Luca Tzimas

Before You Start

Luca Tzimas entered my life first as my teaching assistant and later as a member of the law fraternity I had already built myself into. I now understand that what happened to me was not only about one night. It was also about access: how somebody became familiar, how that familiarity expanded, and how the same person eventually occupied several parts of a life that existed long before he entered it.

I had never encountered a predator before, and I did not know how to recognize what was happening while I was inside it. I thought danger would look more obvious. Instead, I noticed things about Luca that made me uncomfortable and repeatedly found explanations that allowed the version of him I already knew to remain intact.

Some of what I describe comes from things I experienced directly or later reconstructed through records. Other parts are what I understand differently now, with distance. I do not need to claim that every action was part of some perfectly designed master plan in order to explain what those actions ultimately accomplished.

The Life Luca Entered

I did not meet Luca while searching for direction. I already knew I wanted to go to law school, and that goal had shaped the academic choices, extracurricular commitments, and professional experiences I was deliberately building around myself.

Phi Alpha Delta was part of that plan before Luca knew me. I had intended to join the university's law fraternity since my freshman year and deliberately waited until campus activities returned in person after COVID restrictions. When I finally joined during my sophomore year, I became president of my joining class and my roommate became vice president.

After crossing into the organization, I was elected Professional Development Chair. My roommate and I became much closer through that process. This was the environment Luca later entered.

The Course That Gave Luca Access to Me

The following semester, I enrolled in a small Writing and Critical Inquiry course focused on law. I had specifically sought permission to join because the course fit the path I was already pursuing. It involved analytical and self-reflective writing, including early work on a law-school personal statement. Luca was the course TA.

That role created an information imbalance before there was ever anything resembling a personal friendship between us. I was expected to submit writing, respond to prompts, accept feedback, and meet with him about work that was often personal by design.

I cannot know exactly what Luca thought when he read my work. What I can say is that his institutional role gave him access to information about me that I would never have voluntarily handed to a random nineteen-year-old man.

Then My TA Entered My Fraternity

Only a few weeks into the semester, Luca told me he was considering interviewing for Phi Alpha Delta. Before he became independently known there, people primarily knew him through me: he was “Belli's TA.”

During his interview, Luca chose to reenact a rape scene from a television show and selected me to play the victim. I treated it as bizarre and inappropriate. My roommate took a photograph because of how absurd the moment seemed.

No one in the room treated it as something that required intervention, and I did not understand it as a warning about what Luca would later do.

My Roommate Became His Independent Access Point

After Luca joined Phi Alpha Delta, the joining process gave him structured opportunities to meet existing members. During one of those early interactions, Luca and my roommate began talking and connected quickly. Eventually, she became his fraternity “big,” meaning his mentor within the organization.

Before joining the fraternity, much of Luca's access to my social world ran through me. Afterward, that was no longer true. He had his own standing inside the organization, his own relationships, and a direct connection to the person living with me and knowing me better than almost anyone else.

I cannot tell you everything Luca and my roommate said to one another. What I can describe is the position that relationship gave him.

The Things I Explained Away

I did not fail to notice everything. What I lacked was not perception. It was interpretation.

Less than two weeks before the assault, Luca placed a tracking device inside my backpack without my knowledge. I found it, immediately removed it, and took the battery out because I was genuinely disturbed.

I cannot prove exactly why he put it there or tell you with certainty what he was thinking. I can tell you what happened: he crossed an enormous privacy boundary, I discovered it, and even then I did not reorganize my understanding of him around danger.

April 22, 2022

On April 22, Phi Alpha Delta held a themed “brother party” created by Luca's joining class. They chose a wedding. My roommate and I were selected as the bride and groom. We held a mock ceremony and later went to an Airbnb for the reception.

I was extremely intoxicated, and my memory of the rest of the night is shotty. I do not remember everything in one clean sequence. What I have are pieces. I remember walking downstairs toward the bathroom. I remember being on the floor of the downstairs bathroom fighting someone off of me. I remember the physical struggle and trying to resist. I remember leaving with my tights ripped, my body hurting, and feeling completely unlike myself.

What makes that period difficult to explain is that I had memories before I had an understanding of them. I remembered fragments of what happened, but I did not yet know how to place them into a coherent timeline or what they meant in relation to the rest of the night. I was not waking up the next morning with a complete narrative of an assault. I was waking up injured, confused, and carrying pieces of a night I could not yet fully account for.

That distinction became important later. My memory was incomplete, but it was not empty. The bathroom was there. The struggle was there. The condition of my clothes was there. The pain in my body was there. What I did not yet have was the chronology that would allow me to understand those memories for what they were.

I would only begin to understand the full significance of those fragments later, after I started reconstructing the night through records, messages, transportation information, photographs, and other people's recollections.

I also remember Luca carrying me down toward the ride home. What I eventually understood was that Luca raped me that night.

The First Report

My first police report did not begin with a clean factual timeline of my assault. I made that report while I was injured, receiving medical care, and trying to understand a night I had not fully reconstructed.

In those first days, I went to people I trusted because I believed they knew more about what had happened than I did. Information they supplied entered the initial account because I was relying on people I believed were helping me understand the event.

That is not the same thing as me independently remembering another person assaulting me, and it is not the same thing as me personally identifying that person as my rapist.

When the People I Trusted Made Reality Harder to Understand

After the SANE exam, I was in one of the most vulnerable states of my life. I was injured, frightened, exhausted, and trying to understand something that had happened to my own body.

Two people close to me gave me a version of the night that directed my attention toward another person. At that point, I did not yet have the transportation records, timestamps, photographs, messages, or reconstructed timeline that would later allow me to test what I was being told.

I cannot claim to know every motive behind what I was told. I can describe the effect. At a moment when I desperately needed reality stabilized, reality became harder to understand.

Reconstructing the Night

I began rebuilding the night systematically. I approached people who had attended the event and asked for photographs, videos, times, recollections, and information about who had been in different parts of the house.

Transportation records contradicted the timeline I had initially been given. Once the departure time changed, the timeline changed, and attention returned to the Airbnb.

The reconstruction did not create a different assault. It allowed me to understand the assault that had already happened.

After the Assault, Access Became Control

For years, I thought of April 22 as the point where Luca's predatory behavior ended and the aftermath began. I do not understand it that way anymore.

By then, he was no longer simply my TA. He had his own place inside my fraternity, independent relationships with people who knew me, a particularly important relationship with my roommate, and credibility that existed separately from me.

The Fraternity Had Been Mine First

Phi Alpha Delta is one of the hardest parts of this story because I had invested myself in that organization before Luca entered it. I had joined intentionally, led my joining class, been elected, built relationships with existing leadership, and organized professional programming there.

Then I became the person reporting sexual violence. I told fraternity leadership that Luca raped me.

I expected the difficult question to be what it meant to keep him inside an organization where I was already a member and leader. Instead, the practical difficulty increasingly became my refusal to behave as though his presence was normal.

Title IX

By September 2022, I filed a formal sexual-misconduct complaint with UAlbany. I entered that process believing the purpose of an investigation was to investigate.

By then I had medical documentation, photographs, timelines, transportation records, potential witnesses, contradictory accounts that needed examination, and months of work reconstructing what had happened.

The complaint was ultimately dismissed, and I appealed. My appeal challenged what I understood as procedural irregularities, failures to investigate, evidentiary decisions, the treatment of mental-health information, and the reasoning used to terminate the case.

The Speech Changed What the Fraternity Could Pretend Not to Know

While I was still inside all of this, I spoke publicly to the Student Senate about Luca, the assault, and the university process I was trying to survive.

Whatever individual fraternity members had previously heard through private conversations, my position was now unmistakable. I was saying publicly that Luca raped me.

Almost immediately, the organization convened an emergency meeting. That sequence matters. The allegation was public. Luca's name was public. My experience was public. The organization had to respond to that reality somehow.

When My Mental Health Became Easier to Discuss Than His Conduct

One of the ugliest labels attached to me during this period was “schizophrenic.” Schizophrenia is an actual psychiatric diagnosis. It is not shorthand for a woman who is frightened, angry, confused, persistent, or unwilling to accept somebody else's explanation of her own experience.

Once people begin framing a person as unstable, almost every later reaction can be filtered through that assumption. If I found a contradiction, perhaps I was paranoid. If I documented something, perhaps I was obsessive. If I was angry, perhaps I was irrational.

Meanwhile, Luca's conduct became easier to move away from. The tracker became secondary. The assault became secondary. The inconsistent stories became secondary.

The Aftermath Benefited Luca

For years, I described everything after April 22 simply as “the aftermath.” That language now feels incomplete.

The confusion benefited Luca. The inaccurate first timeline benefited Luca. His independent relationships inside the fraternity benefited Luca. The fraternity's preference for normalcy benefited Luca. The conversation about my mental health benefited Luca.

That does not require me to claim Luca personally engineered every one of those outcomes. Systems can protect somebody without the protected person controlling every individual inside the system.

Understanding the Pattern

I do not think every predator behaves exactly like Luca. I do think my experience taught me several things I wish I had understood earlier.

Why This Site Exists

I am publishing this because silence did nothing useful for me. I want the chronology preserved. I want the difference between an initial confused report and a later evidence-based reconstruction understood.

I want people to understand how predatory access can develop through ordinary roles and legitimate institutions, how social protection can emerge without a secret conspiracy, and how the aftermath of sexual violence can involve far more than the original act.

I cannot tell you every private conversation that occurred around me. I cannot prove every thought Luca had. I can tell you what happened to me, what I documented, what I understood then, and what I understand now.

For years, other people had extraordinary freedom to explain me. This is me explaining myself.