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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Allison Stewart. Listeners, we want to let you know the following conversation will discuss intimate-partner violence. If at any time you need support, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1800-799-SAFE, or you can text START to 8878, they provide free and confidential services 24 hours a day.

When author and historian Joy Neumeyer began her PhD program at UC Berkeley, she was excited to be among like-minded and intelligent students like herself. She found an intellectual and emotional connection with one student in particular, a man named Daniel. What began as an intense friendship developed into a romantic relationship, but soon after they began dating, Joy began to see a terrifying new side of Daniel. He was verbally abusive, fixated on her past relationships with other men, called her a "whore and a disgusting slut". He followed her around campus and intimidated her. He became physically violent, choking Joy, pushing her, and threatening to kill her. When she would threaten to leave him, he would harm himself.

She decided to pursue disciplinary action against Daniel at the university through initiating a Title IX case against him. But as the investigation gets underway, Joy realizes that many of her fellow students and even some of her professors believe Daniel's version of events over hers. Joy writes about her experience in the searing new memoir, A Survivor's Education: Women, Violence, and the Stories We Don't Tell. Joy is going to be speaking at Powerhouse Arena on Tuesday, September 3rd at 7:00 PM and she joins me now. Welcome, Joy.

Joy Neumeyer: Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: A lot of people have read your work, you're a historian, you recently wrote about Putin and Russia in the New York Times. Let's take it all the way back. Why did you pursue history? Why did you want to pursue a PhD in history?

Joy Neumeyer: I think my interest in history began really when I was in high school. I had a very charismatic history teacher who taught AP European history. I grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia, so I already knew some of the history of the South and of the U.S., but in this class, we started talking about Europe and in particular, what fascinated me was the Russian Revolution. It was just this incredible story of a country that was an empire of peasants that suddenly overthrew this authoritarian czar, turned into an industrialized superpower, defeated Hitler, and after all that, it collapsed in the span of a single human lifetime.

I was so fascinated by the arch of this story that I went on to study it in college. I learned Russian, studied abroad there, and after I graduated, I moved to Moscow on a Fulbright and worked there for several years as a reporter. Every time, I just kept, even as I would meet people in the present, I was so struck by how the past continued to inform everything that was happening around me. I ended up leaving in 2014 and heading back to the U.S. to start a PhD in history, where I could look into some of these questions about how the Russian past shapes its present a little bit more deeply.

Alison Stewart: You're at UC Berkeley, you're having what seems to be a great time. You have friends, you have relationships, and you start to date Daniel, and you had a very powerful friendship. What was the basis of the friendship and the connection?

Joy Neumeyer: Yeah, we were great friends. Basically, as soon as we met at Admitted Students' Day, we were both combing through the appetizers that had gone cold, that nobody else was eating. We struck up a conversation and realized we had a lot in common. As we started actually studying together and taking courses in the histories of different regions, including Europe, we I think just shared a lot of the same political values. We were both really fascinated by the Russian Revolution in particular, and of this idea of being on the side of the people against power, I think, was very kind of romantic and appealing to both of us.

All this, we were learning about these historical events in the context of the rise of Donald Trump and on the one hand, disillusionment with some of the failed promises of the Obama administration that had aroused so much hope in our generation, and on the other hand, seeing the rise of this postmodern authoritarian clown who was promising to drain the swamp of Washington by giving bigger tax cuts to the rich. Our current political context was just so disappointing to both of us and we both wanted to believe in the possibility of a better world. That's definitely something that united us and brought us closer together on an intellectual level.

At the same time, as we were building a really close emotional bond, I would confide in him. I was doing online dating at the time. I had a lot of relationships that went nowhere or went poorly and I would tell him about all this. He would give me a shoulder to cry on, and he would also confide a lot in me about his life. He was a first-generation academic who came from an underprivileged background, and he felt like an outsider in a lot of ways at Berkeley. I think at Berkeley, a lot of people-- it was kind of cool to play up the idea that one had come from some kind of underprivilege, because we all wanted to be so progressive, but he really did come from very little means and had a very difficult childhood.

So he felt alienated by this cultural context that we were both in at Berkeley, where people were maybe paying lip service to certain ideals or presenting themselves in a certain way, but to him, it felt a little hollow, and he felt even more excluded. We would both talk to each other. We would go out for fast food, which was a big relief for both of us after the stress of seminars to just eat a lot of junk food and talk not only about ideas, but also about the problems of our lives that we were dealing with as grad students in a challenging academic environment, but also in one of the most expensive areas to live in in the United States. We all felt so many inequalities around us, and we're all struggling to get by, so a lot really brought us together.

Alison Stewart: Before you started dating, Daniel said to you, "You don't know how my moods can get." Looking back, what did that mean?

Joy Neumeyer: I think that I thought I knew him very well because he had told me a lot about his life, about his depression, about his mental health struggles, and I thought that that was the extent of it. When we started dating, I was fully prepared to offer him support through those kinds of psychological trials. But what changed when we started dating, and which I think he already knew about himself, was that his "moods" were completely different when directed against a romantic partner, because for him, in what he had seen modeled in the culture and unfortunately, in his own family, was to use the woman, the wife, the romantic partner, as a living garbage dump for all one's problems.

Instead of being someone who supported him in his anger and sadness and frustration, I suddenly turned into being blamed as the source of it, and this was a tremendous transformation that I absolutely had not anticipated.

Alison Stewart: Daniel threatened to kill you many times throughout your relationship. When was the first time you really believed he might do it?

Joy Neumeyer: You know how it works with trauma, you really dissociate from what's happening around you. As he started to be physically violent towards me and to threaten me, I would be in the room and I would witness all these things happening, but it's as if I was also somewhere else. My mind would really float away and not consciously realize and accept what was happening as a defensive mechanism. I simply couldn't believe that this person I loved and trusted was doing all this. It was I was desperately trying to repress this new information, but probably the first time I really had an inkling that this could happen was when he shoved me down a flight of stairs in front of the History Department at Berkeley.

I thankfully didn't hit my head as I fell backwards, but I felt that I could have. In that moment, even as I was trying not to realize what was happening and to forget it, even as I was experiencing it, I thought, "Wait, this could have really turned out another way." I think the final time that that knowledge or that realization was really cemented for me was the last night that we spent together. After promising to change, of course, as he had so many times before, he became violent again. I looked into his eyes and I saw this energy, this will to destroy that I will simply never forget.

In that moment, all of those red flags and warning signs that I had tried so hard to push away, they all just snapped into focus, and I realized, this person could kill me. They would do it. Once you really allow yourself to have that realization, it is very hard to forget.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with Joy Neumeyer, author of the memoir A Survivor's Education: Women, Violence, and the Stories We Don't Tell. Let's talk about the stories we don't tell, when you and Daniel were texting each other or writing about this to friends, you were very careful about what you put down in writing. Why?

Joy Neumeyer: We were sort of, I would say, collaborating together to cover up what was happening. He would always save his violence, both physical and emotional abuse, for moments when we were alone or around strangers. I went along with this because I wanted to protect him on the one hand and on the other, I believed what he was saying. I wanted to believe what he was saying, that it was my faults, that I had done something wrong, that I needed to make it up to him, so I also felt often that I was the perpetrator. It was almost as if I needed to cover up for both of us.

When I would send a text message to a friend when I felt really stressed about what was going on, I might use a euphemistic phrase like, "Something happened," or, "He needs help." I would often couch it as being he had a problem that he simply needed further love and support to overcome, and it was my job to give him that love and support. It was this constant act of self-censorship that eventually broke down as things got worse and worse. I did finally tell a couple friends more about what was going on, but certainly in the initial months, it was very cloaked.

Although I was later interested to discover during the investigation of our relationship that my friends who observed me closely had actually noticed some signs before I had told them anything explicitly. They would see my hands shaking. They would see me pulling down the blinds in my office in the History Department when I wanted to talk to them, all of these things to cover up that I would never have normally done, and they found that quite strange.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about how Title IX factors into this. First of all, what does Title IX have to say about domestic abuse?

Joy Neumeyer: Title IX, when it was created in 1972, it was to prevent sex discrimination in education and it was initially applied to hiring practices and sports. Over the years, with the rise and fall of different feminist movements, it increasingly came to focus on sexual harassment and violence. These terms were really-- sexual harassment in particular was not in wide usage until the late '70s, but then it really wasn't until the Obama administration that universities began to intensively apply Title IX to sexual and domestic violence, thanks to a directive from Obama's Department of Education telling schools to take these complaints more seriously.

That's how it began and it entered my life a bit later in 2017 when I filed a complaint. Title IX was very much in the news because of the Trump administration. His incoming Department of Education had vowed to ensure "due process" for both accusers and the accused, and a lot of that, what he really meant by that was to make the system that was in place more favorable for people who were accused. Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, had met with men's rights groups and a lot of people like that who had told her, "Wait, wait, these processes are so unfair to men accused of sexual and domestic violence," so she was "reforming" the system at the very time that my case began.

Alison Stewart: At one point during the investigation, the investigation, the Title IX case, you are able to see who has said what about whom. They've interviewed various people. They've asked for various reports. What surprised you about the version of yourself that you saw in those witness statements?

Joy Neumeyer: It was an incredibly surreal experience. I think it could be best described as schizophrenic. It's not very often in life that you see a lot of unfiltered commentary about you that's not really meant for you to read from your colleagues, from your professors, your mentors, your friends. All kinds of people in my department were interviewed, and I think everyone spoke. I think my professors spoke. They didn't say anything insulting about me, anything that was too surprising, but what distorted their perception of me was that many people who were interviewed were so eager as I had been to support and feel sympathetic to my ex-boyfriend, that they were kind of very insistent on seeing him as the victim.

He was the one who needed support. They saw me as having helped him through that because I was so stable, and this really distorted the prism through which they saw me and our relationship and him.

Alison Stewart: You were upset to see that two of your professors, one your academic advisors, seemed reluctant to find fault with Daniel's actions. What did they say?

Joy Neumeyer: Well, in the interview with the Title IX investigator, they didn't say much. They had a position of not really wanting to comment on the substance of the situation, because as they told me later, there were two stories, and they had no way of deciding between them, so they preferred not to say anything much at all. To me, this was a misunderstanding, because often in a domestic violence case, you might not have a direct witness to violence that occurred, but what you do have are, for example, the victim telling people certain things at certain times around when the violence happened. Depending on who heard what when, and if the story is consistent, it can really help build a convincing case.

I think that that was a mistaken assumption on his part, that that was the best approach. It came out increasingly as I engaged with him more about it later that he did in fact think that the university had been too harsh on my ex-boyfriend and that he should have been allowed to stay. I was really shocked and disappointed by this information because I had looked up to my advisor so much, and I had trusted him to support me and look out for me. Unfortunately, in these kinds of situations, it's a near universal tendency to try to support the person who has done wrong and to not really acknowledge the impact that they've had on the victim and on the community. Unfortunately, some of my professors, as smart as they were, they fell into some of those same traps that many people do.

Alison Stewart: What would you say to someone who's listening right now, who finds themselves in a similar situation on their own college campus?

Joy Neumeyer: I would say before even considering making a Title IX complaint, to make sure you have as much support as possible from your friends, from people you really know and trust, who will be there for you no matter what. If you file a complaint with the university, unfortunately, the vast majority of them never go anywhere. I have read a lot of Title IX reports over the course of researching this book, and it's just incredible. Only a tiny minority of cases are ever investigated, much less have any meaningful consequences like a suspension or an expulsion.

I would say it's up to you whether you want to officially come forward. Sometimes the university can help make accommodations for you, like changing your course schedule, providing you with a confidential counselor. Those things can be very helpful, and you can do that sometimes without having to go through a full investigation, which is, as you might have deduced from what I'm saying, very unpleasant. But really, no matter what the institution does or doesn't do, just making sure you have the support that you need to move on with your life in a safe way and to realize that the institution might not be able to guarantee that for you.

Alison Stewart: The name of book is A Survivor's Education: Women, Violence, and the Stories We Don't Tell. It is by Joy Neumeyer. Joy, thank you so much for sharing your story.

Joy Neumeyer: Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: And if at any time you need support, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1800-799-SAFE or text START to 8878. They're open 24 hours a day. That is All Of It. Coming up tomorrow, you'll hear a new collection of poetry from Danez Smith called Bluff. Kousha will be your host tomorrow and Friday and then you're stuck with me, so thank you, thank you, thank you to Kousha for joining team All Of It, and for your good spirit and good energy. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening, and I'll meet you back here when I meet you back here.

 

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