By Robert M. Hoffman
Collegiate sport should always be a “safe space” for women and men, free of hostility, harassment, abuse, and assault from the peers and coaches they trust, yet this is often not the case. For their part, educational institutions must do far more to protect student-athletes from this horrific behavior and treatment, while not continuing to “turn a blind eye” to hostile and dangerous athletic environments. At Canisius College, a small Jesuit college in Buffalo, New York, three student-athletes on the women’s cross-country/track-and-field team were allegedly sexually assaulted by a member of the men’s team from 2016 to 2018 (Crawford, 2022). These women were also purportedly subjected to a pattern of discriminatory behavior, abuse, and harassment, including being forced to share beds with other female team members, targeted for verbal beratement and repetition of drills, accused of damaging the team through the homosexual relationship of two of these athletes, and compelled to attend parties providing alcohol and marijuana, either directly or through the hostile environment cultivated by head coach Nathan Huckle and athletic director William Maher. Once the athletes reported these allegations, they claimed retaliation and harassment, citing season-ending meetings with Huckle that pressured them to resign and being forced to do the laundry of other athletic teams as part of a post-resignation service agreement to retain their scholarships.
Proof of a hostile environment and retaliation in a court of law is not as straightforward as convincing the public that these two offenses occurred (the allegations of sexual assault are not addressed in this analysis). In JD1 v. Canisius College (2022), the court considered a motion to dismiss the plaintiffs’ claims of a hostile environment and retaliation. This court was not charged with judging the defendants’ guilt of any charges or assessing any injunctive relief or punitive damages. The only issue for the court to resolve here was whether the plaintiff’s claims could continue to a later trial. As a result, any path to proving that a plaintiff’s right to a safe and supportive environment was violated is a long and arduous one. In exploring the JD1 court’s findings, this article seeks to take the first step on that path by clarifying the standards of a hostile environment and retaliation in a collegiate athletic environment.
Background
In JD1 v. Canisius College (2022),three former student-athletes filed a civil lawsuit against Canisius College, the school’s cross-country/track-and-field head coach Nathan Huckle, athletic director William Maher, and student-athlete Donovan Glavin.
“Plaintiffs alleged that Defendants Canisius, Huckle, and Maher ‘directed, controlled, managed, and conducted’ the Canisius College Cross-Country/Track and Field Team in a manner which was hostile and discriminatory toward women and lesbians, and which fostered, promoted, and condoned harassment, abuse and even sexual assault against women and lesbians” (Crawford, 2022, para. 1).
The lawsuit also included allegations of sexual assault of all three Plaintiffs by Defendant Glavin, as well as claims of retaliation by Canisius, Huckle, and Maher after the plaintiffs reported the alleged conduct.
Rule 12(b)(6) requires plausibility
In response to the lawsuit, the college defendants presented a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to challenge most of the claims asserted in the plaintiffs’ complaint (JD1, 2022). This is significant because in a Rule 12(b)(6) motion, the court must determine whether a claim is valid and sufficient not to dismiss. “In order to be found sufficient, a pleading must put forth sufficient facts to suggest that a cause of action is legally plausible” (Bell Atl. Crop v. Twombly, as cited by Crawford, 2022, para. 28). Essentially, the court must decide whether the claim is not only theoretically possible, but also whether there is some credibility or evidence to support the claim. While this standard seems straightforward, the plaintiffs’ actions of modifying and withdrawing some of their claims in response to the defendants’ motion in this case suggest otherwise. In reviewing the JD1 court’s decisions on hostile environment and retaliation claims, it should be noted that without plausibility, the claim must be dismissed regardless of other factors.
Hostile Environment
In reviewing count-one of the lawsuit, the JD1 court determined that the assertion of a hostile environment was a Title IX claim, even though this type of allegation is traditionally judged based on Title VII law. This was a pivotal decision, since Canisius had presented a motion to dismiss the hostile environment claim under Title VII. The court then rejected Canisius’s argument that the claim was based on a one-time incident that occurred after the plaintiffs had resigned from the team. Instead, the court reached its determination based on the alleged behavior that occurred before the plaintiffs departure (i.e., Huckle’s mocking of the plaintiffs, his expectation that female athletes attend team parties, his alleged instruction to not mention Chavin’s conduct to incoming freshman, and his chasing after and screaming at JD2), which must be considered as part of a plausible Title IX hostile environment claim. Operating under the assumption of Title VII jurisprudence, Canisius provided no argument in response to this pattern of behavior, and the court declined to dismiss the hostile environment claim.
Retaliation
The jurisprudence governing retaliation is arguably more complex than the distinction between Title VII and Title IX hostile environment claims. The JD1 (2022)court dismissed Count 11 against the defendants Huckle and Maher, while considering the plausibility of Count 11 against Canisius College. Under Title IX lawsuits, only colleges or universities receiving federal funds can be found liable (Liability under Title IX, 2022), which explains why the claims against the individual defendants were dismissed.
Canisius did not seek dismissal of JD1 and JD2’s retaliation claims, but they did argue for the removal of JD3’s claim (JD1 v Canisius. 2022). To claim retaliation under Title IX, a plaintiff must first demonstrate: protected activity by the plaintiff; knowledge by the defendant(s) of the protected activity; adverse school-related action; and a connection between the protected activity and the adverse action (Castro v. Yale University as cited by Crawford, 2022). Although protected activity is meant to be an encompassing standard, JD3’s original complaint did not include allegations that would be described as protected activity. Only through a proposed amended complaint did the JD1 Court (2022) identify two actions that it considered as protected activity: (a) an email sent by JD3 to the Canisius athletic department indicating her resignation from the team due to sexual assault and other inappropriate actions of the defendants; and (b) a meeting with Deputy Title IX Coordinator Connie Pileri. As such, the court ruled against the dismissal of JD3’s retaliation claim. However, the court left the door open for a future dismissal by questioning whether the two protected activities caused an adverse school-related action.
While the JD1 court (2022) determined that a Title IX hostile environment claim and the retaliation claims of all three plaintiffs against Canisius College were plausible and therefore worthy of further action, the process of bringing these claims to trial is complicated. To justify the claim of a Title IX hostile environment, the plaintiffs had to show a clear pattern of behavior instead of a single incident. Note that had the defendants addressed and countered this pattern of behavior before the plaintiffs resigned from the team, the hostile environment claim might have been dismissed. While the retaliation claim of JD3 has been upheld for now, due to her actions considered as protected activity, it is unclear whether this claim will hold up in the future depending on whether the protected activity caused the school to act in a retaliatory manner.
Overall, the difficult path of pursuing hostile environment and retaliation claims raises the question of why successful litigation against violations are so complicated if Title IX legislation is supposed to protect the rights of student-athletes.
References
Crawford, G. W. (2022, June 27). JD1 v. Canisius College: Case no. 1:21-cv-52. Leagle. Retrieved September 3, 2022, from https://www.leagle.com/decision/infdco20220629934.
JD1 v. Canisius College, 1:21-cv-52. (U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York, 2022).
Liability Under Title IX: Parties and Standards. (2022). FindLaw. Retrieved September 3, 2022, from https://www.findlaw.com/education/discrimination-harassment-at-school/liability-under-title-ix-parties-and-standards.html.
Robert M. Hoffman is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Communication, Arts, & Sciences at Penn State University – Abington, and a Sport Management doctoral student at Troy University, specializing in research related to communication and sport and athlete image repair. He lives in Warrington, PA.
