The College has suspended a former student for sexual misconduct after he admitted in Northern Berkshire District Court to two misdemeanor counts of photographing an unsuspecting person nude. These instances occurred in a dorm bathroom at the College.
Adithan Arunachalam, who was a first-year student during the 2022–23 academic year, will not be allowed to return to the College for five more semesters. If Arunachalam returns to the College during or after the fall semester of 2026, he will be barred from living in College-owned housing. However, Arunachalam has no intention of returning to the College, Arunachalam’s lawyer David Hoose wrote in an email to the Record.
Arunachalam was sentenced in November to three years of probation, during which he must stay away from the people who lived near him at the College and continue to receive counseling.
A female student who shared a bathroom last year with Arunachalam filed a report with the Williamstown Police Department (WPD) in March. On numerous occasions, starting around Winter Study, she saw Arunachalam’s phone camera pointing at her from underneath a bathroom stall while she was in the adjacent stall and while she was in the shower, according to the police report, which was obtained by the Record through a public records request.
“We knew — everyone in our pod knew — that he would sit in the same stall across from the shower for hours,” Sandy, a female student filmed by Arunachalam, said in an interview with the Record.
Sandy and Aubrey are pseudonyms for two female students who reported to the police that they were filmed in the bathroom by Arunachalam. They have been granted anonymity to protect their privacy.
“Every time we’d be in there, he wasn’t using the bathroom,” Sandy said. “He would just be sitting there. It would make us very uncomfortable. I was very uncomfortable.”
After Sandy reported the incidents to the police, “Arunachalam voluntarily left Williams College after admitting to the allegations,” Hoose told the Berkshire Eagle.
Arunachalam was enrolled at the College from Sept. 8 to March 12, Chief Communications Officer Jim Reische told the Eagle. Reische said that, to protect students’ rights to privacy, the College does not disclose why a student may unenroll from the College.
Sandy, who initially reported Arunachalam to the WPD, said that she remembers seeing his phone camera pointed at her in the bathroom for the first time during Winter Study. He was the only male student who shared that bathroom, and she said she recognized his shoes under the stall door. “I went to the bathroom and saw a phone pointed toward me underneath the stall, and he was holding it,” she said. “Then I just went back to my room, and I was like, ‘That didn’t happen. There was no way that happened.’”
On Feb. 27, as Sandy entered the shower, she saw Arunachalam pointing his phone camera at her from underneath the bathroom stall, the police report states. However, as soon as she walked out of the shower, she saw Arunachalam pull the phone up into the stall.
“I thought that was really weird. I was frustrated,” she said. “I just wanted privacy.”
Three days later, on March 2, as Sandy used the bathroom, she saw Arunachalam’s phone camera pointed at her from underneath the adjacent stall. Sandy then went back to her dorm room, realized what had happened, and connected that incident to the one on Feb. 27. “I was hysterical,” she said. “I was in shock.”
“I just couldn’t think about anything else,” she said. “I was really angry and really sad that my perception of this college and my perception of the world had completely changed.”
After reporting the Feb. 27 and March 2 incidents to the WPD in March, Sandy remembered the instance in which she was recorded in the bathroom during Winter Study. “It wasn’t until later that I realized that’s what was happening,” she said, noting that by the time she contacted the WPD about the Winter Study incident, the report had been sent to court.
Arunachalam willingly gave the WPD his phone on the afternoon of March 3, when WPD Detective Kalvin Dziedziak came to Arunachalam’s dorm room, according to the police report. Around two hours later, Arunachalam came to the WPD station, requesting to speak with Dziedziak.
Arunachalam then admitted that he had secretly recorded people in the bathroom on several occasions. He claimed that he deleted the recordings immediately after taking them and that he wished for his apology to be relayed to the students he had photographed, the report states.
When Dziedziak searched Arunachalam’s phone on March 6, he found no secretly obtained pictures or videos of students. The Berkshire Law Enforcement Task Force’s Digital Evidence Unit sought to “analyze and extract data” from Arunachalam’s phone, but it could not do so because its software did not support the operating system used by Arunachalam’s phone.
In May, Aubrey, who had used the same bathroom, reported to the WPD that she remembered seeing Arunachalam record her as she used the bathroom around the end of Winter Study or the beginning of the spring semester.
Aubrey filed a police report in May, which was obtained by the Record through a public records request. It stated that she had seen Arunachalam’s phone camera pointed at her under the stall and had felt that the incident was strange, but she did not put much thought into the matter at the time.
Sandy told the Record that she has found an on-campus community of survivors of sexual assault, but these incidents strained her relationships with her friends, negatively impacted her grades, and compelled her to move dorms. “My entire life was uprooted because of this,” she said.
“I had a lot of time to get healthy — to think this through, to work through my emotions, and to be supported by people who really do care about me,” she added.
“By the time I got back here [for this semester], I felt a lot better with my place on campus… [but] I was literally unable to use the bathroom without being terrified that someone was watching me.”
Quinn Casey contributed reporting.
This article was updated at 11:20 a.m. on Dec. 6, 2023, to reflect updated comment from Arunachalam’s lawyer.
