By Meghan Frank, Jamie Farnsworth, Sabrina Esposito and Jessica Hopper
Rock Center

From the time she was a little girl, Claire Russo knew she wanted to be a Marine.

“When I was 10 and when I was 18 and when I was 23, the reason never changed.  They were the toughest,” said Russo in an interview with Natalie Morales broadcast Thursday on NBC’s Rock Center with Brian Williams. 

The native of Washington, D.C., stuck to her dream, graduating No. 4 in her class from officer candidate school in 2003.  Her father, Ken Wilkinsen, watched her commissioning with pride.

“This colonel came up,” Wilkinsen recalled.  “He said, ‘If we had more of her type here... my job would be a lot easier.’”

Russo began what she thought would be a long career in the military, but her work as an intelligence officer was upended when she was sexually assaulted by a fellow Marine in November 2004. 

“I love this country,” said the 32-year-old Russo. “But, you know, there’s a wound that will never heal. I gave the Marine Corps everything and it took from me something that I’m never going to get back.”

Russo is one of the thousands of members of the Armed Forces who have been sexually assaulted while serving their country.  Last year, 3,192 service members across all branches of the military reported sexual assaults. Based on anonymous surveys of active-duty service members conducted in 2010, the Department of Defense says the number of incidents was closer to 19,000. Of the cases that are reported, only a fraction are prosecuted in the military justice system. 

Attorney Susan Burke has filed several lawsuits against the top brass at the Department of Defense on behalf of sexual assault victims, charging they’ve been deprived of their due process.

“What all of us expect as Americans is an impartial system of justice.  We don’t know the judge.  We don’t know the jurors,” Burke said.  “That’s not what is happening in the military.  In the military, the commanders get to decide based on their own impressions of the two people coming forward who to believe. ”

Courtesy of Claire Russo

Claire Russo

Russo’s case was shut down by the Marine Corps, but since her assault happened off base, she was able to seek justice in the civilian court system. Recalling the November 2004 night she was assaulted is still upsetting to Russo.  She attended the Marine Corps Ball at a San Diego, Calif., hotel with her cousin, Tom, a Navy F-18 aviator.  Tom introduced her to a fellow marine, Doug Dowson.  Dowson bought her a drink and said he’d take her to a room party.

Russo said that after accepting the drink from Dowson, things started “to get a little hazy.” Russo said that she felt like she’d been drugged. A drug test taken over 24 hours after the assault was inconclusive.

“The next thing I remember is being on the ground in the bathroom.  He was holding me down and sodomizing me and at that point, I was just crying and begging him to stop,” said Russo through tears.

The day after the assault, she told her cousin. He reported it to his command and was ordered to take Russo to the naval hospital for a rape exam. As Russo was about to undergo the exam, her cousin received a phone call from the military criminal investigator assigned to the case, NCIS Special Agent Zach Paton.

“I told him to leave and come to me,” Paton said. Though Paton was the naval criminal investigator assigned to Russo’s case, he didn’t trust the military to handle it well. “The Naval Medical Center, they didn’t have appropriate personnel, training and material for doing rape kits," he said.

Paton took Russo to a civilian hospital for a sexual assault exam, waiting outside the hospital room as Russo was examined. 

“You could hear her crying out in pain,” Paton recalled.

Since the assault had taken place off base, Paton could run a joint investigation with the local police. This proved pivotal in Russo’s pursuit of justice because although Paton would present the military with forensic evidence, testimony and photos, the Marine Corps ultimately decided not to charge Russo’s accused rapist.

“As the investigation progressed, as the command briefings and evidence and investigative reports were presented to the command of the accused, it was very apparent that they were going to take no action,” Paton said.

Paton broke the news to Russo, but neither of them was prepared to give up.

“Fortunately it was a joint investigation with the police department. So we explored that avenue of letting the D.A.’s office take a look at it,” Paton said.

The San Diego district attorney’s office wanted to prosecute, but Russo said she  felt pressure from her command not to work with civilian authorities.

“They did say, you know, ‘This is a bad idea,’” Russo said.  “Once this case goes to the district attorney’s office, Claire, we can’t help you.  You know, we can’t protect you.”

“It felt as though there was a desire to sort of intimidate both me and the district attorney out of actually prosecuting this case,” Russo said.

Russo said the Marines also ignored her pleas for a transfer which meant that she had to endure an on base encounter with the man she knew had raped her.

“I broke down physically, emotionally and I actually like, I urinated on myself,” said Russo of one encounter with Dowson.  “I was terrified.”

The district attorney obtained a search warrant for Dowson’s house.  There, Paton said he and the police found hidden cameras and hundreds of hours of video of Dowson having sex with seemingly incapacitated women.  Paton also discovered that just seven months prior to Russo’s assault, a female aviator had a similar incident with Dowson. She told her command but said she felt pressure not to file a formal report.

Prosecutors charged Dowson with raping Russo.  He pleaded guilty to sodomy before his civilian trial began and was sentenced to three years in prison. He was released after serving 18 months.  

Courtesy of Darchelle Mitchell

Darchelle Mitchell

When asked if her case is an exception within the military, Russo said, “The only thing that makes my story extraordinary is that I got justice.”

Rock Center interviewed several women who claim they were raped by fellow military members. Unlike Russo, many of them never received justice. Some didn’t report their assaults because they feared it would destroy their careers.

In Darchelle Mitchell’s case, the petty officer she says raped her was acquitted and her Navy career suffered. When Mitchell tried to re-enlist as active duty in the Navy her request was denied. She has since joined the Navy reserves.

“I knew joining the military was going to be a sacrifice.  This wasn’t the intended sacrifice that I was willing to make,” she said.

Former Air Force Sgt. Laura Sellinger said that she attempted suicide after her command announced to her squadron that she had been raped while at a training exercise in South Korea.

“Everybody  knew at work,” Sellinger said.  “And they’re calling me all kinds of things and I’m sitting here and I just went to Iraq and through hell and now I’m dealing with this, ‘I’m a slut, I’m a whore. I deserved it,’ and all this kind of stuff.  I give up.  I absolutely give up. I’ve never been so hollow.”

Courtesy of Laura Sellinger

Laura Sellinger

Another veteran told Rock Center she was threatened with adultery charges from her commander after she pushed for her rapists to be prosecuted. Victims say this culture of blaming them and not punishing their rapists leads to more assaults. 

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said the military is trying to do a better job of prosecuting these crimes.

“I think we owe all of those who’ve been impacted not just an apology, but we owe them the effort to make sure that this doesn’t happen again,” Panetta said. 

Since taking over as secretary of defense in 2011, Panetta said that tackling the issue has been a top priority. 

“It’s an outrage that we aren’t prosecuting the people involved here,” Panetta said. 

Panetta pointed to a number of changes including moving victims away from their assailants, new special victims units and pushing reporting higher up the chain of command. Still, he admitted that for decades this has been a problem the military has been sweeping under the rug.  

“We need to improve the investigations.  We need to make sure we have these special victims units that do the investigations and we need to ensure that we have prosecutors who are willing to bring these cases to court and make sure that these people don’t get away,” Panetta said.

Editor’s Note: Natalie Morales’ full report aired Thursday, Sept. 27 on NBC’s Rock Center with Brian Williams.

Additional Resources:

DOD Safe Helpline

Service Women's Action's Network

Protect Our Defenders

By Alison O'Brien
Rock Center

When Ashley Wood was looking for colleges, she knew she needed a school that would allow her to work during the day and take classes at night.  She clicked on an ad for the Art Institute of Las Vegas and asked for more information. Within hours, she got a call from an admissions counselor.

“Everything they told me was, sounded incredible.  They told me it was the top-notch school, that it had the best accreditation and that I would fit perfectly there.  They really persuaded my mom and I that it was the perfect school for me,” said Wood in an interview airing Thursday, July 19 at 10 p.m.ET/9 p.m. CT on NBC’s Rock Center with Brian Williams.

The next day, she visited the campus.  She was admitted and attended her first class that night. Wood, who studied graphic design, said that admissions counselors never asked her for a high school diploma or for a portfolio of her work.  She says the school’s staff helped her apply for financial aid, something she needed to attend school. She initially ended up with $68,000 in student loans. Before she would finish her studies, Wood would take out two additional loans for Art Institute programs abroad. Each loan was $14,000 and covered her tuition, travel and living expenses abroad.  Wood says she chose to study abroad and felt no pressure from the school to do so.

After graduating, Wood did find a job as a graphic design artist, but paying off her loans has been more difficult than she imagined. Six years after enrolling, the now 23-year-old Wood has $145,000 in student loan debt with interest rates as high as 12 percent.   

“I honestly believe I would have to pay $2,000, $3,000 a month to get ahead on this loan.  If I pay them what they’re asking, my loan literally will never be paid off,” she said. 

Wood’s story of being saddled with student debt is not unique. Nationwide, student loan debt has ballooned to more than $1 trillion.  It’s a problem so big that it’s drawing scrutiny at colleges across the country, but nowhere has it been as intense as at schools like the one Wood attended, for-profit colleges. 

For-profit colleges appeal to people because they offer classes both during the day and at night, online and on-campus.  They offer specialized fields of study like culinary arts or fashion design as well as doctorate programs in law and psychology.   Commercials for the schools tout their successful graduates from business leaders to Pulitzer Prize winners and Top Chef contestants.

For-profit colleges are a $30 billion a year industry with as much as 90 percent of its revenue coming from student loans and grants, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).  They are often backed or owned by publicly traded companies like Goldman Sachs, which owns 40 percent of Education Management Corporation (EDMC), Washington Post Company, owner of Kaplan University, and Apollo Group, owner of the University of Phoenix which has sponsored NBC's Education Nation.

Controversy has ensued over whether the missions of for-profit schools are to educate or to turn a profit for their shareholders.  The schools say both; critics disagree.

“The for-profit schools, because of their business model, target low-income people, because the lower your income, the more Pell Grants you get and the more student loan you’re eligible for,” said Senator Tom Harkin, D-Ia., chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. “So it’s in your business interest to go after those poor students.”

Senator Harkin, who has spent three years investigating the industry, argues that despite the successes the schools may have had, students at for-profit schools take out more student loans, default more often and have a higher rate of unemployment than students at traditional colleges.  A December 2011 report by the GAO confirmed his findings.   

Though some colleges dispute the numbers, the Department of Education says that students at for-profit colleges represent about 10 percent of the nation’s college enrollment.  They take out about a quarter of all student loans and grants and of all the students across the country who default on their loans, nearly half come from for-profit colleges.  And when students default, it is taxpayers who pick up the tab.

Some for-profit executives, as well as an industry trade group, acknowledge that their students are more likely to default, but they say it’s because their schools serve a low-income population that is underserved by traditional colleges.  They also say that many students over-borrow by taking out loans to cover things beyond their tuition. For example, students will take loans out to cover their living expenses. That is money that the schools never see. 

In an interview with Rock Center, Bonnie Campbell, a spokesperson for EDMC, the second-largest company in the for-profit industry and owner of the Art Institute Wood attended, defended the company and the industry against criticism regarding its student population.  Campbell is a former attorney general for the state of Iowa and a former member of the state’s board of regents that oversees its education system.

She said, “Do you think it’s appropriate to take a huge block of low-income people and ignore them, say to them, ‘Your dream to get an education and a good job really isn’t important to anybody?’ It is.” 

EDMC officials say the schools provide financial aid counseling to try to keep students from borrowing more money than they need for tuition and other school-related expenses, but it is the students who are ultimately responsible for determining the amount of funds they wish to borrow.  The company says that regulations prohibit them from doing anything to control or prevent this over-borrowing.  EDMC and others in the for-profit industry say they are advocating to change those regulations.

Campbell went on to say that 82 percent of EDMC graduates find jobs in their field and giving students a good education is in the company’s best interest.

“If you're not educating students properly, if you're not placing them in jobs, you won't make a profit,” Campbell said. 

But some former recruiters for EDMC and its schools paint a picture of a school consumed less by student success and more by profit.

“The students are just a conduit for federal money,” said Suzanne Lawrence, a former recruiter for EDMC.

Lawrence recruited students for six months and said that her job was to sign up as many students as possible and send them directly to the financial aid office.  

“They’re simply siphoning money from the taxpayers and from the federal government, siphoning them through these students and on the way ruining these students’ credit, ruining their lives and filtering that money straight into their stockholders’ pockets,” Lawrence said.  

Kathleen Bittel, another former recruiter at EDMC, said she too was told to boost the bottom line by recruiting students, regardless of their qualifications.  She says she felt like a telemarketer when she worked for the company.

“We called and called and called…phone numbers all day long, hoping for someone to pick up the phone and talk with us,” she said. 

EDMC is currently the subject of an $11 billion false claims act lawsuit by the Department of Justice along with eleven states. The suit alleges that, from 2003 to 2009, EDMC paid its recruiters solely on a per student basis, which was in violation of the Safe Harbor regulation.

"Paying people a salary is legal", said Eric Jaso, a former deputy general counsel for the Department of Education who helped draft the Safe Harbor regulation that is the center of the lawsuit. "You can adjust a salary for different factors, quality of work. You can promote people. However, you cannot adjust that salary solely on the basis of how many people they recruit."

Paying recruiters solely on a per-student basis is an allegation EDMC strongly denies.  

“At all times now and then, EDMC was in compliance,” Campbell said. She says that there are other quality factors that determine a recruiters pay – including professionalism and work ethic - and that the former recruiters we spoke with were not in a position to know how compensation was ultimately determined.

"Literally impossible to determine someone's compensation without a consideration of those factors," Campbell said. She added that the $11 billion figure, which the government says represents the amount of federal funds EDMC obtained from 2003 – 2009, is patently absurd and was put in the lawsuit for the headline.

Jaso says that for-profit colleges do provide a valuable service to low-income students, but he fears that, in some cases, greed triumphs over good.

"When you pay people on a commission basis to recruit students, bad things happen,” Jaso said. "Students are unqualified. They don't stay in school, they don't graduate. They don't get good jobs. They don't pay back their student loans, and the taxpayer suffers. That's what this is all about."

This is not the first lawsuit brought against the industry for allegedly paying recruiters solely on a per-student basis. One of the largest lawsuits was against University of Phoenix owner, Apollo Group. In 2009, Apollo settled the case for $78.5 million, but did not admit any wrongdoing.

As for the EDMC case, U.S. District Court Judge Terrence McVerry called it "massive and complex." He said, in a recent ruling, that the company’s compensation plan was legal as written, and it is “certainly possible” that EDMC complied with all government regulations. Nevertheless, the question remains as to whether it was in fact illegal as implemented.  EDMC vigorously contests the lawsuit, which is pending in the U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh, Penn.

Editor’s Note: In a report on for-profit colleges that aired on NBC’s Rock Center on July 19, 2012, images of the Art Institute of Boston were used. 

The Art Institute of Boston is a private, not-for-profit art school, which is part of Lesley University and is not affiliated with The New England Institute of Art, a for-profit college.