For victims and survivors of sexual violence, the conclusion of a Title IX case doesn’t end the impact the assault — and the process — has on them.

A closed case, regardless of the outcome, may provide closure to some. But for the five women who have shared their stories in “(un)silenced: Journeys through Ohio State’s Title IX process,” it didn’t erase the trauma they accumulated, nor did it undo what their perpetrators did to them.

These women left Title IX and Ohio State with residual pain: nightmares, anxiety, suicidal thoughts or post-traumatic stress disorder. They left with memories of invasive questions, unempathetic friends or investigators and upended lives. They also left with new career goals, healthy relationships and personal growth — what they described as increased empathy, more assertiveness or self-compassion. 

Some have moved away or gone home, heading toward new jobs or educational opportunities. All have found themselves, in one way or another, alive in the aftermath. These are their stories.

Uma Subrayan

When people ask Uma Subrayan about her time at Ohio State, the first thing that comes to mind is the man who stalked and harassed her for more than a year.

She said it’s undoubtedly changed how she functions; she has the habit of checking if her bedroom door is locked each night, and she can’t shake the paranoia that follows her around campus. Since 2019, she’s had flashbacks to the painful memories of her stalker’s incessant text messages, him showing up to her TA office hours and the fateful night he snuck into her dorm room and stole her shoes.

But Subrayan, a May 2020 graduate, said it took a long time for her to begin processing what happened to her. Before then, she only acknowledged how her case affected her friends — who were friends with her stalker.

Subrayan said the mutual friends she had with her stalker were upset with her after she reported the shoe incident — they failed to understand why what he did was wrong. When her stalker was removed from his student organization after they became aware of the report, the resentment deepened. For a while, Subrayan internalized those messages.

To make matters worse, Subrayan said, she felt guilty for another reason: When her stalker stole her shoes, he inadvertently grabbed a few of her suitemate’s shoes — thus entangling her in what Subrayan told herself was her own mess to handle.

That suitemate, Rachel Leimkuehler, said she never blamed Subrayan for her shoes getting stolen — that blame is reserved for Subrayan’s stalker.

Leimkuehler said she actually met Subrayan in the bathroom of Park-Stradley Hall their freshman year — they brushed their teeth at the same time, and her roommate was friends with Subrayan. They were nothing more than casual acquaintances when they ended up suitemates the next year.

“We became a lot closer then throughout the year, commiserating about our roommates who weren’t the best,” Leimkuehler said.

Both women agree the shoe incident cemented their friendship — Subrayan said after they reported it, she and her stalker’s mutual friends ostracized both of them. She said it felt nice to have a supportive person who saw the harassment and who wanted to support her.

“I’ve never had a bond with someone like that,” Subrayan said. “Where we can be serious when we need to be serious and we have each other’s backs, but in some of the moments of darkness, we’re able to find some kind of light and we’re able to laugh.”

In fact, Subrayan said Leimkuehler was her “lifeline,” especially when her mental health declined.

“She just listened, and I just needed someone to listen during that time,” Subrayan said. “And that was something that I wasn’t really used to.”

Leimkuehler said in the aftermath of the case and Subrayan’s mental health, she’s noticed Subrayan has grown into a much more assertive person. Both women said before the stalking and during the investigation, Subrayan was a “people pleaser” — willing to not only sacrifice for the comfort of others, but to endure friends shaming and blaming her for her stalker’s actions and dismissing the impact it had on her.

Now, however, Subrayan is more comfortable shifting her priorities to herself.

“Uma’s not afraid to call somebody on what they’re saying, to really see people’s true colors,” Leimkuehler said. “She’s grown a lot, and she’s outgrown a lot of people.”

Subrayan said she’s learned how to manage her triggers through meditation in the mornings and evenings and by doing yoga and other exercise. She also limits the amount of time she spends on social media, instead setting aside time to do arts and crafts. 

She hopes to start an Etsy store to sell art and donate proceeds to organizations that support victims and survivors of sexual violence.

Aside from figuring out her triggers and how to mitigate them, Subrayan said one thing she’s working on is automatically associating her time at Ohio State with her stalker. Instead, she reminds herself how much she’s grown and the positive ways her life has changed. 

“I’m oddly grateful to the situation because the amount of growth I’ve experienced, I don’t know if I would have experienced it in any other situation,” Subrayan said. “If it hadn’t had happened, … it would have probably been a more calm or peaceful life, but I just learned to really appreciate myself and the strength that I exhibit.”

Shortly after receiving the outcome letter from her Title IX hearing, Ashley Yong trained to be a Sexual Assault Response Network of Central Ohio volunteer.

She was tasked with taking calls from SARNCO’s 24/7 helpline, helping victims of relationship and sexual violence work through crises and shock after assaults. Yong said her therapist cautioned against jumping into something potentially triggering so soon after experiencing trauma.

“I just frankly didn’t listen to her and I did it anyways,” Yong said. “It really served a beautiful part of my healing process.”

Now, having just received her master’s in higher education, Yong has her sights set on the University of Utah’s McCluskey Center for Violence Prevention, where she’ll research sexual violence with particular regard to its impact on marginalized communities.

Yong said the McCluskey Center is named after Lauren McCluskey, a 21-year-old University of Utah student who was killed in 2018 by a man she dated — the same man she reported to campus and local police several times for his threatening behavior, to no avail. As part of her role, Yong will also educate the campus community on ways to prevent relationship and sexual violence.

“I’m really excited because it really beautifully marries my heart for justice and advocacy, and also this relationship with sexual violence work that I so deeply care about and want to do with my career,” she said.

Yong, who was sexually assaulted in her apartment by a date in September 2019, said she doesn’t regret going through the Title IX process. Even though her perpetrator wasn’t found in violation for any Code of Student Conduct charges, Yong said the investigation and hearing provided closure.

“I was able to say to him, ‘This is how much pain you’ve caused me. I hope you never do this to anyone again,’” Yong said.

But she acknowledged the end of the Title IX process didn’t bring as much relief as she thought it would.

In the months after her hearing, Yong was diagnosed with PTSD and began taking antidepressants — which she said presented a challenge in finding the right dose and type of medication. She said although she knew how important processing her trauma through therapy was for her healing, it became increasingly difficult to prioritize.

Emily Collins, who met Yong in their masters program in the fall of 2019, said she watched her bubbly friend become more anxious and hopeless as the Title IX process went on. She said Yong disclosed her assault to her in the spring of 2020 — as the case “started to ramp up” ahead of the hearing.

Collins said one of the things she and Yong bonded over was their Christian faith — they prayed and went to bible study together. But both women said Yong’s assault had a profound impact on her relationship with religion.

Yong said she stopped going to church and reading the Bible consistently. It was difficult for her to maintain her faith when she struggled with a question many victims and survivors face: Why did it happen to her? 

“I know that deep down, I will come back to it someday. But honestly, the priority for me in these last few months has really been taking care of myself on this basic level of my basic needs and finishing out grad school strong,” Yong said. “I’m not super proud of the way my faith was shaken by this. But at the same time, I know that it’s a really traumatic event and there are going to be lots of things in your life that are changed by this.”

For Collins, Yong has always been empathetic, devoted and passionate — her assault did not change those things. What Collins noticed did change was that Yong started putting herself first.

A year ago, Collins said, Yong would sacrifice sleep, time and happiness to make other people happy and comfortable. But Collins said she’s seen Yong work on setting boundaries and following through with them.

Yong said going through the Title IX process made her realize how passive and “meek” she was socialized to be. She said she gave the university the benefit of the doubt; she accepted her unanswered and ignored emails as part of her investigators’ heavy workloads. 

What she wished someone would have told her before she went through the process — and what she learned in the aftermath — is that she didn’t have to be the “nice girl” to earn her story being heard.

“I just gave so much grace, and saying, ‘Well, it’s OK that you took a month to respond, you’re busy’ and all that kind of stuff,” Yong said. “Respondents, they don’t often show the same level of grace.”

With just a few months until Yong begins her new journey at the McCluskey Center in Salt Lake City, Collins said she can barely talk about her moving hundreds of miles away. Collins even has a flight booked for Labor Day weekend to go skiing with her best friend.

The McCluskey Center “couldn’t be more lucky” to have Yong, Collins said.

“Talk about manifesting your destiny. It is so cool what she’s doing,” Collins said.
“We prayed about job search stuff and like what’s gonna happen, and I am just so excited for her.”

Although Yong made the decision to report her assault and follow through with an investigation and hearing, she said victims and survivors have complete autonomy and power to determine whether or not reporting an act of sexual violence is in their best interest.

Above all, Yong said she hopes other victims and survivors recognize that they are “absolutely not alone.”

Despite the disruption of the majority of her time at Ohio State and the emotional toll her Title IX case had on her, Yong said she never regrets proceeding with the investigation and hearing.

“At the end of the day, I can have some peace knowing that even if there wasn’t justice or accountability, that he now knows, and he knows that that kind of behavior in the future is not acceptable,” she said.

After Lisa Radochonski was sexually assaulted during the fall semester of her sophomore year at Ohio State, she said she “completely changed” as a person.

What used to be outings with friends every weekend turned into going out just twice per semester, and Radochonski, a May 2020 graduate, said she was so anxious about attending Senior Bar Crawl that she felt relieved when the event was canceled due to COVID-19.

“I was never putting myself in situations where I would think that something bad could happen to me again,” she said. “I really just missed that whole social aspect.”

Emma Radochonski, who was in high school at the time of her sister’s assault, said she watched her sister become increasingly despondent and hyper-aware of her surroundings during the months after her assault.

“It was also hard, just like watching someone who had been my role model growing up, like really going through it, you know?” Emma Radochonski said. “She had been such a symbol of strength for me, and seeing her breakdown was something that I felt like I wasn’t used to.”

After her perpetrator was found not responsible for sexual assault, Radochonski withdrew from Ohio State during the fall semester of 2018. Instead of attending football games in the ’Shoe, Radochonski was admitted to the hospital, where she underwent four weeks of group therapy and received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“This is an understatement, but I feel like I spiraled emotionally,” she said.

Radochonski is among the 39 percent of victims and survivors who face “a substantial disruption in their educations” after reporting a complaint of sexual misconduct, often resulting in temporary withdrawal or dropping out of school entirely, according to Know Your IX, a sexual violence prevention organization.

In the spring of 2019, Radochonski said she was eager to return to Ohio State for classes, hoping to attain some semblance of normalcy. She said she was especially excited for her immunology class.

But within minutes of walking into a lecture hall on the first day of that class, Radochonski spotted a much-too-familiar face: Her perpetrator.

“I remember because I was looking around because of PTSD — I just have hypervigilance,” Radochonski said. “So I’m just scanning the room, just making sure I’m in the clear, and I lock eyes with him. And he just slowly sinks into his chair.”

Radochonski said she couldn’t bear to be in the same room as the man who raped her, so she left the class in tears.

She found herself back in the Title IX office, an encounter she described as “another bad experience with them,” in hopes that her perpetrator — with whom she had a no-contact directive — could be moved to another section of the class or enrolled in the class online.

To her dismay, a representative from the Title IX office told her there was nothing they could do, as they feared the potential for her perpetrator and his family to sue the university, Radochonski said.

Instead, she said she was forced to take the class online and learn the material via pre-recorded lectures. Radochonski said she had to meet with her professor once a week to ensure she understood all the material, and the weekly quizzes and exams signaled frequent trips to the Office of Student Life Disability Services.

“It was just a lot of extra work that I feel like could have been avoided if they just didn’t put us in the same class,” Radochonski said.

A few weeks after her May 2018 Title IX hearing, Radochonski received the outcome letter through which she discovered her perpetrator was found responsible for endangering behavior — only one of the three initial charges filed against him. He was found not responsible for non-consensual sexual intercourse and sexual harassment.

“Honestly, for my case, I only think he was found in violation of [endangering behavior] because I went to the hospital,” Radochonski said. “I think if I hadn’t gone to the hospital or anything, he would have been completely let off the hook.”

According to the university’s Code of Student Conduct, endangering behavior is “taking or threatening action that endangers the safety, physical or mental health, or life of any person, or creates a reasonable fear of such action.”

As a result, the university placed him on disciplinary probation — “a state of warning” — for the remainder of his undergraduate career, meaning that any further violation of the university’s Code of Student Conduct or residence hall policies could result in suspension or dismissal, according to the outcome letter.

The university also mandated that the no-contact directive between Radochonski and her perpetrator “will remain in place indefinitely,” which prohibits in-person contact, electronic communication or contact through third parties.

However, as Radochonski soon discovered, no-contact directives are only meant to limit verbal communication between two people — it doesn’t restrict physical proximity.

“In a hypothetical situation, he could be sitting right next to me in class, not saying anything, not talking to me, but that would be allowed,” Radochonski said.

However, on May 31, 2018, Radochonski’s appeal was rejected by Doug Koyle, the former assistant vice president of the Office of Student Life, who did not find that any of the four aforementioned circumstances impacted the outcome of her case, according to the rejection letter he sent to Radochonski.

“It really hit me then because that was like the last avenue I could take to try to get something changed,” she said. “And when that was rejected, I just felt really defeated.”

After an unsuccessful, last-ditch effort to urge the Title IX office to reconsider the rejection of her appeal, Radochonski began her second hospitalization for suicidal ideation and withdrew from the university.

Today, Radochonski said she works as a research technical assistant in the microbiology department of the University of Chicago, with a particular focus on immunology. 

She said she’s noticed “a large improvement” in her mental health today compared to where she was in the months following her assault. 

“I think just moving out of Ohio and coming home is the best thing I could have done for myself — just to get out of that place, honestly, I think was just kind of what I needed,” she said.

During her weekly counseling sessions, Radochonski said her therapist continues to help her process the trauma she endured while validating her story — a response she called “refreshing” when people often question victims’ and survivors’ accounts of their assault. 

Emma Radochonski said she also noticed her sister become more empathetic following her assault, especially toward the students she taught while working as a teaching assistant at Ohio State. 

“She just wanted to help people after that,” Emma Radochonski said.

Although Radochonski said her experience with sexual violence has made her more “compassionate and open-minded,” she hopes that other victims and survivors will consider their own needs before leaping into a Title IX investigation.

“Take care of yourself first before you start trying to take care of others,” she said. “In reality, I can’t help anyone unless I am stable enough myself.”

When Syreeta Palackdharry returned to her home in Bexley, Ohio, at the onset of the pandemic, she refused to step into her front yard.

Moving back home while continuing to pursue her undergraduate degree at Ohio State had its perks: home-cooked meals and no obligation to pay rent. But there was one caveat.

“Every time that I would get in my car and drive past it, it was like, ‘Oh, that’s the place where I was assaulted,’” Palackdharry said.

Two years earlier, Palackdharry, who graduated from Ohio State in May, was sexually assaulted in her front yard as she watched several cars drive down her street. Not a single one stopped to help her, she said.

“I can go to my front yard now — and I’m not gonna say that I’m not reminded of the assault because that wouldn’t be true — but I can go out there and stay grounded in the present and do whatever it is that I need to do,” she said.

Palackdharry’s resiliency is something Jillyan Will, who served as Palackdharry’s hearing adviser, said amazes her. Will, a former police officer, met Palackdharry during a sexual assault trial, at which Will testified. The two “immediately clicked,” Will said.

After Palackdharry reported her assault to the Bexley Police Department, Will got to know her even more intimately. 

“She reached back out to me and essentially was like, ‘Man, I wish you were the police officer handling this call,’” Will said.

Will became Palackdharry’s support as she went through the Title IX process. She said it was difficult as a former police officer and Ohio State alumna to watch Palackdharry suffer through something that was supposed to help her — both during the brief criminal investigation and the university’s investigation.

Despite a drawn-out investigation and a hearing marked by invasive questions about her previous trauma and mental health, Will said Palackdharry remained strong and persistent. 

“I saw her like, ‘OK, here’s my voice. This is what happened to me. This should not have happened to me, but I’ll be damned if this is going to happen to someone else,’” Will said.

Palackdharry said she may have been motivated by a desire to prevent future sexual violence, but she’s challenged that reasoning in her healing process. She said she is no longer as adamant about encouraging other victims or survivors to report a sexual misconduct complaint, especially given how retraumatizing a Title IX investigation can be for some people.

“I can go to my front yard now — and I’m not gonna say that I’m not reminded of the assault because that wouldn’t be true — but I can go out there and stay grounded in the present and do whatever it is that I need to do,” she said.

Palackdharry’s resiliency is something Jillyan Will, who served as Palackdharry’s hearing adviser, said amazes her. Will, a former police officer, met Palackdharry during a sexual assault trial, at which Will testified. The two “immediately clicked,” Will said.

After Palackdharry reported her assault to the Bexley Police Department, Will got to know her even more intimately. 

“She reached back out to me and essentially was like, ‘Man, I wish you were the police officer handling this call,’” Will said.

Will became Palackdharry’s support as she went through the Title IX process. She said it was difficult as a former police officer and Ohio State alumna to watch Palackdharry suffer through something that was supposed to help her — both during the brief criminal investigation and the university’s investigation.

Despite a drawn-out investigation and a hearing marked by invasive questions about her previous trauma and mental health, Will said Palackdharry remained strong and persistent. 

“I saw her like, ‘OK, here’s my voice. This is what happened to me. This should not have happened to me, but I’ll be damned if this is going to happen to someone else,’” Will said.

Palackdharry said she may have been motivated by a desire to prevent future sexual violence, but she’s challenged that reasoning in her healing process. She said she is no longer as adamant about encouraging other victims or survivors to report a sexual misconduct complaint, especially given how retraumatizing a Title IX investigation can be for some people.

Today, Palackdharry said she is happy with where she is in her healing journey — her triggers are less frequent, and therapy has enabled her to further process the trauma she experienced.

Once she realized that her perpetrator engaged in “classic abuse and manipulation tactics” during Palackdharry’s assault and Title IX case, she said she began to let go of some of the blame she carried for the assault.

“Knowing that he is so good at manipulation that I blamed myself when I shouldn’t, it actually made me feel validated because I was like, ‘Oh, he’s actually good at abusing people, like, I’m not good at being a victim, he’s good at abusing people,’” she said.

Although Palackdharry said the assault and Title IX process allowed her to empathize with others, she would not wish the experience of sexual violence on anyone. She said she was “forever changed” from what her perpetrator did to her.

“Healing is a lifelong journey,” she said. “I don’t think there’s ever going to be a point in my life where I feel fully healed from what happened to me.”

Another former friend of Kinnen’s engaged in victim-blaming, citing her disbelief that Kinnen attended a date party with her perpetrator’s fraternity because “everyone knows what happens at those parties.”

Although Kinnen had to entirely “reinvent” her friend group her senior year of college, she said she found solace in the group therapy sessions she attended for victims and survivors of sexual violence.

“There was a running joke in group therapy that, like, ‘Get raped and you’ll find out who your real friends are,’” she said.

Kat Kinnen sports a bouquet of flowers purchased from a sustainability fair.

Courtesy of Kat Kinnen

She’s also found support in her girlfriend, Maya, whom she met and started dating shortly before the pandemic shut the country down last spring.

“She’s the sweetest, most supportive person in the world,” Kinnen said.

Kinnen said she told Maya early on that she was assaulted, but it took several months before she felt comfortable disclosing how it still impacted her — like why she only felt safe sleeping at her own house, for example, and how it’s difficult for her to open up or voice complaints.

“I can’t handle people being upset with me. It’s a way bigger part in my relationship than I want it to be,” Kinnen said. “But now, it’s been like three years, and it’s still very consuming.”