One recent alum and one student at the College filed complaints to the Department of Education on July 25 and Sept. 17 alleging that College administrators violated the Clery Act after the complainants were victims of sexual assault or stalking on campus.
In interviews with the Record, the complainants and one other student also alleged regular miscommunications and other errors by the Title IX office that they claim jeopardized their safety on campus.
The Clery Act, a federal law passed in 1990, mandates transparency from colleges and universities about crimes committed on campus. It requires the College to issue a timely warning to the campus if it believes there is an ongoing safety threat and to provide all victims of crimes covered under the act with a written documentation of their rights.
“Clery crimes” include Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) offenses such as domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking. If students believe their Clery Act rights have been violated, they can submit a written complaint to the Clery Act Compliance Division of the Department of Education.
Iris, Sandy, and Lydia are pseudonyms for the three women, who have been granted anonymity to protect their privacy.
A failure to provide protective measures
Iris, who graduated in 2024, claims that the College failed to inform her of her alleged assailant’s enrollment status and failed to monitor and maintain her No Contact Order (NCO).
In her complaint, which she provided to the Record, Iris said she was sexually assaulted by a fellow student in January 2022 and instituted a NCO under the guidance of Title IX Coordinator Toya Camacho. At the start of the following fall semester, Iris and her alleged assailant signed a new NCO upon Camacho’s instruction to reflect her new dorm location.
Camacho declined to comment on either complaint or any other allegations. “It wouldn’t be appropriate for the College [staff] to comment on an ongoing process,” Jim Reische, special advisor to the president for executive communications and media relations, wrote in an email to the Record.
According to her complaint, Iris heard from friends in December that her alleged assailant planned to attend the same study away program as her the following spring semester. In an interview with the Record, Iris confirmed that this was the first time she had heard her alleged assailant would be attending the same program.
Over winter break, Iris corresponded with her study away program to ensure her NCO would remain in effect while abroad. “I had to try and chase down not just representatives from this college, but from my program as well, over a holiday, which was tough,” Iris told the Record.
Laura Dunn, a victim’s rights lawyer of counsel with C.A. Goldberg, PLLC, told the Record that she believes the College violated the Clery Act by failing to inform Iris of her alleged assailant’s study away plans.
The Clery Act mandates that institutions “provide written notification to victims about options for, available assistance in, and how to request changes to academic, living, transportation, and working situations or protective measures.”
“The institution must make such accommodations or provide such protective measures if the victim requests them and if they are reasonably available,” the law continues.
Dunn said that such protective measures include NCOs and that the College was required to actively monitor and enforce Iris’s agreement with the other student. “I would argue that it’s a violation of the protective measure that prohibited his contact with her, that the school should have prohibited his enrollment [in the study away program] and kept her away,” she said.
To Iris, the situation represented a failure on the part of the Title IX office. “Somebody dropped the ball and it landed on the student — me — to ensure my own safety and my own wellbeing,” she said. “Imagine if I’d gotten off the plane, … seen this kid, and had no idea from Williams that he was going to be there, or what to do, or why was he in the country.”
Iris told the Record that, when she returned to campus in the fall, she was informed in an email by Camacho that her alleged assailant was no longer enrolled at the College and therefore her NCO had been discontinued.
As a result, Iris said, she assumed he had left the College permanently. “I thought I was never going to see him again,” she said.
On Feb. 3, 2024 — four days after she returned to campus for the spring semester — Iris saw her alleged assailant on Spring Street. She said she immediately returned to her dorm room and contacted Campus Safety Services (CSS) and former Director of Sexual Assault Response and Prevention Meg Bossong ’05.
Iris said Bossong told her that her alleged assailant was, in fact, an enrolled student that semester, and that Bossong did not know that Iris’s NCO had been discontinued. Bossong facilitated the institution of an emergency NCO, Iris said.
“I was pretty crushed,” Iris said. “I thought I was never going to see him again… That was my expectation, and that was so suddenly torn away.”
According to her complaint, when Iris went to sign her NCO the following day, a member of CSS told her that CSS had no records of her previous NCOs with the other student, nor was CSS made aware of the discontinuation of her NCO. Iris said she was never given an explanation as to why the records were missing.
Alison Warner, CSS’s Deputy Director for Operations, and Theresa Ryan, Associate Director of Clery Compliance and Safety Engagement, both declined to comment.
The next day, on Feb. 5, Iris filed a formal Title IX complaint against her alleged assailant. She told the Record that, on a subsequent Zoom call with her parents and Camacho, she requested a written explanation as to how she was not informed that the other student was attending the same study away program as her or of his return to campus.
On March 15, Camacho sent Iris an email, which Iris provided to the Record, in which she wrote that after Iris’s experience, “The college has implemented a new internal notification process to make sure that the Title IX office is informed in advance of students’ study-away plans to prevent this situation from happening again.”
“With respect to the other student’s return to Williams this Spring, because of a misunderstanding between my office and the Registrar’s office, I did not realize they had re-enrolled at Williams after withdrawing for the fall semester,” Camacho continued. “We have also resolved the underlying misunderstanding so this will not happen in the future.”
Iris told the Record that she had hoped for more information about the nature of the misunderstanding. “You’re telling me there was no line of communication between the registrar, Title IX, the Director of Sexual Assault Prevention, and CSS?” she said.
On Sept. 5, an investigator from the Department of Education met with Iris to review her complaint. Iris wrote in an email to the Record that the investigator did not provide a specific timeline regarding next steps.
Tracey Vitchers ’10, executive director of the campus sexual violence prevention nonprofit It’s On Us, helped Iris and Sandy file their Clery Act complaints. She told the Record that it often takes months or even years for the Clery Act compliance desk to reach a complaint in its backlog and consider opening an investigation, and more time still if the investigation does run.
When a school is found to have violated the Clery Act, according to Dunn, the most common response by the Department of Education is “technical assistance,” where department officials train and supervise school administrators to improve their compliance.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if 90 percent of CAC [Clery Act compliance] complaints resolve through technical assistance,” she said. “That’s why these complaints are really important for changing culture and preventing future issues, but they don’t always remedy it for the survivor that went through it.”
Overlooked warnings and documentation
Sandy, a student at the College, alleged in a complaint filed on Sept. 14 that the College failed to issue a timely warning to the campus of an ongoing safety threat and failed to provide victims of a crime with written documentation of their rights, both of which constitute violations of the Clery Act.
According to a Williamstown Police Department (WPD) report obtained by the Record, Adithan Arunachalam, then a first-year student at the College, photographed Sandy nude in her dorm bathroom on Feb. 27 and March 2, 2023. Sandy reported Arunachalam to the WPD and filed a formal complaint against him to the College’s Title IX office in March 2023, and he admitted in Northern Berkshire District Court to two misdemeanor counts of photographing an unsuspecting person nude.
In her complaint, which she provided to the Record, Sandy wrote that she moved out of her dorm room on March 3, the day after the second incident. However, she wrote that Arunachalam did not move out of the dorm for “several days” and that the three students who shared his bathroom — all female — did not find out about the photography until Sandy informed them on March 6.
On March 9, students on her floor of the dorm received an email from Dean of the College Gretchen Long, which Sandy provided to the Record. In the email, Long stated that she wanted to “check in about some concerns about safety in your residence,” which she did not specify. “I want to reassure you we would never have students remain in a space where there was an ongoing threat,” the email continued. Long declined to comment on the email or Sandy’s complaint.
In her complaint, Sandy wrote that her three podmates did not receive any further communication from College administrators until Sandy opened a Title IX investigation against Arunachalam in April.
Sandy argued that after her Title IX report, the College should have issued a timely warning to the campus about the ongoing threat of clandestine photography, which she writes in her complaint qualifies as a VAWA offense.
Dunn, the victim’s rights lawyer, said she believes the College should have issued a timely warning when Sandy first reported Arunachalam. “That is a good [Clery Act] violation claim under these facts, if there was someone actively filming people and the school had notice.”
Last September, Reische, then the College’s chief communications officer, told The Berkshire Eagle that Arunachalam’s enrollment at the College ended on March 12. Sandy, however, said she was not given information about Arunachalam’s whereabouts or enrollment status until March 16, so she skipped all meetings of a course in which Arunachalam was also enrolled in for nearly two weeks.
“There was no communication,” she said. “I was like, ‘Why is he not off campus? Why is no one telling me anything?’” Sandy said her grade in the course suffered after skipping so many classes, and she ultimately decided to designate it as Pass/Fail.
On March 16, according to Sandy, Camacho informed Sandy that Arunachalam had voluntarily withdrawn from the College and was no longer on campus.
Sandy wrote in her complaint that during the first arraignment for the hearing in the Northern Berkshire District Court on April 19, she learned that Arunachalam had been living at the Williams Inn since he left his dorm in early March. She wrote that, at the arraignment, the judge ordered Arunachalam to move out of the hotel and filed a harassment order on her behalf.
Sandy argued in her complaint that, because the Inn is owned by the College and subject to campus fire safety policy, it should be considered on-campus and thus she believes she was given incorrect information by Camacho. A representative from the Williams Inn confirmed to the Record that the Inn is part of the College’s campus.
Dunn told the Record that, if College administrators knew that Arunachalam was continuing to live on campus and failed to inform Sandy, that would be a failure to provide protective measures required under Title IX and the Clery Act.
Sandy wrote in her complaint that neither she nor her podmates received any written documentation of their rights, which Dunn said would constitute another Clery Act violation.
Insufficient communication about a safety threat
Lydia, a third student, who did not file a Clery Act complaint, described a failure by College administrators to monitor her contact with her alleged stalker.
Lydia told the Record that she filed a NCO against her ex-boyfriend in 2023 after she noticed him following her on campus, watching her through her dorm window, and, on one occasion, trying to break into her dorm room. Her ex-boyfriend was two years older than she was, and after he graduated, she met with Bossong in October 2023 to discuss how to maintain her protection.
“I was like, ‘This is clearly not over,’” Lydia said. “He’s coming back to visit. He has friends here. I want to make sure that I don’t get blindsided by him coming and finding me.”
Lydia, Bossong, and Camacho agreed that if her ex-boyfriend returned to campus, he would be required to notify Camacho, who would notify Lydia. According to Lydia, he agreed to comply with this rule.
Lydia said she expected her ex-boyfriend to return to campus for Homecoming the following month and was surprised when she received no notice from Camacho. After she saw pictures that suggested he had been on campus recently, she informed Bossong that she thought he had returned to the College and asked her if she had any information.
Lydia said that Bossong responded that she would ask Camacho in their next meeting. At this point, Lydia believed her ex-boyfriend had broken the terms of their agreement.
Lydia later learned from Bossong that her ex-boyfriend did return to campus on Nov. 11, one week after Homecoming, and that he had notified Camacho by email at about 10 p.m. on Nov. 9 but that Camacho had failed to inform Lydia.
“[Camacho] had two days to tell me, and she didn’t,” Lydia said. “She knows my email address… She didn’t reach out to apologize.”
The value of legal advice and awareness
Vitchers told the Record she believes that, outside of the specific Clery Act violations that Iris and Sandy outlined, the College’s handling of their cases also violated Title IX law. However, since complaints about Title IX violations against institutions must be filed within 180 days of the alleged violation, Vitchers advised Iris and Sandy to direct their attention to Clery Act violations, which have no time limit for complaints.
“Something that we see across the board at so many institutions is that students often don’t know that their Title IX rights have even been violated,” Vitchers said. “They may know that something doesn’t feel right, that they don’t believe that this is the way something should be playing out… By the time I was able to speak with the students involved in the complaints, it was already well outside that 180 day window.”
Dunn emphasized that in addition to reporting to their school’s Title IX office, victims of sexual misconduct on campus should seek out legal advice as quickly as possible.
“It’s not the natural instinct of victims of crime to think that they need lawyers… They assume the system’s going to work for them,” she said. “It’s really important for survivors to talk to people with legal training who actually know their rights and options to give advice early and often.”
