You have more options than you may realize.
Your school’s process is often the quickest way to protect your education right now. But it is only one of three tracks open to you, and the other two can hold the institution itself accountable. New York gives college students some of the strongest protections in the country, and most students never learn what they are.
Our New York work has reached Cornell, Columbia, SUNY Geneseo, Baruch College, The Juilliard School, Parsons and The New School, and Ethical Culture Fieldston.
See the record ↓Three tracks are open to you.
Your school can protect your education within days.
Every New York college has to offer interim measures while a report is pending. Ask for them in writing, and ask for exactly what you need.
Housing
A move to a different room or residence hall, so you’re not sharing a building with the person who hurt you.
Classes
A schedule change, a different section, or staggered arrival and seating, so you never need to cross paths.
Deadlines and grades
Extensions, incompletes, or a chance to redo work, so that what happened to you does not end up on your transcript.
A no-contact order
A written directive from the school requiring that the other person stay away from you, with consequences if it is broken.
Letters and advisers
If the person who harmed you is the professor you need a recommendation from, another faculty member can often write it instead.
Disability services
Trauma that affects your studies can qualify for accommodations.
The most important thing is to protect your transcript, protect your letters, your extracurriculars.Iliana Konidaris · In conversation with physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, 2023
What each one can do for you.
- Your school’s process It can produce a no-contact order, a housing change, and a finding of responsibility. It cannot award money damages, and its finding does not bind a court.
- Title IX If an official who could act knew about the harassment and responded with deliberate indifference, the school itself can be sued. What the school knew, and how it acted on that knowledge, becomes the center of the case.
- A civil lawsuit The only track that can award you money damages. It can reach the school for negligence and negligent supervision, a national fraternity and its chapter, and in New York City, under the GMVA, any institution that enabled the violence.
- The order In most cases, we want the school’s process to create a record before a civil case is filed, without you making statements before you know how they could be used. Getting that order right, early, is one of the most valuable things a lawyer does.
The type of school sets your first deadline.
A private university, a SUNY campus, a CUNY college, and a public school district are each sued in a different court, and some require written notice within about 90 days. Search for your school to see which rules apply to it.
Your search is private. Nothing you type or choose leaves this page.
Pick a school or a kind of school to see which laws apply, where a claim against it is heard, and the first deadline that can apply.
- Enough is Enough
- Title IX
- Where a claim is heard
- First deadline to watch
This is general information about New York law rather than advice about your situation. Every rule here has exceptions, and your age at the time can change all of them.
What Enough is Enough gives every student in New York.
Article 129-B of the New York Education Law, known as Enough is Enough, applies to every college and university in New York, public and private. These are the protections that matter most after an assault.
Affirmative consent
Consent is a knowing, voluntary, and mutual decision among everyone involved. Silence is not consent. Being asleep or incapacitated is not consent. Consent to one thing is not consent to another, and it can be withdrawn at any time.
Amnesty
If you report an assault in good faith, your school cannot discipline you for drinking or drug use connected to it.
Your choice about police
You have the right to report to campus safety, to the police, to both, or to neither. The New York State Police run a dedicated unit for campus sexual assault if you choose to report to them. The school cannot retaliate against you for whichever choice you make.
Off campus counts
The law covers assault, dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking that happened off campus or abroad, as long as there is a reasonable connection to the school.
Confidential resources
Licensed counselors and medical providers on campus can keep what you tell them confidential. Other employees may be required to report what you share, so it’s worth asking about confidentiality before you disclose.
An adviser of your choice
You are entitled to bring an adviser of your choice through the school’s process, and that adviser can be a lawyer who does not work for the school. We can be that adviser, helping you prepare and standing with you at each step.
More than one institution may be responsible.
When an assault happens at a fraternity house, at a team event, or in a school program, several organizations may have known something and been able to stop it: the university, the fraternity and its national organization, or the athletic department. Our Cornell case set New York precedent on national fraternity liability because we did not stop at the students in the room.
Institutional liability turns on what the institution knew and failed to act on: prior complaints about the same person, prior incidents at the same house, and warnings that went unanswered. Those records exist, even when the school would prefer they did not. In the Cornell case, a New York judge ruled that records of the chapter’s earlier misconduct were not shielded by the federal student privacy law, FERPA, and had to be turned over to George’s mother.
Our campus cases, from Ithaca to the Bronx.
Each one is built from what the institution knew.
A hazing death that set New York precedent
George Desdunes died in 2011 after a Sigma Alpha Epsilon ritual. His mother’s wrongful-death case held the national fraternity accountable along with its members, survived years of efforts to dismiss it, and resolved in a confidential multi-million-dollar settlement.
Read the caseStanding with the student who came forward
Iliana represented the complainant in Feibleman v. Columbia University and secured a confidential resolution in January 2021.
Iliana’s workA group the college had already banned
Arman Partamian died in 2009 after two days of drinking to join an off-campus fraternity that Geneseo had banished in 1996. His family’s case was brought in New York Supreme Court in Queens County.
Read the caseA fraternity retreat across the state line
Michael Deng, a Baruch student, died during a 2013 fraternity retreat in the Pocono Mountains. His death was ruled a homicide and led to criminal prosecutions and civil litigation.
Read the caseA coach the school had reason to watch
Iliana is lead counsel for a Fieldston alumna who alleges her volleyball coach abused her beginning in 2004 and that school staff knew. The case was filed in Bronx Supreme Court in 2025 and is ongoing.
Read the caseWhat students learn too late.
You can be your own best advocate.
Many Title IX coordinators take their obligations to you seriously, but the school is also protecting itself from the first report onward. Keep your own notes of every meeting, every request, and every answer you get, with the date of each.
You are rarely the only one.
In Iliana’s experience, especially when the person who caused the harm is a faculty member or holds power on campus, there is usually another student with a similar story, and records of earlier complaints. A lawyer knows where to look for both.
Graduate students may have workplace claims, too.
If you are paid as a teaching or research assistant, you may be considered an employee of the university, and employment law can reach conduct that Title IX alone does not. Ask us about both.
Olympias Iliana Konidaris
Iliana has represented students in Title IX proceedings and civil cases at the K-12, university, and graduate levels across New York City for more than a decade. She is lead counsel for the plaintiff in the Ethical Culture Fieldston School litigation and Co-Chair of the New York City Bar Association’s Sex and Law Committee.
More for New York survivors.
Frequently asked questions
Should I still report to my school’s Title IX office?
Usually, yes. No court can protect your housing, classes, and grades as quickly as your school, and a written report creates an official record of what happened. Go in knowing that what you say can surface later in a lawsuit, and consider bringing an adviser or a lawyer with you.
Do I have to report to the school before I can sue?
No. You can file a civil lawsuit without going through your school's process first, and without a police report. If you have already reported, that report can help your case. If you have not, no door has closed.
What is the difference between a Title IX complaint and a Title IX lawsuit?
A Title IX complaint is a report to your school. It starts the school’s own investigation, which the school runs under its own policy. A Title IX lawsuit is a case you bring in federal court claiming the school itself broke the law, usually by ignoring harassment it knew about, which courts call deliberate indifference. You control the lawsuit, and in New York it generally must be filed within three years.
Does it matter whether my school is public or private?
Yes, mostly for timing. Claims against SUNY or a CUNY senior college go to the New York Court of Claims, which has its own short filing rule. Claims against a public school district or a CUNY community college usually need written notice within 90 days. Private colleges have no special notice rule. Use our school lookup to see which rules apply to yours.
Can I sue the fraternity as well as the school?
Often, yes. The national fraternity, its local chapter, and the university can each have a duty to you. Who we name depends on what each one knew and could have done.
I was in high school when it happened. Does this apply to me?
Yes. Title IX applies to K-12 schools that receive federal funding, which includes public districts and some independent schools. If you were under 18 at the time, the Child Victims Act can give you until age 55 to bring a civil claim, and it removes the notice of claim requirement for public school districts.
If a New York campus is part of your story, talk to us.
One free and confidential conversation will tell you what each track can do for you and which order to take them in. Nothing about it commits you to anything.
Free and confidential. Contacting us does not create an attorney-client relationship.
- New York State Domestic and Sexual Violence Hotline, confidential, 24/71-800-942-6906
- Safe Horizon, New York City, 24 hours800-621-HOPE
- New York State Police campus hotline, to report an assault on a college campus1-844-845-7269
- RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline, 24/7800-656-HOPE
If you are in danger right now, call 911. The New York State Office of Victim Services may help cover counseling and medical costs.
Title IX regulations have changed more than once in recent years and remain subject to federal rulemaking and litigation; statements here reflect the rules in force as verified for this page. Sources for every legal statement are listed in the Sources panel.
This page is attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. It is general information about New York and federal law as of October 19, 2026, rather than legal advice about your situation, and the law changes. Please do not send confidential information until an attorney-client relationship is established in writing.