by Angela Carone | KPBS
edited by Lorie Hearn | inewsource
It was after midnight on a Friday in September 2007 when Jennifer ran out of the Sigma Pi fraternity house onto the street near the campus of San Diego State University.
A 20-year-old junior at SDSU, she was crying and frantic. She was barefoot and didn’t have a purse.
She didn’t care. She was trying to get away. She thought her boyfriend was chasing her, something he “always did.” They’d been together for nine months; he lived in the house. He’d choked her in the past.
The night before, Jennifer says she’d experienced his most violent act yet. But she went back to the house anyway, a decision she would have to answer for in the months and years to come.
As Jennifer ran toward campus, two male students saw her and stopped. They called 911.
“I just kind of collapsed on my knees after I heard them calling 911 because I knew now that the police had been called, there’s no going back,” she said.
“There’s no more hiding this from people, there’s no more hiding it from my friends. It’s really over.”
Over the course of two nights, Jennifer told the cops her boyfriend had raped, sodomized and beaten her.
“He threw me against the wall and then he picked me up again and threw me on the floor,” she said.
“I landed on my back and then I looked up at him and he was reaching for his huge TV and I knew he was going to throw it on me. So at that point I realized if I don’t get out of here, he’s going to kill me this time.”
The police found her boyfriend a few hours later. He was arrested, spent the night in jail and released on bail the next day.
That meant he would return to campus.
Silence and Isolation
Jennifer is not her real name. She agreed to tell her story publicly only if her identity was not disclosed. KPBS and inewsource agreed because she is one of the few victims of sexual assault to report the abuse and to battle in the university judicial system.
Her story illuminates a process that was a struggle at every turn: for information, for returned calls, for protection from fear and harassment.
Experts say most men and women who have experiences like Jennifer’s never tell anyone, much less the police or university officials. And there are a lot of them. Sexual assault, date rape, and dating and domestic violence incidents happen at roughly the same rates on college campuses across the country. That means one in four or five students will experience some version of sexual violence, said Jeffrey Bucholtz, president of the San Diego Domestic Violence Council.
Click to read “Fraternity culture linked to college sexual assault problem“
Members of law enforcement, rape crisis advocates and school administrators agree sexual assault and dating violence are underreported.
“It’s incredible in 2014 how much silence and isolation there is around abuse,” said Bucholtz.
When victims do come forward, nothing about the process is easy.
When Jennifer decided to press her case through the criminal justice system and through SDSU’s judicial process, she thought she’d get immediate relief. But at every juncture along the way, over the course of an entire academic year, she said she had to fight to make both systems work for her.
Jennifer didn’t come from a rich family. She was a scholarship student. She searched for a pro-bono attorney to represent her. Her ex-boyfriend, she said, hired three attorneys and a private investigator.
She said it was a constant struggle to get a response from school officials. She wrote letters and emails. She collected evidence for her own case. She found witnesses.
Sometimes her efforts panned out. Often they didn’t.
She had to do all of this while afraid and traumatized. The results of Jennifer’s hearing might look like vindication. She said the process rarely felt like justice.
By law, universities have to address sexual assault complaints through a disciplinary process.
Students who are found guilty won’t face criminal charges, but they could be expelled.
This is why the school process can be appealing to a sexual assault survivor. It means there’s the possibility of not having to attend classes with the attacker or see the person on campus.
These hearings — and how colleges handle them — are just one of the reasons more than 80 colleges are being investigated by the federal government. SDSU isn’t one of them, but Jennifer thinks it ought to be.
Since 2009, SDSU has held only four hearings related to sexual violence. None was for rape or sexual battery. One was for inappropriate comments, another for indecent exposure.
That means there’s been little opportunity to improve the judicial hearing process for a sexual assault case since Jennifer experienced it in 2008.
In fact, she said, it felt like the process was being invented as she went through it.
Taking Action At School
On the Monday after Jennifer was attacked, she woke up sore and frightened.
She spent much of Friday night getting a SART (sexual assault response team) exam, often called a rape kit. Her thighs were bruised and she had abrasions on her back. She worried it was broken.
Jennifer realized she had to do something, because she was afraid to leave her apartment and go to school.
She went to SDSU’s Center for Student Rights and Responsibilities. At this office, a student can file a complaint against another student and launch the disciplinary process. A victim of sexual violence can file a Title IX complaint. Title IX is a 1972 federal law banning sex discrimination in education.
Jennifer deliberately wore shorts to the office, hoping the school official would see the bruises that covered her legs. “I was scared no one would believe me,” she said. “So I thought if I go in and my bruises are apparent, they’ll take this seriously.”
She met with Lee Mintz, the Title IX deputy coordinator, who still holds that position. Mintz is also the center’s director. She had Jennifer write a detailed statement about what happened.
After she filed the complaint, Mintz explained it would launch an investigation. Mintz would get her ex-boyfriend’s side of the story, as well as interview any witnesses. There could be a hearing.
Jennifer was stunned. She thought filing the complaint alone, along with her bruises and the police involvement, would get her ex-boyfriend removed from campus.
She had no idea how long it would take and how hard she would have to fight to make it happen.
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Resources At SDSU For Sexual Assault Victims
- SDSU Counseling & Psychological Services: (619) 594-5220 (non-emergency)
- Counseling Access & Crisis Line:
(888) 724-7240 - Student Health Services, Calpulli Center:
(619) 594-5281 - SDSU Police Department: (619) 594-1991
- Center for Community Solutions: (888) 385-4657 (bilingual rape crisis hotline)
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Fraternity Retaliates; She Withdraws From School
When Jennifer visited the school’s health clinic in early October, the doctor who examined her made a list on her chart describing her well being: can’t sleep, very anxious, paranoid about investigation, unstable, depressed, suicidal.
Jennifer was able to get a San Diego Superior Court judge to give her a five-year restraining order against her ex-boyfriend. Even with that, she said she dropped out of school that fall semester.
“I tried to be on campus, but the worst part was not only him being on campus, but his entire fraternity was going out of their way to harass me,” Jennifer said.
Everywhere she was on campus, Jennifer said her ex-boyfriend’s fraternity brothers yelled her name as they whizzed past in golf carts that many of them drove as part of their jobs. Two fraternity brothers blocked her cab when leaving a bar in Pacific Beach. While waiting in line to get burritos one night, a fraternity brother mocked her for letting her ex-boyfriend beat her and then he threatened to hit her himself, she said.
She reported these incidents to the university and to Sigma Pi’s national headquarters.
Mintz would not talk about the specifics of Jennifer’s assault but said retaliation happens in many sexual assault cases.
“There have been cases where somebody has reported an incident, and friends of the accused have made comments to them or put comments on Facebook,” said Mintz. “Sometimes they pressure them to drop the case.”
She said she doesn’t have the authority to do much with the retaliation. “It’s a conversation I have with the person that comes to report when we decide what course of action to take,” Mintz said.
She does encourage students to report retaliation so the school can investigate and take possible disciplinary action.
Jennifer said she couldn’t live with the retaliation. “The decision to ultimately withdraw was not an easy one but I had to make it because that’s how bad the harassment was,” she said.
SDSU provided Jennifer with counseling through the school’s Counseling and Psychological Services Department. She said the service she got there received was excellent.
Where’s the Criminal Justice System?
So why would a man accused of a violent felony not be charged and prosecuted?
“There’s a very strong burden of proof in criminal court. It’s beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Jessica Pride, a civil attorney. “That means the evidence has to all be there so that they can feel comfortable taking it to a jury.”
“Most sexual assaults occur with only two people in the room,” she said.
“It’s a he-said, she-said.”
That is what the lawyer handling Jennifer’s case at the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office told her when the charges were dropped against her ex-boyfriend. Jennifer said she met with Brian David Erickson, now a deputy district attorney in the office’s sex crimes and stalking unit. She said Erickson told her she was credible, but rape and sexual assault in the context of a dating or spousal relationship is hard to prove to a jury.
Bucholtz with the San Diego Domestic Violence Council said prosecutors and law enforcement can’t be blamed entirely for sexual assault and domestic violence cases not making it all the way to court.
He said juries, like the general population, do a lot of victim blaming. In cases like this one, where a young woman went back to the man she claims raped her, law enforcement and prosecutors may believe her, but that’s not enough. Juries have to believe it’s rape.
Until the general population starts to understand why people stay in abusive relationships and how consent works, the criminal justice system is not going to adequately address sexual violence, he said.
“Not as long as our jurors buy into the same stereotypes that 90 percent of the population buys into.”
The campus judicial process has a much lower bar to reach, said Gail Mendez, an attorney with the local rape crisis center.
“For a campus to find a perpetrator guilty, they only need to do it by a preponderance of evidence, which is more likely than not,” Mendez said.
Jennifer was anxious leading up to the hearing. She’d lost faith in SDSU’s investigation.
With criminal charges no longer a possibility, there was a lot riding on the school’s hearing.
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Title IX Coordinator
SDSU is required to designate a Title IX coordinator who is available to explain and discuss how to file a criminal complaint (sexual assault and sexual violence); the university’s complaint process, including the investigation process; how confidentiality is handled; available resources, both on and off campus; and other related matters.
- Title IX Coordinator: Jessica Rentto, associate vice president, (619) 594-6017, jrentto@mail.sdsu.edu
- Title IX Deputy Coordinators: Lee Mintz, director, Center for Student Rights and Responsibilities, (619) 594-3069, lmintz@mail.sdsu.edu
- For complaints against faculty, staff and visitors: Thom Harpole, director, Office of Employee Relations and Compliance, (619) 594-6464, tharpole@mail.sdsu.edu
- For complaints relating to athletics: Jenny Bramer, associate athletic director/SWA, Department of Intercollegiate athletics, (619) 594-0394, jbramer@mail.sdsu.edu
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How “fair” is a school hearing?
Jennifer began taking steps to prove her case. The hearing was scheduled for Jan. 25, 2008, almost four months after she filed her complaint.
She had taken pictures of her bruises to submit as evidence. She got evaluated by a doctor who said her injuries were more likely from a hand or a foot, not from falling, as her ex-boyfriend contended in the police report.
He declined to be interviewed for this story.
Jennifer asked some of her Gamma Phi Beta sorority sisters who had seen abuse in the past to testify on her behalf. Most said no. She said the sorority president told her national headquarters advised them not to get involved because it might ruin the sorority’s relationship with Sigma Pi fraternity.
The student conduct hearing is presided over by a hearing officer, an SDSU staff or faculty member who gets 3-4 hours of training each year.
The Title IX deputy coordinator, in this case Mintz, acts like a prosecutor.
The accused student is also there. The accused can have an attorney, but that person cannot speak for the student. They can only consult through notes and side conversation. Jennifer said she was told she couldn’t have an attorney, only a victim’s advocate.
Current policy says both accused and victims can have attorneys as advisers.
Without an attorney, Jennifer said she felt vulnerable. She requested an armed police officer be in the room during the hearing to help her feel safe.
SDSU would not provide KPBS or inewsource with a transcript of the hearing, citing student privacy rights.
Jennifer said she was only allowed in the room to testify. “They kept asking about why I would go back to him if he raped me the previous night,” she said. “So as a victim I had to kind of explain to them that that’s how domestic violence works.”
In a courtroom, her attorney would likely object to this kind of repeat questioning.
Jennifer had recorded phone messages where her ex-boyfriend yelled at her and threatened to kill her.
She wanted them submitted as evidence, but at the moment they were introduced her ex-boyfriend’s attorney objected. The calls were not considered.
This, she said, was unfair.
“Having these people with no law degree make this decision as to what’s admissible as evidence is outrageous. It would have been admitted in a court for a multitude of reasons,” she said.
Jennifer had a witness who saw her ex-boyfriend shove her in the past. She said the witness waited to be called but was told only details from the exact nights in question were needed. Her testimony, which may have spoken to a pattern, was not considered relevant evidence.
Joe Cohn, a policy director at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said these hearings aren’t fair to the accused or the victim. They’re meant to deal with things such as pulling a fire alarm in the dorm or cheating on a paper. They’re not designed to handle complex felonies.
“If you pulled 100 of these hearing cases, you would find they were botched 99 percent of the time,” Cohn said. “Expecting colleges to do this well is crazy.”
Commenting only generally, Mintz said, “If you compare it to the court process — we don’t like to do that — but if you think of a defendant and an attorney, the goal is to get their client off of these charges.”
She added: “Our goal regardless of what the outcome is: We want it to be educational.”
A 2012 executive order from the chancellor of the California State University system states: “Student conduct proceedings are not meant to be formal court-like trials. Although University related sanctions may be imposed, the process is intended to provide an opportunity for learning.”
Cohn said the idea that these hearings are educational is laughable. “I don’t know a parent in California or anywhere else, spending $120,000 a year, that would choose for their child to have an educational experience of defending themselves in a kangaroo court.”
Justice can be elusive
After the hearing ended, Jennifer waited for a decision.
She was back at school.
Her ex-boyfriend left for an SDSU study abroad program in Spain.
She was supposed to get the results of her hearing in 15 days. Weeks later, she still hadn’t heard.
“I would call like once a week asking for a decision. I would email asking what’s going on? Why hasn’t a decision been made?” Jennifer said.
She wrote a letter to James Kitchen, then-vice president of student affairs, asking for the results. She didn’t hear back for a month.
At the beginning of April, two months after the hearing, she got a phone call from Mintz.
Her ex-boyfriend was found guilty and would be expelled.
Jennifer didn’t get the results in writing until she requested them a few weeks ago.
The university also suspended the Sigma Pi fraternity for two years. According to a statement from the school’s office of Life and Leadership, the suspension was for “a pervasive pattern of policy violations.”
During the phone call, Jennifer said, Mintz told her she couldn’t tell anyone about the ruling in order to protect the privacy rights of her ex-boyfriend. She said Mintz told her: “if you tell anyone about this decision, the school can take action against you.”
Jennifer felt defeated.
“He’s telling all his friends a completely different story than what happened,” she said. “And I’m not allowed to say, ‘No, look. The school believes me. I went through this hearing and they believed me! They saw the evidence and they expelled him.’
“I couldn’t do that. There’s no justice in that.”
In SDSU’s 2010 Safety and Security Report, in a section titled “Student Discipline,” it states: “The victim is required to keep the results of the disciplinary action and appeal confidential.”
That policy violated federal guidelines. A 2011 article in the Daily Aztec pointed out the violation and that resulted in a letter to Kitchen from the director of public policy at the Clery Center for Security on Campus.
SDSU did not respond to a question from KPBS and inewsource as to whether the policy has changed.
What is justice?
Even though Jennifer’s ex-boyfriend was expelled from SDSU for sexual assault, he went on to finish his undergraduate schooling at a different college and get a law degree from George Washington University. He transferred there after going to Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego for a year and a half.
This past July, he sat for the California Bar exam in the same room with Jennifer.
“Out of the huge room, he ended up in the row right in front of me,” Jennifer said. “So I took the three-day bar exam with the person who beat me up back in college — that I got expelled from college — I took the bar exam with him to become a lawyer.”
Law school grads have to do more than pass the bar exam. They have to pass what’s called a moral character determination test. Applicants have to reveal whether they’ve ever been expelled from a school and why.
The California State Bar won’t release admission records due to applicant privacy rights.
Schools have a legal and, some say moral, obligation to address sexual assault cases and create a safe environment for students. These disciplinary hearings are part of how colleges answer that mandate.
“I think we have an extremely fair process here. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t,” Mintz said. “I know that good things can come from it. We can give consequences or I can connect survivors to resources.”
Mintz said her biggest frustration is lack of reporting or whatever keeps people from reporting.
Cohn, a fierce critic of college judicial hearings for sexual assault cases, said schools across the country are starting to farm out the process to professionals. Harvard University, Tufts University and other colleges already hire freelance professionals to investigate sexual assault cases. The upcoming code of conduct hearing for star quarterback and Heisman-trophy winner Jameis Winston will be presided over by a retired state judge hired by Florida State University.
But those who’ve been working in the field for a long time say professionalizing the process doesn’t guarantee justice.
Attorney Mendez from the rape crisis center said whether it’s through the courts or a university, clear-cut justice isn’t always the end result.
“Justice is going to be individualized,” Mendez said. “Everyone’s sense of justice is going to be different. But I do think that being believed, being given respect throughout the process, is one of the most important takeaways from coming forward.”
Looking back, Jennifer said it would have made a difference to have a victim’s advocate on campus helping her navigate the system and explain her rights. “I think there should be a physical structure for victims to go to,” she said.
“There was none then, and there still is none today.”
SDSU has plans for a women’s center, staffed by an advocate. Jessica Rentto, SDSU’s Title IX coordinator, told KPBS in August. She hoped it would be up and running by October. In an email response this month, Rentto said the opening of the center has been delayed “in order to allow for maximum input from campus stakeholders.” She said the opening is at least a couple of months away.
Today, Jennifer works at a law firm. She earned a law degree from an Ivy League school.
Her college experiences, good and bad, have taught her that justice is complicated, slippery even. But she said that won’t stop her from spending her career trying to grasp it.
In a few weeks, the names of those who passed the California Bar exam will be made public. Jennifer will learn whether she and the man who was expelled from college for sexually assaulting her will be able to practice law in California.
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CEO, Editor and Founder: Lorie Hearn, loriehearn@inewsource.org
Lorie Hearn is the chief executive officer, editor and founder of inewsource. She founded inewsource in the summer of 2009, following a successful reporting and editing career in newspapers. She retired from The San Diego Union-Tribune, where she had been a reporter, Metro Editor and finally the senior editor for Metro and Watchdog Journalism. In addition to department oversight, Hearn personally managed a four-person watchdog team, composed of two data specialists and two investigative reporters. Hearn was a Nieman Foundation fellow at Harvard University in 1994-95. She focused on juvenile justice and drug control policy, a natural course to follow her years as a courts and legal affairs reporter at the San Diego Union and then the Union-Tribune.
Hearn became Metro Editor in 1999 and oversaw regional and city news coverage, which included the city of San Diego’s financial debacle and near bankruptcy. Reporters and editors on Metro during her tenure were part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning stories that exposed Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham and led to his imprisonment.
Hearn began her journalism career as a reporter for the Bucks County Courier Times, a small daily outside of Philadelphia, shortly after graduating from the University of Delaware. During the decades following, she moved through countless beats at five newspapers on both coasts.
High-profile coverage included the historic state Supreme Court election in 1986, when three sitting justices were ousted from the bench, and the 1992 execution of Robert Alton Harris. That gas chamber execution was the first time the death penalty was carried out in California in 25 years.
In her nine years as Metro Editor at the Union-Tribune, Hearn made watchdog reporting a priority. Her reporters produced award-winning investigations covering large and small local governments. The depth and breadth of their public service work was most evident in coverage of the wildfires of 2003 and then 2007, when more than half a million people were evacuated from their homes.
Managing Editor: Mark J. Rochester, markrochester@inewsource.org
Mark J. Rochester began as inewsource managing editor in April 2021, having served as editor in chief at Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative newsroom in Manhattan. He was previously senior news director for investigations at the Detroit Free Press. Both newsrooms, he notes, shared a commitment to diversity and inclusion, and their investigative journalism often received national recognition for exposing problems impacting communities of color.
His family looks forward to returning to California, having spent more than seven years in San Francisco where Rochester was a senior manager for the Associated Press. While with the news cooperative, he led computer-assisted reporting training efforts around the West, both inside and outside of AP, and conducted a widely used analysis of the $74 million in campaign contributions that went toward the California gay marriage ballot initiative in 2008. The AP analyzed who gave and why and then made the data available to member newspapers. The resulting series of stories based on the data was AP’s 2009 Pulitzer nomination for Local Reporting.
Rochester, who served as a Pulitzer Prize jurist in 2017, also has held senior leadership positions at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Denver Post, Newsday and The Indianapolis Star. Rochester is vice president of Investigative Reporters & Editors Inc., the 6,000+ member international organization dedicated to improving investigative journalism. He also serves on the national advisory board of the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University in Washington, D.C.
Managing Editor: Laura Wingard, laurawingard@inewsource.org
Laura Wingard is the managing editor at inewsource. She has been an editor in San Diego since 2002, working at The San Diego Union-Tribune, KPBS and now inewsource. At the Union-Tribune, she served in a variety of roles including as enterprise editor, government editor, public safety and legal affairs editor, and metro editor. She directed the newspaper’s award-winning coverage of the October 2007 wildfires and the 2010 disappearance of Poway teenager Chelsea King. She also oversaw reporting on San Diego’s pension crisis.
For two years, Wingard was news and digital editor at KPBS, overseeing a team of four multimedia reporters and two web producers. She also was the KPBS liaison with inewsource and collaborated with inewsource chief executive officer and editor Lorie Hearn on investigative work by both news organizations.
Wingard also worked at the Las Vegas Review-Journal as the city editor and as an award-winning reporter covering the environment and politics. She also was the assistant managing editor for metro at The Press-Enterprise in Riverside. She earned her bachelor’s degree at California State University, Fullerton, with a double major in communications/journalism and political science.
Byline Policy
Most of our articles carry a byline to identify the author. In some cases, inewsource will use a brand byline such as “Staff” or “inewsource” for internal or editorial information about the newsroom. In these instances, inewsource‘s Editor and Managing Editor are responsible for content that uses a brand byline.
The Trust Project
inewsource is proud to be a member of The Trust Project and support efforts to increase transparency in journalism by displaying the 8 Trust Indicators on our stories. We launched the Trust Indicators on Sep. 16, 2020.
Privacy Policy
inewsource has prepared this Privacy Policy to explain how we collect, use, protect, and share information when you use our inewsource.org website (the “Site“) or when you use any of our services (the “Services“).
By using the Site or Services you consent to this Privacy Policy.
Log Data
Like many site operators, we collect information that your browser sends whenever you visit our site (“Log Data”).
This Log Data may include information such as your computer’s Internet Protocol (“IP”) address, browser type, browser version, the pages of our site that you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages and other statistics.
Cookies
Cookies are files with small amount of data, which may include an anonymous unique identifier. Cookies are sent to your browser from a web site and stored on your computer or mobile device.
Like many sites, we use “cookies” to collect information. You can instruct your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, if you do not accept cookies, you may not be able to use some portions of our site.
Certain pages on our site may set other third party cookies. For example, we may embed content, such as videos, from another site that sets a cookie. While we try to minimize these third party cookies, we can’t always control what cookies this third party content sets.
Additionally, we may use third party services — such as those that provide social media conveniences, measure traffic, send newsletters and facilitate donations — that may place cookies on your computer. We don’t have any way of knowing how such services handle the resulting data internally. inewsource makes no claim, nor takes liability for the insecure submission of information via these applications.
Here are the services whose cookies you can find on inewsource.org:
- Sharing buttons for Facebook and Twitter. These use the standard scripts provided by each company.
- Google Analytics, which we use to measure site traffic. Google Analytics gathers certain non-personally identifying information over time, such as your IP address, browser type, internet service provider, referring and exit pages, time stamp, and similar data. We also use Facebook Pixel to measure, optimize and build audiences for advertising campaigns served on Facebook. In particular it enables us to see how our users move between devices when accessing our website and Facebook, to ensure that our Facebook advertising is seen by our users most likely to be interested in such advertising by analyzing which content a user has viewed and interacted with on our website.
- Stripe, which allows us to accept donations through our website.
- Salesforce to manage newsletter subscriber, donor, and other identifiable user data.
- Mailchimp, to manage newsletter distributions. We collect your email address if you choose to subscribe to one of our email newsletters or email news alerts. Other optional information that you enter when subscribing – such as your first and last names or city are simply so that we can deliver more personalized email newsletters. We DO NOT sell, rent or market your information to any other parties. We retain your information only as long as necessary to provide your service. When we send emails, it collects some data about which users open the emails and which links are clicked. We use this information to optimize our email newsletters and, as aggregate information, to explain what percentage of our users open and interact with our newsletters.
Personal Data
We only collect personally identifiable information such as your name and email address when you sign up for a newsletter, donate to our organization, or otherwise submit it to us voluntarily. We do not share your personal data with any third parties other than some common service providers, whose products use your information to help us improve our site, deliver newsletters, or allow us to offer donation opportunities.
inewsource limits access to all user data for the purposes of newsletter, fundraising, and customer service only. User data is not sold to or otherwise shared with anyone not working with or for the inewsource.
You may unsubscribe or opt-out of our email and mail communications at any time by hitting the “unsubscribe” button in any email you receive from inewsource, or by emailing us at contact@inewsource.org or calling us at 619-594-5100.
Donor Information
The identities of all donors will be listed on our website. inewsource does not share, trade, sell, or otherwise release donors’ personal information to any third parties.
Refunds
If you encounter errors when donating on the website, please contact us at members@inewsource.org. For example, if you submit a donation for an incorrect amount or make a duplicate transaction please email us immediately so we can reverse the charges.
Cancellation of Recurring Donations
You can cancel your monthly recurring donations free of charge by notifying us at members@inewsource.org.
Links to Other Websites
Our site may contain links to documents, resources or other websites that we think may be of interest to you. We have no control over these other sites or their content. You should be aware when you leave our site for another, and remember that other sites are governed by their own user agreements and privacy policies, which should be available to you to read.
Disclaimers and Limitation of Liability
Although we take reasonable steps to prevent the introduction of viruses, worms, “Trojan Horses” or other destructive materials to our site, we do not guarantee or warrant that our site or materials that may be downloaded from our site are free from such destructive features. We are not liable for any damages or harm attributable to such features. We are not liable for any claim, loss or injust based on errors, omissions, interruptions or other inaccuracies on our site, nor for any claim, loss or injust that results from your use of this site or your breach of any provision of this User Agreement.
Contact Us
If there are any questions regarding this privacy policy, please contact us at contact@inewsource.org or call us at 619-594-5100.
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