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Alleged rape victim Emma Sulkowicz carried a mattress around campus after her alleged rapist was not expelled from Columbia University. Photo: Kristy Leibowitz
A Columbia University student accused of raping a classmate — who turned the alleged assault into an international media story by carrying a mattress around campus — claims he’s the real victim in a new gender discrimination lawsuit against the Ivy League school.
Student Paul Nungesser was cleared by school officials and law enforcement of allegations by Emma Sulkowicz that he choked, slapped and then anally raped her in August 2012.
As proof of his innocence the now-senior includes what he says are private — and graphic — Facebook messages from his classmate.
Freshman year Sulkowicz sent Nungesser messages about anal sex before the two became intimate.
“f–k me in the butt,” Sulkowicz allegedly wrote.
“eehm, maybe not?” Nungesser replied.
“you don’t miss my lopsided ass?” Sulkowicz then asked in the exchange.
Sulkowicz told The Post the exchange was taken out of context.
“Freshman year that was an expression, to be like ‘Oh my god i’m so annoyed,'” Sulkowicz explained.
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Columbia University students carry a mattress around campus in support of sexual assault victims.Photo: Robert Kalfus
She reported the alleged assault seven months after the incident but Columbia “discredited Emma’s entire story,” Nungesser’s suit says.
Yet Sulkowicz mattress campaign, which Nungesser accuses the university of supporting,”effectively destroyed [his] college experience, his reputation, his emotional well-being and his future career prospects.”
The German foreign exchange student, who attends Columbia on full scholarship, is suing for unspecified monetary damages but also wants to block Sulkowicz from bringing the mattress to their May 20 graduation.
“We do not want Columbia University to allow Emma Sulkowitz to hijack the joyous, sacred celebration of graduation for her continuing personal agenda of celebrity at the expense of Mr Nungesser,” his lawyer Andrew Miltenberg told The Post.
Sulkowitz is not a defendant in the Manhattan federal case filed Thursday, but the suit names both President Lee Bollinger and Sulkowicz’s visual arts professor Jon Kessler.
Nungesser gripes that Bollinger allowed Sulkowicz to violate a confidentiality agreement related to the university investigation into the rape allegations. Further the school is giving Sulkowicz class credit for the mattress project, which was shaped into a thesis by Kessler, according to court papers.
“President Bollinger displayed a contemptible moral cowardice in bowing down to the witch hunt against an innocent student instead of standing up for the truth and taking appropriate steps to protect Paul from gender based harassment,” the suit says.
Nungesser is suing under the federal Title IX law that’s most often used to enforce gender equity in funding for school athletics.
Sulkowicz called the suit “ridiculous,” adding that her mattress project is “just an artistic expression of the personal trauma I’ve experienced at Columbia.”
She said the rules of her performance piece require her to “carry the mattress at all time.”
“If for some reason someone prevents me from carrying the mattress at graduation that will be how this historical moment ends,” she said.
A spokesman for the school, Bollinger and Kessler declined to comment.
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