Dive Brief:

• The University of Minnesota discriminated against a former women’s golf coach because of her sexual orientation, a judge has ruled.
• The university must pay $359,588 plus attorney’s fees to the coach — double her back pay, plus compensation for mental anguish.
• The associate coach’s boss made her working environment intolerable, and the coach was “demeaned, belittled and prevented from performing the job” that she had been hired for, the judge ruled.

Dive Insight:

Not a good PR day for the University of Minnesota. Former associate coach Kathryn Brenny, a lesbian, was essentially forced to resign after less than two months on the job in 2010. Her boss, John Harris, resigned as head of the school's golf program in 2011, five months after she sued. Other university officials consistently deferred to Harris, allowing his conduct against Brenny, according to Hennepin County District Judge Thomas Sipkins. The school not only discriminated against the coach, but also destroyed text messages and other data from the cell phone it had issued to Harris, which could have been evidence in the case.