Jane was away from the University of Kansas campus at a conference when she heard the news: Her abusive ex-boyfriend and lab partner had been expelled. A weight was lifted from her — finally.

She thought that would be the end of it. But she was about to go through more hell.

The Title IX system had worked as designed — she reported the abuse to the appropriate, federally-designated office, an investigation was conducted, a decision was made resulting in the expulsion of her abuser, all according to the rules.

But 11 years since coming to KU, she is still unable to finish her degree because, she says, the university failed her. Meanwhile her abuser was readmitted to the university in 2020 and has since finished his PhD.

During that time, her mechanical engineering professor, Lorin Maletsky, asked her to take a leave of absence from the research lab so her abuser could finish his degree. For a year, he forced her to keep working in the same lab where she was sexually assaulted.

She couldn’t sleep at night. She suffered from panic attacks and post-traumatic stress triggered by the professor repeatedly and unnecessarily mentioning her abuser’s name at work.

The university offered no help.

“Domestic violence completely destroys your sense of safety and your sense of self,” Jane told The Star. “It’s unacceptable that it also can have such a huge impact on your career and your education.”

Now a doctoral candidate, Jane settled a sexual discrimination lawsuit against KU late last year, under terms that have not been made public, and told her story to The Star over a period of months. The newspaper generally does not name victims of sexual assault and is referring to her by the name “Jane” at her request to protect her identity. In this story, The Star is also not naming the abuser to avoid putting Jane at risk.

She is not the first to bring claims against KU for failing to properly handle sex discrimination or abuse against female students.

The university in recent years has paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in sexual discrimination lawsuits brought by students and has been forced to contend with vehement calls from students demanding change and accountability on campus.

Experts and specialists dealing with victims of sexual abuse who have read the lawsuit and reports in Jane’s case say the university should have done more to protect Jane and that existing Title IX protections don’t go far enough.

When asked about Jane’s story, university spokeswoman Erinn Barcomb-Peterson said she could not discuss “particular incidents.” She instead referred The Star to KU’s sexual harassment policy.

Maletsky, reached by phone at his office earlier this month, declined to comment for the story.

Elizabeth Vermilyea, a traumatic stress specialist based in California who works with victims of sexual abuse read Jane’s lawsuit at The Star’s request. She said KU responded to Jane’s concerns like “any insular self-protected institution.”

The university gave Jane hope by upholding her accusations, only to have nothing change beyond that. It’s deeply demoralizing, Vermilyea said.

Put simply, her professor, and the institution, sent a message that they didn’t care about their student.

“And that’s pretty powerful to convey to another human being, especially one whose education and professional development has been entrusted to your care,” she said. “Especially when it’s your job to see to their education and development.”

Not long after Jane joined the KU biomechanics lab in the fall of 2011, she started dating a senior research assistant there.

The relationship soon turned controlling and abusive.

Adding to the trouble was her new boyfriend’s position as a kind of supervisor to her in the lab. It was his job to delegate and assign her tasks that helped fueled Maletsky’s research.

He would often criticize her body, grope her in the lab, talk down on her research and tell her she was too stupid to be in grad school, Jane said. As the relationship worsened, he began giving her thankless and menial work — work that could have impacted whether her name appeared on published research. He often threatened to destroy her and her career, she said.

The abuse was often violent: He would call her a “slut,” a “stupid bitch,” slam her into walls, tear off her shirt, and kick and punch her in the leg.

In 2013 he dragged her across a parking lot by her shirt. That was the first time the police were called by a bystander. Jane didn’t want to press charges. He had ingrained in her a fear she wouldn’t be believed.

The abuse went on for years, and things only got worse.

Jane feared for her life.

One day in the spring of 2016, Jane recorded him on her phone as he threatened and berated her, saying at one point: “I will kill you before I take you home.”

The evidence became important later, in the resulting Title IX investigation.

In the summer of that year, Jane went to see a counselor through KU’s CARE program. The counselor encouraged her to file a report detailing the abuse.

“You don’t understand,” she told the counselor. “He’s well-respected in our engineering department. And if I come forward, I’m not sure I’m going to be believed.”

Jane didn’t file the report then. The counselor, who still works for KU, could not be reached for comment by The Star.

The abuse came to a head weeks later after Jane had broken off the relationship, not for the first time.

Eight days into the fall semester, her abuser showed up uninvited at the Lawrence house Jane shared with her brother. He rang the doorbell, texted, called and refused to leave.

Then he broke through a window screen in the living room and pushed his way into the home.

A neighbor called police, who arrested and booked him into jail on criminal trespassing charges, according to court records. A responding officer encouraged Jane to file a separate police report documenting the abuse. So did her parents.

She filed the report the next day and requested a restraining order. Then she drove straight to KU’s Office of Civil Rights & Title IX, not realizing one of her biggest battles was still ahead.

Before Jane took action, another student in their lab had already brought the abuse to the university’s attention. A Title IX report was filed on her behalf without her knowing.

Classmate Max Eboch had witnessed some of the abuse and told Maletsky, who as a mandated reporter had an obligation to file a report to what is now KU’s Office Civil Rights & Title IX.

According to the lawsuit, Maletsky took no other steps after filing the report, and nothing ultimately was done.

KU’s policy states that mandated reporters are only required to contact the Office of Civil Rights & Title IX to “report incidents of discrimination and sexual harassment, including sexual violence, of which they know or have reason to believe may have occurred.” He did what he was required to do.

Jane received a formal letter from the university acknowledging the report. This was before she started seeing a counselor, before filing a police report regarding the abuse, and before she was ready to take action herself. She didn’t follow through with the investigation.

Months after the report was filed, Maletsky spoke with Jane about the allegations for the first time.

He told her he believed Eboch made it up.

Jane’s position was a difficult one. Maletsky was not only her professor but also her advisor in the graduate program, so he had additional power over her academic and professional future.

After she filed the Title IX report in 2016, she told Maletsky about her abuser’s arrest, the restraining order and the investigation to come.

“And then immediately my advisor asked me to leave KU,” she told The Star.

Maletsky told her she should take a leave of absence so her abuser, who was ahead of her in school, could graduate, according to the lawsuit.

Maletsky offered to find another instructor to take over the course she was teaching and she could take a leave.

“I’m not leaving,” she told him. After all, she wasn’t the one sitting in jail.

That was the first sign that reporting the abuse would have a negative impact on her academic career, an issue that Title IX experts say is far too common.

“This favoring of men even if they commit sexual violence against women at the detriment of women’s access to education is sex discrimination,” said Laura Dunn, a national Title IX expert. “And it is implicit throughout our society.“

Graduate students are particularly vulnerable in the hard sciences because the programs are developed with a hierarchy that essentially leaves students with one gatekeeper who decides whether and when they get their degree, according to a 2018 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

The student is stuck.

To Jane, it felt like her advisor, who had control of her academic fate and future career prospects, was picking sides. Frustrated, she handed him a business card for KU’s Title IX office in case he had more questions.

Later that night Maletsky texted her, saying he’d had a productive conversation with the Title IX office. The next Monday, he texted her again, asking if she could work in a different space so her abuser could use their lab.

“He didn’t ask if I was OK,” she said. “He didn’t ask if I was safe.”

A few days before the first Title IX hearing, Jane almost dropped the case.

A member of the student affairs office pulled her aside and told her Maletsky and two of her male co-workers in the lab would be there at her abuser’s request.

He told her he was sorry she was “being ganged up on,” but that there was nothing he could do to stop it, Jane said.

The former student affairs employee could not be reached for comment by The Star.

The day of the hearing, Jane sat beside her mother as they listened as her coworkers and advisor say they knew nothing about the abuse.

“Being in the same room as someone who threatened to kill me was bad enough,” she said. “But thinking that my advisor, who has control over my PhD and my career, was also coming when I didn’t ask him or want him to be there and he had already told me to leave KU, that was so intimidating. I’m not sure why they allowed it to happen.”

Rebecca Gill, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has studied Title IX extensively. She read through the initial complaint filed by Jane and said the moment Maletsky decided to defend Jane’s abuser was the moment red flags should have gone up to university officials.

Vermilyea, the traumatic stress specialist, said victims need to be witnessed. They need people to stand in the space with them. Instead, she said, Jane was subjected to gaslighting.

“I’m not convinced that (Maletsky) didn’t believe her,” Vermilyea said. “I’m convinced that he denied her a witness.”

A couple of weeks after the hearing, on Oct. 6, 2016, the results of the investigation were sent to Jane and her abuser by email. The panel found he had violated six tenants of KU’s code of student rights and responsibilities through sexual misconduct, domestic violence, stalking, intimidation, physical harm and verbal abuse.

As the result of this “non-academic misconduct,” he was immediately expelled from KU for three years, with the option to reapply in spring 2020.

He was banned from campus as long as Jane was there.

Even after her abuser was removed from campus, Maletsky continually brought up his name, Jane said.

She asked him not to, and requested multiple times that she be able to move out of the lab where she had been assaulted. But Maletsky prevented her from moving. The university didn’t step in.

“Every time I saw him, he brought up my abuser, the abuse, my career, my position in the lab,” she said. “Like he would not stop talking about it.”

He urged her to change her career, suggested she teach somewhere else, and even told her she was the reason he gave up a research contract, since it was with a company that by then employed her abuser.

In her lawsuit, Jane said that because she filed the Title IX complaint, she “suffered harassment, intimidation, and retaliation by Dr. Maletsky.”

Gill said it’s obvious that KU’s Title IX office “botched” the wrap-up of Jane’s case.

But it also points to a larger problem, she said: Universities that rely only on Title IX to manage their legal liability are doing nothing to address the climate and culture on campuses that so often leaves abuse and retaliation unchecked.

While most Title IX offices aren’t lacking in people who care deeply about the work and the students, Gill said, they’re often confined to the parameters of their jobs, which Gill said don’t include engaging in problems early on, or providing support to the accuser before a legal issue is raised.

Gill said while stories like Jane’s aren’t uncommon, it’s not as common to see them appear in lawsuits, or in the media, because it almost never pays for the accuser to follow through with the process.

In December, Jane wrote a long email to KU’s chancellor, Title IX office, vice provost of student affairs and dean of engineering offering to share her perspective on how KU could better support survivors.

The year before, she had been a guest speaker at a trauma informed sexual assault training in Douglas County. She offered to help KU as well.

“Enduring sexual assault and domestic violence completely destroys a person’s sense of self and safety,” she wrote. “Please don’t let abusers also take away our access to an education.”

No one at KU responded.

When Kait Howard started her master’s program at KU in 2017, the university told her there had been a “falling out” in the lab.

Howard and Jane became friends, and when she learned more about Jane’s story she was angry, she said. She felt tricked.

“I felt like I needed to protect myself. I felt like I needed to, (keep my) head down. Just get out of there. Don’t make waves,” Howard, now 35, told The Star.

Women continue to face an uphill battle in many engineering programs, she said.

She had chosen that lab specifically because it had proven to be a pipeline for graduates to Johnson & Johnson and other top engineering firms in the region. But her post-collegiate career path wasn’t what she had hoped.

Howard believes that the handling of Jane’s case had tarnished the lab’s culture and reputation.

“It’s hard for me to pinpoint something KU did wrong,” she said. “They just didn’t do anything right.”

It’s still hard for Jane to recount the abuse and trauma. She suffers from panic attacks when her abuser’s name is mentioned. She still has trouble sleeping.

Like many survivors, she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Her abuser at one point knew where she lived. Where she worked. Where she parked her car. She goes to extreme lengths now to make sure he can’t find her.

“How would anybody expect me to get anything done?” she asked.

Looking back, she firmly believes that KU is a dangerous place for survivors who choose to make a Title IX report. And she’s not alone: KU students over the past several years have raised many criticisms of the university’s Title IX office.

In 2014, KU became the subject of a federal investigation into its handling of a 2013 sexual assault report.

Student protests at KU erupted after that the university declined to put a student accused of sexual assault on probation. A group of students released a video in September 2014 warning possible future students not to enroll because the Lawrence campus is unsafe.

In a lawsuit filed against the university in 2020, a former KU law student said the university’s Title IX investigators doubled down on a flawed investigation conducted by the Lawrence Police Department that resulted in her being charged with filing a false report. The charges were later dropped.

Another former KU student said university officials failed to tell her when her alleged rapist re-enrolled in the university.

“That notion of asking for help, thinking you’ve received help and finding out that help was just lip service undermines faith, number one in the institution and two of the processes put in place to protect people when there’s been a violation of the code of conduct or behavior or Title IX,” Vermilyea said.

As currently constructed, the system simply wasn’t built to handle situations such as Jane’s well, said Gill, the University of Nevada professor. Her inclination is not to blame the individuals working in the Title IX office, but rather the pipeline used to deal with these cases, she said.

Title IX is not only the process of reporting grievances, Dunn said, it’s a statute that prohibits someone from losing their access to education.

“That’s kind of the heart and soul of it,” said Dunn.

Lawsuits can be an effective tool for creating change on campus. But as far as Dunn is concerned, Title IX failed Jane.

Maletsky was eventually removed as her adviser in 2018 only after he was served papers in Jane’s lawsuit. Maletsky still works for the university, and, in the past few years has transitioned from associate dean to an associate professor.

Jane settled her lawsuit with the university in December. She still has not been able to finish her PhD.

“KU needs reform, badly,” she said. “Their professors and their staff needs training on how to handle this.

“Even after I made the Title IX report, and my abuser had been expelled, I still wasn’t even allowed to get my life back on track.”