Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz alleges she was raped by a fellow student in her college bed in 2012. When her case was dismissed by college authorities last summer, she decided to protest in a very different way.
The visual arts student plans to carry her mattress everywhere until her alleged rapist is expelled from the university or chooses to leave.
The protest also forms part of her final year thesis and is called Mattress Performance or Carry That Weight. Emma says it symbolises the weight she carries every day following the alleged rape and failure of the authorities to act.
According to Time Magazine, Emma and two other women reported the same person to the university last year, but all three cases were dismissed.
She is also one of 23 Columbia and Barnard students who filed a discrimination complaint (known as a federal Title IX complaint in the US) last April alleging that the university mishandled sexual-assault cases.
Emma told the Columbia Daily Spectator: ‘Rape can happen anywhere, but I was attacked in my own dorm bed.
‘For me that place that is normally very intimate and pure was desecrated and is very fraught. The piece is about carrying the memory of that everywhere I go.’
