photo by: Ashley Golledge

This Journal-World file photo from 2020 shows Green Hall, 1535 W. 15th St., home to the University of Kansas School of Law.

A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit by a woman against the City of Lawrence and the police, finding its claims without merit.

The woman had been charged in Douglas County with filing a false rape report. Even though the criminal case against her was dropped, she filed the civil lawsuit, with former Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez saying she would be a witness for the woman against the local government entities.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court of Kansas in October 2020, named the City of Lawrence, multiple Lawrence police officers and the University of Kansas as having caused the woman emotional distress, embarrassment, lost educational opportunities, and expenses for medical and psychological treatment, as the Journal-World reported.

The lawsuit was in response to the woman having been charged by former DA Charles Branson’s office with making a false report after she told police that a fellow law school student at KU had raped her in 2018. However, text messages exchanged by the woman with her friends, cited in court documents, suggested that the sex was consensual and that the rape report was retaliatory. Police accused the woman of making a false report, and prosecutors agreed, though they later dropped the case against her.

The woman had alleged in her suit that the city and the Lawrence Police Department failed to adequately train officers and failed to conduct a thorough investigation. She also alleged that KU had failed to investigate her reports of ongoing harassment by the alleged perpetrator and that, instead, the university had subjected her to a student conduct hearing, at which she risked expulsion.

The court in May of 2022 dismissed the woman’s claims against KU saying her claim that KU violated her Title IX rights by creating a hostile environment and retaliating against her were without merit.

The rest of the suit was dismissed Jan. 13 in its entirety after the court determined the police involved in the case have qualified immunity and that there was no evidence that the woman was discriminated against. The court also found that the investigators directly involved with the case did not intentionally inflict emotional harm on the woman.

In her claim against state prosecutors for malicious prosecution, the court determined that probable cause had been found to charge the woman with making a false report after a two-day preliminary hearing in Douglas County District Court.

Valdez, who used to be employed by KU’s law school before resigning after a dispute with its administration, was named as a corroborating witness in the woman’s lawsuit. Valdez had been critical of how the university handled investigations of sexual assault, and she said the fact that she was a corroborating witness in the lawsuit may have contributed to KU retaliating against her professionally — a claim the university denied.