the future.
“Quite a few friends I know have been raped at BU,” Roslonski said. “I want these women to have something or someone to turn to. When you’re a rape victim and you’re alone, it’s a very scary thing.
“What they’re doing is outrageous. No one should have to go through this,” Roslonski said. “There’s this hype in the media?saying women should go forward when they’ve been raped?so I go forward and have all this happen to me. It’s so angered me, I’ll do whatever it takes to right things and make [BU administrators] see it my way.”
At a press conference at the George Sherman Union announcing her attorneys had filed a civil rights complaint against BU with the U.S. Department of Education, Roslonski spoke publicly for the first time about the night of her alleged rape and its effects.
The BU investigation found no evidence that a sexual assault had occurred, and Roslonski was suspended for alcohol violations and sexual harassment, according to BU officials. She has since transferred to Tufts University in Medford.
After the conference, Roslonski and her lawyers met with BU administrators for a judiciary hearing on the sexual harassment charges filed against her by her assailant.
“If he felt so assaulted and harassed, he never would have come back and gotten me and taken me up to his room, and the rape wouldn’t have taken place,” said Roslonski, who said she found the hearing intimidating. “It was nerve racking to be sitting in a room with a bunch of guys in black suits… It was a staged farce. I knew that BU had their mind made up from the beginning.”
According to Roslonski, the Judicial Affairs panel heard testimony from her assailant and two of her former friends. Roslonski said she was then allowed to question her assailant.
“I asked him if he’d undergone counseling for this assault and he said, ‘No.’ And I asked him, if he hadn’t known that I was actively seeking to press charges against him, would he have brought forward his charges against me…and he said, ‘No.'”
Roslonski said she has learned her lesson. She estimated she drank once in high school and drinks now with “extreme moderation.” Coming to college, she said, was a shock.
“I had no experience with sex whatsoever. And I come to college, and I was living in an Animal House-type floor; and I got caught up in it for a while and look what it resulted in.”
When asked if she would have changed any of her actions that night, Roslonski paused.
“I would have locked my door,” she finally said. “I could say I wish I didn’t drink, but drinking is not an offense punishable by rape. Sure, I could say I regret things. I could say I wish I could change things, but [the alleged assailant] shouldn’t have taken advantage of the situation at hand. I could just as easily just have woken up with a hangover the next day.”