Alexandra Brodsky
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Title IX Warrior
Alexandra Brodsky began 2016 as a law student. She will end it with a degree from Yale, as a leading feminist activist, and one of the most respected voices on the hot-button issue of “rape culture.” She’s a senior editor at Feministing.com and a co-founder of Know Your IX, a not-for-profit that helps students end gender-based violence by educating them on the federal law that protects their right to education. She’s also working at the not-for-profit National Women’s Law Center in Washington, D.C., as a prestigious Skadden Fellow.
After a nationwide controversy erupted over the light sentencing of a Stanford University undergraduate who raped an unconscious woman on campus, Brodsky wrote about the sentencing for The New York Times.
Even as an undergraduate at Yale, Brodsky, 26, made herself heard in the halls of power. In 2011, she joined 15 classmates to file a Title IX complaint against the university, alleging that its inadequate policies for dealing with sexual harassment and assault “precludes women from having the same equal opportunity to the Yale education as their male counterparts.”
Brodsky joined the group because when she was in her first-year of college, she had accused a man she thought was a friend of trying to rape her, but then followed the school’s advice not to report the assault. The experiences of the attack led her to co-found “Know Your IX” in 2013.
Today, the group has become a nationwide grassroots network that, in addition to educating students about sexual violence, advocates for policy and legislative change on the federal and state levels.
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