Before William Barr was appointed to serve as Donald Trump's personal lawyer, he lent the weight of his reputation to a book titled, The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America's Universities. The book published in 2017 claimed that President Obama's administration had created a culture that eagerly and unjustly targeted male students who had been accused of sexual assault, according to NBC News. Barr heaped praise upon it, calling it a "masterful account" of how Obama's Education Department had been "fanning the false narrative of a ‘rape culture’ on college campuses" and creating a "regime of kangaroo justice."
"Your blood will boil as the authors meticulously examine scores of cases where, in the name of political correctness, male students are sacrificed to the mob, with academic leaders happily serving as the hangmen,” Barr wrote in a blurb for the book.
In 2017, Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos ultimately rolled back the Obama-era mandate instructing colleges and universities to aggressively investigate sexual assault cases under Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in education. DeVos partially relied on the book and Barr's strong embrace of it to support her rollback of the policy. DeVos is also advocating for other changes, including disclosing the identities of accusers to the accused and allowing the accused to cross examine their accusers in the course of the investigation.
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary say they were not aware of the blurb at the time of Barr's confirmation. On Thursday, California Sen. Kamala Harris called the statement "appalling."
"A majority of campus sexual assault cases go unreported in part because survivors don’t have faith they will be believed," Harris tweeted. "I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Barr must resign."