LUCA
TZIMAS

PREFACE

Initially, I did not understand this story in the order, or through the routes, I can describe it now. What follows is a reconstruction built from what I documented, what other people told me, and what I learned only after placing those pieces beside one another.

Some things were clear immediately. Others only made sense after I had enough information to see how they connected.

It Started With Access

Before there was an assault, there was a structure of access. I first knew Luca as my teaching assistant, inside a small law-focused writing course I had deliberately chosen because I was already preparing for law school.

That role gave our contact an ordinary explanation. He could read personal writing I submitted for class, respond to my work, speak with me about my goals, and know things about me that I would not have volunteered to a stranger. At the time, I understood that access as academic.

Then Luca entered Phi Alpha Delta, the pre-law fraternity that was already a major part of my social life. I had joined before he did, held leadership roles, built close friendships there, and lived with another member. Once he joined, he no longer needed me as his only connection to that world. He could form his own relationships with people who knew me, attend the same events, and become familiar with the social structure around me.

That change matters to the story that follows. Luca did not appear in every part of my life at once. His presence expanded through settings that each had a legitimate explanation: first school, then the fraternity, then relationships within it.

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.

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

Luca first met my roommate through me. During his first Phi Alpha Delta one-on-one, I was the brother 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, he had made sure “All of Me” was playing. I took a photo and told him he was insane for playing it.

That dinner was the first time Luca and my roommate really spoke. They connected quickly. From that interaction, their relationship developed independently of me, and she later became his fraternity “big” — his mentor within the organization.

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 the person I lived with and one of the people who knew me best.

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 the semester's joining class. They chose to create a wedding party. 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 intoxicated, and my memory toward the end of the night is spotty. 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 also remember leaving the Airbnb on April 22 with 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 stopped relying on the version of the night that had been handed to me and began rebuilding it from the record itself. I contacted people who had attended the event and asked for photographs, videos, timestamps, recollections, and information about who had been in different parts of the house and when. I was no longer asking what people believed had happened. I was trying to determine what the available evidence could actually establish.

The transportation records changed everything. They contradicted the timeline I had initially been given and forced me to reconsider where the unexplained portion of the night actually belonged. Once the departure time changed, the entire sequence shifted with it. The period I had been trying to understand led back to the Airbnb.

That distinction is critical. I did not arrive at a different account because I decided I preferred one explanation over another. I arrived there because the first explanation did not survive contact with the records.

The reconstruction did not create a different assault.

It exposed the structure of the assault that had already happened.

After the Assault, Access Became Position

For years, I treated April 22 as a dividing line: before it was Luca's access to me; after it was simply the aftermath. I do not understand the sequence that cleanly anymore.

By the time of the assault, Luca was already embedded in the same social structure I depended on. He was no longer only my TA or a new fraternity member. My roommate had become his fraternity big. He had his own relationships with people I considered brothers, his own standing inside the organization, and credibility that no longer depended on me.

That mattered after the violence. The question was no longer only whether he could reach me. It was how each of us was positioned among the people around us: who had access to whom, whose account arrived first, whose behavior looked ordinary, whose reactions looked disruptive, and whose uncertainty could be interpreted as a problem.

I cannot know every private conversation or claim that Luca directed every response that followed. What I can identify is the structural change: before the assault, many of these relationships were part of my support system. Afterward, some of the same relationships also connected directly to the person I had identified as having raped me.

The violence happened once. The social positioning kept moving.

The Fraternity Had Been Mine First

Phi Alpha Delta is one of the hardest parts of this story because I had built a life there before Luca entered it. I had led my joining class, held leadership, developed friendships, had a big of my own, and understood many of the people around me as brothers and part of my support system.

By April 22, those relationships were no longer arranged only around me. My roommate was also Luca's big. Other people I trusted had their own relationships with him. The same network that had once made the fraternity feel stable to me now contained overlapping loyalties and competing versions of events.

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

I expected the central question to be what it meant to keep him inside an organization where I was already a member and leader. Instead, I increasingly found myself having to explain my reactions, defend my presence, and navigate people who were not only connected to me anymore.

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.

The Emergency Meeting

After my Student Senate speech, Phi Alpha Delta held an emergency meeting. I walked into a room where people were already talking about me.

Some had been present on April 22. Some knew Luca socially. Some knew me before Luca ever entered the fraternity. Some had leadership roles. Some had information potentially relevant to understanding the night. Yet the meeting became a place where people discussed whether I was credible, what they believed about me, how they interpreted my behavior, and what they thought might be wrong with me.

That is not a minor detail. People who existed inside the factual universe of the allegation were simultaneously participating in a social discussion about whether the person making the allegation should be believed.

I had publicly said that Luca raped me. The organization responded by urgently gathering to discuss whether something might be wrong with me.

The Emergency Became Me

The most important thing about this emergency meeting is not simply that people felt entitled to discuss me in my absence. It is what the organization implicitly decided constituted the emergency.

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 made visible information that had previously circulated privately: conversations between fraternity members, institutional knowledge, and details about the handling of the situation that even some members of the organization apparently did not know. I was no longer only making an allegation. I was publicly describing a structure of knowledge around it.

That should have raised obvious questions for the fraternity: Who knew what? When did they know it? Why had Luca remained? What had leadership told different people? Why was information being handled differently depending on who was asking?

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.

That distinction matters. From my perspective, the meeting was not the beginning of the confusion surrounding me. It was an extension of it. I had already spent months trying to understand events while receiving conflicting information, navigating institutional processes, and questioning my own interpretation of what had happened. Now the same displacement was occurring collectively: rather than examining the information I had placed in public view, people began examining me.

People Were Making Credibility Decisions Before the Facts Were Finished

One of the most disturbing aspects of the emergency meeting was timing. The factual process was not finished. I was still producing information, reconstructing the night, dealing with institutional processes, and trying to understand contradictions.

Yet socially, judgments were already being made.

A formal process might require documents, interviews, records, timelines, and evidentiary standards. A social group requires almost none of that. Within an hour, an informal credibility system can form. People leave the room with impressions, and those impressions become the next person's background information.

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.” 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 Meeting Made the Power Shift Visible

Before the assault, the fraternity was one of the places where my relationships gave me stability. I had leadership, history, credibility, a roommate who knew me closely, a big, and people I considered brothers. Luca was the new person.

After I identified him as the person who raped me, those same relationships no longer functioned in the same way. My roommate was also his mentor. People I trusted had their own relationships with him. What had once been my support network had become a shared social field in which both of us already had standing.

The shift was not simply that people “chose him.” It was more subtle and, in some ways, more powerful: his continued presence could remain ordinary while my response to that presence became increasingly visible, discussable, and disruptive.

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.

What Happened After the Room Mattered Too

The emergency meeting was not important only because of what was said while people were sitting together. It mattered because of what followed.

Afterward, my relationship to the fraternity changed in ways that made my exclusion increasingly tangible. Communication changed. Access changed. My place in decision-making changed.

Exclusion rarely arrives with somebody saying, “We have decided to isolate you.” It happens procedurally and socially. Information no longer reaches you. Decisions affecting you occur elsewhere. People stop responding the same way.

The Aftermath Was Not Socially Neutral

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

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.

They made it easier for Luca to remain socially legible as an ordinary fraternity member while I became increasingly legible as the disruption surrounding him.

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.

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 access can develop through ordinary roles and legitimate institutions, how independent relationships can become social position, how 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.