Community Corner

Wesleyan, Fraternity Settle Student Rape Suit for Undisclosed Amount

A former student at Middletown's liberal arts university who said she was assaulted at a fraternity house Halloween party in October 2010 was seeking $10 million in damages.

By Cassandra Day

The Wesleyan student who filed charged against the university and a fraternity last year for $10 million alleging rape at an October 2010 Halloween party has settled her suit, according to the Middletown Press.

The Maryland woman, known simply as “Jane Doe,” charged the university failed to protect her from being raped and termed the Wesleyan University Mu Epsilon chapter of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity at 184 High Street, Middletown, a "rape factory."

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In April 2011, non-Wesleyan student John O’Neill, 21, of Yorktown, N.Y., plead guilty to charges of assault and unlawful restraint on Oct. 31, 2010, after visiting his brother at the Beta house during Halloween weekend.

O'Neill was sentenced to 15 months in jail in June 2012 after pleading no contest to third-degree assault and first-degree unlawful restraint.

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In April 2010, a Wesleyan student wrote a piece in the Argus ,“Wesleyan’s Great, Unless You Get Raped,” which says she had been raped two and a half weeks prior on campus. In it, she charged, “There is a serious disconnect between the infrastructure set up on campus for victim of sexual assault and the administrations follow through.”

And she placed blame on university policy, “The rape culture on this campus is deeply internalized within our system of student’s sexual interactions.”


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