Mattress Girl Redux

Emma Sulkowicz tries to open a new chapter, but is the old one closed?

Credit: Andrew Burton (Getty)

Before there was #MeToo — about three years earlier — there was what New York Magazine called a “revolution against campus sexual assault,” and it had no greater icon than Emma Sulkowicz, a.k.a. “Mattress Girl.” Sulkowicz was the Columbia University student who famously carried a mattress around campus as both a senior art project and a protest against the university’s failure to expel the fellow student she had accused of rape.

Emma Sulkowicz and mattress on the cover of New York magazine in the fall of 2014.

I had a somewhat significant role in the way the story played out in the media, as the author of a February 2015 article in The Daily Beast that first brought to light material (including Facebook messages between Sulkowicz and her alleged rapist) widely seen as casting doubt on Sulkowicz’s story. Both Sulkowicz and the accused man went on to graduate from Columbia, with Sulkowicz famously carrying the mattress at graduation; Sulkowicz also went on to become a performance artist. The man — whom, at his request, I will identify here only by his first name, Paul, even though his full name has been published many times before — returned to his native Germany and launched a career…