LUCA
TZIMAS

PREFACE

I began examining this story because I could no longer rely on other people to explain what had happened. I wanted to understand how Luca became so embedded in a community I had helped build, and how that community and the institutions around us responded after I identified him as the person who raped and stalked me. No single conversation or case file could answer those questions.

I needed to compare what I remembered with the records, trace where other people’s accounts entered the chronology, and examine the decisions that followed.

The initial record

I expected my first police report to be the beginning of a reliable record. I had reported sexual violence and undergone a sexual assault forensic examination. I allowed the report to be filed but asked law enforcement to pause a formal investigation until I returned. I expected that investigation to examine the evidence, test conflicting accounts where possible, and document what could — and could not — be established.

Instead, much of the work of reconstructing the surrounding chronology fell to me. The first report was made while I was injured and relying partly on information from people I trusted. I later compared messages, photographs, transportation records, timestamps, and conversations. That work exposed errors in the location, timing, and identification recorded in the initial report. Correcting those errors did not mean inventing a different assault. It meant separating what I personally experienced from what others told me.

When I returned to law enforcement in July, I identified Luca by name and gave investigators the downstairs Airbnb bathroom as the location of the assault, based on my own recollection. I also pursued Title IX and other reporting avenues. Each entity had its own jurisdiction, standards, and limits; none produced a finding holding Luca responsible for the sexual violence I reported. Those outcomes matter. They do not, however, establish that the reported violence did not occur.

What happened around the allegation

What surprised me was how quickly the discussion could move away from the original allegation. My relationships, my distress, my behavior, and even my eating habits became subjects of conversation. My former roommate supplied statements about my mental health and eating that I dispute. I am examining where those statements traveled, how they were treated, and whether they affected any decision. The available dismissal alone does not establish that they caused the Title IX case to close.

College continued for everyone involved, and Luca and I graduated in the same period. Graduation did not settle the questions I was carrying. It ended my time as a student while the work of understanding the assault and its aftermath remained unfinished. I have advocated for myself since 2022; publishing this account is another step toward making the chronology, documents, and institutional decisions available for scrutiny.

This account also asks what happens when a serious allegation enters a network of friendships, student leadership, and university procedures. A person can spend years answering questions about her credibility while the original evidence remains unresolved or insufficiently examined.

An institution can close a matter within its rules without answering every question that matters to the people involved. Those are not the same outcomes, and the difference deserves attention.

I thought the first investigation would establish the record. Instead, I spent years assembling it—and learning how easily a discussion about evidence could become a discussion about the person presenting it.

It Started With Access

Before Luca became a central figure in this story, he was a relatively minor one in mine.

I was pursuing a future in law, taking courses that reflected that ambition, and building a life around the people and institutions I believed would help me get there. Luca entered that life as the teaching assistant in a small, law-focused writing course I had deliberately chosen. His position gave him an entirely ordinary reason to read my personal writing, learn about my aspirations, and become familiar with parts of my life that I would not ordinarily share with a stranger.

At the time, I understood that familiarity as part of his academic role. The access arrived with a job description, not a warning. I had no reason then to treat feedback on my coursework as a threat.

Then he entered Phi Alpha Delta.

By the time Luca joined, I had already established myself within the fraternity. I had friendships, leadership experience, a roommate who belonged to the organization, and a history there that existed entirely independently of him. He was the newcomer. I was not.

His membership changed the nature of his access. The man who had initially known me through coursework could now develop relationships within my social circle, attend the same events, and establish a reputation among people who had known me long before they knew him.

None of this arrived with a warning label. A teaching assistant belonged in a classroom. A fraternity member belonged at fraternity events. A friend of a friend belonged in familiar company. Each point of contact had an ordinary explanation when I encountered it.

I encountered those points of contact separately. I did not yet see how much of my academic and social life they connected.

In hindsight, I can trace how his presence extended from one part of my life into another. At the time, I was simply going about a life I had worked hard to build.

That order matters. I had built this life and those relationships before I had to defend my account and my right to remain part of them.

The Life Luca Entered

I did not meet Luca while searching for direction. Law was already the direction I had chosen, and I was building my coursework, experience, and commitments accordingly. He entered a life already in motion.

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 waited until campus activities returned in person after COVID restrictions. When I joined during my sophomore year, I became president of my joining class and my roommate became vice president.

After becoming a full member, I was elected Professional Development Chair. My roommate and I became much closer through that process.

In January 2022, I secured an internship with the New York State Attorney General’s office. I began the spring semester both as an Attorney General intern and Phi Alpha Delta’s Professional Development Chair. When Luca met me as the teaching assistant in my law-focused writing course, I was already building professional experience and holding a leadership role. Those commitments—and the sense of direction behind them—were mine before he entered the picture.

The Course That Gave Luca Access to Me

In a small law-focused Writing and Critical Inquiry course, I submitted analytical and self-reflective work, including an early law-school personal statement. Luca was the teaching assistant. A course that asked for personal writing also gave him a legitimate academic reason to read it.

Personal disclosure was part of the coursework, not an invitation to a personal relationship. I submitted writing, accepted feedback, and discussed subjects I would not normally have raised with someone I barely knew. Before that, our contact was largely limited to ordinary end-of-class questions. As our discussions expanded to personal interests and apparent similarities, the boundary between academic familiarity and friendship became harder to see.

I cannot know why Luca took the teaching-assistant position or what he intended. I can explain the access the role gave him: he read personal work I was required to submit and learned about my goals and experiences through what appeared to be an ordinary academic relationship.

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 intervened. At the time, I saw the reenactment as an offensive stunt, not as a warning of the assault I would later report. Looking back, I can explain why it troubles me without pretending I should have predicted what happened.

My Roommate Became His Independent Access Point

Luca first met my roommate through me. For his first Phi Alpha Delta one-on-one meeting, I was the fraternity member assigned to him, and we planned to go to Chili’s. My roommate and I were close, so we decided to combine our separate one-on-ones and meet there. The new members picked us up separately: Luca picked me up, while the other new member picked up my roommate.

When I got into Luca’s car, “All of Me” was playing. I took a photo and told him he was insane for playing it. I remember that strange, almost comic detail because, at the time, it was exactly the sort of thing I thought I was dealing with.

That dinner was the first time Luca and my roommate really spoke. They connected quickly, and their relationship developed independently of me. She later became his fraternity “big” — his mentor within Phi Alpha Delta.

HE ENTERED THROUGH ME. HE DID NOT NEED ME TO STAY.

At the time, it looked ordinary: fraternity bonding, new friendships, mentorship. What matters to me now is the progression of access. Before Phi Alpha Delta, much of Luca’s connection to my social world ran through me. After that night, it no longer had to. He had his own place inside the organization, his own relationships, and a direct connection to my roommate, one of the people who knew me best.

The Things I Explained Away

I noticed behavior that unsettled me before I understood how the incidents might be connected. Recognizing that something was wrong was not the same as knowing what risk it posed.

Less than two weeks before April 22, I discovered a tracking device inside my backpack that I understood Luca had placed there without my permission. I removed its battery and told several fraternity members, including my roommate, about what I found. I later returned the device to him in class.

I was disturbed by the device, but I did not yet know how to place it alongside the other interactions I was living through. I cannot infer his full purpose from that object alone. I can say that finding a tracker where it did not belong raised a concrete concern about my privacy and safety.

I was alarmed by the object. I did not yet know how alarmed to be by him. That is not a failure to think clearly; it is the difference between noticing an intrusion and understanding the larger risk.

April 22, 2022

On April 22, Phi Alpha Delta held a themed “brother wedding party” organized by the semester’s joining class. My roommate and I were chosen as the bride and groom. I spent hours writing my vows. We held a mock ceremony, complete with first dances and speeches, and later went to an Airbnb for the reception.

I was conscious and participating in the celebrations at my mock wedding. I was also intoxicated. The end of the night did not remain with me as one continuous sequence, but important moments did. I walked downstairs toward the bathroom. On the floor of that downstairs bathroom, I fought Luca off me and struggled to resist him. I emerged in pain, with ripped tights, feeling profoundly unlike myself.

Afterward, I sat dazed at the downstairs bar, then moved to the piano. A friend joined me, noticed something was wrong, and asked what had happened. Luca carried me downstairs and into my Uber as we left the Airbnb.

What I needed to reconstruct was not whether I had experienced violence. It was the surrounding sequence: times, movements, and what other people claimed to know. I could be certain about the struggle I remembered and still have questions about the chronology around it.

I eventually identified Luca Tzimas as the person who raped me that night. I reached that understanding after I finally had distance from him for the first time that semester.

The Bruises I Brought to Work

One moment from those early days has stayed with me. I went into my shift at the New York State Attorney General’s office with bruises on my upper thighs and arms that I attributed to the assault. I was only beginning to process what had happened, yet I was still arriving at work, still trying to inhabit the professional life I had been building beforehand.

I asked my supervisor to come with me into the attorneys’ conference room—the room used for our NYS COVID updates and office announcements. In private, I showed her the bruises. I was not making a carefully thought-out disclosure. I was reaching for a woman I trusted because I needed someone else to see what I could barely put into words.

She comforted me and reminded me of the strength I possessed at a moment when I could not easily feel it. I remember being exposed and frightened in a place where I was accustomed to being capable, prepared, and useful. She did not turn my distress into a question of character. She met me with care.

I did not leave that room with a complete timeline or a solved case. I left with something more immediate: the experience of being taken seriously without first having to prove that I deserved kindness. Her response helped me recognize myself again, however briefly. It also gave me a standard against which I would later measure the responses of others.

The First Report

My first police report was filed while I was injured, receiving medical care, and trying to put April 22 into a reliable sequence. It placed the assault at approximately 11 p.m. in my dormitory and listed a person who was not the man who raped me. I had permitted the report to be filed, but those details came in part from information supplied by my roommate and another close fraternity friend. They were not the result of my independently identifying that person as my assailant.

I told law enforcement that I was not ready to proceed with a formal investigation and asked them to pause until I returned. The initial report documented an early, incomplete account, not a final chronology or a completed investigation. Uber departure records and supporting Apple Maps location data later contradicted its placement of the assault at roughly 11 p.m. in my dormitory. I requested the pause because I was not ready to proceed—not because I was awaiting forensic results to identify the assailant.

In July 2022, I returned to law enforcement. I identified Luca Tzimas by name and told investigators that the assault occurred in the downstairs bathroom of the Airbnb. I was describing my own recollection of the location and physical struggle, not repeating the account someone else had supplied. Luca Tzimas is the only person I have personally identified by name to law enforcement or another official entity as responsible for the sexual violence I reported. An incorrect name appearing in the initial report should not be confused with a name I independently gave officials. The report was incomplete. My experience was not.

The inaccuracies require context, not speculation about my mental health. I had not independently verified the location, timing, and identity supplied by people I trusted while I was injured and trying to understand the night.

I did not invent an assault to fill gaps in a timeline. The errors in the original report deserve to be traced to their sources, not treated as automatic proof of psychiatric impairment or dishonesty. In July I identified Luca to University Police; in August I obtained records that let me test the earlier chronology.

An inaccurate report is not necessarily a fabricated report. Correcting a record is not evidence that the person correcting it was dishonest.

When the People I Trusted Made Reality Harder to Understand

After the sexual assault forensic examination, I was injured, exhausted, and trying to reconstruct a night whose surrounding chronology remained incomplete. My roommate and another close fraternity friend were the only two people I initially confided in. I trusted them not only because they were close to me, but because they had attended the event and seemed positioned to help me understand what had happened.

Instead, what they told me raised more questions.

At one point, they told me that someone had been accessing my phone. That suspicion did not originate with me. They introduced it, and then refused to tell me who they were talking about. I was left trying to understand an alleged violation of my privacy without being given the information necessary to evaluate it.

Their behavior toward me changed as well. They became cold and distant, and I asked directly—both in person and in our group chat—what was happening. I was told everything was fine. Their reassurances did not match the way they treated me.

The contradiction was difficult to ignore. These were the same people who had supplied information shaping my earliest understanding of April 22. Now they were withdrawing from me, introducing concerns they would not explain, and leaving me to reconcile their reassurances with their actions.

I was still attending the writing course in which Luca remained my teaching assistant. My ordinary responsibilities continued while I was trying to understand the assault, the information I had been given, and the increasingly strange behavior of the people I had trusted.

I cannot establish every motive behind their conduct or why they withheld the identity of the person they said had accessed my phone. But I can describe what their actions did to me.

I wanted an explanation for what they had told me about my phone. Instead, I began to feel that my insistence on an answer was itself being used to question my judgment. That was disorienting: I was trying to resolve confusion I had not introduced.

I had trusted these people to help me make sense of what happened. Instead, I found myself having to make sense of them, too.

Reconstructing the assault was painful enough. Feeling required to defend my distress while I did so made it worse.

Reconstructing the Night

May · Distance and conflicting accounts

In early May, after conflict and isolation intensified, I cut off contact with the two friends whose accounts had shaped my first understanding of that night. They had introduced the concern that someone accessed my phone, yet would not identify the person. When I pressed for an explanation, the conflict culminated in University Police becoming involved and what I understood to be an attempt by those friends to have me sent for psychiatric evaluation.

I was not involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital. The encounter did not establish a psychiatric diagnosis, prove that I was inventing events, or resolve the discrepancies in the original police report. I cannot establish exactly what others told police or why they acted without the relevant records.

I can describe how the focus changed: a question about who might have accessed my phone became a question about my mental state. The people who raised the concern did not give me enough information to evaluate it, yet my requests for answers became part of the suspicion surrounding me. I experienced that reversal as discrediting. It did nothing to answer the original question.

After returning to my dorm, I finally had some distance from the conflict. Another roommate, who was not in Phi Alpha Delta, had been home on the night of the wedding with her boyfriend. Their recollections of our return and the time spent together afterward became relevant to assessing the initial timeline. I moved home in May and began to gain enough distance to reconsider what I remembered and what I had been told.

July · Disclosure and returning to police

In July 2022, I told my parents for the first time that Luca Tzimas had sexually assaulted me. I intended to resume the University Police investigation when I returned. I had already asked police to pause the investigation until I was ready to proceed; I was not waiting for forensic results. My intention was to formally identify Luca and move forward with the investigation. The surrounding chronology still required reconstruction, but the identity of the person I was accusing was not in question.

Choosing support

That July, I began therapy for the first time in my life, working with a therapist who specialized in sexual trauma. Over the following two years, I continued therapy, including EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). I credit that treatment, particularly EMDR, with saving my life. It gave me a place to process what had happened while so much of my life remained consumed by explaining, documenting, and defending it.

There is an important distinction between the psychiatric intervention I understood others to be seeking in May and the trauma-focused therapy I voluntarily began in July. Choosing treatment to recover from sexual violence did not validate other people's characterizations of my mental health. Neither event, by itself, established that my report was fabricated or that the errors in its initial chronology were the product of psychiatric impairment.

In July 2022, I gave University Police Luca’s name and identified the downstairs bathroom of the Airbnb as the location of the assault. That same day, the case files were transferred to NYPD. As part of their protocol, police also called the two people who had provided statements for the original report. I had corrected the identification and location; the surrounding chronology still needed to be established.

August · Testing the timeline

In mid-August 2022, as the fall semester approached, I spoke for the first time with the friend my roommate had previously accused. I had already formally identified Luca and the Airbnb bathroom to University Police in July. Until then, I had deliberately avoided interviewing fraternity members about the wedding because I wanted to organize my own information first.

During that conversation, the friend my roommate had accused showed me Uber records indicating that we left the Airbnb at approximately 12:05 a.m., supported by Apple Maps location data. That evidence directly contradicted the original police report’s account of an assault at approximately 11 p.m. in my dormitory: the departure records placed us at the Airbnb well after the time the initial report placed me elsewhere. The discrepancy mattered because the first report had incorporated details supplied by people I trusted, not because I had independently identified that reported location or assailant.

From there, I contacted other attendees and sought photographs, videos, timestamps, recollections, and other records. Those materials helped test the surrounding sequence. The Uber and Apple Maps data did not, by themselves, prove every detail of the assault. They undermined the first report’s chronology—not my account of the violence. I had already identified Luca to police. I was reconstructing the night, not searching for a person to accuse.

After the Assault, Access Became Position

For years, I treated April 22 as a dividing line: before it, Luca had access to my life; after it, I faced the consequences. The timeline was never that tidy. His position within my social world did not vanish when I reported the assault.

By then, Luca was no longer only my teaching assistant. My roommate had become his fraternity big, and he had developed independent relationships within the organization I had joined and helped lead before he arrived.

After I identified him as the person who raped me, access was no longer merely about proximity. It was also about who could speak to whom, whose version of events sounded familiar, who remained comfortable in the group, and whose questions were treated as disruption.

I cannot know every private conversation or claim that Luca directed every response. The structural change is visible without that assumption: relationships that had once been part of my support system now connected independently to the person I accused. My attempts to clarify the facts were taking place inside that network.

The assault was one night. The rearrangement of my social world did not end there.

The Fraternity Had Been Mine First

The hardest part of Phi Alpha Delta is also the simplest: it was my community before Luca ever entered it. I did not wander into his circle. He entered mine.

I had led my joining class, held leadership positions, and developed friendships. I had a fraternity mentor—a “big”—and a couple of “littles” whom I mentored, although some of those pairings later changed. I understood many of the people around me as fraternity brothers and part of my support system.

By April 22, my roommate and other people I trusted had developed relationships with Luca that did not depend on me. The same network that had made Phi Alpha Delta feel secure now contained overlapping loyalties and conflicting accounts of what happened.

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

I expected people to ask what it meant for Luca to remain in the fraternity after I reported that he had raped me. Instead, I found myself repeatedly explaining my reactions, defending my place in the organization, and navigating relationships that had changed.

THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE HAD CHANGED BEFORE I NEEDED IT MOST.

The people I would ordinarily have turned to for stability now had relationships with Luca of their own. The fraternity still existed, with the same title and familiar faces. It no longer offered me the same access to those people or the same assurance of belonging.

My Assault Was Not a Fraternity Secret

By early September, I had already identified Luca to police in July. I was speaking with people connected to the April 22 fraternity wedding and collecting information for the Title IX complaint I was preparing. I was also trying to understand why fraternity leadership had not responded to my concerns about Luca during the summer.

At my twenty-first birthday party, friends from college and Buffalo were celebrating with me. Some did not attend the University at Albany, and none of my Buffalo friends owed Phi Alpha Delta any organizational loyalty.

That evening, while intoxicated, I called Luca. Looking back, I would not make that call again. It reflects how little I then understood about the relationship and its consequences. But the call itself was not what stayed with me most about that night.

My fraternity president had been trying to stop me from calling Luca. She also became very upset that my friends knew about the assault. As I remember it, she referred to the matter as a fraternity secret. I told her my life was not a fraternity secret. We were not doing that here. Of course my friends knew what I had experienced and reported.

After I went to bed, she spoke to my friends in a manner they experienced as patronizing—as if they were students answerable to her. The following morning, they asked to sit down in the living room and talk about it. They were unsettled both by her response and by the suggestion that friends from outside Phi Alpha Delta should treat my disclosure as the fraternity’s business.

I cannot know every motive behind her reaction. I can explain the contradiction I perceived: I was trying to report serious violence and prepare an institutional complaint, while the immediate concern expressed to me was that people outside the organization knew about it. I had been asking her since July to remove Luca.

Confidentiality can protect privacy and the fairness of a proceeding. It does not mean a student organization owns a member’s account of her own experience. The distinction between protecting a process and controlling a narrative became increasingly important to me.

Title IX

By September 2022, I had identified Luca to police, undergone a sexual assault forensic examination, and spent months reconstructing the events of April 22. I filed a formal sexual-misconduct complaint with the University at Albany because I believed an institutional investigation could examine the evidence and address questions that remained unresolved.

I brought medical documentation, photographs, transportation records, messages, potential witnesses, and a chronology assembled through months of work. It was not a neatly packaged record. That was exactly why I believed an investigation, with its own tools and responsibilities, was needed.

Instead, my complaint was dismissed.

I challenged that decision through an appeal exceeding 120 pages, addressing what I understood to be procedural irregularities, failures to investigate, evidentiary concerns, and the treatment of information about my mental health. I sent the appeal, accompanied by supporting materials, to senior university administrators.

I understood that Title IX operated within particular legal and procedural boundaries. What I struggled to accept was how a process could reach its conclusion while leaving so many of the questions that brought me there unanswered.

A CLOSED CASE AND AN ANSWERED ALLEGATION ARE NOT NECESSARILY THE SAME THING.

A procedural dismissal is an outcome, but not necessarily the factual resolution of the underlying allegation. Learning to name that difference changed how I understood accountability across the institutions to which I reported.

The Speech Changed What the Fraternity Could Pretend Not to Know

By the time I addressed the Student Senate, I had spent months seeking answers through the university processes meant to handle reports like mine. I had waited, documented, and appealed. I still needed an explanation of what those procedures had examined and what questions remained unanswered.

My public remarks concerned my sexual-assault report and the university’s handling of Title IX. I was speaking about institutional procedure, not asking the Senate to adjudicate an assault or punish my fraternity. That same day, I sent my appeal of more than 120 pages, with supporting material, to senior university administrators.

Speaking publicly was difficult. I was still a student with relationships inside the institutions I was questioning, and I could not predict how people would respond. I was initially allotted five minutes; student senators gave me additional time to explain the process and the questions it left unresolved.

Silence had not protected me or answered the questions in my appeal. I was trying to make the record legible to people outside the offices in which it had been circulating. I did not know then that I would go on to work with senators on a bill brought before the same student-government body.

After the speech, Phi Alpha Delta convened an emergency meeting. Earlier that day, according to the Senate chair, fraternity leadership had tried to keep me from speaking. The sequence matters: first an effort to prevent the remarks, then an urgent meeting after I delivered them.

The fraternity leadership had already been told whom I accused. Yet the public airing of my concerns was followed by a meeting where my credibility, behavior, and mental health became subjects of discussion.

The irony was difficult to miss: I had spent months asking people to take the allegation seriously. Once I described the university’s response in public, the emergency seemed to be that I had spoken.

I REPORTED AN EMERGENCY. SOMEHOW, I BECAME ONE.

That meeting made visible a power shift I had not fully understood. The person reporting harm had become the person expected to justify her presence, reactions, and right to be heard.

The Emergency Meeting

After my Student Senate speech, Phi Alpha Delta held an emergency meeting. Leadership had known about my allegation before that day; what was new was that I had questioned the university’s response before a public student forum. I retained a recording of approximately an hour of the meeting, which is one source for my description of the discussion.

The room included people who had attended the April 22 event, people who knew Luca socially, people who knew me before he entered the fraternity, and students with leadership roles. Some had information potentially relevant to the night I was trying to reconstruct. The recorded discussion also included judgments about whether I was credible, interpretations of my behavior, and speculation about my mental health.

Those two roles—potential sources of firsthand information and participants in an informal credibility debate—were not interchangeable. A member’s impression was not an investigation, and the presence of possible witnesses did not transform a fraternity meeting into one.

I had used a student forum to raise concerns about the handling of a sexual-assault complaint. The fraternity’s urgent response included questioning the person who reported it. What, exactly, was being examined?

The Emergency Became Me

The issue was not simply that people began discussing me before I arrived. It was what the organization appeared to treat as the emergency: the allegation I had reported, or the fact that I had spoken about the university’s response in public.

My allegation against Luca was not new to fraternity leadership. By that point, the fraternity president had known since July 2022 that I had identified Luca as the person who raped me and that I had an open NYPD investigation concerning him. She also knew about my Title IX case. In fact, one reason I pursued the university process was because I had been told that doing so would provide a basis for removing him from the fraternity.

And yet Luca remained.

So the emergency meeting was not a sudden institutional reaction to learning that one member had been accused of raping another. The organization had already been living with that information.

What changed was that I spoke publicly.

My Student Senate remarks brought the dispute about the university’s process into public view. I described the complaint, the issues I saw in its handling, and why I believed the institution owed students an explanation. The fraternity now had to respond to the fact that I had stopped treating the matter as something that could be handled only in private conversations.

That should have raised questions for fraternity leadership: Who knew what, and when? What steps were considered? Why had Luca remained? Were different people receiving different accounts? Which decisions were documented? These are questions, not conclusions about answers I cannot independently establish.

Instead, the scrutiny moved toward me. Whether I was believable. Whether I was stable. Whether I was causing problems. Whether there was some alternative explanation for what I was saying. Whether my behavior, rather than the underlying facts I was describing, could explain why the organization had suddenly become uncomfortable.

The meeting did not create the confusion I had experienced; it carried it into a larger room. For months I had been testing conflicting accounts and questioning whether I understood events correctly. At the meeting, attention again shifted from the information I had raised to my credibility, behavior, and mental health. The scrutiny was now collective.

People Were Making Credibility Decisions Before the Facts Were Finished

The timing of the emergency meeting troubled me. I was still collecting records, reconstructing the night, and navigating institutional proceedings. Important factual questions were unresolved.

The fact-finding was unfinished. The social verdicts, it seemed, had no such scheduling problem.

A formal process can require documents, interviews, timelines, an opportunity to respond, and standards for weighing evidence. Informal judgment can happen much faster. People leave with impressions; those impressions become the next person’s background information. Within an hour, a social verdict can start to sound like a settled fact even while the underlying record remains disputed.

That is how reputation can begin replacing evidence.

When My Mental Health Became Easier to Discuss Than His Conduct

One of the ugliest labels attached to me during this period was “schizophrenic.” That word describes a specific psychiatric diagnosis, not a conclusion that can be drawn from distress, disagreement, or persistent questioning. I dispute the characterization. I am not presenting anyone else's speculation as a clinical finding, and nothing about that label establishes that I fabricated my account or knowingly supplied false information to police.

My diagnoses are not their labels

As of July 2024, my understanding of my medical evaluations was that they did not support the psychiatric labels other people had applied to me. I have ADHD, and I have since been diagnosed with PTSD. Those diagnoses are not interchangeable with the characterization I dispute.

When I describe my PTSD as “situational,” I mean that it developed in response to trauma; I am not using that word as a separate diagnostic category. PTSD is not something a person is born with. It develops after traumatic exposure. In my account, the violence and its aftermath are the context in which I understand that diagnosis.

Seeking treatment did not make the events I reported disappear. A diagnosis describes something that needs care; it does not, by itself, decide whether an allegation is true or false. The same respect for evidence should extend to anyone with a mental-health condition. I should not have to argue that people with diagnoses are less credible in order to explain why the labels applied to me were wrong.

When a label starts doing the work of evidence

Once a person is framed as unstable, almost any reaction can be forced into that explanation. If I found a contradiction, perhaps I was paranoid. If I collected records, perhaps I was obsessive. If I was angry, perhaps I was irrational. The same actions that might have been seen as diligence in another setting could be reinterpreted as symptoms.

Meanwhile, the discussion I encountered moved away from the concrete conduct I had reported. The tracking device, the assault, and the incompatible accounts did not disappear, but they competed for attention with speculative explanations of my mind. That displacement was itself part of the harm.

The Meeting Made the Power Shift Visible

I do not think the change in my position can be explained simply by saying everyone "chose him." What I could see was that Luca continued to participate in ordinary fraternity life while my presence and reactions repeatedly required explanation.

Power looked like him being able to remain while I had to defend my right to be there. It looked like people discussing my credibility and mental health while the conduct I was describing remained unresolved.

Power looked like my fraternity holding an emergency meeting after my speech and discovering that I could be treated as the emergency.

The Election Changed Both of Our Positions

The recorded emergency meeting after my Student Senate speech was not the end of the organizational response. I also retained screenshots and other materials concerning the leadership process, and I supplied relevant materials to UAlbany Greek Life and Phi Alpha Delta National.

At a subsequent leadership meeting, I was unanimously voted out of my position as secretary and a replacement secretary was elected. During that same meeting, Luca—the person I had identified as having raped me—became treasurer. These were parts of the same proceeding, not separate episodes.

The vote did not decide the truth of my allegation. It did redistribute organizational authority. The recording, the election timeline, and the correspondence about my removal are therefore important in their own right: they document a consequence of the social response, whatever individual motives can or cannot be established.

A vote can establish who has the numbers. It cannot, by itself, establish who has the facts.

The Aftermath Was Not Socially Neutral

For years, I called everything after April 22 “the aftermath,” as though it were weather: unfortunate, inevitable, and nobody’s particular responsibility. The word is too passive for a sequence containing decisions that real people made.

The confusion had consequences. So did the inaccurate first timeline, Luca's independent relationships inside the fraternity, the organization's preference for normalcy, and the growing focus on my mental health and behavior. Whatever the intent of any individual person, those conditions did not affect us equally.

I do not need to claim that Luca engineered every outcome to describe who benefited from the arrangement. A social system can protect someone's position without that person directing every conversation inside it.

The Record the Process Did Not Produce

When I first understood that I had been raped, I assumed that reporting the assault would begin a process aimed at accountability. I had not yet learned how many separate procedures, decisions, and delays could stand between a report and an answer.

I reported, documented, reconstructed, pursued Title IX, appealed the dismissal, and spoke publicly before the Student Senate. Each avenue had a different purpose and different limits. Some of the advocacy that followed helped move policy discussions forward, but none of the proceedings gave me the resolution I had sought in my individual case. A process can change for the future without answering every factual or ethical question that brought someone into it.

A birthday argument, a public-comment objection, an emergency meeting, and an election can seem peripheral in isolation. Together, they show how the allegation entered the fraternity’s relationships, reputation, and distribution of power. They deserve their own dates and sources, not because they prove the original allegation, but because they are part of what happened after I made it.

Phi Alpha Delta was part of my intended legal path before Luca joined. I loved the organization. Its transformation, as I experienced it, was astonishing: I went from leadership and belonging to exclusion, while Luca later held the position of treasurer. The language of legal principle means little when its application is governed by social convenience.

My interest in law preceded these events. It shaped my coursework, my involvement in Phi Alpha Delta, and the direction I hoped to take professionally. My criticism of the people and institutions involved is not a rejection of the legal field. It comes from believing that legal authority demands more than credentials, prestige, or an ability to speak in the vocabulary of justice.

Luca’s LinkedIn profile lists Notre Dame Law School and the Navy. To me, the broader question is how institutions confer public signals of trustworthiness while serious allegations may remain unresolved. Admission, employment, and service are not findings about an unrelated allegation, either for or against the person involved.

I made the allegation, submitted supporting material, pursued available procedures, and kept asking questions. This site is the record I have spent years assembling: what I experienced, the documents I can identify, the responses I received, and the limits of what I can responsibly conclude from each.

Why This Site Exists

This site exists because the institutional record is scattered across different systems and decisions. A police report, a Title IX outcome, a fraternity meeting, and a leadership vote answer different questions. Reading any one of them as the entire story would leave out much of what happened between them.

I have advocated for myself since 2022. This is a more public phase of that work, not a claim to have resolved every uncertainty. I will not pretend to know what people said in private or why they made every choice. I can show what I experienced, what was recorded, what was decided, and where the explanations still fall short.

For years, other people had extraordinary freedom to explain me. Here, I am not asking the reader to accept my analysis without scrutiny. I am asking that my account and the underlying record be examined with the same seriousness that other people’s interpretations of me so often received.

What Was Alleged, What Was Reported, and What Was Charged

I identify Luca Tzimas as the person who sexually assaulted me on April 22, 2022, and describe earlier tracking and later organizational events in this first-person account. These are my allegations and recollections, not findings of a criminal court.

I reported the incident to law enforcement and describe later contact with investigators. A police report, an investigation, a university complaint, and a criminal charge are distinct processes. This site does not claim that criminal charges were filed against Luca because I have not included a charging document or docket establishing that fact.

My account is that the university Greek Life office and Phi Alpha Delta National received materials concerning the fraternity meeting and election. The date, recipient, attachments, and any responses should be checked against the original correspondence before treating institutional notice or inaction as established by the public record.

Institutional resources

Phi Alpha Delta National — Official website

Phi Alpha Delta — About and values

Phi Alpha Delta — Resources and policies

UAlbany — Fraternity and Sorority Life

UAlbany — Title IX grievance policy

Related project — UALBANYPAD.com

These links provide context, not proof of any specific policy violation. The rules in force in 2022 and the documents actually received by each institution should be verified separately.