For what its worth:

When I was an undergrad I was walking from the psych building to the bookstore behind a pack of girls talking about how some professor or grad student/assistant was always flirting with them (I don't know which it was). They weren't exactly being secretive with the conversation and I wasn't trying to listen in on a private conversation since anybody within about a 30 yard radius who didn't have earplugs in heard the same thing as they laughed and joked about it all the way there. I ran into a grad student who was helping in one of my psych classes while eating lunch and very casually mentioned the conversation I had just heard on the walk over.

A couple of days later one of my professors asked to talk to me and told me that he heard about what I had mentioned and asked me to tell him exactly what I had overheard. I told him I didn't think it was a big deal, that they were mostly making jokes about it, didn't seem upset at all, and I wasn't sure who they were referring to. He was concerned when he heard that they were coming out of the psych building at lunch time because it was the summer session and they had several group therapy sessions with local teens and there was a good chance these weren't just students. I told him it seemed like a pretty tame conversation, repeated what I could remember and left it at that.

A few days later I was stopped leaving a class by my professor and told that the dean wanted to see me immediately. I was completely freaked out (having forgotten all about the earlier conversation) and then found out that it was about this same conversation I had overheard. By this time I had forgotten much of the dialogue, but tried to repeat what I could remember as best I could.

A couple of weeks later I got a message on my phone from the campus police telling me that they needed to set up a time to talk to me, but the woman calling didn't say what it was about. Assuming it had to do with one the hundreds of parking tickets I had accumulated, I went to the nearby satellite office with my checkbook and after a blank stare and a few phone calls by the receptionist I was told that I was in the wrong place and I needed to report to their main building. On the way there I was shitting myself wondering what this was all about and, after arriving, was taken to a private office with a couple of campus police and sat around for about an hour until a guy in a suit busted in flashing a badge and handing me his card saying he was city police detective. When I found out it was about some conversation I overheard that I had forgotten all about I was obviously relieved at first, but started to get a bit freaked out again by how overly serious everybody was acting. All I remember is that the detective was sort of a dick and didn't like that I had forgotten just about everything that was said.

I don't know if this all came about because I made a comment about overhearing a conversation or if something inappropriate had coincidentally actually occurred, but after about an hour of questions and promising to make a written statement I finally left. I never wrote the statement and I never heard anything else about it, so I guess I'll never know.

Anyway, I would hate to imagine what would have happened if I had told somebody I had seen a 10 year old kid getting buttfucked in the team locker room instead of just overhearing a couple of loudmouth chicks talking about somebody flirting with them.