Dive Brief:
- A judge has ruled that a lawsuit accusing Xavier University and its president of damaging the reputation of a former player on the school’s basketball team can proceed to trial with most of the claims intact.
- In the federal lawsuit, the player, Dez Wells, claims that he was expelled based on a false rape accusation.
- Among the 11 claims in the lawsuit, Xavier and its president, Rev. Michael Graham, were accused of sex discrimination, intentional infliction of emotional distress, deliberate indifference, negligence, and libel for injury to the reputation of Wells. The sex discrimination and deliberate indifference claims against Graham were dismissed.
Dive Insight:
This case should shed some light on how universities should proceed when one of their star athletes is accused of rape, which is a disturbingly frequent occurrence. When Wells was expelled in 2012, the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights had two investigations of Xavier going, looking into allegations in another case that the school had allowed a student accused of two rapes to remain on campus.
Wells says he was used as a scapegoat, to show the school’s aggressive response. Xavier says he was kicked out of school for a "serious violation" of the code of student conduct, and that the decision was made by a board of faculty, students and administrators that followed standard procedures for U.S. universities. A grand jury declined to indict Wells, who said he had consensual sex with a student after a game of "truth or dare." The prosecutor in the case had expressed doubts to Graham about the rape accusation and urged him to hold off on disciplining Wells until the investigation was completed. Wells now plays for the University of Maryland.
