This year’s contentious presidential race is truly popping up everywhere. Republican nominee Donald Trump’s name has even just showed up in a court case involving the University of Kansas.

Reading through court documents for my story on the KU football player who transferred to another team after being kicked out of KU for sexual assault, which ran in Sunday’s paper, I came across a particularly au courant passage.

For context, the document was KU’s latest reply filed in the case of Daisy Tackett v. KU, an ongoing federal Title IX suit in which Tackett, a former KU student and rower, alleged KU failed to properly investigate and adjudicate her report of being raped by the football player.

Specifically, KU attorney Megan Walawender is responding to an accusation that KU officials knew allowing football players to live in Jayhawker Towers endangered women because, among other examples, the university’s Sexual Assault Task Force co-chairwoman stated, “if you look statistically across the nation on average for each assault reported, eight go unreported.”

Walawender, in the reply, calls that an “inferential leap” because the statement referenced a national, not a local, statistic. Further, she writes, sexual harassment and assault is a societal issue that impacts victims of all ages “and does not diminish after leaving college. See, e.g., Donald Trump Fends Off New Sexual Misconduct Claims at (link) (last visited 10/19/2016) (to date, nine women have accused presidential candidate of sexual assault).”

This is a singular sentence rebutting one of countless points brought up in hundreds of pages of back-and-forth filings in the lawsuit so far. This case is definitely not going to hinge on “The Donald” — but as I said, with two weeks until Election Day there’s almost nowhere you can escape reference to this year’s exceptionally heated race for president, not even the bog of federal and higher education policy and case law that is this local Title IX lawsuit.

More KU news:

• No crime blotter today: Normally I post the weekly KU Crime Blotter on Monday or Tuesday, but incidents from the past week aren’t currently available on the Crime Reports website. Deputy Chief James Anguiano of KU police said they’d check into it to see what the problem is.

• American Indian cultural appropriation season: Between Halloween costumes and the Cleveland Indians playing in the World Series, people are sure to see a number of American Indian caricatures in coming weeks. A panel discussion at KU is going to talk about that. “‘I’m Just Honoring Your Culture!’ The Complicated – and Continued – History of Appropriation of Native Culture” discussion is set for 7 p.m. today (Tuesday) at Spooner Hall. It’s free and open to the public.

Speakers include Charlene Teters, artist, academic dean of the Institute of American Indian Arts and founding board member of the Nation­al Coalition on Racism in Sports and the Media; KU visual art associate professor Norman Akers; KU professor of American studies and English Robert Warrior; and Haskell Indian Nations University English faculty member Joshua Falleaf.

• “Queering Engagement” talk: Also tonight, on another timely topic, the Emily Taylor Center for Women & Gender Equity’s Jana Mackey Distinguished Lecture Series will feature a talk by Connie Burk. “Queering Engagement: A Kansas Activist Comes Home” is set for 7 p.m. in Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union. Burk, a KU alumna, is an advocate and activist currently directing the NW Network for Bisexual, Trans, Lesbian and Gay Survivors of Abuse, or the NW Network, in Seattle.

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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.