INITIAL ALERTEmail
MIT Police Timely Warning – Attempted Sexual Assault
The MIT Police Department received a third-party report of an alleged incident involving the possible use of a date-rape drug and the attempted sexual assault of a female MIT student at an MIT-affiliated fraternity over the weekend of February 21-22, 2024.
The student disclosed that she had not consumed any alcohol that evening. She was given what she believed to be a cup of water by an unknown male individual, after which she quickly became disoriented. The unknown male individual then brought the victim/survivor upstairs and began to remove her clothing until a friend interrupted.
This report was made to the MIT Police through a third party in compliance with the Clery Act, a federal law. The MIT Police Department, with assistance from MIT's Office of Student Wellbeing and Violence Prevention & Response (VPR), is investigating.
Resources: VPR is the primary, confidential, on-campus resource for issues pertaining to sexual assault, stalking, sexual harassment, and domestic/dating violence. VPR can be reached 24/7 at (617) 253-2300.
This Timely Warning is issued in accordance with the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act.
Third-party reporting under Clery is an important and underdiscussed pathway — many sexual assault timely warnings rely on it because survivors often disclose first to friends or RAs who become Campus Security Authorities
The phrase 'victim/survivor' is intentional best-practice trauma-informed language — it lets the reader (often a survivor themselves) self-identify
Naming VPR with a 24/7 number directly in the alert is the gold standard for sexual assault timely warnings and is not consistently practiced across peers
Fraternity is left unnamed — common practice that protects the venue's other affiliates while still satisfying Clery's location-disclosure requirement (the 'where')
Mentioning that the survivor 'had not consumed any alcohol' is unusual and pushes back implicitly against alcohol-blame framing
'Possible use of a date-rape drug' — careful conditional; toxicology was not yet confirmed at the time of the alert