A Stanford University Employee Allegedly Lied Twice About Being Sexually Assaulted On Campus, And Her Reports Matched The Description Of A Black Coworker

Gries claimed she became pregnant with twins from the alleged assault, but had a miscarriage. 

Prosecutors said that after both reports, sexual assault examination kits were rushed for priority testing to protect the public from a potential sex offender. But forensic examinations found the tests were not consistent with what she told nurses had happened and that she was not pregnant, prosecutors said. 

Her reports also prompted campus police to issue an alert, resulting in local news coverage and many students saying they felt unsafe. 

Stanford’s Department of Public Safety continued to investigate the sexual assaults and found that Gries had made a sexual harassment complaint against a coworker, prosecutors said. The man’s appearance fit the description of her alleged attacker. 

In January, Gries allegedly admitted to a district attorney’s office investigator that she had lied about being sexually assaulted and wrote an apology letter to her coworker.  

According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, false reports make up between 2% and 10% of sexual assault reports, and 81% of women in the US experience some form of sexual harassment and/or assault in their lifetime. 

In a statement, Stanford leaders said they will be reviewing Gries’s employment, and she has been placed on a leave of absence. According to LinkedIn, she is a supervisor in the university’s Housing Service Center. 

“These false reports are damaging, both for true survivors of sexual assault and for the members of our community who experienced fear and alarm from the reports,” said the joint statement from Patrick Dunkley, vice provost for Institutional Equity, Access and Community, and Laura Wilson, director of the Department of Public Safety. “We also want to emphasize that both false reports and outcomes such as this one are extremely rare in sexual assault cases.”

According to the National Registry of Exonerations, Black people are almost eight times more likely than white people to be falsely convicted of sexual assault.

This post was originally published on BuzzFeed