This wouldn’t be the first false accusation of hate on campus
A former student at the University of Wyoming who said she was threatened with rape by a Republican in a post on the UW Crushes Facebook page may have written the comment herself.
Meghan Lanker-Simons has pleaded not guilty to interfering with a peace officer after police, with the help of university officials, traced the comment to her IP address and login. The post read in part, “that chick that runs her liberal mouth all the time… one night with me and she’s gonna be a good Republican (explicit four-letter word).”
Lanker-Simons is known to champion left-wing political causes. She filed a lawsuit against the university to force it to allow 1960s radical Bill Ayers to speak on campus. Ayers co-founded the Weather Underground, an anti-war group that bombed the U.S. Capitol.
Lanker-Simons wouldn’t be the first to falsely report hate crimes or harassment on campus.
Lexi Pennell, a lesbian student at Central Connecticut State University, falsely claimed last year that she received anti-gay notes slipped under her dorm room door. Police set up surveillance cameras that showed Pennell slipping hateful notes under her own door. She was banned from state universities for five years, but not until after an anti-hate rally on campus that roughly 300 attended. She told the crowd, “I stand here today speaking to the person responsible for this and all I have to say is that I’m not going to be run out of my home and I will not be intimidated by hate.”
Earlier this year, former University of Nebraska basketball star Charlie Rogers was sentenced to a week in jail, two years of probation and 250 hours of community service after she claimed three people broke into her house, threatened to burn it down and carved the word “dyke” into her skin. After rallies were held to denounce the apparent hate crime, a judge found that she had purchased the knife, white gloves and zip ties at a local hardware store and then cut herself.
Zachary Tennen, a 19-year-old Jewish sophomore at Michigan State University, was beaten so badly at a campus party last August that his jaw was broken. He said it was a hate crime by neo-Nazi skinheads who saluted Hitler, but after interviewing roughly 50 witnesses police concluded Tennen was punched because he had aggressively hit on women, not because he was Jewish.