We have recently published a new video on the Title IX for All YouTube channel about how accused students can prepare for the first interview with an investigator, what considerations they should be aware of, and their options. Feel free to view it and share!

Transcript of the Video

Hi, my name is Jonathan Taylor, I am a Title IX advisor. I have been advocating and working in the Title IX space for fifteen years. In this video I’m going to tell you some things you need to know before going into an interview with an investigator if you have been accused of some form of sexual misconduct through the school’s student conduct or Title IX office.

So, at this point, you should have received a document called a Notice of Allegations letting you know that you have been accused. It could also be called something like a Notice of Investigation or Notice of Formal Complaint. Not long after that, the investigator is going to contact you and ask you to schedule a meeting – usually remotely over Zoom or Microsoft Teams.

It is hard to overstate how vulnerable you are at this stage because you only know the minimal amount of information the school has provided. You don’t know what all the accuser has told the school or what evidence the accuser has submitted. You don’t know whether the school has interviewed any witnesses and what all those witnesses may have said.

You could be called into an interview where they put up a screenshot of a text message on the screen from two years ago, and they don’t give you any context of what happened before or after that screenshot, ago, and you may be asked what’s this about, what is your version of events – again, not knowing what all your accuser has told the school. And they could do the same thing with a recording, or a social media post, a Snapchat post that you thought was deleted but someone screenshotted it, with something that someone said that you did, and so forth.

Some of the most dangerous moments are when you don’t know what you don’t know, and any action could change the course of your life, but you’re forced into a situation where you must act regardless. That’s when you have to be extremely careful and you have to get help. And that’s true in these cases. Because what you say could change the course of the entire case. Remember: it’s easy to add statements – and you can always add statements later – it’s very difficult to take them back.

For example, even if you email the investigator after the interview and say, “oh yeah, I said this during the interview, but then over the weekend I got to thinking about it some more and remembered it better and this is actually what happened,” most of the time the investigator is not going to simply replace your previous statement with your new statement when they write up the investigation report that they will later pass on to the decision-maker. They are going to write up that you initially said one thing, and then later you said another. Even if you made your initial statement in good faith and later corrected it in good faith, a decision-maker – when making a credibility determination (deciding who is more believable) – could assign less weight to your statements because you had trouble remembering the details of the alleged incident and your accuser’s recollection seemed more consistent and thus seemed more credible.

All of this is why the most critical time to hire an advisor is before the first interview with an investigator. For example, when people hire me to be their advisor before their first interview, over 80% of the time we are able to get a positive outcome: either the client is found not responsible for the allegations (which is the school’s way of saying not guilty), or we’re able to resolve the complaint in other ways without you being found responsible so that you can continue your education.

So, if you don’t have an advisor at this point, and the investigator is reaching out to you to schedule an interview, you need to push back that interview for as long as you need to hire one. And if they won’t let you push back that interview to hire an advisor, contact us, let me know, because there are federal regulations that provide good cause for extensions such as these, and one of those good causes that those regulations explicitly mention is the absence of an advisor. Additionally, if you are the subject of a Title IX investigation, you have the right to have an advisor attend any meeting with the school. And you never want to meet with the school alone to discuss the allegations because if you say one thing happened in the meeting and they say another, it’s going to be difficult for the school to take your word over theirs.

Now as advisors, we can do many things to prepare you for that interview. The first thing we’ll do is look at the evidence that is currently available as well as any official communication the university has sent to you and use that to plan a general strategy for your defense. We’ll look at not only what we can do over the next few days, but also how we can set you up for success down the line. Some of these things you have to plan early, because if you don’t, you could cut off certain opportunities later on. But to do that, you have to be familiar with the process, the strategy, and so forth.

The next thing we will do is help you practice telling your story. Getting practice is very important. You do not want the first time you tell your story to be in front of an investigator when you are alone, unpracticed, unadvised, and in a heightened state of emotional vulnerability. You are going to be asked your memory about certain events, and if you are having trouble remembering, you want to try to sort out what you do remember before the interview so that you are not contradicting yourself later on.

Also, there are certain words and phrases that you don’t want to use with these investigators. You may think they are harmless, but some investigators will take them in a very different way.

There is also certain evidence that it may not be wise to mention at this point, because if you mention it, I guarantee that the investigator will ask for it, and it may not be beneficial for you to submit it just yet or potentially at all. You may take a look at the evidence and think it can be read one way, but an investigator or decision-maker may look at that same evidence and have a very different reading of it. Some evidence is good to submit, but not just yet; for example, there may be an opportunity to lure the complainant into a false sense of security, get them comfortable with making some false or at least incorrect statements on the record, and then counter by submitting evidence that directly refutes those statements. And there are other issues with evidence as well.

Another thing we will do to help you prepare for the interview is write out a set of questions that we anticipate the investigator will ask and ask them to you. It’s impossible to predict every kind of question the investigator will ask, but we can get a sense of some of the questions because we’ve been in many of these interviews and we know what investigators tend to ask. And of course, we will work with you on your answers. We’ll hear your answer to the question – what you would naturally say in response – and if there is a way to enhance your response (and usually there is) we will help you with it.

Of course, we’re going to be providing you with advice that is specific to your case, but we’ll also provide general interview advice that is applicable to around 95% of these cases. There are around twenty tips and strategies that apply these interviews in general. I’m not going to go over all of those in this video, both because it would be too long for a video and also because at some point you’d have to hire us.

Depending on how big the case is and how much time you have, we may need more than one meeting to prepare. I’ve never needed more than two. And after the end of the meeting, we’ll send you notes from the meeting so that you can review them – ideally twice – before the interview.

This video is about preparing for the interview, but there are other critical ways that we can help during the interview itself. If you want to learn more, go to our website titleixforall.com. Take a look at our advisory service for accused students. Give us a call for a free consultation or schedule one on an advisor’s calendar. We can discuss the situation, give you some advice, and see if it makes sense to help you on a more ongoing basis as the advisor in your case. I can guarantee that we can offer service at a rate that is more affordable than a lot of other professional advisors out there.

As always, I hope you don’t need us, but if you do, give us a call. Thank you and take care.