Global Courant 2023-04-29 23:19:25
A college student caught up in a web of racism accusations talks about the experience and how rumors threw her life into chaos.
In 2020, University of Virginia student Morgan Bettinger was the subject of a campus-wide scandal after protesters claimed she had threatened to run them over.
Bettinger, who insists the controversy was based on a lie, spoke to Reason magazine this week about the subsequent legal and professional ramifications that continue to haunt her.
“This whole situation has had a huge impact on my life,” Bettinger told the magazine. “The university has never been held accountable for what their actions have done.”
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The campus of the University of Virginia (Will Pryce/Construction Photography/Avalon/Getty Images)
The scandal centered around a brief conversation between Bettinger and a truck driver parked at the edge of a Black Lives Matter protest on July 17, 2020. Bettinger told Reason she told the driver, who was parked to block traffic on the street where the demonstrators were demonstrating: it was good that he was there because the traffic would turn the demonstrators into speed bumps.
“Not once did anything from the past, not even the rally, Unite the Right rally, resonate with me,” Bettinger told Reason. “It was just a comment made to a truck driver who was sitting and blocking the road and just saying, ‘It’s good you’re here.'”
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Bettinger’s comment spread quickly and soon her car was surrounded by protesters who claimed she had threatened to run them over.
“With that one woman hitting my car and other people yelling and starting to threaten me, I didn’t know what was going to happen,” Bettinger recalled to Reason.
The crowd’s outrage quickly spread, both on campus and in the national news. Soon, Bettinger was contacted by friends and became aware of a Twitter thread written by fellow UVA student Zyahna Bryant, who was at the protest.
Bettinger was also goaded by campus news outlet WUVA, which still is posted a video of the incident on his YouTube channel, referring to Bettinger by name, titled “UVA Student Threatens BLM Protesters.”
“I was laying in bed and one of my high school friends… reached out and said, ‘Are you okay?’ And I didn’t know what that meant,” Bettinger recalls.
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Bettinger told Reason that the controversy seeped into every facet of her college life, impacting her classes and social circles. Behind the scenes, activists at UVA called for her expulsion.
“They tried to kick me out of my own major,” Bettinger recalled. “One person in my cohort even compared me to a rapist.”
Zyahna Bryant at the shrine of Sojourners United Church of Christ (Norm Shafer/ For The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Bettinger was investigated multiple times over the following year, Reason reported.
“I knew I had a solid case,” Bettinger told Reason. “I had done everything I could to be as transparent as possible, to show all the facts. But at the same time, when I was confronted with UVA students, I knew I didn’t have much hope that they would be neutral.”
The university’s Judiciary Committee eventually found her guilty of “threatening” the “health or safety” of students. The UJC did not dispute Bettinger’s recollection of the events, but condemned her for not understanding “the context in which (she) uttered these words”, claiming she was “ignoring Charlottesville’s violent history”.
“I think I was numb. That’s probably the best way to describe it,” Bettinger said. “I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of making a face, making a noise, crying. I wasn’t going to have any emotion.”
University of Virginia (Will Pryce/Construction Photography/Avalon/Getty Images)
A year later, the university’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights (EOCR) released its own report finding “more likely than not” that Bryant had not heard firsthand the comment at the center of the dispute.
After the EOCR released its report, Bettinger was relieved but frustrated.
“Yes, I’m right,” she said. “But just because they found the right answer, in a sense they weren’t rid of everything I had just been through.”
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Bettinger graduated from UVA, but still carries the black mark from the USJ verdict on her criminal record.
She still lives and works in the Charlottesville area but did not name her employer, fearing the harassment could flare up again.
Paul Conner is senior editor at Fox News Digital. Email story tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @paconner.
