While a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Isabelle Arana was sexually assaulted by a star member of the University’s football team. The University, through its own disciplinary process, determined Isabelle’s report was true and expelled the football player. But when he was criminally tried for the same assault and acquitted — a proceeding that used a different definition of sexual assault and higher standard of evidence — the University came under significant pressure from the public and its donors and readmitted him in time for the upcoming football season. Isabelle filed a Title IX suit, alleging that the University acted under public pressure and without considering her safety and impact on her education.
Last year, a panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit decided in Isabelle’s favor, holding that a jury could find that the university had behaved “clearly unreasonably.” Today, a majority of the federal appeals court reversed, holding that no jury could find the University’s response to Isabelle’s sexual was “clearly unreasonable.”
“As explained by the dissenting judges, the majority reached its conclusion by ‘skewing the facts in the University’s favor’ and insisting that it ‘isn’t significant’ that the University’s president may have lied about why she readmitted the football player who sexually assaulted Isabelle,” said Adele Kimmel, Students’ Civil Rights Project Director at Public Justice and co-counsel for Isabelle Arana. “Not only does this deprive Isabelle of having a jury hear her case but it may also make it harder for other sexual assault survivors to try to hold their schools accountable for failing to take appropriate steps to ensure their safety at school.”
“Isabelle was already violated, and now her agency, her options to pursue justice, and her ability to have her case heard by a jury has been stripped away further,” said co-lead trial counsel John Clune and Christopher Ford of Colorado’s Hutchinson, Black and Cook, LLC. “This decision is the latest example of survivors being harmed by hurdles in our legal system.”