The Department of Education’s 60-day guideline for conducting Title IX investigations is designed to minimize the impact to a student or employee’s emotional health and professional outcomes, and The Ohio State University’s 582-day streak did copious damage to both.

The initial psychological trauma from Quais Hassan’s abuse might have been manageable. But while he attacked my body, OSU relentlessly attacked my identity by hanging my career as a budding scientist over my head. This stress was compounded even further by generational poverty precluding the option of outsourcing everything to a lawyer, and being forced to build my own legal defense: researching Title IX and civil rights law, researching forensic science and psychology, combing testimony documents for contradictions, captioning and transcribing and searching for any little clues that could make the difference as I rewatched videos of myself being abused over and over for years.

I developed PTSD.

I developed stress-induced secondary oligomenorrhea, wherein surges in cortisol (the primary stress hormone) can cause the menstrual cycle to grind to a halt, and this even mirrored key dates in OSU’s retaliation spree. In the wake of OSU opening the student investigation and confirming that they planned to find me guilty with the same anti-self-defense policy again (and knowing that they could go as far as rescinding my degree), I was so overcome with panic that my period stopped for over 100 days.

I developed debilitating insomnia, with sleep architecture characteristic of PTSD on the polysomnograph.

And these conditions have been diagnosed and treated by The Ohio State University’s own physicians.

Since the stakes were even higher for my career in the second investigation, I finally caved and hired an attorney to just check over my work, read off questions during the hearing, and to try to negotiate with OSU (since students are not allowed to represent themselves off-the-record when they are already under investigation). Those legal expenses, combined with living expenses during the initial difficulty in finding another research job (when OSU has a functional monopoly), drained my meager life savings and put me into debt.

The damages to my career, reputation, competitiveness, and future earning capacity have also been considerable, but I’m hesitant to go into detail on these or to publicly estimate a dollar value on any of the above economic/non-economic past/future damages without consulting an attorney first. [But it’s interesting to note that many Title IX lawsuits with fewer provable legal violations than OSU and fewer provable damages than mine have been won and awarded in excess of a million dollars.]

While I am a long way away from recovering from all this, I am still harboring hope that I will recover, and that's why I am no more suicidal today than I was on 3/23/20. That being said, I have taken a calculated risk in going public with the understanding that he might kill me for doing so.

The stats around women murdered by abusive ex-partners just for continuing to exist after the relationship are already pretty bad, and the stats around women that have published exposés on their ex's conduct are… presumably worse. Quais repeatedly told me how he'd rather die than not become a doctor, and once described fantasizing about shooting himself on Molly Peirano's doorstep. He also knows where I live, never hesitated to show up angry and unannounced, and as you've seen, much lesser offenses than this website have incited his violence against me.

So I just want to go on record warning you that if I go missing or die with signs of foul play within the next year or so, the murderer is Quais Naimul Hassan, II. There's no question.

At every turn, OSU had the opportunity to pursue restorative justice– to listen to the needs of the victim who came to them and to consider options for rehabilitating the abuser. Instead, they chose to cling to a secret, internal, victim-blaming policy (that contradicted their public policies), because that would make their jobs easier. They chose to discard a victim’s evidence and destroy her life because she reported her assault. They chose to reward her assailant’s flimsy DARVO defense and to sweep the evidence of his crimes outside of 3/23 under the rug, because unlike her, he is in the prestigious MSTP program. They refused any private efforts to remedy these mistakes, and in doing so, they forced her to pursue her own justice.

So what you need to understand is that if Quais pulls the trigger-- against me or himself or both-- The Ohio State University put the gun in his hand.