The Inbox: Part 1, Emily

Kristen Torres: It's The 11th. I'm Kristen Torres, one of the producers here. One of the first people we spoke with when starting The 11th was with the writer Sarah Viren. In March of 2020, she published an essay in the New York Times Magazine about how her wife Marta was falsely and anonymously accused of sexual harassment. Rumors spread, a big investigation ensued. The whole thing became really messy. Ultimately, Marta was cleared, but after Sarah published that essay, her inbox flooded with stories—hundreds of them—from people saying they had been through something similar. This is a series about how she made sense of those stories, and her responsibility to them.

Kristen: For this first edition of The 11th, writer Sarah Viren with "The Inbox." A quick warning: this episode contains discussion of sexual violence. Please take care while listening.

Sarah Viren: Last year, I told a story. It was about me and my wife Marta. I'd told it before, privately, to friends and family, and it always shocked them. They said it was unlike anything they'd heard before.

Sarah: But then I wrote about that story in the New York Times Magazine, how both Marta and I had been falsely accused of doing appalling things, and what it did to our lives. The way it made me doubt myself, but also my wife.

Sarah: And afterwards, my inbox filled with people saying they had a story just like mine. There were professors and teachers and lawyers and priests, and just people, so many of them, writing to say that they understood.

Man: "Hi, Sarah."

Woman: "Hi, Sarah."

Man: "Hi, Sarah."

Woman: "Dear Sarah, I have never reached out like this ..."

Man: "I'm shaking as I write this email to you."

Sarah: This was March of 2020. A new virus was spreading across the country. My kids' school and daycare had closed down. Life had been reduced to a screen. I had no idea what to say to the people in my inbox, so for a while I mostly said nothing. But as March turned to April and then summer came, their voices stayed with me in my head. They were intimate and imploring, and I was their only audience. That's when I began to respond. In a few instances, I actually picked up the phone, and we talked, these strangers and me, about their stories and mine.

Sarah: I began to see that there was something in the accumulation of their voices, and I wanted an audience bigger than me needed to hear them. Welcome to my inbox.

Woman: "The feelings you describe in your stomach, the tears ..."

Woman #2: "I am terrified every day."

Man: "It has completely exploded our lives."

Man #2: "I'll keep this short. The point of this email is simply to say your story is one of many."

Sarah: A woman named Emily Van Duyne messaged me on Twitter the day after my story published.

Emily Van Duyne: "Hi, Sarah. Please forgive me for reaching out like this."

Sarah: She was a writer and an academic, like I am. And also a mom.

Emily Van Duyne: "Like you, I had many moments when I doubted my own life, my own actions, my practically failsafe memory. Your story resonated so much with me, but also gave me hope."

Sarah: I called Emily in October to hear her story in more detail, and we talked for more than an hour and a half. She made me laugh a number of times, but also gasp. And more than once I was close to tears. So a few months after that, Emily and I spoke again for this podcast. She'd had a baby in that interim, and she sat in the rocking chair of a nursery in New Jersey while her baby slept. I stared at her from my office in Arizona. She's got dark brown hair and a deep dimple in one cheek when she laughs, which as you'll hear, she does a lot. She's super quick witted and she loves—I mean, loves—Sylvia Plath. As do I, though not quite as much. But we had a lot in common, more than just our shared story. As I discovered early in our conversation, we both once thought of ourselves as poets.

Emily Van Duyne: Trying to publish poems is like shouting into the void, you know? You're like, "Here's my three poems." And then like 18 months later, this journal no one's ever heard of is like, "We don't want them." And you're like, "Oh."

Sarah: It's—no, I write poetry as well. And I have to say, like, responses to poems are the meanest.

Emily Van Duyne: They're horrible.

Sarah: Like, people will be like, "We found some worth in these, but we're gonna reject them." It's like, you don't have to be rude. Like, they're poems!

Sarah: One thing I've always loved about poems is how they often rely on constraints. A sonnet has 14 lines with interlocking rhymes. A sestina uses repeating end words. This podcast is not a poem—I promise—but I've decided to give myself some constraints here. I felt like I needed some parameters. So the first: I'm not gonna tell you my story—I've done that already. This podcast won't be about what happened to Marta and me two years ago. Instead, it's about the stories that came to me—to us—because I told our story first. And the second: I will only talk to those like Emily who wrote to me. No outside talking heads, no anecdotes to help round out or complicate the narrative. Only their voices and mine.

Sarah: Emily's story starts in 2018 in early February. She was at work at Stockton University right outside of Atlantic City, where she teaches classes in gender studies and rhetoric.

Emily Van Duyne: So I was in the writing center grading, and two of my students walked in and they said, "We have to talk to you." And they looked really upset. And I said, "Okay." And we went to a private place, and they proceeded to tell me a really terrible story, which was the preceding Saturday night, one of their floormates had a visitor from another college, and the floormate and the visitor had gone to a fraternity party. And when they came back to the dorm, the visitor was impaired to the point that she couldn't really talk or walk. And the student from Stockton was very upset and said that she had lost her at the party, and she went looking for her, and she opened up a bedroom door and she witnessed her being sexually assaulted by one of the young men who was a member of the fraternity and who also goes to Stockton. And she had tried to interfere, and he had removed her from the room and locked the door.

Emily Van Duyne: So now this is the story that they tell me. And so I'm like, "Wait a second. So—so she witnessed—she saw it happen?" And they said, "Yeah." And I said, "Well, do you know who it is?" And they said, "We just passed him in the hallway."

Sarah: Can I just ask a question about when the students came to you, what were they hoping for? Like, did they want your advice? What were they asking you for?

Emily Van Duyne: Yeah, they wanted consequences of some sort. And they thought that, I think that because I'm so loud, people think I can, like, make things happen. Students, especially, I think, think, like, "She will handle this," you know? Which is very flattering, and sometimes makes me think, like, "I will handle this," you know? Which is certainly how I felt in that moment.

Sarah: Emily went with her students to report the sexual assault. When I imagine this scene, I see her like a mamma bear protecting her cubs. The students talked about the fraternity where the alleged rape had happened—Pi Kappa Phi, or Pi Kap for short.

Emily Van Duyne: They were talking about the party, and the person they were telling the story to went like this, "Pi Kap?" and, like, rolled their eyes. And the students were like, "Yeah." And I'm like, "Wait, you know about this?" And they're like, "Everyone knows about this."

Sarah: Pi Kap is what's called a "rogue fraternity," actually. It had its charter revoked by the national organization, and lost its university recognition in 2010 for, according to a Stockton report, "assaults by members that resulted in hospitalizations." But fraternity members still threw parties at a location off campus. In fact, students had started calling it "Spike Cap," as in "spiked drinks," as in a history of sexual assault allegations.

Sarah: Emily was surprised to learn all of this, but the staff member the students were talking to wasn't.

Emily Van Duyne: I just assumed an investigation will be opened and, like, something will occur. And, you know, nothing happened.

Sarah: Hmm.

Emily Van Duyne: I mean, crickets.

Sarah: Emily learned that her student's friend had tried to get a rape test, but the closest hospital to the university wasn't equipped to take one, and by that point, the woman didn't want to go to another hospital. She also didn't want to file a police report, and even though one of Emily's students reported to the police what she'd seen, nothing came of that either. But in the weeks that followed, Emily started asking around about Pi Kap. She was teaching a gender and sexuality course that semester, and one day she asked her students about the rogue fraternity. It was like the floodgates opened, she said. So many students in the room had a story.

Sarah: For that course, students had to complete an activism project, and after that class discussion, a lot of Emily's students decided to do theirs on sexual assault and rogue fraternities at Stockton. They screened a documentary, they conducted a survey, and they organized a march with the hashtag #FuckPiKap.

Emily Van Duyne: They start, you know, being pretty loud about how dangerous this place is—this place, Pi Kap. And I'm kind of starting to quake a little bit internally, but I'm just, like, putting on a big smile. Like, "Great job guys."

Sarah: So wait, when you say you're quaking, I know what you mean, but can you say what you mean?

Emily Van Duyne: Yeah, because rape is—I don't know if you know this Sarah, but people don't really like to talk about it.

Sarah: Emily didn't yet have tenure, which is basically job security in academia. And she worried that the administration would blame her for the noise her students were making. But she was proud of them, too. She said that.

Emily Van Duyne: It was pretty amazing, the stuff that they did.

Sarah: We're at that point in Emily's story—and I remember being at this point, too—when things haven't yet turned the terrible corner. After reading so many stories from my inbox, I've started to intuit this moment. It's that moment before the stranger comes to town, when the protagonist leaves on a journey, before the shit hits the fan. Or in Emily's case, before the lawsuits started.

[NEWS CLIP: Five of the lawsuits involve an off-campus fraternity that lost official recognition at Stockton years ago.]

[NEWS CLIP: And it really just seems like there's a climate and culture of systemic sexual assaults at Stockton.]

Sarah: The first one was filed in July by a woman who said she was drugged and raped by a Pi Kap student and Stockton mishandled the investigation. Soon after that, another student filed suit with more or less the same claim. Then another. And another. Eventually, nine Stockton students would file suits faulting the administration for inadequately handling their rape and assault allegations—many of which involved Pi Kap. Emily watched it all happen, waiting to see how her university would respond. But when Stockton's president finally made a statement, it wasn't what she'd hoped to hear. He said that, yes, rape is a problem, but it's also a reality. He said the university did everything right.

Sarah: Emily felt like she had to respond. So one night when her kids were asleep, she sat at her kitchen table beside a vase of sunflowers and began to write. She wrote about her students, and how the university needed to do better to protect them from sexual assault. But she also told a story about surviving her own rape, which she'd never shared in such a public way before.

Sarah: She posted the essay to Facebook, and the responses were almost immediate. There was lots of support, and a local news reporter contacted Emily to ask about her students' experiences. But the university administration wasn't pleased—or that's how it felt to Emily. She was asked to retract something she'd said to that reporter, a statement she felt was factual. And then she received a letter of warning for what she felt was a technicality for not getting a specific approval for one of her students' projects the semester before. It had started to feel like she was under surveillance. Then Emily heard something even more absurd: a friend said some administrators now considered her a Svengali figure, luring students into raising hell. She went over to her parents house one day that winter break just to say hi. It was snowing, Emily remembers that. And her mom told her some mail had arrived for her.

Emily Van Duyne: And she was like, "You got a certified letter." And it was stamped in red "Confidential." And I was like, "What the hell is this?" You know?

Sarah: The letter was from Stockton's Title IX office. It said that Emily had been accused of retaliation and discrimination based on sex.

Emily Van Duyne: And the color must have drained out of my face because—and my poor mother, I mean, has no idea what any of it means, you know? Like, she has a vague idea that, like, Title IX means, like, cool ladies get to play basketball. [laughs] I mean, that's basically her understanding of Title IX. And so I was like, "Uh." And I went into my father's—they have this little, like, back den, and I went in and talked to him, and he was just like, "This doesn't sound good." And I was like, "No, it doesn't sound good."

Sarah: When Marta, my wife, first learned that she was being investigated by the Title IX office at our university, I talked to my dad as well. I called him up, and I was crying, sure he'd know what to do. But instead he said, "What's Title IX?" It's one of those terms, I realized then, that those of us in academia know well, but the rest of the world tends to forget, or conflate with women's basketball.

Sarah: The law passed in 1972 with the aim of doing in schools and universities what the Equal Rights Amendment would have done for all of us everywhere: protect us from gender discrimination. At first, most of the attention was on women's sports, and making sure female athletes got the same resources as men. But over the years, the focus changed. And one of the biggest shifts happened in 2011, when the Obama administration decided to tackle the problem of campus rape. Colleges and universities were tasked with investigating and adjudicating sexual misconduct complaints themselves or risk losing federal funding. And with that shift, Title IX became known as a law not about basketball-playing ladies, but about sexual misconduct.

Sarah: That certified letter that Emily received said she was being accused by a student at Stockton. It was one of the men named in the nine lawsuits filed the summer before. Emily had never met him, but still, he was claiming that her activism online and on campus had been a form of discrimination against him. The Title IX office wanted her to come in for an interview, but she got an attorney instead. And in April of 2019, she and her lawyer entered a room on campus where a Title IX investigator was waiting to question her. They all sat down at a table.

Emily Van Duyne: And then they brought out a stack of papers that was, like, minimum 200 pages.

Sarah: 200 pages: tweets and Facebook posts and articles she'd written. Seemingly her entire life online. It was a shock to see it all there. Before going in that day, Emily's lawyer had scoured her social media looking for anything that might have been misconstrued as specifically targeting this student she didn't know. She'd found nothing, and yet there was that stack of paper.

Emily Van Duyne: And I mean, Sarah, page by page. We went through every page. They asked me about every Facebook status, every Instagram picture, every tweet. After every single one they would say, "Is this about X?" And they would name the student. You know, "On this day you wrote on your Facebook, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And I go, "Uh-huh?" "Is this about X?" And I would be like, "No," you know? And so, for example, I wrote on Facebook at one point, "Is Stockton University doing enough to protect students from so-called rogue fraternities like Pi Kap? I don't think they are." And they would say, "Is this about" and they'd name the student. And I would say, "No, that's a question asking if they're doing enough to protect students." I would just repeat myself! So basically any time I referenced anything that had to do with sexual assault—which is a lot, but had always been a lot.

Sarah: The interview went on like that for hours. Emily had retweeted Roxane Gay, and the investigator asked if that was about the student. They showed her a post she'd written after hearing those rumors that she was a Svengali. "If I was a Svengali," she'd joked on Facebook, "I'd be able to get my students to use semicolons correctly." The investigator asked her if that was about the student. They also asked her to read the essay that she'd written and published on Facebook the summer before, the one in which she identified herself as a survivor of rape.

Emily Van Duyne: I think we took like a short break during the first interview. And I remember I looked at my lawyer and I said, "Isn't this a—don't I have the right to say this stuff?" And she said, "Absolutely," and rolled her eyes. In fact, as chilling as it was, it became simultaneously more terrifying and more ridiculous because, like, there were posts that had nothing to do with sexual assault, and then they would ask me like, "Is this about blah dee blah?" And I was like, "What?" And that included a cat meme. [laughs]

Emily Van Duyne: So I had posted a cat meme of this really fat orange and white cat who looks like our really fat orange and white cat, Jean-Luc. And the meme is this, like, picture of the cat, and he's sitting on the kitchen counter next to a cake that is shaped and iced to look exactly like him. And then the caption says, "Am I a fucking joke to you, Karen?" And I just thought that was hilarious because I have a fat cat, right? And it's a funny cat meme. Well, they—this kid, his mother's name is Karen.

Sarah: Oh, God!

Emily Van Duyne: And so they printed it out, and they were like, "Is this about Karen?" And I was like, "What?" [laughs] And I started to laugh and I said, "No, that's a cat meme," you know? And they're like, "Well, it says Karen." So then I have to explain Karen is, like, internet joke for, like, middle-class white lady who complains about things.

Sarah: When the investigator finished going through each of the 200 or so pages, Emily felt like she had defended herself, and explained why none of what she'd written online was targeting this man she didn't know. But the investigator still had more questions. And that's when Emily started to get scared.

Emily Van Duyne: And then they brought up an on-campus event called Sex Toy Bingo.

Sarah: Sex Toy Bingo. More on that after a break.

***

Sarah: When we left off, the Title IX investigator had just brought up a campus event called Sex Toy Bingo.

Emily Van Duyne: And they said, Why did you go to Sex Toy Bingo and yell at the young man and tell him he had to leave Sex Toy Bingo?" And I mean—I said, "That—that never happened. That is a complete fabrication."

Sarah: I knew exactly how Emily felt. You know the accusation is a complete fiction, but it's being treated like fact. And you start thinking there's no way I can prove that I'm telling the truth. Emily's attorney had been taking notes on her legal pad during the whole interview, not really commenting. But at one point she wrote a note directly to Emily.

Emily Van Duyne: She wrote, "You're doing fucking amazing." And I felt really—actually, that's the first time in this interview that I felt, like, choked up, because that was really—like, she believed me, you know?

Sarah: After the interview finished, Emily walked back to her car, replaying what had happened in her head.

Emily Van Duyne: And then I started driving home to our house. And it was getting dark, and I was on this really pretty road where there's like, the bay is on either side of you. We live by the ocean. And I just was, like, racing thoughts. Like, my brain was like a wind tunnel and I couldn't get away from that issue about Sex Toy Bingo. Like, this idea that I had been in this place where I wasn't. And I was panicked, and I really thought, like, "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" What if I did this thing, and I had a psychotic break or something?" And that was the thing that really terrified me. Like, they had managed to get me to truly doubt myself.

Sarah: Doubting yourself like that would be scary anyway. But for Emily it was even more so. It reminded her of what she calls "The worst two years." She was in her early-30s then, recently graduated with her MFA in creative writing, and she'd met a man she fell hard for, another poet. They moved in together and had a kid. But he'd had a drug problem, and it got worse. He grew manipulative and abusive, and then he started making up stories.

Emily Van Duyne: He would say that I was physically abusive with him, that I was physically abusive with our son, that I had done all these things that had no basis in reality.

Sarah: I remember you mentioned, like, you would have a glass of wine and then he would pour out the whole bottle and then say the next day that you drank the whole bottle, which is ...

Emily Van Duyne: Yeah.

Sarah: Which must feel really bewildering in a similar way, because you know you didn't do it, but yet there's a whole narrative around.

Emily Van Duyne: There's a narrative and there's, like, evidence, right? Like, it's like, "Oh, here's this empty bottle." And you're like, "Well, like, you could have drank that wine," you know? He's an addict, right? He's a heroin addict. And so he had to convince other people that I had a substance abuse problem to, like, throw attention away from his extreme substance abuse problem. So I think this is also is a parallel to what was happening in the office that day in that, like, "Oh, we don't have a rape problem. Like, we have an Emily Van Duyne problem."

Sarah: Emily fled that relationship—literally running away in the middle of the night with her son, who was eight and a half months old at the time. She moved back in with her parents in New Jersey. She started adjuncting, and eventually she got her job at Stockton. She met someone new, a really nice guy named Vince, who was there when she got home that night after the Title IX interview and asked her how it had gone. "Really bad," she said. Her mind was still on Sex Toy Bingo. She needed to find proof that she wasn't there.

Emily Van Duyne: So I found Sex Toy Bingo, which took place on November 6, 2018, which was election night, like the midterms when AOC was elected. So I start laughing to myself because I'm like, "I know exactly where I was that night." You know, I left campus. I went to pick up the kids. I took them with me to the VFW to vote. And then I went to my mother's house and we ate chicken pot pie, and we watched the returns come in. And I spent the whole night alternately grading and emailing and watching the returns and texting my friend Sean. He's one of my good friends. We grew up together.

Emily Van Duyne: So now I'm frantically scrolling back. Now at this point, it's April of 2019, but I'm going back to November of 2018 in my text messages with Sean. Sean and I talk all the time on text. So I'm like, "Oh my God, this is insane." Like back and back and back and back. So then I do find messages between Sean and I, but there's nothing saying specifically that I'm home. So now I'm calling AT&T. "Can you date these text messages? Like, can you tell me, like, what tower my phone pings?" I'm thinking, like, "Oh, it's like that episode of Serial, you know? [laughs]

Sarah: Wait, what did they say when you asked if they could tell you where your phone pinged in a certain area? Were they just like, "Sorry, crazy lady?"

Emily Van Duyne: They're like, "No. No, we can't do that." And I'm like, "Well, you've gotta have that." And they're like, "Yeah, if a federal court subpoenaed us, we could produce it." And I'm like, "Well, it's a Title IX investigation." And they're like, "What? Basketball-playing ladies? No."

Emily Van Duyne: So finally, I realize that I sent a bunch of emails, and so I'm like, "Okay, my IP address will prove that these emails were sent from the tiny town where we live." So I call, like, Stockton's IT. I say, like, "Hi!" [laughs] Like, make it out like it's no big deal. "Hi, I'm involved in this, like, annoying thing. Would you mind, you know, whatever." And the guy's like, "Well, actually we can do that." And they sent me an email saying all of these were sent from an off-campus location. And I'm thinking I wasn't at Sex Toy Bingo!

Sarah: The next day was the day that Emily was officially being awarded tenure, that promotion that gives you lifetime job security. A ceremony for new tenure awardees was being held nearby on campus. But Emily didn't go. She worried if she went, if she showed her face, they'd suddenly change their minds and revoke her tenure. So instead, she stayed in her office and graded and cried. At some point that afternoon, her therapist texted and suggested she reach out to the police. At first, Emily balked at the idea, but her therapist didn't back down.

Emily Van Duyne: He was like, "Listen, you know, I've been a licensed social worker for a really long time, and I've seen a lot of stuff, and please do this for me. Like, you have to file a police report about this. Like, this person is stalking you.

Sarah: Emily thought back to that pile of more than 200 pages of social media posts. A lot of them hadn't been collected by the investigator—at least as far as she could tell. They appeared to have been submitted to the Title IX office by that student to bolster his case. Some of the printed pages even included his comments, things like "Emily Van Duyne is at it again," and "I can't believe Emily Van Duyne is still talking," and "She won't shut her mouth."

Sarah: So Emily called up the Stockton police. She told them how this man had fixated on her in a way that felt scary, and that her therapist thought his behavior was strange and should be reported. Not long after that conversation, she got a text from a friend who was at the tenure ceremony. It was over. Emily had tenure.

Sarah: A couple weeks later, Emily and her lawyer met with the Title IX investigator again. They were there to read and approve a summary of the first conversation. But as soon as they sat down, the Title IX investigator said she had something new she wanted to discuss.

Emily Van Duyne: So then they pulled out a copy of the police report that I had filed, and they said, "Did you file this?" I fell apart at that point. And I just said, "How did you get that?" And they said the name of my accuser, and they said he received an anonymous tip that you filed the police report. And my lawyer said twice, "That's terrifying. That's terrifying."

Sarah: Emily knew that the report should have been kept confidential, but it hadn't been. And she couldn't understand what was going on. Had someone been listening outside her office? Was her phone tapped? Did the local police give her accuser a copy of the report? When we contacted a spokesperson at Stockton and asked about this, she said the university couldn't comment on anything related to a Title IX case.

Sarah: Title IX investigations are supposed to be prompt in issuing their findings, but often they aren't. Summer arrived, and Emily tried to find a new normal. She was working on a proposal for her first book—about Sylvia Plath, and how Plath's husband, the poet Ted Hughes, manipulated her even after death, promoting one narrow image of her: that of the unreliable, overly emotional female poet. Listening to Emily talk about that book, it wasn't lost on me that Plath's story sounded a lot like a version of her own—and mine, and so many others I've heard now—a woman's story rewritten by a man.

Sarah: In August, while Emily was still waiting to hear what the Title IX office would decide, she got a call from her agent. They'd sold her book. Emily called her parents, and said she and Vince were jumping up and down. She called her best friend and they cried. She called her high school English teacher, the one who had introduced her to Plath, and thanked him for everything. And the next day, her mom took her shopping to celebrate. Emily remembers that it was raining.

Emily Van Duyne: Driving, driving, driving. And I hear "Deedle-dee-doo," which is my, like, work email ping on my phone. And it's the determination letter.

Sarah: The determination letter includes the official findings in a Title IX case. It says whether you are innocent or guilty or, in the language of Title IX, responsible or not responsible. Emily read the letter from her phone while her mom drove through the late summer rain.

Emily Van Duyne: And I'm—I am responsible. I have retaliated against this student.

Sarah: Out of those 200 pages of social media posts, only one had been deemed problematic. It was the one where Emily joked about being a Svengali. Apparently, in the comments section for that post, someone had asked Emily who had called her a Svengali, and she'd responded, "Some moron." The Title IX office decided that she'd been talking about that student, the one she'd never met. But Emily was also found to have retaliated for another reason.

Emily Van Duyne: The fact that I had filed a police report.

Sarah: That report that should have been confidential, the one her therapist told her to file to protect herself.

Emily Van Duyne: They said that I had filed that report to retaliate against him, to get back at him. And this was the thing that made me so crazy. Like, thinking about the absolute terror and, like, sadness and just fucking disaster that I felt in that moment where I felt like I had to file a police report.

Sarah: And we felt that too, this—the way that Title IX is structured in particular is that once somebody's set up as a perpetrator, like, you can never be a victim. Like, you're just not allowed that narrative. So even if you felt victimized, you can't act on it because if you act on it, it's an act of aggression, which completely traps you.

Emily Van Duyne: That's exactly right, Sarah.

Sarah: After Emily was found responsible under Title IX, she and her lawyer decided to sue her university for infringement of her First Amendment rights. She's waiting now for that case to be settled.

Sarah: Before I sat down to work on this podcast, I listened again to my first phone conversation with Emily, the one that took place in October, just a week before she had her baby. I'd recorded it at the time with Emily's permission. I listened back while walking my dog or going to pick up my kids, and one day I was listening to Emily in the grocery store when I realized that our stories overlapped not just in plot but also time.

Sarah: I was by the walnuts, facing a display of tulips. Emily said something about her Title IX interview taking place in April of 2019. I was suddenly yanked back to that moment in time. Marta and I had our Title IX interview that month, too. I cried alone in my office, just as Emily described crying in hers. And that connection made me sadder than almost anything else I'd heard so far. I could almost see a world in which Emily and I had known to talk to each other, when it might have been more than just her attorney who believed in her, when Marta and I might have had more than each other to understand what was happening to us. I think we might have been fiercer had we known to talk. I think we might have fought harder. I know that the loneliness would have abated just a bit.

Sarah: I hadn't realized until I look back now, but we were both going through this at the same time because our interviews were in April. And I assume that you'd read our piece, but I hadn't put that together. And I was like, "I wish we had known each other," you know?

Emily Van Duyne: I know.

Sarah: Because it's the isolation that you feel when you're accused.

Emily Van Duyne: I mean, when I read your article, I just remember sitting. I was sitting on the couch shaking, and I was like, "This happened to somebody else." And then I was so hesitant to reach out to you because I was like, "I don't want to upset her," but I just felt like she's gonna be relieved to know that she's not alone.

Sarah: Isolation was a thread woven through many of the emails I received. Person after person told me things like, "I could tell no one," or "I decided to tell no one because I was afraid I wouldn't be believed." Or the worst, from my perspective: "I was accused of something that was once done to me. And no one knows." I think about that compounded shame. What incredible loneliness. Of the almost 200 emails that filled my inbox, many of them were written out of kindness—people hoping to help in some way. They wanted to Venmo me coffee money or, in one case, offer me an "Almost free" vacation in Camden, Maine—neither of which I took, by the way.

Sarah: But about half had a story to share, and I was surprised by how many of those stories were about Title IX. It's a law that I long supported, until my inbox made me question so much of what I thought I believed. That's next, on part two.

Kristen: "The Inbox" is a project of The 11th from Pineapple Street Studios. It's written by Sarah Viren and produced by Sarah Viren, Jenelle Pifer and Maria Robins-Somerville, with editing by Joel Lovell. The 11th team is Leila Day, Joel Lovell, Eric Mennel, Jenelle Pifer, Chloe Prasinos and me, Kristen Torres. Our executive producers are Max Linksy and Jenna Weiss-Berman. Our engineers are Raj Makhija, Hannis Brown and Davy Sumner. Fact-checking by Sarah Avery, music by Raj Makhija, Pointforms and Blue Dot Sessions. Sales and marketing by Cadence13. Artwork by Jonathan Conda. Special thanks to Sophia Stephanovic for her story about the sushi roll and the parrot, which you can find in addition to all four parts of "The Inbox" in your podcast feeds.

Kristen: Thanks for listening.