Man sentenced in secret videos of women is back on campus 30 years later and so I wrote him this letter

Keith -

I suspected when you wrote me that apology letter in 1998 and then when you appeared on The Oprah Winfrey show in 1999, that you had yet to learn the lesson that the universe sent especially for you. And after all these years I am certain that you still missed it entirely.

I mean, sex addict? Really? Surely you cannot possibly believe that that was the moral crux of your criminality? Because we none of us really care so much about your sexual tendencies or desires. We care that you had the audacity to act on them.

With flagrant disregard for our privacy you videotaped our partially and fully disrobed bodies for your sexual gratification without our consent. You had access to us in the first place because of your power as one of twelve associate deans, a director of the university’s Black Community Services Center and resident fellow for Mirrielees House.

As an activist who has committed his life to racial justice, surely you understand power dynamics. I mean systemic racism is really all about power, am I right?

And because privacy is fundamentally linked to our ability to control exposure to our own bodies, we were sexually violated. You committed a sex crime, Keith.

People who are sexually violated suffer from staggering rates of anxiety, depression, eating disorders, sleeping problems and relationship issues. Have you considered this?

Just because you are able to compartmentalize your life and to rationalize doing whatever it is you are going to do, doesn’t mean that the eleven of us want to see you again. We don’t want to see you at the hotel we booked for our class reunion, or lakeside at the Sierra Family Camp with our families.

The DA convinced me to settle. After your lawyer promised to make each of your victims relive the trauma by testifying in court with the videotape of their partially and/or disrobed bodies for the court to see, the rest of the woman backed off. And so I agreed to your no contest plea to a misdemeanor charge of electronic eavesdropping — nolo contendere.

I think you got a fine and community service. And then we got the promise that the tapes would be destroyed (lest their evidence bring us further shame!), and that your relationship with our alma mater would be permanently severed. You got that lawyer, Thomas J. Nolan, right? Didn’t he go on to get Brock Turner a super sweet deal too? No jail time for you. You didn’t have to register as a sex offender. Nice.

So that’s where, as the kids say, “you got me f-cked up.” Why can’t you just choose the right and the decent thing to do? Why insinuate yourself back into campus life and alumni events? Why, after all of the hurt, would you need to put your name for all eternity on a brick outside of the BCSC? You could have anonymously donated.

When I saw that brick, I really began to worry. Is this narcissism a part of the cognitive distortion that is so common among sexual predators? I pray that you are cured of your sociopathy. I understand that you have reestablished yourself in Antioch, California as a leader who works with vulnerable populations, many of them children. I hope that the good things that you are doing are not simple moral compensation for some impropriety that you are executing in other areas. How deeply troubling this is.

I wish that I had those tapes that were destroyed in 1992. Because destroying them did not serve us. In this case, as with too many, the legal system worked precisely as it was intended: to erase all institutional memory of certain criminal behavior.

The VHS tapes could have served as a tangible reminder of the impudence and audacity of your serial predation. And, even better, I might be able to identify and connect with the other women. I’d be super curious to know how their views on the matter have evolved over the decades.

Stanford “permanently severed” your contact with the university, and you acknowledged that you would “never regain the trust of the community. The damage is irreparable.”

So, would you please be straight with me all these years after sneakily videotaping me in my undies? Why didn’t you stay away?

Rachel Hartshorn