Cases & Developments

Opinion Granting in Part Defendants’ Motion. Plaintiff, a male student at the University of Maryland, brought a Title IX reverse discrimination and retaliation claim against the university following a months-long public campaign by a female student “to brand [plaintiff] as a rapist” and remove him from the Club Lacrosse team after a university disciplinary process found plaintiff not responsible for sexually assaulting her. The court denied the university’s motion for summary judgment on plaintiff’s Title IX sex discrimination claim, finding there was sufficient evidence for a jury to conclude (1) the persistent public pronouncements that plaintiff is a “rapist,” a “sexual predator” and “dangerous to girls on campus,” constituted harassment “on the basis of [plaintiff’s] sex”; (2) the removal of plaintiff from the Club Lacrosse team amounted to a deprivation of an education benefit; and (3) that the university was deliberately indifferent when it failed to respond to plaintiff’s second complaint to the university and summarily dismissed it a month later. However, on plaintiff’s Title IX retaliation claim, the court granted summary judgment in favor of the university, finding that plaintiff’s “mere participation as the accused in a Title IX process” was insufficient to constitute Title IX protected activity, and even if it did, there was no evidence that “the hostility [plaintiff] later faced was because of that participation.”