Thank you for all the support and advice. It is so meaningful, especially feeling so vulnerable and not really getting proper support from the University. I haven't gotten a lawyer but I do have free legal benefits through my husband's benefits so I might if they don't take my account seriously.

What I did was look up the term I initially used "verbal assault" and found out more information about the legal rules about that. There are laws in other countries about it but in the US this kind of assault is known as "Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress."

So in my prepared document for the investigator, I start with that definition and the 4 conditions that have to be present to bring it to the legal level of a tort. I say that I'm not at this time pursuing it legally, but instead using the legal definitions to understand the seriousness of the student's actions and the effects.

I have an additional letter from my shrink saying I suffered from extreme distress, both observed by him and reported to him that includes physiological as well as emotional signs of distress.

I think I'll start the meeting with the investigator off by showing him the letter first, saying it would be traumatic for me to recount and therefore have to relive the experience so I'm going to insist that he read a written account of the incident that is very specific and accurate, so much so that I really don't think the other student would be able to remember the incident in that kind of detail.

I saw her for the first time today in class. She was acting as if nothing was wrong. She is very competitive and thinks of herself as queen-like in her command of the place. I didn't feel a sense of vengeance before, but when I saw her today I admittedly felt the desire to get her into some serious trouble.

The University has acknowledged so far that her behavior was "unacceptable" but they haven't moved much more than that. The rules of conduct at the University are very strict. I believe that however things go with the investigation, since it is a he-said, she-said situation, that there is enough there to warrant her going before the same committee to face potential actions about violations.

The main reason I want this is that the University right now feels like a toxic environment because this student gossips a lot and has probably maligned my character to faculties, officials, and other students. Until that is addressed, I won't feel entirely safe there. And she is so unpredictable since this attack came out of the blue after weeks and weeks of no contact, after a rather friendly last interaction, that I think she is unstable. She has admitted to having a diagnosis for which she is not currently in therapy for.

And she bend and breaks rules to have the appearance of getting good grades. She's half my age and is obviously not taking any responsibility for her own internal processes. Instead she's using officials and the University as ways to process her emotions. Whereas I've said nothing about her to anyone at all. I'm a Zen Buddhist so I have taken vows about not speaking that way about others.

I have the suspicion, though I won't admit this publicly, that she sees me as competition because I am the only student who does as well or better than she does. She admitted to being prone to hostile envy. I've had lots of experience with other women who do things that are aggressive to undermine me. I think she is exploited the fact of the unintentional email to claim she's a victim and get lots of sympathy so she can get me out of her way. She just recently took on a job that will affect her performance and I think it was at that point that she decided, rather calculating, to use this to her advantage to get attention and get me dismissed and also just before the committee meeting about my dismissal, raise charges against me.

The committee did already meet. I think it went well for the most part, but these are psychologists not psychiatrists so they had a really hard time taking in that the email in question was written as a side effect basically when I was in a semi-sleep state. They simply don't know enough about medication so think everything is only behavior. That was frustrating, because I had to say it over and over again, even though I had provided a statement with legal precedent about the side effects and a detailed letter from my psychiatrist. Still they wanted to say that the email was a violation of codes of conduct. I had to stop them and say how could I be held responsible for something I wrote while asleep? And according to the school's own rules, if you do something unintentional it is not considered a violation. I may be considered an "infraction" that needs a warning, but anything else is not part of the rules.