On July 30, 2020, CWLC and Equal Rights Advocates filed an amicus letter urging the California Supreme Court to grant review of the Court of Appeal’s decision. Our amicus letter argues that this decision, the most recent in a string of decisions from the Court of Appeal, has created a gender-biased procedural system in which onerous requirements are imposed in sexual assault and intimate partner violence proceedings, but not in any other disciplinary proceedings. 

This disparate treatment creates two separate tracks—one procedural system for gender-based violence cases and another for all other cases—that feed and lend credence to harmful and false narratives that victims of gender-based violence are inherently untrustworthy, and that perpetrators need additional procedures to protect them from “false” allegations. Click the download button above to read the letter.