My Introduction… to Medium (as shown on medium.com):
On Feb. 3rd of this year, an attorney named Tom Carroll physically attacked me. He wasn’t alone; two other men helped him, but I don’t know their names.
I do know this: I suffered a concussion, and still have symptoms today.
I also know this: A little more than a year ago, Carroll promised to be a fake elector for President Donald Trump during the 2020–2021 coup attempt. This means that he had pledged to replace one of the legitimate electors that President Joe Biden won in Pennsylvania during the 2020 election. It also provides illuminating context for me personally, given that I was attacked shortly after saying I was a journalist for Salon Magazine. For that reason I believe it was motivated by my occupation as a liberal journalist.
The attack happened in Allentown, a small city in eastern Pennsylvania, at a political event held by a local chapter of the Tea Party — and to which I’d been invited by Dean Browning, a Republican candidate for state senator.
To this day I struggle with the physical symptoms from their attack, as well as ongoing PTSD. I have been flatly told by the police that they will not help me receive criminal justice, but I at least hope my attackers will be held accountable in the court of public opinion — especially if any of them are currently holding or seeking positions of political responsibility.
Shortly after that literal beating, I was figuratively beaten by the university where I’ve been studying for my PhD for more than a decade.
Lehigh University refused to provide disability accommodations for my concussion for weeks, causing me immense suffering. In doing so, they continued a preexisting pattern of resisting my requests for disability accommodations and making me feel unwelcome through their responses to my autism-related disabilities.
The whirlwind of events surrounding my PhD program has ended with me filing a civil rights complaint to the Department of Education against Lehigh University. The Department of Education was supposed to make a decision on my claim within 30 days of it being filed. More than 30 days have passed, and I have not heard any decision.
Like millions of my fellow graduate students (especially the disabled ones), I feel demoralized, drained and desperately in debt. Since I also have a distinctly leftist bent in my worldview, however, when I reflect on my own experience I marvel at the common conservative claim that academia is full of liberals.
Here I suspect I can safely speak for marginalized college students everywhere: The same professors who will evangelize about liberal values in the classroom are, with depressing regularity, in private the most unrepentantly vicious bigots you’ll ever encounter. They talk like liberals in the abstract, but don’t act like liberals on a day-by-day, person-by-person basis.
They forget the most important rule of liberalism — to, whenever realistically possible, err on the side of compassion. If you don’t strive to do that in your every interaction as best you can, your “liberalism” will always be fundamentally hypocritical.
The stories of Lehigh University and the Lehigh Valley Tea Party intersect not only because they involve me, but because of where they took place — Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley — and the fact that they both involve right-wing behavior (both overt and from “liberals”). The stories are both also very, very long. In order to keep things short, I am limiting this narrative as much as I can to the events that occurred in the year 2022, even though both stories stretch back much farther.
That said… I can’t make this too short, and that is one reason why I’m writing this for Medium instead of Salon. Carroll’s attack profoundly altered my life, so much so that the needs which drive me to write this article are different from those of any other piece I’ve composed. I feel the same way about Lehigh University’s cruel behavior toward me while I’ve been in their PhD program to which I’ve dedicated more than a decade of my life.
I have never had to put together a story like this, and I need complete creative control. Salon supports me writing this article, has been wonderfully accommodating of my medical needs and gives me their blessing to publish this with my own distinctive approach on Medium. And by “distinctive,” I mean that one great advantage of Medium is that it will not ding me for leaning into my greatest vice as a writer — verbosity.
I really can’t help it, and for the sake of describing these traumas, I’d prefer to not have to try. I need to make this as detailed as I deem necessary both to fully demonstrate that I’m factually correct and to put my mind at ease. Even if the resulting length scares away some potential readers, I must do my best to include every important fact and observation.
After all, I only have one shot to tell this story right.
The literal beating:
I am a staff writer at Salon Magazine who specializes in science stories and writes a column about history and politics… although, thanks to the events of Feb. 3rd, I try to avoid writing about politics as much as I used to.
Because I have previously used both my history/politics column and other platforms to talk with conservatives about history and politics, I had developed a friendly acquaintanceship with a local Republican politician named Dean Browning. (Browning is now the Republican nominee for State Senator in Pennsylvania’s District 14.)
In an earlier conversation, Browning had invited me to a Lehigh Valley Tea Party event so that I could casually converse with attendees. I was initially supposed to join him in January but cancelled shortly beforehand for health reasons. As such, Browning invited me to the event in Allentown on Feb. 3rd. (It is not unusual for me to have casual and friendly conversations with local conservatives; only weeks earlier, I’d met with a Lehigh University biochemist and intelligent design proponent named Dr. Michael Behe for a friendly evening of beer and spirited debate about evolution… and, eventually, my 2019 interview with Tucker Carlson.) At the last second Browning cancelled for personal reasons, but gave me instructions that he said would lead to me being admitted on my own if I followed them. (I was later told by the Allentown police that I needed to have had Browning physically with me to be admitted because this was on one of the flyers for the event; I pointed out that Browning had directly said the opposite to me earlier that day in our email conversations, when I asked what I should do after he cancelled.)
I showed up a few minutes after the event began and attempted to follow Browning’s instructions, but as I was in the middle of doing so events beyond my control cut me short. Three men who never identified themselves accosted me without warning and escalated the situation without provocation to the level of a physical confrontation, resulting in me leaving the event with a concussion, PTSD and various superficial bodily injuries.
I know that phrasing doesn’t sound exciting. Here is the problem: I suffered a concussion and PTSD. My memories of the violence inflicted upon me are shrouded in smoke — and just like smoke the closer I approach them, the more it hurts my perceptive organs, and the harder it is to see clearly.
What matters is that I did not provoke violence at any time or react violently at any time. Indeed, I barely had time to register anything before the violence started, and spent most of the time during the violence trying desperately to record what was happening with my iPhone. My last memory before the violence befell me was talking to a man at a front desk by giving out my name, occupation and employer — and I did so while cracking a joke, saying that he could confirm Salon was “legit” because “you can look us up on your phone.” (I did not realize this article of mine — “The psychological reason that so many fall for the ‘Big Lie’” — was being featured on Salon’s website at the time of that wisecrack; after I made that remark the man at the front desk checked his phone and abruptly left.) Soon thereafter is the memory of feeling threatened, and instinctively pulling out my phone to record and protect myself, re-identifying myself by name and occupation while doing so. There were three men, including Carroll and a man in an American flag shirt.
From there my mind’s eyes start to sting and water. That is because from start to finish, my experience beyond that was nothing but feeling fear and pain — and trying to keep my iPhone recording as my one way of protecting myself. The altercation began in the building but ended outside of it, after my father happened to walk by (I had promised that I’d text him when I got inside and he was concerned when I hadn’t done so). At that time, the man in the American flag shirt let me up — because, until the sound of my father’s footsteps began to approach from half a block away, the man in the American flag shirt had been kneeling on my head. I feared that it would cave in like an overripe cantaloupe; in one of the video clips, where you see nothing but a red screen, my iPhone was under my stomach (where I’d put it so the men couldn’t seize it from me). This is the clip during which the man in the American flag shirt was kneeling on my head.
The men allowed my father to collect his son — who after being let up phoned the police and then accused his attackers of being “fascists” (one had the gall to say my use of the term was inappropriate) — and drive him to the hospital. The men never identified themselves to my father, although because I tried to record the violence as it was happening and managed to capture video fragments to show to others, one politically-connected friend figured out from the images that one of the men who engaged in violence against me was Carroll. I had interviewed Carroll for Salon on two separate occasions in 2018 — although, interestingly, Browning (who was a congressional candidate in that election) had been a colorful, friendly and therefore memorable character while Carroll had not been. I’d kept in touch with Browning, but forgot about Carroll.
Perhaps not coincidentally: Carroll had also been an assistant district attorney in Allentown for many years and has supported the local Blue Lives Matter chapter. In 2019, he had been the Republican nominee for Northampton County District Attorney, during which it came out that he had been accused of racially bullying one of his African American colleagues, including by putting a stuffed monkey on her desk. After he lost the election, Carroll pulled a Trump and falsely claimed “overwhelming irregularities.”
The Allentown Police Department told me that they would not pursue charges because they did not believe there was “probable cause,” although when pushed by both me and my attorney they either would not or could not further elaborate on this reasoning. When I asked if there was security footage to back up my own fragmented video clips, they said that there were no security cameras in one part of the building where the violence occurred; for the area where violence had occurred and there was a security camera, on that night it showed nothing but gray. I told the Allentown Police that, given how I was clearly trying to keep recording and the men were clearly trying to stop me, it should be obvious which party had something to hide — even though, as I tried to record their violence against me, the men kept shouting that I was the one attacking them, a right-wing counter-protester tactic that often intimidates victims against using footage which proves they were victimized. (It’s akin to right-wingers playing Disney songs and falsely claiming victims will face copyright lawsuits if they post the footage; also, it’s pretty hard to be violent when you’re actively trying to record with an iPhone in your hand.)
I alleged that the three men accosted me shortly after I identified myself by name and as a Salon journalist, and escalated it to assault after I started recording them, with the men repeatedly hitting me on the body, head and hands (presumably to turn off or seize my phone, which was recording them). I pointed out that I only reentered the building because I was dazed, and that the video footage shows me briefly turning around outside and then quickly reopening the door with one hand, in contrast to the police’s assertion that I had tried to force my way back into the building. Additionally, because the men had not identified themselves and approached me too abruptly for me to get a good look at them, I knew them as nothing more than three strangers who suddenly became physical while demanding I leave an event to which I had been invited… not as figures with any authority.
I pointed out to the police that they were effectively taking the word of the three accused individuals over mine without explanation and despite evidence reinforcing my story, including the emails from Browning showing I’d been invited, the video clips, medical records and more.
The police replied that, although I had called them after Carroll and the other two Tea Partyers attacked me, I left before the police arrived, and they seemed to find this discrediting. I pointed out that the men who had just finished attacking me directly ordered my father and me to leave shortly after I’d called the police, and that I had called the police a second time a few minutes later after I arrived at the hospital… where I immediately filed a report.
When I tried to explain the cognitive as well as physical aspects of my disability (in response to police asking how I did not intuitively know I was in a dangerous situation; autistic people struggle with social intuition), a detective expressed surprise that I was autistic and said he would not have known if he hadn’t been told because I seem very intelligent. I pointed out that his comment was both insulting to autistic people and seemed to glibly brush off what I was trying to explain to him about how my disability affects the way they think about how I acted. He said that the remark was intended as a compliment. I noted that if their logic were applied consistently — namely, that if an autistic person who is not breaking the law can be physically attacked merely because a neurotypical person expects the autistic person to intuit non-verbal social cues — then every autistic person in America would have a target on their back.
The criminal justice system failed me and couldn’t tell me why. At this point I presume there will be no criminal justice for the violent attack on me. I hope that by writing this, I can expose what Carroll did — as well as the related issues of free speech rights, journalists’ rights and the rise of the violent extreme right in America — and perhaps identify the other two men who were violent toward me. By stating the truth publicly, and not allowing the men who attacked me to smear me or bully me into silence, I hope I can achieve closure.
I am also concerned about the possibility that Carroll’s actions toward me will not be fully factored into the public’s verdict regarding his conduct during Trump’s coup attempt. Given the violence he inflicted upon me on Feb. 3rd, I worry that the events of Jan. 6th may have merely foreshadowed the norm that Trumpers wish to establish in this country. It is important to hold Carroll and the other two men accountable so that others who sympathize with Trump’s coup attempt will know that they cannot practice violence with impunity.
Carroll’s actions on Feb. 3, 2022 are very much part of the story of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. That horrible day was not an anomaly; it was just a particularly grotesque symptom of a disease that will prove fatal to our democracy if we remain in denial about its existence.
And he is merely the one attacker I’ve been able to identify. The attacker in the American flag shirt said he was a former police officer; I do not know the identity of the third man. Yet all of them, by their actions toward me, revealed that the violence of Jan. 6th is alive and well among Trump’s followers today.
The figurative beating:
At the start of 2022, I was a PhD student at Lehigh University’s history program… and at the time of this writing I still am. I was ABD (All But Dissertation), and I had discussed the subject of my upcoming dissertation proposal many times with the late John Pettegrew, my adviser until his death in 2018; I had even announced the dissertation dream that Pettegrew and I shared in a 2018 Salon article.
As of the start of 2022, I knew that I was expected to submit a dissertation proposal that would have to be accepted by a committee of three history professors who had been assigned to me against my will in 2019 (even though I had previously accused one of them, John Savage, of discrimination). I was told at the time that Savage was going to chair my committee whether I liked it or not, and that I had to work with him and two other advisers I did not choose; the alternative to accepting this was forced removal from the program. I was even forced to sign a “Communications Protocol” that effectively faulted me for displaying autistic traits and, among other things, limited my due process rights to my distinct disadvantage.
(One quote from the Communications Protocol is instructive: The Protocol said that I could not use an attorney “as an internal advocate or representative. All students are expected to self advocate and to represent themselves in internal matters, unless Lehigh policies or procedures say otherwise. This is especially true for graduate students.” Lehigh has repeatedly found ways to discourage my use of an attorney, and I have always felt it ableist and condescending as well as dishonest to imply my due process rights are just a personal excuse for desiring to not “self advocate.” The line “especially true for graduate students” reminds me of how Lehigh’s previous disability services head, Cheryl Ashcroft, had proposed — as her own idea — structuring disability accommodations for me based on what was used for undergraduate students, since she told me Lehigh didn’t have applicable precedents for graduate students. Lehigh attorney Heather Hosfeld later told my attorney that she thought Ashcroft’s solutions had gone too far.)
I had spent many months in 2019 struggling with every fiber of my being against having to sign Lehigh’s version of the Communications Protocol, which I found to be discriminating and degrading, and I did not want to permanently forfeit my academic independence by accepting Savage — who I had never taken a class with, or at any point evinced the slightest interest in having as an academic mentor — as my adviser. My first attorney was incompetent and seemed disinterested in my case; the second did his best to clean up the first one’s mess, and ultimately Lehigh agreed to a few accommodations, such as the professors summarizing meetings with written notes instead of expecting me to actively take notes while they talked to me, which is difficult for me due to my disability.
As a result of these circumstances, as of the start of 2022 I had been working with Savage and two other professors I did not choose, Monica Najar and John Smith, for three years (with a year break due to the COVID-19 pandemic).
Up to that point, I had been repeatedly reassured by those professors that I did not need to worry about time in terms of when to submit my proposal. Instead they had had me spend the previous year or so working on drafts with a dissertation coach paid for by the university — in large part so that the professors would not have to interact with me as often. (I’ve often told Pennsylvania’s Office of Vocational Rehabilitation, which helps me pay for my education, that I do not believe Lehigh’s professors are acting in good faith.) The coach consistently said during that year when we worked together that I was accurately following the professors’ instructions, at least as they had been conveyed to us. She also observed that the professors seemed to give unclear feedback and move the goalposts about their expectations.
I would tell the coach that she, despite just being one person, seemed to put in more work and engage in more actual academic mentoring with me than the three professors forced on me by Lehigh — combined. For all intents and purposes, she was my adviser; Lehigh had basically outsourced the job.
In the middle of January, the three professors abruptly informed me that I had until June 1st to write a proposal that they would accept, or else they would begin the process of removing me from the program. We had two meetings to discuss how I could write a proposal they would find acceptable. This is where — and not for the first time in my experience as a Lehigh student — my autism became a problem for my professors. Although as a disability accommodation the three professors were contractually obligated to provide me with notes summarizing our meetings within “approximately 5 business days” of each meeting, they refused to do so for both of the January meetings. This was a problem because, as a disability accommodation, I was supposed to use those notes as instructions for my academic assignments; although I could and did continue studying to the best of my ability without those instructions, I could not know for sure whether I was doing what the professors wanted.
My approach was to be patient and politely remind them of their responsibility to provide the notes. The professors finally informed me directly that they did not believe the notes I required as a disability accommodation were actually needed, without explaining in any clear or specific way why this was the case, and instead instructed me to follow an outline that Smith wrote himself and sent in a separate email.
Because prior circumstances had made it difficult for me to judge how I could remedy their seeming failures to communicate on my own — among other things, I was given Smith’s outline exactly one day after I suffered the concussion — I tried to do my best with a bad situation. I informed disability services of the concussion and my decision to try to write the proposal in spite of it, taking heart in the fact that Smith’s outline asked for a relatively modest amount of work from me. A meeting to discuss my new draft was scheduled for March 30th, and I worked on a proposal that matched Smith’s outline, consulting with the dissertation coach. (The coach said that she believed I had successfully followed the professors’ instructions, at least to the extent that they had been communicated to us.)
One day after the meeting, on March 31st, my attorney sent a letter requesting disability-related accommodations to the person Lehigh publicly identifies as its ADA and Section 504 coordinator, Karen Salvemini. The letter stated that I needed and was not getting from Lehigh accommodations to which I asserted I was legally entitled, and explained how prior attempts by Lehigh to provide accommodations had been ineffective; how those prior attempts since 2018 had inappropriately excluded me from important decisions about my own career and then pressured me into making choices which I asserted at the time I felt were adverse to me (at least in my case, the post-Ashcroft disability services head Maria Zullo was definitely not a believer of “Never about us without us.”); how those prior attempts had overall created a climate that I described as discriminatory; and how, in light of the professors’ now-apparent behavior (which the letter characterized, through descriptions though not with this exact word, as toxic), it would neither be reasonable or healthy for me to be required to figure out how to effectively manage such behavior while simultaneously continuing my recovery from my concussion symptoms.
For the following six weeks, both I and my attorney Laura Caravello from Disability Rights Pennsylvania (one of the few unambiguously heroic figures in my story; and I’m putting in this parenthetical aside despite what I imagine will be Caravello’s protests, because I’m grateful that she championed my cause) repeatedly asked Lehigh University for new disability accommodations that we felt were justified based both on the way I had been treated by the professors, and by the fact that my health was deteriorating as my concussion symptoms persisted.
Through their attorney Heather Hosfeld, disability services head Maria Zullo and outside counsel Robert Duston (from the prestigious law firm Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr), Lehigh repeatedly and intransigently refused to grant any of the requested accommodations, or even acknowledge that the Lehigh professors’ actions had broken previous agreements. Salvemini dismissed my accusations of discrimination without citing any basis in fact or law for doing so, and the university continued to refuse to provide the requested accommodations. During those six weeks, my health deteriorated significantly — and in ways that were observed by several doctors and therapists — as a result of Lehigh’s intransigence on accommodations and its simultaneous refusal to remove the June 1st deadline, which preceding events had rendered inoperable for reasons clearly beyond my control. Lehigh was repeatedly told that their inflexibility on the matter was hurting my health.
Perhaps the most pointed example of cruelty came from Zullo, who on one occasion said she would only consider providing accommodations if I went through a process that was practically impossible for me as a physically disabled person — multiple in-person on-campus meetings (I cannot drive and do not live close to the campus). Zullo also refused to copy my attorney in her emails to me despite being asked to do so, saying that I’d need to forward her messages myself, and both she and Salvemini relied on Lehigh policy in telling me that no lawyer or other advocate would be able to speak or participate in meetings with them; they instead could only passively attend, and I alone would be allowed to talk. I was taken aback when Zullo demanded a level of direct access to my doctors that I considered invasive; I was additionally taken aback when Duston sent a menacing letter to my attorney shortly after I informed Lehigh that we were filing a civil rights complaint. He did not complain about our doing so, but instead attacked my attorney’s character for a letter she sent to a university employee on my behalf about a routine matter. Surprising for an attorney from a firm as prestigious as Saul Ewing, Duston mischaracterized entirely my allegations and requests, acting as if I were merely stalling for an indefinite extension from Lehigh while ignoring both a specific request from my lawyer for particular accommodations and detailed accusations of discrimination, harassment and retaliation.
In similar ways, Lehigh seemed to bully me throughout the process during which I asked them for a disability-related accommodation of extending or suspending the June 1st deadline. As a reminder: I wanted to do this because I literally had no clear assignment from my professors, had already accused them of discriminating against me, and now had new medical issues that needed to be addressed. In addition, Smith has removed himself from my panel of advisers, meaning I will likely never be able to directly ask him to explain his outline.
To this day, Lehigh University is still refusing to provide accommodations for the disability issues that I have raised, and only semi- relented on the deadline shortly after I informed them that Caravello and I were filing a civil rights complaint against the university with the Department of Education. Lehigh has also supplied me with “notes” from the professors months after those notes were due… and the notes are effectively useless since I’m not allowed to contact professors with questions during my leave of absence and I have no idea when these notes were written, or with what motives — and, most importantly, I cannot be reasonably expected to work with these professors in the future because of how they have mistreated me. My leave of absence extends until the start of the fall 2022 semester in August, and as such the June 1st deadline could only be pushed to Oct. 7th. No decision has yet been rendered on the case by the Department of Education.
I later learned that Salvemini is being accused by other students of stonewalling attempts to hold a former staff member accountable who has been accused of sexual misconduct. I learned this because, if you do a Google search for Salvemini and Lehigh, you find a petition that at the time of this writing has over 500 signatures. (Here is the hyperlink.) I also later learned of a student newspaper that in May 2022 wrote an article complaining about Salvemini’s office and how it handles sexual misconduct accusations. (Here is the hyperlink.) The authors of the petition noted that Salvemini frequently seemed to be absent from campus; I had the same experience with Salvemini, in particular with her claiming to have been out of the office for almost a week after I filed the March 31st letter that had initially outlined my discrimination accusations.
During that near-week when I was waiting to hear a response, and had no idea about the university’s views about my letter, Zullo and my professors met to discuss me without my knowledge.
Lehigh once gave an honorary doctorate to Trump, and other fun facts from “liberal” academia:
To this day, I continue to suffer from the concussion and PTSD symptoms caused by the attack.
The first two weeks after the attack were like the worst kind of whirlwind — the type that makes you feel like your body and mind are totally out of control. I struggled to walk, slept constantly, and had extremely volatile emotional fluctuations. I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin with anxiety. I couldn’t think clearly and was laid down low with headaches and light sensitivity.
Physically I still struggle every day with light sensitivity and related headaches, although those symptoms were far worse before I received therapy. Often I have brain fog, wherein I’ll lose my train of thought and need to recollect my thoughts. The worst part, though, has been the PTSD flashbacks. I frequently feel as if I am stuck in a giant version of Feb. 3rd, 2022 (it’s one reason why I remember the date so easily), and there are specific memories from the event that replay in my mind even when I try to shove them out. Even worse, although I’ve long struggled with anxiety, that sense of looming dread was previously (and mercifully) devoid of fears about my own mortality. Ever since the attack, I cannot shake in my solar plexus a constant terror, as if I am a prey about to be pounced upon. Sometimes it would flare up and I’d be drenched in terror before I could pause it, like a bad acid reflux attack scalding my throat. I have since found ways to push it beneath the surface, but sometimes I know a burn is rising, and can do nothing more than clench my teeth.
With Lehigh, there is the horror of knowing that I may be forced to pay more than 10 years’ worth of student debt for a degree that the college seemed determined to never let me have after the death in 2018 of my original adviser, the great John Pettegrew. I also feel immense pain at the countless weekends and vacations that I sacrificed for an academic career in which I believed passionately, and in which the advisers forced on me never seemed particularly interested. The people at Lehigh who could effectively control my progress seemed to not want me to succeed because of a perverse belief that acknowledging and accommodating my disability-related “idiosyncrasies” (their word) would somehow advantage me over non-disabled students. It’s one thing to lose 10 years of your life, and another to watch an act of career arson against you occur in real time. Even though I have been told by some to wait until the Department of Education has ruled on my case before coming forward, I urge them to think of how they would feel if their own possessions were being set ablaze. Would they be calm and patient as well, or would they also insist that the arsonists be stopped as soon as possible?
My main form of relief from this constant source of pain is play, albeit a form of play that is also work: I escape into and find release in writing science articles like a swimmer might feel most alive after diving into an Olympic pool. I have written some of my best work since the literal beating (particularly when I had the privilege of using my platform to raise awareness about climate change, interview the inventors of the Octa-glove, defend President Joe Biden’s legacy — even though I got ripped on by Fox News for doing so — advocate for seals as the “chunky Einsteins of the ocean” and discover that my concussion had given me a sense of kinship with woodpeckers). A person who seeks escape in their work will turn it into their ultimate playground. It helps that Salon has allowed me frequent breaks to rest my eyes from the laptop screen, and I can type at 100 wpm and therefore spare myself intensive periods of labor.
Yet writing about science can only temporarily numb the pain, and it jolts back as soon as I stop reading and writing about science (and occasionally politics) and am again stuck in the prison of my own injured neurology.
By far, this pain is worse because I was pressured by a support network that, for a while, did not understand how to properly assist someone with head injuries. If there is one lesson I have for allies, it is this: Remember not to substitute the victim’s will with your own.
People experiencing trauma and head injuries are particularly susceptible to emotional pressure and irrational thinking. In my case, individuals who I know love me and want what they think is best for me tried to — without suspecting it — tell me what to think, instead of helping me make up my own mind. And that means, because I was not mentally competent during the period immediately following the attack, I made mistakes.
For instance: Even though I filed charges with the police immediately after the event happened, I withdrew them a few days later because I was convinced by people close to me that I needed to do so for my own physical and mental health… and for my personal safety. They refused to accept my protestations that this was a bad idea, instead peppering me with insistences that I drop charges “because the best thing for you is to drop this and move on,” regardless of how often I said that didn’t feel right to me and that I actually needed time to process. The pressure became overwhelming because so many people were saying the same thing, and I didn’t think of how I’d be viewed as less credible for having initially withdrawn the charges even though I had been very clear to the police that it was for the aforementioned personal reasons.
It seems obvious now, but remember: I had just suffered my concussion, and I was still reeling from the trauma of what happened.
Similarly, I was convinced by those close to me that — because Smith’s outline had been presented to me as an amalgamation of my previous drafts, and therefore easier to write than a totally fresh draft — I should bite the bullet and try to impress Lehigh by writing it. I had my doubts about the wisdom of this course, given Lehigh’s previous toxic behavior and my own need for rest. Yet I disregarded my better judgment after sustained pressure and spent time that could have been invested on healing toward the task of impressing professors who hadn’t even bothered to provide disability accommodations to which they had agreed in writing. It was lost time that I had a right to spend on myself, or at least engaged in projects where those to whom I was responding were indisputably acting in good faith.
Yet I couldn’t think clearly for myself, and on both occasions I was pressured to act against my better judgment by people who didn’t see and respect my boundaries as a concussed person, a PTSD victim and a neurodivergent individual. On both occasions there were people who believed they knew better than me what was in my own best interest, and on both occasions those people unintentionally took advantage of the fact that I was impaired by the PTSD and concussion to pressure me to handle things their way — even as I repeatedly insisted I wanted to be left alone.
I suspect this happens a lot to victims, so it must be made clear: Anyone who urges a trauma or head injury victim to change their mind on something crucial to their own lives — and does so while they are still vulnerable — is being brutally unfair. Your good intentions are irrelevant; people with trauma and head injuries have a right to space so they can make up their own minds. There is a crucial difference between providing information and gentle guidance, which is helpful, and imposing your will, which is destructive. Many advocates fail to recognize that distinction, and therefore harm when they hope to heal.
Closing (and thanks for sticking around this long):
I’ll close by adding that the stories of my two beatings — one delivered by Lehigh University and figurative, the other by the Lehigh Valley Tea Party and quite literal — are so lengthy that I have jotted down hundreds of pages worth of details. Much has been trimmed because if I thoroughly documented every instance in which I have suffered since the Feb. 3rd attack, or in which I have accused Lehigh of discrimination, I’d need several hundred pages.
(I know that for sure in the latter case because I had to file a damn report on this mishigas to the Department of Education — one roughly the size of the dissertation I still aspire to write.)
America has been Trumpified. In the case of the Lehigh Valley Tea Party, there is literal Trumpism: Carroll participated in a coup attempt with Trump himself, and the Tea Party’s hostility to me seems likely to have been motivated by me being a liberal journalist. It seems unlikely a low-level local politician like Carroll didn’t remember being twice interviewed by Salon Magazine about a national election — and I told him my name and employer many times both prior to and during the attack. I do not believe it is a coincidence that one of Trump’s fake electors without provocation beat up an invited, unarmed, nonviolent and disabled journalist less than 13 months after the Jan. 6th coup attempt — and did so while a radical Christian nationalist named Doug Mastriano seeks to become Pennsylvania’s next governor. I also do not believe it is a coincidence that another one of the men who gave me a concussion described himself as a former police officer.
My autism is also relevant to the Feb. 3rd attack. From the Allentown police to my closest confidantes, I’ve learned the hard way that if you do not present yourself in a neurotypical fashion, many people with power will reflexively dismiss you because of your autistic mannerisms. It soon became clear that, if a neurotypical needs to check X number of boxes to be taken seriously in a situation like mine, an autist will be expected to check 10X as many boxes.
So I did. Over and over again, I told people what happened and insisted that they didn’t need to take my word for it but should instead look at the evidence: The medical records, phone records, email records and video clips. Between that evidence and simple deductive logic, it is undeniable that I had sound reason to believe I had been invited to the Feb. 3rd event; that I was physically attacked after showing up by Carroll and the other men caught on the video clips; and that I left with serious, documented injuries. Because of my physical disabilities and appearance (I’m under 5′ 9″ and have hand-eye coordination, fine motor skill and balance issues), it seems absurd to argue that these three men sincerely believed I posed a physical threat. (I also have no history of physical violence.) There is no plausible way to deny that as a group these men physically attacked me at an event to which I’d been invited, and that I left with a concussion as a result.
In Lehigh University’s case, the connection to Trump is less obvious but still powerful. This is the same school that gave Trump an honorary doctorate and let him keep it through most of his presidency, only revoking it after the coup attempt. More broadly, though, the university has a long history of controversies related to its treatment of marginalized students. My professors’ seeming contempt for disability accommodations is only part of that trend.
I chose to get a PhD from Lehigh University for the same reason I went to that Lehigh Valley Tea Party rally… because I love talking about history. With both Lehigh University and the Lehigh Valley Tea Party, I thought I could have sincere and good-faith conversations as part of furthering my dream careers as an academic and journalist.
On both occasions, I was rudely reminded that some people don’t want to have those conversations. With the Lehigh Valley Tea Party, it seems to be a partisan issue — namely, their dislike of liberal journalists. With Lehigh University, it seems to be a disability issue — namely, their apparent resentment toward my need for disability accommodations.
Many liberals did not express surprise upon hearing that I was attacked when I tried to talk about history with the Lehigh Valley Tea Party. (This is depressing for its own reasons; America is in a dire state when each partisan side literally fears the other one.) But what does it say that my interactions with Lehigh University were, frankly, no less damaging to my long-term health?
If Lehigh University sincerely thinks that refusing to provide disability accommodations isn’t as Trump-ian as a red MAGA hat — if they believe that mouthing anemic progressive platitudes cancels out the hard reality of their seeming contempt for my Section 504 rights — then there is something even worse at play here than mere hypocrisy.
It means that these history professors have learned nothing from history.