A Columbia MBA Says She Was Drugged & Raped By A Classmate - Poets&Quants

The Jane Hotel bar (photo courtesy of the Jane Hotel)

Not long after Katie Brehm, a first-year MBA student, realized that she had been drugged and raped by a classmate at Columbia Business School, she did something extraordinary. The 31-year-old young professional wrote an email to the 70 fellow students in Cluster A, one of several groups assigned to take all of the first-year core classes together.

She wrote the Nov. 7th letter as much for clarity as anything else. She had little memory of the night she was assaulted at a social at the Jane Hotel to celebrate the end of mid-term exams, instead relying on the recollections of other classmates and friends. But from what she could piece together, Brehm had become convinced that a tall, white male classmate had slipped a date-rape drug into the Bulleit Bourbon she ordered at the bar and taken advantage of her blackout.

That night ended with a sidewalk spill that led to the diagnosis of a concussion, a rape kit assessment in a New York City hospital that found bruises on her inner thighs and vagina, indicating signs of forced penetration, and endless questioning of friends about what exactly happened at a private party attended by hundreds of Columbia Business School students.

‘NOT ONLY WAS I DRUGGED, BUT I WAS SEXUALLY ASSAULTED’

Columbia Business School MBA student Katie Brehm

“I have been MIA since the Jane Hotel because I am on short-term medical leave,” she told her classmates. “While it is partially for a concussion, it is predominantly because a fellow CBS student has drugged me three times this semester. I have spent the last two weeks in and out of the hospital, NYPD, and Columbia University gender based misconduct offices. At the Jane Hotel, three female students sustained concussions. If you want to believe that is a coincidence, that is your choice. Not only was I drugged, but I was sexually assaulted. I am not letting whoever did this to me get away with it…”

Brehm, who had been a senior manager of digital marketing at New York & Co., came to Columbia to pursue a dual master’s degrees in international affairs and business.

She wanted an MBA to transition her career to luxury marketing or a women’s advocacy group. Friends describe her as an outgoing, highly likable person. Starting the MBA program in August after being named a Lord Irvine S. Laidlaw Scholar, she hoped to add to her existing degree in business from the University of Texas at Austin.

NOT EVEN A SINGLE FOLLOW-UP FROM COLUMBIA’S DEAN OF STUDENTS

Instead, Brehm now finds herself immersed in the emotionally churning aftermath of the attack, the frustrating back-and-forth with university administrators, the replaying in her head of just what happened and why, and fear for herself and others that at least one and possibly two sexual predators are on the loose at Columbia Business School. After initially withdrawing from her fall classes and facing the loss of her prestigious Laidlaw scholarship, she obtained a “no contact” order this past week against the classmate she is accusing of rape. She has now asked for a plan to re-enroll and complete the remainder of this semester.

But Brehm is especially angry with the way Columbia Business School has reacted to her complaint. There was no follow-up from Dean of Students Zelon Crawford after a 20-minute meeting on Nov. 7, shortly after sending the email to her Cluster A classmates. The dean, she says, never even sent a follow-up email or made a phone call to check up on Brehm to make sure she was okay.

She believes the school is protecting and harboring two criminals. ”They have sat on allegations of drug assisted sexual assault for over three weeks,” says Brehm. She recently hired a law firm that is exploring the potential of a civil suit against the school for failing to promptly and adequately deal with her serious charges and to protect her and the other female students at the school. A spokesperson for Columbia Business School declined to comment for this story.

ALLEGATIONS FOLLOW A HIGHLY-PUBLICIZED TRIAL THIS SUMMER

Her allegations come at an awkward time for Columbia Business School. Only this summer, the school and one of its professors was the subject of a highly publicized trial in New York District Court that ended with a $1.25 million judgment in favor of a former assistant professor who said she was a victim of sexual harassment and retaliation at CBS. During that trial, it was revealed that the university investigated three separate harassment cases involving male professors at its business school simultaneously in 2014, including an allegation that a Columbia Business School professor had sex with a female student in his faculty office.

The law firm that won the judgment, Sanford Heisler & Sharp, now represents Brehm in her Title IX investigation and claims against the university. Meantime,  Columbia has hired a high-powered litigator, Roberta Kaplan of Kaplan Hecker & Fink, to handle the Brehm case in pre-suit negotiations.

Most nagging in this new case is the fact that there was no DNA left after the attack. The clothes and underwear she wore that night have yet to be tested for possible DNA evidence. An NYPD investigation is underway, but far from complete. And her own recall of exactly what happened is clouded because she believes she was drugged, possibly with the popular date-rape drug rohypnol.

‘NEXT TO IMPOSSIBLE TO CONVICT A RAPIST IN THIS COUNTRY’

“We don’t know what happened because there hasn’t been a thorough investigation,” says Brehm, who consented to using her name in this story.  “There isn’t enough evidence to draw a firm conclusion.” That is also why Poets&Quants is not identifying her assailant nor the other male classmate who she believes drugged her at an earlier CBS party in Sag Harbor on Aug. 8th and, she says, sexually assaulted another female MBA student at Columbia.

“In all likelihood,” she says with resignation, “nothing will happen. “It makes me want to try to change how rape crimes are investigated and prosecuted because victims are set up to fail.”

In her email to her fellow students, Brehm acknowledged that the odds are not in her favor. “It is next to impossible to convict a rapist in this country,” she wrote. “Out of every 1,000 rapes, only six rapists actually go to jail for their crimes. The fact that I have no memory of the sexual assault will make it very difficult for me to prosecute. Fortunately, when you’re at a party with 300 of your closest friends, people see, hear, and notice things. I am appreciative of all of the love and support I have felt in this community so far this semester, and thank you in advance for helping me through this difficult time.”

A friend helped Brehm into a cab and back to her apartment after the fall

AN OUTPOURING OF SUPPORT FROM HER MBA CLASSMATES

She wrote the letter on her laptop while in a plane, flying from her hometown of Houston, where she visited her parents, to New York. Before Brehm landed at LaGuardia Airport late in the morning of Nov. 7, she had heard from many of the MBA students in her cluster. “I got an outpouring of responses from my classmates expressing their concern,” she says. “I heard from two additional women on the flight who believed they were drugged and another that evening. At least one other woman had sustained a concussion in a fall.”

While inflight, she also heard from Dean Crawford who had initially reached out to Brehm on Oct. 31, six days after she first reported the drugging incident to the university’s Gender Based Misconduct Office. Writing the email to her classmates, Brehm believes, was “one of the bravest things I have ever done because I admitted to my classmates that I had been sexually assaulted. I had no doubts about it. I did not accuse anyone by name then, even though I knew who had drugged and attacked me. But I wanted to gather as much information as I could before accusing him.”

The party at the trendy Jane Hotel in the West Village on Oct. 22  was meant to be a celebratory affair, a time to blow off steam after the mid-term exams for the first-year MBA class. This was an “unofficial” CBS social, meaning it was organized by the students who arranged for the private party in the boutique hotel’s first floor ballroom, something of a millennial playground with stuffed animal heads, mismatched couches, glitter balls, and potted palms. It is, as described by one writer, “like stepping into the pages of a Graham Greene novel.”

A GLASS-BREAKING FISTFIGHT, DANCING ON THE FURNITURE

When Brehm arrived just before 11 p.m., after attending an opera at the Met, the party was in full swing. The bar that night was crowded, loud and rowdy. Two of her male classmates had already gotten into a glass-breaking fistfight. Many of her classmates had clearly been overserved. Some were dancing on the furniture in the ballroom. Bream says she saw one woman, a classmate, fall off a couch in the bar’s lounge, appearing to sustain a head injury.

When Brehm walked up to the bar, she recalls getting a hug from a male classmate she had met at a couple of earlier social gatherings. “He put his arm around me, said I looked beautiful and offered to buy me a drink,” she recalls. Brehm ordered a glass of her favorite bourbon on the rocks, engaged in some conversation with the young man around 12:30 a.m. She vividly remembers discussing a concert she had attended the previous weekend and then little else. The rest of the night was pretty much a blur.

Her departure from the hotel, however, was captured by a video camera. When the police retrieved the recording, she says, it showed her with the classmate who had earlier offered to buy her a drink. The video showed her coming out of the hotel, little more than three seconds behind him, and then standing on the sidewalk together for seven minutes, with few words being exchanged between them. Once she collapsed, he asked a classmate if he should help her and then fled the scene, leaving her unconscious on the sidewalk. Her friends came to her assistance.

‘THE GUY WHO SHE WAS WITH DID NOTHING’ WHEN SHE COLLAPSED ON THE SIDEWALK

“The guy who was with her didn’t do anything,” confirms a friend of Brehm who did not want to be quoted by name. “She hit her head on the pole of a street sign with her whole body weight. I ran over to Katie to see if she was okay. A security guard came over as well, and the guy she was with was gone.” Her friend would then hail a yellow cab and bring Brehm to her university-owned apartment on 113th Street shortly after 2:30 a.m.

In the cab, Brehm would tell her friend that she was happy she fell because she didn’t want to go home with the classmate and that he was “not a nice person.” At least that is what her friend would tell Brehm later when she was trying to put the puzzles pieces together over what happened to her.

When she woke up that morning around 10 a.m., she felt the base of her skull was tender and the area above her right ear was sore. “My entire body felt achy. I was nauseous and attempted to throw up. My pelvic area felt very sore. My stomach felt bloated.” Brehm also realized that she was suffering memory loss because she did not know how she sustained her head injury.

‘SHE LOST HER ENTIRE MEMORY OF THE NIGHT’

The friend who brought her home that night checked in on her to make sure she was okay, but Brehm felt she couldn’t even get out of bed that morning. “I was really surprised that she didn’t remember anything from the night before,” recalls her friend. “She didn’t even remember that I had taken her home. It seemed odd to me that she lost her entire memory of the night.”

Later that afternoon, however, she mustered up the energy to go to a Cluster A party at an apartment on 108th St. and Amsterdam. “During the party,” she recalls, “I felt difficulty regulating my emotions I experienced extreme elation and laughed to the point of crying. I do not struggle with emotional regulation, this was an unusual experience. It made me feel incredibly uncomfortable being around my classmates and friends.” A friend urged her to check in with a doctor and she promised to do so the following day.

When Brehm went to the university’s health department the next morning on Oct. 24, she met with a doctor who would ultimately diagnose here with a concussion. The doctor also scheduled Brehm for an STD test. The same day, in the afternoon, Brehm also paid a visit to the university’s Office of Disability Services. A staff member at the office told Brehm that it was odd that she would sustain memory loss or fall at a party and suggested the possiblity that she may have been drugged.

‘IT WAS A CRAZY NIGHT AND A LOT OF PEOPLE DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED’

On Oct. 25, Columbia Health referred her to Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital for a drug assisted sexual assault rape kit. The examining nurse would discover and photograph bruises on her inner thighs and vaginal irritation and bruising that indicated signs of forced penetration. The hospital protocol required Brehm to file a report with the NYPD’s Special Victims Squad to have the rape kit assessed. Suddenly, for the first time, Brehm says she processed the fact that she had been sexually assaulted.

The following day, she met with a case manager at the university’s Sexual Violence & Response Office and visited the police department where she was interviewed by a detective. Together, they would make phone calls to two of her friends, including the friend who came to her aid, and the man she was last seen with at the party. Though he could not be reached at the time, he would call her back later.

When they connected, Brehm says, she was “fishing for information. I told him I hit my head and asked if he saw me. He said it was a crazy night and a lot of people don’t know what happened that night. There was a lot of bro language. The next day, I sent him a text message and told him a friend saw him with me on the sidewalk. Then, he admitted he was with me on the sidewalk, but that he was with other people. He said he didn’t see me fall.”

Columbia Business School. Courtesy photo

‘MY FATHER ASKED WHETHER I EVEN WANTED TO GO BACK TO COLUMBIA’

The video, she would later discover, would prove he had lied. But from what she could piece together, along with his conflicting stories about what happened that evening, convinced her that he was her assailant. At another business school event, she openly accused him of leaving her unconscious on the sidewalk and told him that she didn’t want to have anything to do with him.

She had told her parents that she fell, suffered a concussion and went to the emergency room for treatment. But when she visited them in Houston on Nov. 6, Brehm revealed that she believed she was drugged and assaulted. “I had a very long conversation with my father about what to do,” says Brehm. “He asked whether I even wanted to go back to Columbia. My parents are helping me with my tuition, and he was outraged by the amount of money he had given the school when they couldn’t protect their own students.”

That night in her parents’ home was yet another restless one. She began writing the email to her classmates, finishing it on her flight back home. Before landing, she had heard from Dean Zelon Crawford who wanted to see her as soon as possible. That afternoon she walked into the dean’s office and, with an accompanying friend, sat at Crawford’s round table. Only last year Crawford won the school’s Robert W. Lear Award given to those who most clearly demonstrate commitment and interest in working with students.

‘AM I THE ONE THAT IS UNDER FIRE HERE?’

Dean of Students Zelon Crawford

According to Brehm, however, Dean Crawford showed little empathy in the meeting. Brehm says that the dean suggested she was defaming a fellow student by bringing her allegations forward. “I reminded her that I didn’t name the student, but ‘Yes, am I the one that is under fire here?’”

Dean Crawford, she recalls, warned her to be very careful and told her not to have any other written communction with her classmates. The dean gave no indication she would investigate the charges Brehm was making, didn’t even express concern for any of the women who said they had been drugged. When Brehm left Crawford’s office, Brehm felt that the dean believed she had fabricated the story. “I felt deflated when I walked out,” recalls Brehm. “I felt like I was being attacked. I asked for added security and a do-not-contact order. She made everything sound unreasonable and insisted that Columbia had incredible security at all events. My friend told me that woman is not your friend.”

Shockingly, Brehm would never hear directly from Dean Crawford again. It’s possible, of course, that the lawyers muzzled the dean, given the potential legal consequences of a follow-on message. But Brehm would never even receive a follow-on email from Crawford to see how she was doing.

Soon after leaving the meeting, however, she learned from the NYPD detective who interviewed her that the video footage obtained from the Jane Hotel shows her male classmate with her when she collapsed on the sidewalk. Instead of helping her, she says, the detective told her that the man immediately fled the scene after some of her friends came to her assistance.

A NO CONTACT DIRECTIVE PREVENTS HER ALLEGED ASSAILANT FROM FURTHER CONTACT

Just before Thanksgiving, on Nov. 20th, a Title IX investigator at Columbia, Jennifer Kelly, informed Brehm that she gained a no contact directive against her alleged assailant. According to the email from Kelley, the accused is named and “prohibited from contacting you until further notice. Such prohibited contact includes, but is not limited to: personal contacts, written communications, text messaging, social media and other electronic communications, and communications through a third party, whether on or off campus, which may be considered in conflict with the spirit of this directive.”

What happens next is anyone’s guess. Will her assailant ever be brought to justice? Will the university’s handling of the complaint result in a civil lawsuit and a legal battle? Brehm believes that she has traveled an ordeal that would resonate with many sexual survivors. “I’ve gone from confused, fearful, and scared to empowered, fearless and brave,” she says. Brehm knows one thing: She wants to finish what she started and with her MBA pursue some role in women’s advocacy.

“I want to continue my education,” she says. “I am feeling motivated to get back. I want this to be an opportunity for the university to do good. “I was angry but I don’t think the whole university is rotten. I am very pleased with my peers, my academic advisor, and my donor for supporting me. A lot of people have really stepped up.”

DON’T MISS: MEET COLUMBIA’S MBA CLASS OF 2020 or AN INTERVIEW WITH COLUMBIA’S MBA GATEKEEPER

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