Jury verdict in a Title IX case against Thomas Jefferson University: $15 million for the accused man.
An expelled male student wins his life back focusing on what the school did to him, not on what happened between the expelled man and the likely female student who accused him of sexual assault. Simply put, only schools violate Title IX with gender biased investigations, which also cause gender biased adjudications. Whether to sue the woman complainant is a tough question mostly of defamation, not of Title IX.
The trend, for years, has been and still is that the school believes the woman first, and tends to conduct an investigation that fails to believe the man, so by the time the adjudication comes along, during the disciplinary hearing, the man faces a story that defames him, and practically guarantees the hearing officer or panel will find him responsible.
The data on these disciplinary events shows a harsh disparity where the man is punished in ways that end or harm his career forever, while the woman is treated in ways that benefit her only. That is certainly our experience with schools that investigate and expel based on Title IX compliant policies and codes of conduct. From our perspective, the school’s Title IX administrators care very little about fairness to the male respondent because they risk very little.
However, little by little, the trend is changing. Yesterday, the news out of Philadelphia rocked the Title IX world:
A federal jury found that Thomas Jefferson University (TJU) had treated a man who worked there, John Abraham, badly, with bias because he is that, a man, while treating the woman who accused him of sexual assault, then TJU student Jessica Phillips better, because she is that, a woman.
As a result, the jury has now ordered TJU to pay a total of $15 million dollars to the man the jury found was discriminated against, John Abraham. The jury did this because it must have seen how TJU destroyed Abraham’s career while acting with bias against him because he is a man who faced a horrid accusation from Phillips which he not only denied, but actually claimed was the other way around.
Importantly, nothing in the jury’s verdict that TJU treated Abraham with male bias affects Phillips at all. That is Phillips does not have to pay a cent to Abraham. Only TJU pays. And this makes sense because only schools violate Title IX which is the law that Abraham used to sue TJU. The verdict also reflects Abraham’s high income. His lawyers established Abraham’s financial loss at a very high $11 million. But the jury went well beyond and awarded $4 million in punitive damages that do not reflect Abraham’s income loss, but rather the outrage in TJU’s conduct of the Title IX investigation.
Beyond that powerful statement that schools will be held accountable, in this rare occasion of a Title IX jury trial, we find the best, and most recent Court statement on what is a Title IX dispute:
“As a Title IX case, the issue is whether there was gender bias or discrimination on the part of Jefferson in conducting its investigation. There is an extensive report of 61 single-spaced pages provided by the law firm retained by Jefferson to conduct the Title IX investigation (“the Report”), which Plaintiff alleges was biased against him because of his gender, and resulted in the termination of his relationships with Jefferson, the circumstances of which are also in great dispute.”
Case 2:20-cv-02967-MMB Document 112, page 2.
Judge Baylson’s remarkable, path setting, in limine ruling fundamentally defining Title IX claims as what the school does and how, not what the students say happened, can be found here:
Here’s what the Volokh Conspiracy said on this remarkable turn of events for any man responding to sexual assault in an academic institution: