The Jayhawker Towers on the Kansas University campus are pictured on Thursday, Nov. 9, 2010.

The University of Kansas is wielding a recently dismissed lawsuit in an argument to dismiss a related Title IX suit that’s currently pending against the school.

The university filed a motion Friday in federal court to dismiss the case of Daisy Tackett v. KU, in which the former rowing team member accuses KU of failing to properly handle her report of being raped by a football player in KU’s Jayhawker Towers apartments.

Tackett — along with her parents, another former rower who said she was sexually assaulted by the same football player, and the second rower’s father — had also sued KU in Douglas County District Court under the Kansas Consumer Protection Act, claiming KU falsely represented campus housing as safe. A judge dismissed that suit March 17, saying the plaintiffs lacked standing.

Daisy Tackett

“Plaintiff Daisy Tackett has twice sued the defendant University of Kansas on the basis of the sexual assault she claims occurred in Student Housing,” KU attorneys wrote in the motion to dismiss filed Friday in federal court. “A state court has already dismissed one case on the merits, and Kansas law does not give plaintiff two bites at the apple.”

KU argued that because the federal suit arose from the same sexual assault and involves the same parties, the state court’s judgement bars “duplicative action” under the doctrine of res judicata, meaning a matter already judged.

Attorney Dan Curry represents the plaintiffs in both cases, as well as a Title IX case by the second former rower, Sarah McClure, pending against KU in federal court.

“I do not believe it has merit,” Curry said Friday of KU’s new motion to dismiss Daisy Tackett v. KU. “We will respond to it in due course.”

Regarding the recently dismissed consumer protection case, Curry said that he is appealing the judge’s order to dismiss the case and that the appeal was filed this week.

Title IX is the federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in education, including sexual violence.

Following previous motions to dismiss by KU, a federal judge did dismiss a significant portion of Daisy Tackett v. KU in February.

The remaining arguments are currently scheduled to move forward in court, with a jury trial set for July 2018 in Kansas City, according to court records.

Tackett said the football player raped her in fall 2014, when she was a freshman, and that she reported the incident to KU in fall 2015 after hearing the same man sexually assaulted McClure, too. Tackett did not file a police report; McClure’s police report did not result in criminal charges.

KU’s Office of Institutional Opportunity and Access investigated, found the man responsible for assaulting both women and banned him from campus in mid-spring 2016. Tackett withdrew from KU in early 2016 and first sued KU in March 2016. McClure’s suit, filed under the name Jane Doe 7, followed.

Both women have publicly shared their names.