Daisy Tackett

Former Kansas University rower Daisy Tackett has added a couple of new allegations to her lawsuit against KU, in which she said a football player raped her in Jayhawker Towers and that KU failed to comply with Title IX after she reported the incident. Specifically the new accusations take aim at the KU rowing coach and his “history of Title IX gender discrimination.”

Title IX is the federal law prohibiting gender-based discrimination in education, including sexual harassment and sexual violence. Tackett, in her suit, says KU took too long to investigate her rape report and allowed her attacker to intimidate her on campus and her rowing coach to retaliate against her after she reported, in October 2015, about a year after the incident occurred (and about the same time fellow KU rower Sarah McClure — who also has since sued KU under the name Jane Doe 7 — reported to KU that the same football player had raped her).

Tackett’s new filing says KU knew that rowing coach Rob Catloth systematically denied her opportunities to participate on the rowing team after she reported her rape, and that KU knew of Catloth’s prior gender-based discrimination against female rowers, specifically inappropriately calling them “fat.” On Friday, Tackett filed amendments to her original complaint saying that:

• KU officials had actual knowledge
that, prior to October 2015, KU
medical staff had attempted to
implement a policy requiring Coach
Catloth to refer female rowing teams
members to a nutritionist if he viewed
their weight as a performance issue,
instead of calling them “fat.”

• KU officials had actual knowledge
that Coach Catloth was not abiding by
the policy.

• KU officials, including Debbie Van
Saun, the administrator who was
supposed to have the duty to monitor
Title IX compliance and gender equity,
chose not to make Coach Catloth comply
with the policy.

KU has moved to dismiss the lawsuit, saying that university isn’t liable unless it’s aware of ongoing peer-on-peer sexual harassment and remains “deliberately indifferent” to it. KU investigated and ultimately expelled the football player.

In addition to the amendments Tackett filed Friday, she also responded to KU’s motion to dismiss. Tackett, who withdrew from KU early in the spring 2016 semester before the football player was expelled, says the harassment she experienced was “severe and offensive” enough to deprive her of her educational opportunity.

“This is not a quibble with the punishment KU ultimately agreed to dole out to this KU football player (after permitting him to finish out the football season); it is a critique of KU’s failure to implement specific available options to protect Daisy Tackett on campus and indeed the other women forced to bear the cost of KU’s deliberate indifference,” wrote her attorneys, Sarah Brown and Dan Curry of Brown and Curry LLC in Kansas City, Mo.

KU is expected to file another response later this summer, before the court rules on whether to dismiss or proceed with the lawsuit, according to federal court records.

• In K-State Title IX lawsuit news: The federal government, in “statement of interest” documents filed Friday, has come down hard against K-State’s argument that it’s not responsible for investigating student-on-student rape at off-campus fraternity houses. (Two women have sued K-State, both saying they were raped at fraternities but that K-State refused to investigate their reports.)

The New York Times has a full story here. I read the filing in the Weckhorst case, and it’s quite clear that the authors — including U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division attorneys and U.S. Department of Education attorneys — think K-State was in the wrong by claiming the fraternity houses are outside its jurisdiction for sexual violence investigations. They spend nearly 40 pages explaining why.

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• I’m the Journal-World’s KU and higher ed reporter. See all the newspaper’s KU coverage here. Reach me by email at sshepherd@ljworld.com, by phone at 832-7187, on Twitter @saramarieshep or via Facebook at Facebook.com/SaraShepherdNews.