Thursday, May 30, 2002 Updated: June 3, 4:41 PM ET
Legal defense
By by Bruce Feldman
If you think Title IX just has to do with cutting the men's golf team or adding women's soccer to your local college athletic program so it can be gender balanced, think again. Title IX, as a few lawyers know, and many more are about to discover, could encourage dozens, if not hundreds, of silent rape victims to come forward. It also could drain the pocketbooks of universities all across the country.
In a pair of lawsuits involving Division I schools, women who allege they were sexually assaulted by athletes assert that the universities broke the federal Title IX laws by allowing male athletes to run wild, creating a hostile environment for women students.
Kathy Redmond's experiences inspired her to found the National Coalition Against Violent Athletes.
Sometime in the next year, lawsuits brought by female students at UAB and Oklahoma State may have landmark ramifications. Previous Title IX cases (Doe v. Petaluma City School District, Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education) made little news, but the impact of a big-money, big-name institution getting sued could be dramatic. Yolanda Wu, a senior staff attorney with the NOW Legal Defense and Education
Fund, says these cases could have the same impact that the Title VII sexual harassment suits had following a 1986 Supreme Court ruling. "Some big money judgments will make schools take notice," says Wu. "It could be exactly what we saw in the sexual harassment arena in the past decade."
In the UAB case, academic prodigy Brittany Benefield alleges that two years ago, when she was 15, she was sexually assaulted by 26 Blazer football and basketball players, as well as an employee of the UAB Police Dept. and the school's mascot. The Benefields are seeking $80 million in compensatory and punitive damages. On May 29, federal court judge Inge Johnson heard arguments on the university's motion to dismiss. She is expected to give a ruling within the next two weeks. If she dismisses the case, the Benefields lawyers, John Whitaker and Terry Dytrych, plan to take their case up to the 11th Circuit Court.
Whitaker and Dytrych had realized their best recourse was a Title IX lawsuit after they heard the story of Allison Jennings. She is the OSU student who claims she was gang raped in 1999 by four Cowboy football players. Jennings has said a detective tried to coerce her into signing a prosecution waiver while she was being treated at the ICU.
Last spring Jennings was thumbing through a magazine at the dentist's office when she stumbled upon a story about Kathy Redmond. It was her story too. In 1995, Redmond accused Cornhusker football star Christian Peter of raping her four years earlier. Redmond didn't press criminal charges, instead filing a harassment civil suit against the university. She soon realized she was taking on not only the defensive tackle (who had a pattern of physically and sexually abusive behavior) and the school, but essentially the entire football-mad state.
Redmond alleged the university engaged in a pattern of conduct -- including refusing to investigate her allegations of sexual harassment, failure to alleviate the sexual harassment and failing to investigate, counsel or discipline Peter -- creating a hostile environment in violation of Title IX.
The school and Peter both settled with Redmond out of court without admitting culpability. In 1997, Redmond founded the National Coalition Against Violent Athletes "in response to the growing number of violent crimes committed by athletes in all areas of the sports world."
Based in Loveland, Colo., she has become a clearinghouse of sorts for victims, championing a cause she says colleges have been trying to sweep under the rug for far too long. Redmond says she can see a future in which lawyers are practicaly running ads on TV: Have you been raped by an athlete? Call this number. "The lawyers are out there," Redmond says. "They just don't know a lot about this law yet. But the colleges have deep pockets and they are not granted immunity."
