The Volokh Conspiracy
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Unsealed Title IX Complaint Against Columbia Now Available
I wrote in September about this case, Doe v. Columbia Univ. (S.D.N.Y.); as Judge Dale Ho wrote there,
[T]hese cases concern allegations of sexual assault and that the events in question occurred from 2012 to 2014 or 2015, around the time that Plaintiff was an undergraduate student at Columbia University…. Plaintiff … filed identical letters seeking to proceed pseudonymously in each case …. In his letter motions seeking pseudonymous status, Plaintiff noted that his "Complaint includes sensitive health information regarding a sexual assault, and medical and psychiatric treatment for these assaults, which could have deleterious consequences if this information became public record." Plaintiff did not request that the Complaints be sealed altogether, but the Clerk of Court, as a precaution given Plaintiff's motions to proceed under a pseudonym, limited electronic docket access to Plaintiffs' Complaints to "court users and case participants." …
I moved to intervene and unseal the Complaint "with any necessary redactions of various people's personally identifying information" (but didn't oppose pseudonymity), and the court agreed. That unsealed redacted Complaint has now been filed, and it is here; there's a lot going on there, but plaintiff (a gay black man) is alleging both that he was wrongly disciplined for alleged sexual misconduct and that Columbia failed to take seriously his own claims against two other students. More generally, he's claiming race discrimination, sexual orientation discrimination, antigay harassment, breach of contract, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
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