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United StatesCopies of these binoculars seemed too similar to be honest
Wrongly accused of cheating on an exam, twin sisters sued their university for defamation. They received 1.5 million dollars in compensation.
Kellie and Kayla say they suffered from the rumors surrounding this case.
No, Kayla and Kellie Bingham are not cheaters. In any case, this is the conclusion reached by a court in Charleston (South Carolina) last month. In 2017, the twins sued the Medical University of South Carolina for defamation. The reason? Two weeks following an exam was held, the institution accused the two young women of having cheated, as their respective copies looked alike. This allegation deeply shocked Kayla and Kellie. “My brain was overheating. I was sobbing and mightn’t believe what was happening to us,” Kayla told Insider.
The twins assure it: it was impossible for them to cheat. “We were more than a meter apart,” says Kellie, who adds that screens prevented them from seeing each other. A supervisor, however, claimed to have seen the two students shake their heads several times, as if to exchange signals. At one point, one of them even “folded” a sheet so that her sister might see it. “We were just nodding our heads while reading a question on our computer screens”, assure the twins, hammering that they never exchanged the slightest glance.
Summoned before the disciplinary council, Kellie and Kayla explained that, since their earliest childhood, their school results were incredibly similar. Found guilty of cheating, the two sisters were finally cleared a few days later. But the damage was done. “Whispers and rumors went around campus that we had been dishonest,” Kellie said. The atmosphere was so unbearable that the twins ended up changing universities and even career plans: they left medicine to devote themselves to law.
In the libel suit the Americans filed once morest the institution, their lawyer presented the jury with their nearly identical grades. A professor also confirmed that the two sisters gave exactly the same answers to an exam he had supervised, during which they were each seated at one end of the room. Finally, a psychologist who specializes in behavioral genetics and the study of twins explained that she would have been surprised if Kayla and Kellie had not “achieved the same results”.
The jury ultimately ruled in favor of the twins, who were awarded $1.5 million in damages. “We knew the truth. We were not going to let it go and let our reputation be ruined”, welcome the two Americans, now 31 years old.
(joc)
