Carol, this was wonderful!
As painful as it was for Lois to listen to the tape, it gave us the wonderful opportunity to see what Clark was thinking during that time.
Snodgrass is truly evil. I actually think he may be worse than Paul. While there is a possibility that Paul has some sort of mental illness, or something happened in his past to make him this way, it's hard to believe either of those could be true about Snodgrass. (As a note, I don't think either of those make Paul innocent, just possibly less evil than Snodgrass.) Snodgrass is just someone who doesn't want his reputation tarnished by having these rapes come out.
It reminds of a newspaper article when I was in college (and as much as I hate to date myself, I should say this was about 15 years ago, and I'm sure Brown is very different now). It was about Brown University and while maybe it was just because it was my first year in college, but from my perspective, the issue of acquaintance or date rape was becoming more and more well known as the primary cause of rape (rather than the random man coming out of the bushes stories).
At Brown, there was a women's bathroom where women kept a list of men on campus who had date raped them as a warning for other women. For reasons Brown refused to explain, that bathroom seemed to get cleaned more often than others and particular care was taken to remove "graffiti" which was generally ignored in other bathrooms. The list would reappear a few days later and the whole thing would start again.
This thing with Snodgrass just reminds me of that - I think it was well understood at the time that Brown wanted to keep it's reputation as a college with high academic standards in a nice area of the country and feared that this list made the college seem unsafe, when in fact, it's unlikely date rape happened any more frequently at Brown than anywhere else - what made Brown unsafe at the time was the knowledge that likely there were no repercussions for the perpetrators allowing them to date rape multiple women.
