Timid Response to Harassment Claim Disputed

A UC Berkeley law professor Wednesday rebutted assertions that faculty members responded timidly to a student who sought help after an alleged sexual assault by the law school’s dean.

Addressing what she called “mistakes in statements made in the press,” professor Eleanor Swift said she counseled a student at length on ways to pursue a sexual harassment complaint against Dean John P. Dwyer, who resigned last week because of the allegation.

Swift, a former associate dean at the Boalt Hall law school, said that when the woman sought her advice in the spring of 2001, several months after the alleged victim claimed to have been molested by Dwyer, she described several formal and informal steps that the student could take. Ultimately, she said, the student decided not to pursue the matter while she was enrolled at the school.

The woman, who graduated in May, filed a formal sexual harassment complaint with the university in October. Laura Stevens, the woman’s attorney, has said that university faculty were uncertain when approached for help by the student and feared retaliation by the law school if they came to the student’s aid.

Stevens said university officials tried to keep the matter quiet to protect the reputation of the prestigious law school and its highly regarded dean.

“I did not fear retaliation against me if I were to help her,” Swift said in a two-page written statement released Wednesday.

Another professor, Linda Hamilton Krieger, said Monday that she tried to offer the woman assistance as well, even contacting the university’s Title IX officer in charge of sexual harassment complaints to obtain information for the student about the complaint process. Krieger said she assumes that the alleged victim waited until October to file her complaint because she was studying for the bar exam.

The university acknowledged Monday that the student sought help from three female professors, but did not name them.

In an interview Monday with The Times, before she made public that she had been consulted by the student, Swift said, “I do not believe women faculty would have refused assistance to the student because of fear of retaliation. I simply don’t believe it.”

Swift said Wednesday that she spoke in her office with the student in the spring of 2001. “She was upset, angry and scared,” Swift said.

“I treated this matter with utmost concern, care and caution,” Swift said. “I sought to give her some comfort. I kept her statements confidential, which is what she wanted.”

At a second meeting with the student, Swift said, she described the university’s sexual harassment complaint procedures, and outlined less formal approaches “that might produce an acknowledgment from the dean and some form of remedy, plus assurance that this would not happen to other women students.”

Swift said she offered to communicate with the dean herself, or ask a male faculty member to talk to the dean. She offered to accompany the student to talk with the executive vice chancellor and provost without filing a formal complaint, Swift said.

After describing the options, Swift said, the student “said that she wanted to be able to finish law school and concentrate on her academic and public interest work, which she feared she could not do” if the matter became public while she was at school, Swift said.

Swift, 57, had lodged a grievance against the university in 1987 when she was initially denied tenure. An expert on evidence law, she has some experience with conflicting witness accounts. She once wrote an article entitled, “Rival Claims to ‘Truth.’ ”

Dwyer, whose resignation is effective Jan. 1, described a “single encounter” that he said was consensual. Attorney Stevens said Dwyer “grossly mischaracterized” the December 2000 incident, which she said was a sexual assault that occurred after a night of drinking.

By Stevens’ account, the alleged assault occurred after her client went to dinner with a professor and other students. They were joined at the restaurant by Dwyer, who later accompanied the alleged victim and four other students to a bar.

After the second gathering, Dwyer drove the student to her Oakland apartment. Stevens said her client remembers waking at 4:37 a.m. and found Dwyer, fully clothed, in her bed fondling her.

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Times staff writer Henry Weinstein contributed to this report.