Handling of old allegations against Matthew scrutinized
Posted: Sunday, October 12, 2014
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — Two Virginia universities are pressing each other to unearth the information they exchanged after an on-campus rape allegation against Jesse “LJ” Matthew Jr. more than a decade ago, when the football player was transferring from Liberty University to Christopher Newport University shortly after a woman accused him of sexual assault.
Matthew, 32, has been charged with abduction in connection with last month’s disappearance of University of Virginia second-year student Hannah Graham, an alleged kidnapping that police say was for the purposes of sexually assaulting the 18-year-old from Fairfax County. The search continues for Graham, who went missing after witnesses saw her with Matthew in the early hours of Sept. 13 on the Downtown Mall.
The allegations against Matthew from the early 2000s are receiving renewed law enforcement scrutiny amid a widening investigation spurred by the Graham case. Liberty and CNU officials said they are cooperating in that investigation, which has expanded beyond Graham to encompass two more unsolved attacks on women, including a violent sexual assault in Fairfax City in 2005 and the case of a young woman who went missing from Charlottesville in 2009 and later was found dead. Two people familiar with the Graham investigation said that the link is Matthew’s DNA.
The previous accusations against Matthew — one at Liberty and another less than a year later at CNU — were investigated by police at the time, but neither resulted in a criminal charge. Internal university actions are shielded from public view by privacy protections for student records.
The most unrestricted opportunity for sizing up a security threat comes during student transfers, when schools are free to share educational records and ask — and answer — a much wider range of questions about a student that otherwise would be prohibited.
Yet even now, in the wake of the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings and amid heightened concerns about sexual assaults, many schools do not flag disciplinary sanctions on transcripts even if they are prepared to answer another school’s potential questions, according to several experts on student records and federal privacy rules.
“Given what we know about the predatory nature of perpetrators of campus sexual assaults, it would be ideal if more colleges and universities had a more robust policy and process for tracking disciplinary actions when students transfer,” said S. Daniel Carter, director of the 32 National Campus Safety Initiative, which was created after the Virginia Tech rampage. “As a practical matter, there is not an exhaustive review and not typically a request to send everything over.”
Matthew left Liberty, in Lynchburg, on the day that he was accused of rape in October 2002, and he enrolled at CNU, in Newport News, the following January. A few weeks into the next football season — in September 2003 — Matthew was accused of sexually assaulting a CNU student on campus. A defensive lineman, Matthew formally left the football team and, after that, the university in October 2003.
CNU said Matthew’s accuser sought an internal university disciplinary review, but school officials would not disclose the outcome of that process, citing privacy rules. Liberty would not say whether the university conducted an internal investigation that included the alleged victim in its case, citing privacy protections for student records. Such internal disciplinary outcomes are almost always kept secret.
Matthew’s attorney, James Camblos III, declined to comment on the allegations at Liberty and CNU. “I am not aware of the particular details of either event. Therefore, I cannot comment on them,” he said.
Limited details about the allegations against Matthew were released under federal and state laws that permit disclosure of crime reports.
At the time he was transferring, even more information could have been shared between Liberty and CNU, but that window to fully look into his history closed once the transfer was complete.
“The law does not prevent a school from disclosing an allegation of assault or criminal activity when a student is transferring. There is no legal barrier,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., a former prosecutor who has proposed legislation that would expand disclosures and investigations into campus threats and crimes.
But just as there is no ban, there is no requirement to share disciplinary information, Blumenthal said.
“That’s one of the major failings we are trying to correct,” he said. “A lot of the current criticism is well justified” about schools being lax in responding to on-campus problems. “It’s not just second-guessing and applying hindsight.”
Deciding how much information to share can be thorny for a school, particularly when a claim was unsubstantiated or involved a minor infraction that could haunt students for their academic careers, several experts on student privacy said.
Descriptions by Liberty and CNU of the processes in place during the period when Matthew was transferring show how disciplinary information and an assault allegation could fail to draw attention and then virtually disappear.
The rape allegation at Liberty and any disciplinary action against Matthew would not have appeared on a transcript sent to CNU, according to the standard procedures Liberty described.
Liberty’s official transcripts show “on their face” that “they are the transcript of academic record,” and that document “does not show if the student is not in good standing from a student disciplinary or conduct perspective,” Liberty officials said in emails to The Washington Post.
To get a student’s disciplinary history during a transfer, a school would have to request it specifically, ask what was alleged and request the results of any investigations, which Liberty’s Student Conduct Office would provide, according to Liberty officials.
If Liberty administrators had involuntarily withdrawn a student during 2002, the student’s record would show “official withdrawal” — a term that covers expulsions and suspensions for discipline but also would be used for a student who chose to withdraw for a medical reason or bereavement.
“Other than death or a student in a coma, though, Administrative Withdrawal is generally used for disciplinary separations,” Liberty officials wrote. They said that they cannot say under what terms Matthew left the school.
When CNU dismisses students for academic or disciplinary reasons, “that is always placed prominently on the student’s transcript,” CNU President Paul Trible Jr. said. “Tragically, we have recently learned that is not done by many schools.”
But there was a second avenue for delving into Matthew’s history on campus.
As a transferring football player, Matthew faced a review of his eligibility to play under NCAA rules. The two universities appear at odds over what was presented about Matthew in “tracer forms” for athletes.
Trible said that before CNU accepts a transferring athlete, it requires signed statements from the athlete and from the athletics department he is leaving that say the player is in good standing with regard to academics and disciplinary matters.
“They would not be in uniform here otherwise,” said Trible, who has led CNU for 18 years. “We follow that in every instance, and that has been the process in place since I’ve been here.”
Liberty said it does not keep athletic transfer forms for longer than a decade and could not say what questions or follow-ups CNU might have asked in Matthew’s situation.
But after hearing CNU’s account to The Washington Post, Liberty officials asked CNU for a copy of the tracer forms sent during the 2002-2003 period and said they were told that CNU no longer had the records. A CNU spokeswoman said the school could not provide additional documents or further information on that point.
Those behind-the-scene exchanges point to the heightened and renewed interest in Matthew’s past.
With Matthew’s arrest in Graham’s case, Virginia State Police said they have a “forensic link” between Matthew and the disappearance of 20-year-old Morgan Harrington, who was found dead outside Charlottesville after she vanished in October 2009.
Should Graham’s disappearance be directly related to Harrington’s, it would suggest the work of a serial offender that also includes a violent sexual assault in Fairfax City in 2005. The FBI has said that Virginia authorities submitted forensic evidence in the Fairfax City case to the FBI’s national DNA database, and that a search matched DNA from the Harrington investigation.
Matthew’s alleged victim at Liberty declined to press charges, and no independent witnesses could be found to corroborate her account, so charges were not filed, said Lynchburg Commonwealth’s Attorney Michael Doucette.
Liberty officials said they cooperated with the Lynchburg police investigation. A heavily redacted police report released to The Washington Post in response to a public information request shows the alleged rape occurred the evening of Oct. 16, 2002, in “field/woods” and was reported in the early hours of Oct. 17. Liberty has said that incident occurred behind the Vines Center, a basketball arena and special-events facility.
Trible, the CNU president, said the school’s police force investigated the allegation that Matthew committed a sexual assault on its campus. The alleged victim did not want to pursue a criminal case but did take part in a disciplinary investigation on campus, Trible said. Trible and other CNU officials declined to share the outcome.
Howard Gwynn, commonwealth’s attorney for Newport News, said it is not possible for him to know whether an allegation from 2003 was brought to his office for review.
“As tempting as it is to throw caution to the wind and share everything Liberty University knows related to Jesse Matthew, we must respect federal law and try to not prejudice any ongoing criminal investigation,” Liberty said in an email. “We understand this may not be satisfactory to a public hungry for more details on this case, but we are satisfied that everything that needs to come out concerning Jesse Matthew and Liberty University will come out in due course and through legally permitted channels.”
http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/crime/handling-of-old-allegations-against-matthew-scrutinized/article_118ecaf4-51a0-11e4-803f-001a4bcf6878.html
