Court sides with SJU
After a former SJU student sued the school in February, a judge has granted SJU's request to dismiss the case.
A judge ruled against a former SJU student on Oct. 27 after he sued the school following his suspension for sexual misconduct. The student, who filed the suit as John Doe in February, claimed the school unfairly sided with his accuser, a CSB student.
U.S. District Judge Wilhemina Wright granted SJU’s request to dismiss the case, issuing a dismissal without prejudice. This means the student can sue again with a different complaint.
Katie Alvino, CSB/SJU vice president of marketing and communications, said SJU currently has no further comments on the case.
According to the lawsuit, the CSB student accused the SJU student of sexually exploiting her multiple times from March to November 2019 in her dorm room at CSB and while both were studying abroad in France.
The plaintiff said the CSB student made sexually aggressive remarks toward him while they were in France, which he said he resisted. However, they and the woman’s roommate sometimes slept in the same room on top of multiple mattresses pushed together on the floor.
Then, after a night where the man drank heavily at a karaoke bar, he walked back to their living quarters with the woman and her roommate. He woke up the next morning with both of them on the mattresses with no recollection of what happened after they returned from the bar.
Ten days after that night, the SJU student was informed that the woman accused him of “unwelcome physical conduct of a sexual nature, non-consensual sexual contact and sexual exploitation.”
He filed a complaint of his own, and SJU completed its investigation of the incident in March 2020. In May 2020, a three-person panel decided to suspend the man through 2021 or until his accuser graduated, whichever came later. No hearing was held before the decision.
According to SJU’s Title IX guidelines, the current policy and procedure for sexual misconduct requires a live hearing to take place, due to a federal mandate that colleges revise their policies and procedures related to Title IX and sexual misconduct.
However, that mandate did not go into effect until Aug. 14, 2020. SJU faced a similar lawsuit in 2016, when former student Aaron Wildenborg sued both SJU and CSB over the handling of a sexual assault allegation made against him by a CSB student.
In Wildenborg’s case, he was accused of sexually assaulting the CSB student at a party while she was drunk. He said the school falsely concluded that the accusation was probably true.
He contended that the process was biased against him because he was prevented from fairly challenging her claims of what happened and that she retreated from her initial allegations.
