August 19, 1999
After meeting through a mutual friend earlier in the summer, Parker, then a sophomore, and the 18-year-old Penn State freshman we’ll call Jane Doe hang out at her dorm room. Parker tries to have sex with her but she refuses, saying she doesn’t know him well enough. She performs oral sex on him instead. As Doe later testifies, “I didn’t want to have sex but I didn’t want to leave it at nothing.”

August 20, 1999
Doe waits for Parker for a date at a bar near campus. Parker is late, and Doe accepts drinks from a construction worker and from a student named Rugigana Kavamahanga while waiting for him to arrive. Later, in court, lawyers raise the possibility that the combination of the alcohol and Doe’s prescribed Prozac caused her to black out.

August 21, 1999
Parker arrives at the bar around midnight, and he and Doe join a small group leaving for Kavamahanga’s apartment. According to Doe, at around 1 a.m., Parker invites her back to his apartment to sleep. A friend later claims she “wasn’t really making that much sense” and “was talking very loud,” while Kavamahanga says she was “coherent but noticeably drunk.” Another friend later testifies that Parker told her Jane Doe was “extremely intoxicated.” Parker later disputes this, saying Doe “didn’t drink around me and sure didn’t seem drunk that night.”

Once Doe enters the apartment, accounts continue to diverge. Doe claims she fell asleep quickly, and then woke up to find Parker and Celestin, his roommate, having sex with her: “I just remember opening my eyes and seeing Nate having intercourse with me. It was just a split second. And then awake again and … somebody just on top of me other than Nate.” In his statement to police, Celestin claims that Doe pulled him by the hand into Parker’s room, began having sex with Parker, and gestured for him to join. Parker, too, maintains the sex was consensual. Kavamahanga later testifies that Parker told him he and Celestin had “run a train on” Doe.

However, another student named Tamerlane Kangas, who had driven Parker and Doe to the apartment, later testifies that he and Celestin had both been outside Parker’s room watching him have sex with Doe. “There was a smirk on his face, because he caught us watching him,” Kangas says, “and so that’s when he motioned for us to come in.” He claims he told Celestin, “You don’t want to go inside the room,” and left after Celestin ignored him and started to have sex with Doe. “I figured that was there for Nate and not, you know, Nate and Jean,” he says. (During the trial, defense lawyers argue Kangas’s testimony was influenced by police threats to charge him alongside Parker and Celestin.)

The next morning, Doe claims, she wakes to find Parker having sex with her again. Parker later claims this too was consensual: “She was awake and did not show any signs of discomfort.” After leaving the apartment, Doe says, she spends the day in “the worst pain I have ever felt in my life … I couldn’t walk.”

September 7, 1999
Doe meets with Dr. Anna Shallcross, telling the doctor she has been sexually assaulted. Shallcross later testifies that Doe’s cervix showed signs of inflammation “from infection or some type of trauma.”

Mid-September, 1999
Doe calls Parker, secretly recording the conversation. (Pennsylvania’s two-party consent law makes such a recording illegal.) She presses him to tell her who else she had sex with that night. “I remember waking up and seeing somebody else fucking on top of me and me asking where you were,” she tells him. “You are so full of shit,” he says, denying that anyone else had had sex with her.

Soon after, Parker and Celestin seek guidance from two wrestling team mentors, Brian Favors and Kerry McCoy. Parker says that, “For some reason she says she doesn’t remember the evening,” McCoy later recalls. Both men allegedly tell Parker and Celestin to be “nice” to Doe and find out what she wants. According to a statement from Parker, McCoy tells him, “These things come up from time to time with girls who feel guilty about what they did before, or may even find themselves pregnant with a multiracial child and rejected by their parents.”

October 13, 1999
After receiving counseling from the university, Doe reports the alleged assault to State College police.

Around this time, Doe calls Parker again. This time the call is recorded by the police, who have a warrant. She tells him her period is late, and again asks him how many people she had sex with in his apartment. “I didn’t want to have sex with you that night,” she says. “I was so out of it, my whole body was numb, I couldn’t do anything about it.” This time, Parker identifies Celestin as the other man, but continues to dispute her account of the evening: “You were all for it … It’d be different if you were just laying there, but you weren’t. You were active.” Doe asks to speak to Celestin so he can apologize to her; Celestin takes the phone and tells her, “I really don’t know what I’m apologizing for, but … if anything offended you, and you got hurt, I’m sorry.”

October 18, 1999
Parker and Celestin give interviews with the police maintaining that Doe was not drunk and the sex was consensual. Parker later claims that in his interrogation detective Chris Weaver “went into a rage,” telling him the Penn State wrestling team had “raped and battered the whole town.”

October 21, 1999
The two men are arrested and charged with rape, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, sexual assault and indecent assault, which prompts their suspension from the wrestling team. Parker posts $25,000 bail, on the condition that he have “absolutely no contact” with Doe. Doe later says that the two men began an “organized campaign” of harassment against her after their arrests.

October 27, 1999
According to Doe, Parker shows up in the common area of her dorm at night, violating the terms of his bail.

October 28, 1999
Doe reports the alleged harassment to Penn State.

October 29, 1999
According to Doe’s subsequent lawsuit, university administrator Joseph Puzycki instructs Parker and Celestin not to have any contact with Doe, and vice versa. He reportedly warns them that a failure to comply could lead to their expulsion.

November 8, 1999
Doe sends another statement to the university complaining that the harassment — which she claims includes Parker and his friends following her around campus shouting “sexual epithets,” calling her incessantly, and hiring a private eye to put photos of her around campus — has intensified. She also files a formal complaint with the school’s Office of Judicial Affairs.

November 17, 1999
According to a later complaint, Doe attempts to commit suicide. She subsequently meets with Puzycki about the alleged harassment, but says he refuses to discipline Parker or Celestin.

November 23, 1999
According to the complaint, Doe attempts suicide again.

November 25, 1999
Doe writes another letter to Penn State about Parker and Celestin. She later claims the university’s only response is to move her to off-campus housing. She also says the school publishes her new phone number in the student directory against her expressed wishes, allowing the harassment to continue.

January 2000
Doe drops out of Penn State, but continues to live in State College. She later claims that the harassment continues throughout her time in the town.

October 2000
Parker and Celestin are readmitted to the wrestling team.

October 5, 2001
After a three-day trial, Celestin is found guilty of sexual assault. Parker is cleared of all charges. The defense had repeatedly brought up Doe’s attire on the night in question, as well as her history of drinking and her previous consensual encounter with Parker.

November 20, 2001
Celestin is sentenced to six to 12 months in prison, lower than the mandatory sentence of three to six years, after multiple Penn State administrators send letters of support to judge Thomas Kistler. The jail sentence is delayed to allow Celestin time to graduate, a decision that sparks controversy on campus: A victims-rights group calls his potential graduation “an absolute indignity,” while the school’s Black Caucus, of which Celestin is a member, pushes for him to be allowed to walk, noting that all but one of the jurors in the case were white. (Doe is also white.)

December 7, 2001
Celestin is expelled from Penn State for two years, with the possibility of graduating after his expulsion is up. The school claims it had been waiting, with Doe’s support, for the case to be resolved in the legal system before taking action against either of the men. Parker transfers to Oklahoma around this time, graduating in 2003.

March 6, 2002
The Women’s Law Project files a lawsuit against Penn State on Jane Doe’s behalf, saying that the university did not adequately protect her from the alleged harassment.

December 5, 2002
Penn State settles with Doe for $17,500. The university does not admit fault, but does agree to change its anti-harassment policies. Her lawyer tells reporters the suit wasn’t about money: “The critical factor for her all along was changing policies at Penn State so this doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

May 2, 2003
In denying Celestin’s appeal, the Pennsylvania Superior Court also orders judge Kistler to give him to a harsher sentence.

March 30, 2004
Celestin is resentenced to two to four years in prison.

October 28, 2005
While serving his sentence, Celestin is granted a new trial after the Pennsylvania Superior Court rules that his original attorney erred in not challenging the admission of Jane Doe’s illegally recorded phone call, as well as various hearsay testimony. Prosecutors eventually decline to retry the case, and Celestin’s conviction is vacated.

December 23, 2007
With the release of The Great Debaters, Parker’s big break, the actor is profiled by his hometown paper, the Virginian-Pilot. The interview touches on the rape charges. “Something like that turns you into a man real fast. It teaches you the world doesn’t owe you anything,” he says. “If I had it my way, it would never be brought up again. It’s taken six years of my life to get past it.” Still, he attempts to place the accusation at the center of a redemption arc: “I know if all that hadn’t happened then, I wouldn’t be here today.”

November 8, 2008
Parker’s Wikipedia page is created. The same day, it is updated to include a mention of the rape charges. The case receives its own section on August 16, 2016.

April 15, 2012
Jane Doe commits suicide at a rehab facility. “She became detached from reality,” her brother later tells Variety. “The progression was very quick and she took her life.” Though Variety notes there’s no direct link between the alleged assault and Doe’s suicide, her brother points to the trial as a turning point: “If I were to look back at her very short life and point to one moment where I think she changed as a person, it was obviously that point.”