--- title: Columbia Student Will Carry Mattress Daily Until Alleged Rapist Leaves description: Emma Sulkowicz's performance-art project began this week and may last till the end of the school year. canonical: https://time.com/3259455/columbia-student-pledges-to-carry-a-mattress-every-day-till-alleged-rapist-leaves-campus/ author: Francesca Trianni article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-09-02T23:39:01.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-01T08:58:12.933Z og:title: Columbia Student Will Carry Mattress Daily Until Alleged Rapist Leaves og:description: Emma Sulkowicz's performance-art project began this week and may last till the end of the school year. og:url: https://time.com/3259455/columbia-student-pledges-to-carry-a-mattress-every-day-till-alleged-rapist-leaves-campus/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt265a68b37641795b/69868f4eadae44393b54313e/emma-sulkowicz.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2500 og:image:height: 1406 og:image:alt: Emma Sulkowicz at Columbia University in New York City, on May 1, 2014. og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Columbia Student Will Carry Mattress Daily Until Alleged Rapist Leaves twitter:description: Emma Sulkowicz's performance-art project began this week and may last till the end of the school year. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt265a68b37641795b/69868f4eadae44393b54313e/emma-sulkowicz.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Columbia Student Pledges to Carry a Mattress Every Day Till Alleged Rapist Leaves Campus > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=ecbac7cd-4475-4d5e-88d9-3300c5b2f650&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: My Rapist Is Still on Campus: Sexual Assault in the Ivy League [Watch (HLS stream): My Rapist Is Still on Campus: Sexual Assault in the Ivy League](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/o8izpqKu.m3u8) (6:50)  _Published 2014-05-14. In April, 23 Columbia and Barnard students filed a federal Title IX complaint alleging that the University mishandled sexual assault cases_  by [Francesca Trianni](https://time.com/author/francesca-trianni/)  ## Francesca Trianni Sep 2, 2014 11:39 PM UTC  by [Francesca Trianni](https://time.com/author/francesca-trianni/)  ## Francesca Trianni Sep 2, 2014 11:39 PM UTC Columbia University senior Emma Sulkowicz, 21, says she was raped in her own bed at the beginning of her sophomore year. This week, two years after the alleged assault, Sulkowicz, a visual-arts major, has made a promise to carry her mattress around campus every day as part of her senior thesis. It is, she says, a symbol of the burden sexual-assault survivors carry with them every day. “The act of carrying the mattress from inside my room out into the light has mirrored the way my life has changed, as I’ve brought my personal story out into the light,” Sulkowicz told TIME. “This project is a way to heal one of the most difficult things that happened to me. As I will build muscle and get stronger, hopefully I will also build emotional strength.” Sulkowicz started the performance-art project on Tuesday, and she said she is determined to continue carrying the mattress wherever she goes — to class, the library, the gym — as long as her alleged rapist is still on campus. That means her project could last until graduation day in May 2015 — unless her alleged assailant is either expelled or chooses to leave the school. Last year, Sulkowicz and two other women reported the same person to the university. All three cases were dismissed. Sulkowicz’s initiative also brings further attention to colleges’ lackluster performance in handling reports of sexual assault, as [reported](http://time.com/100542/the-sexual-assault-crisis-on-american-campuses/) in a recent TIME cover story. As part of the project, Sulkowicz is not allowed to ask for help, but can accept it, if offered — a further analogy to the burden that sexual-assault survivors carry with them. Sulkowicz is one of 23 Columbia and Barnard students who filed a federal Title IX complaint in April alleging that the university mishandled sexual-assault cases. “Rape can happen anywhere, but I was attacked in my own dorm bed,” she said. “For me that place that is normally very intimate and pure was desecrated and is very fraught. The piece is about carrying the memory of that everywhere I go.” ## Transcript My name is Emma [ UNKNOWN ]. I am a junior at Columbia college. I am a visual arts major. On the first day of my sophomore year, I was raped by a fellow classmate. I didn't report at first because. It's a big emotional trauma, and I didn't feel like dealing with it at first, until I met at that time, two other women who told me the same person who had assaulted me, had assaulted them. The school found a way to dismiss each of our three cases separately. [ MUSIC ] My rapist, it still goes to my school, and still is on campus. [ MUSIC ]. This is not a single campus issue. This is not an individual issue. This is a cultural problem. We have a huge issue with rape culture on all college campuses. There was a study that was done that shows that men on college campuses who are perpetrators. Are more often than not repeat offenders. The average number of people a perpetrator will sexually assault is six, according to this study. So this isn't a random phenomenon. This isn't this happens in an alley, this happens when everyone's incredibly drunk at a party. There is a certain profile for what sexual assault looks like on a college campus. And that is why we need administrators to be open, and transparent, about that. Right now, their approach seems to be to ignore the problem, to try to deny students access to resources, to deny that that's happening at all when it fact they really should be getting in front of the issue. Our hearing took place seven months after I reported the incident. The investigator in my case didn't take down many important things such as the position I was in when he raped me. My hearing panelists weren't even trained, one woman kept asking me how it was physically possible for anal rape to happen. Why Columbia didn't find him responsible? I don't actually get to write a statement of what happened. It's all the investigator's statement that they read. There's an office called the Office of Gender Based and Sexual Misconduct. You go in there and at that time a woman was working there so I told her what had happened. She was the one who took erroneous notes, and missed really important that I said. Since her statement didn't make any sense, my case didn't make any sense. I think another reason that the school didn't find him guilty was that they, they really didn't want to treat it as a serial rape case because we, all three of us reported, and then they would say you are not allowed to mention each others' cases, we are going to treat them separately. I think that. If the hearing panel have had known that this was a serial offender, they might have believed us more maybe? They also said that there was not enough evidence to determine that it was more likely than not. That the respondent engaged in behavior that met the de, definition of sexual assault. So the charge was dismissed. [ MUSIC ] There are many reasons why a student would choose to not go to the police, and go to, you know, a campus adjudication process. Many people don't want the outcome to be the person that attacked them to go to jail. If you're a person of color. Or if you're ****, the process of going to the police can also be one that is not necessarily competent or great to deal with. Some people seek out resources from their school in order to make sure they're not living in the same dorm as a person who assaulted them, which is very different from making sure that someone goes to jail. And I also think that improving processes on campus across the board. Including you know, therapy for survivors, adequate rape crisis centers, and adequate academic interim measures, are things that are important for everyone to have the police absolutely cannot give you when you're a student. Everyday I'm afraid of leaving my room. Even seeing people who remotely look like my rapist is a scary thing for me. Last semester, I was working in the dark room in the photography department. Which is a small dark room. He asked permission from his teacher to come and work in the darkroom during my class. I started crying and hyperventilating and. As long as he's on campus with me he can continue to harass me. They're setting up for graduation for all of the seniors and all of the bleachers are coming up on campus. And, I was just thinking about the fact that. Because of what the administration did, I'm going to have to be sitting on those bleachers with my rapist and a serial rapist at that. Knowing that he's going to get the same education as me and I'll be feeling horrible on my graduation day. A lot of students think that when they go to a campus, if they see that there are zero sexual assaults reported that that's a really positive thing, that, that must mean that campus is incredibly safe, it's going to be a great place. But actually when you consider the fact that the overall rates of sexual assaults on campus are as high as one in four, if you see a campus reporting zero sexual assaults that should actually be a red flag. [ MUSIC ] I feel like it's taken over my entire, entire college experience. This happened on the first day of my sophomore year. And here I am. I just finished my last day of school for my junior year. And I'm still talking about it and still thinking about it. And I know that I'm going to look back on my entire Columbia experience and see that's how the administration has failed me. and. 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