I know pretty much the whole world is up in arms about Cuties, the French film set in a housing project or cite in an inner ring suburb / banlieue or outer ring arrondissement in Paris. Initially, I had only heard about the outrage, vaguely how this film was on the order of a snuff film starring very young girls, but for pedophiles. I’m in the midst of trying to save my life and career, which is weirdly isolating, in that I just don’t have the time or the energy to worry about anything online that doesn’t directly concern me. But the outrage had crescendoed to the extent that it penetrated my cocoon of infamy and vengeance.

I had no idea that this was a French film set in the housing projects of the suburbs of Paris until I started watching it on Netflix. I was shocked. I’ve also been meaning to watch Les Miserables, a similarly situated Academy award nominated French film, also on Netflix, but I haven’t yet.

A decade ago now (how time flies!), during the year following my graduation from Fordham law school in NYC, I worked with Ni Putes Ni Soumises in Paris, France, as a Human Rights Fellow. I was awarded a fellowship from my law school in Spring 2009, the year that the bottom fell out of the legal profession, especially for human and civil rights attorneys. I felt very lucky. I had the option to work with any human rights organization in the world for a year, and I chose Ni Putes Ni Soumises, following an online search. I tried desperately to freshen up my French. I contacted Ni Putes Ni Soumises and told them that I wanted to come work for them for a year for free, and they immediately agreed. The French Consulate in NYC was less convinced that this was a good idea. Being the naive open book that I am, I just guilelessly fessed up that I intended to embark on a sociological study on access to sexual and reproductive healthcare and rights for the girls and women of the banlieues surrounding Paris, the suburban housing projects predominantly comprised of Muslim immigrant communities.

Ni Putes Ni Soumises may not exist anymore, and that makes me incredibly sad. As a French newspaper said not long ago, “It’s the end of an era.” Ni Puts Ni Soumises, which translates as Neither Whores Nor Submissives, roughly, is a fierce women’s rights organization, born as a response to the egregious violence perpetrated against the women and girls of the banlieues. It began as a 40 day march across France, to the French Parliament in Paris, led by Fadela Amara, Ni Putes Ni Soumises’ first President, after a young girl was burned alive behind a dumpster, in a banlieue.

The three pillars of Ni Putes Ni Soumises are secularism, actually the strict French version thereof, gender equality, and gender desegregation. Ni Putes Ni Soumises take an uncompromising stance on women’s rights as universal human rights. They demand that women have full and unfettered access to the public space, as part and parcel of their French citizenship.

During my year with Ni Putes Ni Soumises, hardly a week would go by when we were not marching through the banlieues, being filmed by broadcast and cable news, chanting slogans, after a woman had been burned to death by her husband in front of her children, raped and murdered, or terrorized for staging a play about Muslim immigrant women’s oppression.

Ni Putes Ni Soumises was, unsurprisingly, a very provocative organization, often accused of stigmatizing the Muslim immigrant communities in France, especially in the ghettoized housing projects, or cites, of the suburbs, the banlieues. Ni Putes Ni Soumises condemns racism and is happy to march alongside the communities in which most of the activists grew up, to condemn the marginalization and dehumanization of their brethren, but they also reject political Islam (Islamism) and cultural relativism and insist that women can only be fully citizen under a secular government.

While I was with Ni Putes Ni Soumises, in 2010, the entire nation was in an uproar over the proposed anti-face mask law, colloquially known as the burqa ban. I marched with Ni Putes Ni Soumises in front of the French Parliament, in faux burqas, in support of the law, which Ni Putes Ni Soumises regards as a simple safety provision, as well as a civil rights and public desegregation measure, along the lines of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the United States. We also placed a huge black burqa over a statue of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic, in the Place de la Republique.

We participated in a town hall on the burqa ban in an inner ring banlieue, at an elementary school, that erupted repeatedly into violence. I was filming the event. There were women in niqab speaking and denouncing Ni Putes Ni Soumises. Lubna Ahmed Al Hussein, the Sudanese UN worker who had been sentenced to 40 lashes for wearing pants in Khartoum was present. She had escaped to France in a burqa and was being sheltered by Ni Putes Ni Soumises. At one point, when the event erupted into violence, I scurried out a side door. Thank goodness we were not in the US, or someone probably would have started shooting a gun. From the outside, I could look in through the large windows. I found myself standing next to a woman in hijab. We looked at each other with wide eyes. She grabbed my hand when people started grabbing and pushing in the interior of the room. “C’est chaud,” she said, meaning: “Things are getting heated.” I only responded, “Oui.”

With the permission of the then President of Ni Putes Ni Soumises, Sihem Habchi, I conducted a sociological study in the banlieues with a small troupe of international interns on access to sexual and reproductive healthcare and rights for the women and girls of the cites. We would take a train and a bus and another bus out to an isolated French suburb near one of the housing projects involved in the 2005 or 2007 riots, which were, not dissimilar to what is happening in the US currently, embroiled in rioting and fires, following the deaths of young dark skinned Muslim immigrant men at the hands of the French police. It was a profound and eye opening experience, to say the least.

We created a survey, in French and Arabic, asking intimate questions about their sex lives, including how many abortions they had had, if they had used the morning after pill, and if they went to the gynecologist regularly. We would stand on street corners, near the mosque or housing project, and speak to any women or girls who passed by. Most were at least in hijab or chador. There were a few women in niqab, with their faces fully covered below the eyes. The women and girls, for the most part, were very happy to speak with us. We took care to only speak with the women, and we tried to avoid provoking the men or capturing their notice. When the men did take notice of us, or even approach us, we would just pretend to be clueless American college girls, working on a project for college. We would usually leave as quickly as we came, once we drew the attention of the men in the community.

I was quite and pleasantly surprised that the women were happy to answer all of our questions typically. They usually asked to have the questions read aloud to them. Sometimes they were unable to read. They did not seem to be concerned to answer in front of others. They usually wanted to speak about how angry they were at the French government for abandoning them with nothing but crumbling housing projects, out in the middle of nowhere, with no access to education or jobs or reasonable transportation into the city or anywhere. They wanted very much to take us home for tea usually. In some suburbs we would speak with young girls in blue jeans and uncovered heads, hanging out at the new McDonald’s. There was a range of attitudes that we encountered, attitudes towards assimilation and sexual mores, but, regardless, everyone seemed open to speaking with us about any topic. Of course, most of the young seemed eager, if able, to be like any other French girl, enjoying her youth and beauty and freedom.

While at Yale, I told Jack Dovidio, my Statistics Professor in the Psychology Department, that I was holding onto a treasure trove of data. As my final project, I conducted a rudimentary statistical analysis. And, there was a very particular question I was hoping to answer. I was looking for a preference for emergency contraception over regular birth control (oral contraceptives or the patch, etc.) in young women and girls, especially Muslim young women, and I found statistically significant results.

I had been told repeatedly, especially by young women and girls from Muslim families, that they preferred to use emergency contraception as their primary form of birth control, because it was easier to hide from their families than oral contraceptives would have been.

I had had a similar experience in Rabat, Morocco, when I spent the summer there, working with the Moroccan Organization for Human Rights. I was visiting with a family in their home, the home of a young woman, who was the girlfriend of a young man who was the good friend of a young man whom I had met and befriended in Rabat. I had dinner with them, and I ended up spending the night. I wanted very much to speak to the women when I was there, and I would just let people take me home with them. Everyone wanted to take me home with them for dinner and to meet their families, and I would let them. I know that might sound crazy, but I really wanted to speak especially with the women and girls about their lives, and that was the best way to do it.

So, this one evening, after dinner, we were watching tv, and the elderly mother of this young woman was sitting with us, and she didn’t speak French, but the daughter would translate into French from Arabic, and the mother really seemed to want to speak with me and to tell me about her life. And, I was very happy to listen and to ask questions.

And, she had been married to her much older husband, sitting in the next room, when she was a very young girl. She said that she was so young that she wasn’t very good at cooking or housework, and he would beat her mercilessly. She had had a large number of children from a very young age, and she was quite old. The young woman who had invited me was in her early twenties at the time and was this woman’s youngest child. At least a few of her older siblings were living in France. It seemed that the goal of most young people in Rabat, Morocco, was to get to France, somehow, some way.

We were watching a rap music video on tv, with women in thongs grinding against one another and various young men. It made the old woman laugh uproariously. I asked the elderly woman what she thought of the video and the nudity and the promiscuous behavior. She said that this is for the young, not her. She seemed completely unfazed by it. I asked her if she was happy. She said that she was very happy. She said that she loved her husband very much and all of her children. She said that she did not bear any grudge about how difficult her life had been. She showed me pictures of all of her children, including her children living in France.

The young woman and I slept in one room, on couches. She showed me where she stashed her birth control pills. She swore me to secrecy. As we fell asleep, we could hear her parents cooing at one another and giggling in the next room. “Lovebirds,” their daughter whispered to me and laughed quietly. I was so struck by the scene.

While I was in Rabat, Morocco, when I was living in an apartment building in the city center, I would hear the maids being beaten and I would cry myself to sleep. I told the young man whom I had befriended. He simply said there was nothing to do and that this is just the way things were. He advised me not to say anything to anyone.

I also had an experience meeting a young girl who was homeless. She hung out at the telephone cafe where the young man worked. He told me that her mother had thrown her out of her house, because her father had said that he wanted to start having sex with her, with his own daughter. The young man whom I knew told me that it was better for her to be living on the streets than to be raped by her own father, and that her mother had acted out of love for her.

I fear that this blog post is getting too long. And, I haven’t even addressed my initial reaction to Cuties yet! I want to wrap this up. But, I have much more to say. I believe that I will write multiple blog posts about Cuties. I have also invited Gretchen Mullen, skepticreview89, and MisfitPoise, from Twitter, to respond. I will post their responses. And, we’ll have something of a conversation via blog post.

So, I wanted to tell you about all of these experiences I had had, because, obviously, these experiences very much inform my reaction to the film.

My reaction to the film was very much along the lines of Misfit Poise’s reaction and Gretchen’s reaction.

I think the film is much more about the relationships between the mothers and the daughters, and how Muslim immigrant women and their girl children navigate a new life in France and straddle two cultures, the culture of their birth, a Muslim immigrant / African culture, and the culture of their newfound home, secular and libertine modern France.

Just like the elderly woman living in Rabat, Morocco, laughing at women gyrating in thongs on the television, seemingly at ease with this display of flesh, yet her daughter hid her birth control pills from her. Just like how young women and girls in the Muslim immigrant communities in the housing projects in the ghettoized suburbs around Paris use emergency contraception as their primary form of contraception, because it’s easier to hide from their families.

The mother in Cuties tells the grandmother to leave her daughter alone, while the daughter is dressed like a whore. She tells her she need not attend her father’s wedding to his new, younger second wife. But, this same mother had a man, whom I presume was the local imam, check her daughter for demons after performing something of an exorcism on the girl.

It seems to be ok for the young to adopt the dress and habits and tastes of libertine France, as long as the young girls are not adopting the sexual mores of libertine France. Skimpy clothing? yes. As long as chastity and virginity are maintained.

I have so much more to say, but I think I’ll stop here for the moment. But, I didn’t feel that this was a movie made for pedophiles. I do completely understand why some of the scenes with the very young girls dancing and gyrating on the floor, etc. were very disturbing for a lot of viewers. Of course I do. But, I don’t think this was the point of the film by any stretch of the imagination.

I also want to end by saying that I didn’t feel that the film was hyperbolic in its characterization of the day to day life of a young girl like Amy. I do think very young girls feel tremendous pressure to be cool, to be liked by boys, and girls, and to be very sexual from a very young age. And, girls are nothing less than vicious to one another at that age. And, for someone from a strict religious and insular culture, it’s almost impossible not to blunder and egregiously violate social conventions where are entirely foreign to you. I had this kind of experience growing up in a strict and misogynistic religious cult, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and then attending public school. I have so many memories of my blunders that make me cringe in shame to this day. I wanted so desperately to be cool, to be popular, to be liked by the boys, to be thought of as pretty and beautiful and sexy and desirable. Thank God there was no internet and no social media. Phew.

More to follow.

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I’m crazy upset, because something shocking happened.

Isabel Wilkerson, the author of the book, Caste, selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club, egregiously defamed me on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman yesterday, and I found other instances of her having defamed me in the Fake News Press in recent weeks to sell copies of her book.

On Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, Isabel Wilkerson spoke about me during an interview in which she also discussed Hitler, slavery, Jim Crow, and lynchings, as well as George Floyd’s killing and Ahmaud Arbery’s killing.  This is literally insane and evil.  When Isabel Wilkerson defamed me as someone who lynches black students at Yale on Democracy Now, she is trying to get me killed.  She is trying to incite my murder.  She is trying to drive me to suicide.  She is trying to get me killed to make money off of my corpse.

I am under no illusions about why Isabel Wilkerson did this.  She did this to exploit George Floyd’s killing for Moral Outrage Industry money and fame and to revive the Living While Black movement as a bloodsport targeting vulnerable white women, because it’s a far easier way to make money than actually addressing real Racism and Police Brutality.  She did this to sell copies of her Race Hoax of a book, Caste.

I know for a fact that Isabel Wilkerson, who is now blocking me on Twitter, because she didn’t appreciate me publicly exposing her as a lying bigot and fraud, LIED about me on Democracy Now.  She also lied about me in an Israeli newspaper recently.  I know this, because I know that Oprah knows that the Living or Napping While Black Incident at Yale was a Hate Crime Hoax, and if Oprah knows this, then there is no way that Isabel Wilkerson does not know this.

I know that Oprah knows that the Living or Napping While Black Incident at Yale was a Hate Crime Hoax, because her lifelong producer, Jack Mori, contacted me to appear on Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk show.  Then, after Oprah announced that she was making Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste her next Oprah book club selection, suddenly Red Table Talk is no longer pursuing this topic, according to an email I received from their Supervising Producer.  Also, I was recently approached by the Casting Director, Rachel Macy, for an A&E show about cancelled people.  I am now being ghosted by them, after Oprah made her announcement.  Just in case anyone doesn’t believe that there is a conspiracy of silence now and that the powers that be will stop at nothing to prevent me from saving my life and lifelong human and civil rights career.

If Democracy Now wishes to continue to assert that they are journalists with integrity and ethics, then they need to have me on to tell the truth about the Living or Napping While Black Hate Crime Hoax at Yale.  I am sick and tired of people thinking it’s ok to get me killed to make money off my corpse, because I’m white and poor.  

Every time I think no one could possibly be so stupid or evil as to defame me in the Fake News Press any longer, along comes Isabel Wilkerson and Democracy Now to prove me wrong.  I just needed to scream out my rage and despair for a moment.  I feel better now. 

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My heart breaks when I think about the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. Here is a picture of me with Tom Tyler, my former advisor and the Father of Procedural Justice and one of the Founders, along with Tracey Meares, of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School, as well as a member, again along with Tracey Meares, of President Obama’s 21st Century Policing Taskforce. It was taken towards the end of April, 2018, at a restaurant in New Haven, CT, with other student Justice Collaboratory members of Tom Tyler’s lab group. This was around 2 weeks before the Living or Napping While Black Hate Crime Hoax at Yale on May 8th, 2018:

I was also part of the Justice Collaboratory and a member of Tom Tyler’s lab group at Yale Law School. Yale Sterling Law Professor Alan Schwartz had suggested that I approach Tom Tyler and ask to work with him. I had worked for years with Alan Schwartz on an agent-based computational model and simulations of a corporate control market. In fact, our work was recently published in the Harvard Business Law Review. Tom Tyler seemed very keen to work with me. He was very pleased with my social psychological empirical study design on the nature of authority, the nature of legitimacy, and the nature of the relationship between the two. My PhD Dissertation, the Statics and Mechanics of Social Institutions, is on the philosophical foundations of law and language. Tom Tyler became part of my Dissertation Committee and one of my Co-Chairs. I worked with the Justice Collaboratory on a study on School Resource Officers in public schools and the disparate impact on students of color and the school to prison pipeline.

I actually spoke with Tom Tyler before May 8th, 2018, about the fact that I had been falsely accused of racism, including by a group of Yale Deans. At the time, I didn’t know that I had in fact been accused of having perpetrated a racist hate crime comparable to a lynching for having called the non emergency helpline of the Yale Campus Police, more or less regarded as campus security, after a stranger followed me in an unauthorized manner up to my isolated Yale dorm room on the 12th floor of the tower of the Hall of Graduate Studies, my Yale dorm. At the time, Tom Tyler assured me that he knew I wasn’t racist, and he told me not to worry.

After the Living or Napping While Black Hate Crime Hoax at Yale, on May 8th, 2018, Tom Tyler remained supportive of me. He wrote a character letter on my behalf for Yale’s General Counsel after Yale Graduate School Dean Lynn Cooley falsely charged me with racial harassment on June 5th, 2018. As I continued to keep my advisors apprised of the situation, and the communications between my attorney and Yale’s General Counsel, the months went by, and Tom Tyler became less and less involved, and his assurances of support dwindled. There definitely came a point at which he stopped communicating with me altogether. I was concerned, but I was so overwhelmed with trying to save my life while doing my best not to kill myself, not to mention the fact that I was in hiding and being deluged by death threats, that I just didn’t have the energy to address it.

It wasn’t until I asked Tom Tyler in late spring 2019 to speak with a journalist that I knew definitively that he had abandoned me. He told me matter of factly that he wanted nothing more to do with me. I figured that I knew the reason for his change of heart about me.

Immediately after the Living or Napping While Black Hate Crime Hoax at Yale, on May 8th, 2018, Vesla Weaver wrote a patently ridiculous Vox dot com article about me that was nothing but lies. This farce of an article, which she was trying to pass off as scholarship, was heavily promoted, including on social media, by Chris Lebron, who mentioned me by name and described me as an egregious racist. I was in a state of complete shock when I discovered that they had done this.

Both Vesla Weaver and Chris Lebron are currently professors at Johns Hopkins University. They were both formerly at Yale University, and Chris Lebron was denied tenure at Yale, which precipitated their subsequent moves to Johns Hopkins. Vesla Weaver is currently a member of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale, and a longtime friend and collaborator of Tracey Meares. Tracey Meares was very public in her denunciations of Yale for having denied Lebron tenure. Both Vesla Weaver and Chris Lebron work on the areas of policing and its disparate impact on communities of color, and Lebron also works specifically on the Black Lives Matter movement.

Vesla Weaver and Chris Lebron used me as a proxy to get revenge against Yale for Lebron being denied tenure. This was made clear to me by a number of persons inside Yale. Both Vesla Weaver and Chris Lebron knew me, and they knew me as an anti-racism activist and graduate student who worked on the subjects of police brutality and implicit bias. I would even go so far as to say that Chris Lebron knew me well at one point. I had worked closely with Chris Lebron at Yale on a couple of explicitly anti-racism conferences, including the Joyce Mitchell Cook Conference, honoring the first African American woman in the US to earn a PhD in Philosophy, which she earned at Yale. The point being, that they knew me, they knew I was entirely innocent, and they knew that they were telling disgusting lies about me that put my life in the gravest danger and would very likely get me killed or drive me to suicide.

I know for a fact that Yale Graduate School Dean Lynn Cooley contacted Vesla Weaver to ask her to retract the farcical Vox dot com article, or, at least, to correct the many glaring factual errors in the article. I am under no illusions about the fact that Dean Cooley did so to protect Yale, not me. It was clear to her that Vesla Weaver had written the article to use me as a proxy to get revenge against Yale for Lebron having been denied tenure. I know for a fact that Vesla Weaver told Dean Cooley that she couldn’t care less about the lies in the article and that she had no intention whatsoever to correct a single error. I know that Yale Graduate School Dean Lynn Cooley also contacted Vox dot com to let them know that the article was riddled with gross lies. I believe that Vox dot com agreed to publish subsequent articles that defamed only me to placate Dean Cooley.

I can’t remember exactly when I began to publicly denounce Vesla Weaver and Chris Lebron for having used me (an anti-racism graduate student whom they knew and with whom they had worked) as a proxy to get revenge against Yale for Lebron having been denied tenure, but I believe it was around this time that Tom Tyler became ever more distant and cold towards me and began ghosting me.

I presume that Tom Tyler dropped me as an advisee at the behest of Tracey Meares to protect Vesla Weaver, who remains, to this day, a member of the Justice Collaboratory, and a friend and collaborator of Meares.

Recently, another member of the Justice Collaboratory and a Yale Law School Professor, Monica Bell, wrote a disgusting NYU Law Review article that grossly defames me. I almost killed myself when I discovered that she had done this. I was in a complete state of shock. I responded to Monica Bell’s contacting me publicly on Twitter when I discovered the defamatory article and told her that she knew me, and knew I was innocent, and had told disgusting lies about me, and was driving me to suicide, and her response was to stigmatize mental illness and to block me. Blocking me was also the response by Vesla Weaver and Chris Lebron when I called them out for having tried to drive me to suicide.

Again, Monica Bell knew me, she knew me as an anti-racism activist, and I had worked with her briefly at the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. She knew that I was entirely innocent, and she knew that she was telling disgusting lies about me that would very likely bring about my death by getting me killed or driving me to suicide. I can only assume that she did this to protect the Justice Collaboratory and the members thereof, including Tom Tyler, Tracey Meares, and Vesla Weaver.

After Monica Bell’s recent lying NYU Law Review article, I was prompted to reach out to both Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken and Johns Hopkins President Ronald Daniels for help in addressing the gross malfeasance and unprofessional misconduct of the Yale Law School Professor members of the Justice Collaboratory, as well as Johns Hopkins Professors Vesla Weaver and Chris Lebron. They had all tried to get an innocent anti-racism Yale University graduate student with whom they had worked killed to cover up their own wrongdoing. I never received a response from Johns Hopkins University President Ronald Daniels. The response I received from Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken was chilling. She refused to address the gross misconduct of Yale Law School Professors, and she stigmatized mental illness in doing so. When I responded by asking Dean Gerken to please refer me to the office at Yale Law School that is responsible for responding to the gross misconduct of Yale Law School Professors, she did not respond to me. Likewise, I never received a response to my message to the NYU Law Review, letting them know that Monica Bell had grossly defamed me in her lying article, Anti-Segregation Policing.

The disgusting behavior of the Justice Collaboratory towards me also taints President Obama’s 21st Century Policing Taskforce, of which both Tracey Meares and Tom Tyler were members. Anything having to do with the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School now has zero credibility on policing and police brutality, and this includes the consultancy, 21CP, an offshoot of President Obama’s 21st Century Policing Taskforce. No, I do not in any way think it is a coincidence that the Yale Administration used 21CP to create a farcical report on the Yale Campus Police, a report that grossly defames me and is an exercise in how to destroy the life of an innocent anti-racism activist and graduate student, as was Yale’s farce of a Title VI Review Report. They all destroyed their credibility by trying to get an innocent graduate student killed to cover up their own wrongdoing. They destroyed themselves. I’m just telling the simple truth.

At this point, after the disgusting way that I have been treated by Yale and the Yale Law School, no one should send their children there. If you do, you risk the Yale Administration trying to destroy your child’s life for daring to stray a hair from Woke Intersectional Feminism dogma.

I want the whole world to know that in April, 2018, Yale Law School Professor Tom Tyler said some decidedly unWoke things at our end of the academic year dinner for the student Justice Collaboratory members of his lab group. Yes, the above picture is from that very dinner. We were talking about race, and I spoke of having grown up in a racially integrated religious cult, the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I spoke about not learning about or having any understanding of racism, until I was a bit older, in public school. I spoke about how this put me in a strange position in the current cultural climate, especially on college campuses, wherein one is supposed to profess one’s ineluctable indoctrination as a white supremacist in the US. We spoke about implicit bias and the standard implicit bias test (the IAT), and I admitted that I had never taken it, but that I would be very curious to know what my results would be. Tom Tyler encouraged me to take the standard test, which is available online, but he told me not to put too much stock in the results.

I think everyone will be very surprised to learn that Tom Tyler made statements that you might have heard from Amy Wax, the University of Pennsylvania Law Professor who is often under fire in the media for saying that Black students are, generally speaking, academically ill prepared to handle college level work. Tom Tyler said as much.

Tom Tyler said that most US Black high school students are woefully ill prepared to handle college level academic work, and that this is particularly the case at elite colleges like Yale. He said that this is why when you see newspaper stories about a US high school student who was accepted to all 8 Ivy League schools, they are always Black. He said that there are so few Black US high school students who are prepared to handle the academic work at an elite college that all of the Ivy League universities fight over them and are willing to do almost anything to enroll them.

I am telling the simple, honest to God truth. I am sick and tired of the Justice Collaboratory, Yale Law School, and the Yale Administration and Police telling disgusting lies about me that put my life in grave danger. I demand that Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken address the gross malfeasance of these Yale Law School Professors.

If you wish to support me, as I seek justice, it would mean the world to me. Here are my PayPalMe and GoFundMe links. 

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I just sent the following email to Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken:

Dear Dean Gerken,

It pains me to have to send you this email, but I feel that I have no choice.  

I suspect that you know who I am.  My name is Sarah Braasch, and I am the PhD Candidate in Philosophy at Yale who is the purported villain of the Living or Napping While Black Incident at Yale when in truth I am the entirely innocent victim of the Living or Napping While Black Hate Crime Hoax at Yale, and the Yale Administration and Police were complicit therein.

I am guessing that you are aware that I was a member of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School, at the time of the Hate Crime Hoax, and Professor Tom Tyler was my advisor.  Professor Tyler was very excited about my social psychological study design on the nature of authority, the nature of legitimacy, and the nature of the relationship between the two.  Moreover, I had been working, for years, with Yale Sterling Law Professor Alan Schwartz, on an agent based computational model and simulations in Matlab of a corporate control market.  The results of our efforts were recently published in the Harvard Business Law Review.  Because my PhD Dissertation is on the philosophical foundations of law, I had been very much a part of the Yale Law School community during my entire experience in the PhD Program in Philosophy at Yale.  

I write to you to unfortunately let you know about the gross malfeasance of many of the members of the Justice Collaboratory.  

Immediately following the Hate Crime Hoax, current Johns Hopkins Professor Vesla Weaver, a current Justice Collaboratory member and longtime friend and collaborator of Tracey Meares, along with one time Yale Professor and also current Johns Hopkins Professor Chris Lebron, used me as a proxy to get revenge against Yale for having been denied tenure.  Both Professors Weaver and Lebron knew me and they knew me as a deeply committed anti-racism activist, and I would even go so far as to say that Professor Lebron knew me well at one point.  I had worked closely with Professor Lebron while organizing the explicitly anti-racist conference, the Joyce Mitchell Cook Conference at Yale, to honor the first African American woman to earn a PhD in Philosophy at Yale.  

Professor Vesla Weaver wrote a patently ridiculous vox dot com article, which she tried to pass off as scholarship, that was nothing but disgusting lies about me.  Professor Lebron actively promoted the article as scholarship, including on social media, and he explicitly named me and referred to me as an egregious racist.  

I know for a fact that Yale Graduate School Dean Lynn Cooley spoke with Professor Weaver and asked her to retract the article, because it was replete with gross inaccuracies.  Please bear in mind that I am under no illusions about the fact that Yale Graduate School Dean Lynn Cooley did not do this for my benefit in any way, shape, or form.  She did this to protect Yale, because it was clear to her that Professor Weaver had written this article and used me as a proxy to wreak vengeance upon Yale.  I know for a fact that Professor Vesla Weaver told Dean Cooley that she couldn’t care less about the lies in her article and that she had absolutely no intention of altering a single word.

After I publicly denounced Professors Weaver and Lebron for having abused me, an entirely innocent anti-racism graduate student with whom they had worked, by using me as a proxy to get revenge against Yale for having been denied tenure, Professor Tyler dropped me as an advisee, presumably at the behest of Tracey Meares.  Professor Meares had been very public in her denunciations of Yale for these denials of tenure.  And, she is a longtime friend and collaborator of Professor Weaver’s, who remains a member of the Justice Collaboratory.  

Recently, Professor Monica Bell wrote an NYU Law Review article, Anti-Segregation Policing, that names me and grossly defames me.  I had worked briefly with Professor Bell at the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School.  She knew me and she also knew me as a deeply committed anti-racism activist.  She absolutely knew that she was telling disgusting lies about me that place my life in the gravest danger and that would likely drive me to suicide.  I can only interpret Professor Bell’s actions as an attempt to destroy me and to drive me to suicide to protect the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School, including Professor Tyler, Professor Meares, and Professor Weaver.  

I beseech you to please help me.  In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, I have been subjected to yet another global vilification and defamation campaign against me.  I have been in hiding for more than two years.  I have been intermittently suicidal for more than two years.  I have been deluged with death threats and threats of violence for more than two years.  My life and lifelong human and civil rights academic and legal careers have been destroyed.  I will never be able to secure gainful employment and support myself.  I can’t even tell you how many times I almost committed suicide, including recently, as the result of being named and defamed in the NY Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post, and many, many other publications, as well as on social media.  I have endured Twitter mobbing after Twitter mobbing, including recently by one incited by Josie Duffy Rice, the President of The Appeal.  

Please help me regain some semblance of my life and career that were stolen from me.  I am literally begging you.  

I also ask you to address the gross misconduct of the members of the Justice Collaboratory and Yale Law School towards an entirely innocent and dedicated anti-racism Yale graduate school student.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Best regards,

Sarah Braasch

If you wish to support me, as I seek justice, it would mean the world to me. Here are my PayPalMe and GoFundMe links. 

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I just sent the following online message to the NYU Law Review (I didn’t copy it before I sent it, so this is to the best of my memory):

Dear NYU Law Review,

It pains me to have to write this message, but I feel compelled to do so. I will be concise here, since this is only an online message, but please contact me at my email address for the full story.

I am asking you to retract Professor Monica Bell’s article, Anti-Segregation Policing, in your most recent issue. This article grossly defames me.

I worked briefly with Professor Bell at the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. She knows me, and she knows me as an anti-racism activist. She knows that she was lying about me and endangering an entirely innocent person’s life.

I believe that Professor Bell wrote this article to defame me and to drive me to suicide to protect Professor Tom Tyler, my one time advisor, Tracey Meares, his Co Director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School, and Vesla Weaver, a Johns Hopkins Professor and current Justice Collaboratory member.

Professor Weaver, along with one time Yale Professor Chris Lebron, currently also at Johns Hopkins, used me as a proxy to get revenge against Yale, because they were upset about not having received tenure at Yale.

Shortly thereafter, after having publicly denounced Professors Weaver and Lebron for having used me so, Professor Tyler dropped me as an advisee, presumably at the behest of Tracey Meares, since Professor Weaver is a long time friend and collaborator of hers.

I believe that Monica Bell wrote this article to defame me and to drive me to suicide and to cover up the gross malfeasance of Tom Tyler, Tracey Meares, Vesla Weaver, and the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School.

Thank you for your time and your consideration.

Best regards,

Sarah Braasch

If you wish to support me, as I seek justice, it would mean the world to me. Here are my PayPalMe and GoFundMe links. 

PayPalMe:  https://www.paypal.me/SarahBraasch

GoFundMe:  https://www.gofundme.com/sarah-braasch-legal-fund

You can follow me on twitter here:  https://twitter.com/sarahbraasch1?lang=en

Please subscribe to my YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz4xV2R6mTVJhAu9OQzwp5g

I just sent the following email to Johns Hopkins University President Daniels:

Dear President Daniels,

It pains me to have to write this letter to you, but I feel compelled to do so.

My name is Sarah Braasch, and I am the PhD Candidate in Philosophy at Yale who is the purported villain of the Living or Napping While Black Incident at Yale.  In point of fact, I am the entirely innocent victim of the Living or Napping While Black Hate Crime Hoax at Yale, and the Yale Administration and Police were complicit.  My life and lifelong human and civil rights academic and legal careers were destroyed, I’ve been in hiding for more than 2 years, and I can’t tell you how many times I almost committed suicide.

It pains me to have to tell you that Professors Vesla Weaver and Chris Lebron participated, in no small part, in the global vilification and defamation campaign against me.  

Please know that I was a member of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School at the time of the Hate Crime Hoax, and Tom Tyler, the father of Procedural Justice, was my advisor.  Of course, Tracey Meares and Tom Tyler, the Co Directors of the Justice Collaboratory, were both part of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.  Vesla Weaver, a longtime friend and collaborator of Meares, is currently a member of the Justice Collaboratory.

Additionally, I organized an explicitly anti-racism conference with my advisor, Jason Stanley, the Joyce Mitchell Cook Conference, honoring the first African American woman to obtain a PhD in Philosophy at Yale.  I worked closely with Professor Lebron while organizing this conference.  
Both Professors Vesla Weaver and Chris Lebron knew me, and I would even say that Professor Lebron knew me well at one point, and they both knew me as a profoundly committed anti-racism activist.  Moreover, I was a graduate student working with them as faculty.

Their betrayal of me devastated me.  

After the Living or Napping While Black Hate Crime Hoax at Yale, Professors Weaver and Lebron used me as a proxy to get revenge against Yale, because they were angry that Professor Lebron had been denied tenure at Yale.  They knew that they were telling disgusting lies about me that were endangering my life and destroying my lifelong human and civil rights academic and legal careers.  They didn’t care about destroying an entirely innocent anti-racism graduate student; they only cared about getting revenge against Yale.

Professor Weaver wrote a patently ridiculous vox dot com article, which she tried to pass off as scholarship.  Chris Lebron actively promoted this article, including on social media, and he explicitly named me as an egregious racist when doing so.  I was in a state of shock.  I know for a fact that Yale Graduate School Dean Lynn Cooley contacted Professor Weaver, to ask her to retract her ridiculous article, because it was riddled with lies, not, mind you, to help me, but only to protect Yale, because it was clear that Professor Weaver had written this article and used me to wreak vengeance upon Yale.  I know for a fact that Professor Vesla Weaver told Yale Graduate School Dean Lynn Cooley that she had ZERO intention of altering a single word of her ridiculous and grossly defamatory vox dot com article.  

I cannot express the devastation I felt at being used in this way and betrayed by two Professors with whom I had worked as an anti-racism activist.  I am still struggling to regain some semblance of my life and career.  In the wake of George Floyd’s death, I have had to endure yet another global vilification and defamation campaign against me.  I have had to go back into hiding to save my life.  I have been deluged by death threats and threats of violence again.  I have been intermittently suicidal for the past two years.  

I beg you to help me save my life and human and civil rights career.  Please help me.  I don’t know what else to do.  

I also thought you needed to know that this is how two Professors at Johns Hopkins treat a graduate student whom they knew and with whom they had worked.  I do not think that Professors Weaver and Lebron should be allowed to work with graduate students.  I do not think that they should be allowed to continue to pretend that they care about Racism and Police Brutality.  I do not think that they should be allowed to continue as Professors at Johns Hopkins.  They disgrace the legacy of Johns Hopkins.  

Thank you for your time and your consideration.

Best regards,

Sarah Braasch

If you wish to support me, as I seek justice, it would mean the world to me. Here are my PayPalMe and GoFundMe links. 

PayPalMe:  https://www.paypal.me/SarahBraasch

GoFundMe:  https://www.gofundme.com/sarah-braasch-legal-fund

You can follow me on twitter here:  https://twitter.com/sarahbraasch1?lang=en

Please subscribe to my YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz4xV2R6mTVJhAu9OQzwp5g

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar just signed my death warrant in the LA Times.

If you wish to support me, as I seek justice, it would mean the world to me. Here are my PayPalMe and GoFundMe links. 

PayPalMe:  https://www.paypal.me/SarahBraasch

GoFundMe:  https://www.gofundme.com/sarah-braasch-legal-fund

You can follow me on twitter here:  https://twitter.com/sarahbraasch1?lang=en

Please subscribe to my YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz4xV2R6mTVJhAu9OQzwp5g

I just sent the following email to Yale President Peter Salovey:

President Salovey,

I am afraid for my life.  I am begging you to save my life and tell the TRUTH finally about the Living or Napping While Black Hate Crime Hoax at Yale.

I believe that I will be killed soon, if you do not make a public statement exonerating me and apologizing to me.

I don’t know what else to do.

Please do the right thing finally and tell the TRUTH and save my life and lifelong human and civil rights academic and legal careers.

Sarah Braasch

If you wish to support me, as I seek justice, it would mean the world to me. Here are my PayPalMe and GoFundMe links. 

PayPalMe:  https://www.paypal.me/SarahBraasch

GoFundMe:  https://www.gofundme.com/sarah-braasch-legal-fund

You can follow me on twitter here:  https://twitter.com/sarahbraasch1?lang=en

Please subscribe to my YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz4xV2R6mTVJhAu9OQzwp5g

Below you will find two links to the pdfs of a set of emails sent by Yale’s General Counsel to my then attorney in the summer of 2018. I hadn’t read these emails until recently, so I didn’t realize until recently that these emails include new emails that PROVE that the Yale Admin, including Yale Graduate School Dean Lynn Cooley and Yale Graduate School Diversity Dean and Title IX Coordinator Michelle Nearon LIED about the Living or Napping While Black Hate Crime Hoax. This set of emails also includes emails that PROVE that Yale Campus Police Chief Ronnell Higgins perjured himself at the CT Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Commission Hearing on November 4th, 2019, in downtown Hartford, CT.

On page 5 of the pdf of the first batch of emails, there is an email from the Resident Coordinators to Yale Housing Managers Beth Bishop and Kate St. Marie on Saturday, February 24th, 2018, at 10:43 pm. I think this email provides strong corroboration of my claim that the Resident Coordinators of the Hall of Graduate Studies (my Yale dormitory) were complicit in the Living or Napping While Black Hate Crime Hoax, were very likely friends of Lolade Siyonbola and Jean Louis Reneson, were very likely present for the event on the evening of Saturday, February 24th, 2018, and may have even participated in the harassment I experienced that evening. I also think this email shows that I was widely known and despised across campus, including by the Resident Coordinators of the Hall of Graduate Studies, because I stood up for the Federal Civil Rights of an Evangelical black man at Yale during my 1st year in the PhD Program in Philosophy, in Spring 2015, and I was branded an anti-LGBTQ bigot for having done so.

In this email, the Resident Coordinators say that they didn’t have a chance to meet with me on the evening of Saturday, February 24th, 2018. I believe that this is a lie. In this and other emails, they make clear that they were able to speak with everyone besides me. They spoke with the Yale Campus Police officers, whom I now believe never even came to the 12th floor of the tower of the Hall of Graduate Studies, because I never heard them. They spoke with Lolade Siyonbola and Jean Louis Reneson. But, they never bothered to knock on my door to speak with me. Please note that I sent my email to the Resident Coordinators at 6:28 pm, while I was still being harassed. The Resident Coordinators didn’t bother to respond until after 10 pm that evening. I was in my dorm room that entire time. They could have knocked on my door at any point. They had ample time to come speak with me.

Next, the Resident Coordinators make clear to the Yale Housing Managers that they regard me as the guilty party, an opinion that they formed without ever speaking with me. They also make clear, I believe, that they knew about the Spring 2015 incident, and that they regarded me as an anti-LGBTQ bigot. They tell the Yale Housing Managers that this isn’t the first time I had been involved in something like this, and they state that they don’t wish to meet with me alone. Then, they state that the other students involved feel very aggrieved about what happened. I believe, after my complaint about the harassment at 6:28 pm, that the Resident Coordinators of the Hall of Graduate Studies, Esther Sosa and Grant Mandigora, developed a plan of attack with Lolade Siyonbola and Jean Louis Reneson. I think they decided to falsely accuse me of racism, to deflect from the fact that they had been harassing me.

Please remember that when I met with Yale Housing Managers, Beth Bishop and Kate St. Marie on Monday, February 26th, 2018, they fully exonerated me for the incident on Saturday, February 24th, 2018. They told me that I had done nothing wrong. They told me that I was the only person who had done nothing wrong. They told me that they would deal with all of the other presumed students involved, including the students who had been harassing me that evening. They told me that they were very upset with the way that the Resident Coordinators had handled the situation. They told me that the Resident Coordinators would be reprimanded. Beth Bishop also told me that she would be more than happy to close the 12th floor common room, if it was becoming a problem. The Yale Housing Managers told me to return to my dissertation and not to give what had happened on Saturday another thought. I was perfectly happy to drop the issue. I had no interest in getting anyone in trouble, as I told the Yale Housing Managers. I simply wished to be left alone and in peace to complete my Saving the World project, my PhD Dissertation.

I want everyone to remember that Lolade Siyonbola and Jean Louis Reneson wrote a letter to Yale Graduate School Diversity Dean and Graduate School Title IX Coordinator Michelle Nearon, to which she refers in these emails, in which they accused me of having perpetrated a racist hate crime comparable to a LYNCHING. This was a ridiculous and obviously false charge. There is no way that Dean Nearon did not KNOW that this was a completely ridiculous and false charge. Yale Housing Director George Longyear told me that this letter had been written to Dean Nearon. I was not allowed to see this letter nor know what it was that I was being accused of having said or done that was racist until the end of June, 2018. I was falsely charged with racial harassment on June 5th, 2018, by Yale Graduate School Dean Lynn Cooley. I questioned the veracity of the version of the letter which I received at the end of June, 2018, because it was addressed to Yale Housing Director George Longyear. I believe that this was changed, in an effort to protect Dean Nearon and the Yale Administration from legal liability. I believe that the emails below corroborate this point. Notice how Dean Nearon discusses how she need not give me the letter.

I’ll stop here for now. I have much, much more to say about these emails. Stay tuned for subsequent parts of this blog post.

Here is the first batch of emails sent by Yale General Counsel to my then attorney in the summer of 2018:

https://app.luminpdf.com/viewer/5e9d59069afed100170cbae5

Here is the second batch of emails sent by Yale General Counsel to my then attorney in the summer of 2018:

https://app.luminpdf.com/viewer/5e9d5b609afed100170cbb8e

If you wish to support me, as I seek justice, it would mean the world to me. Here are my PayPalMe and GoFundMe links. 

PayPalMe:  https://www.paypal.me/SarahBraasch

GoFundMe:  https://www.gofundme.com/sarah-braasch-legal-fund

You can follow me on twitter here:  https://twitter.com/sarahbraasch1?lang=en

Please subscribe to my YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz4xV2R6mTVJhAu9OQzwp5g