Expelled Yale basketball captain to sue school, lawyer says
The saga of the 2015-2016 Yale men's basketball team seems to reach peaks and valleys at the exact same time, over and over again.
The day after the NCAA revealed a slot for Yale in March Madness for the first time in more than 50 years, the team's expelled captain, Jack Montague, announced plans through his lawyer to sue the school for making him "a whipping boy."
The Yale Daily News reports Montague's lawyer, Max Stern, released a statement to local media Monday detailing plans to sue.
"Last week, the media widely reported on statements made by Yale students and posters put up on campus which condemned Jack Montague directly as the named culprit and as a rapist, thus slandering him with this accusation. He was never accused of rape and Yale took no steps to correct these actions. As a result, Mr. Montague has no choice but to correct the record," the statement read.
According to multiple reports, the incident in question involved Montague's relationship with an unnamed female student. According to Stern's statement, a university fact-finding committee found that he had had sexual relations with the woman on four occasions. He was allegedly expelled for what she claimed was unwanted contact during the fourth encounter. Montague has said it was consensual, and his lawyer points to her returning to the room afterward as proof.
The Yale Daily News writes: "A year after the fourth encounter, which occurred in October of 2014, the female student reported the incident to Yale's Title IX coordinator. A Title IX official, not the student, filed a formal complaint within the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct."
Montague believes Yale's actions were "wrong, unfairly determined, arbitrary, and excessive by any rational measure," according to his lawyer, who added: "We believe that it defies logic and common sense that a woman would seek to re-connect and get back into bed with a man who she says forced her to have unwanted sex just hours earlier."
In a statement to the website Jezebel, a Yale spokesperson defended the school's investigation.
"The allegations are investigated by an impartial fact finder, heard by five trained members of the Yale community, and decided by the accused student's dean. Throughout the process, all parties have advisors, which can be legal counsel, and they can appeal a decision," the statement read. "Where cases involve judgments about the witnesses' credibility, all of the available corroborating or contradictory information is carefully weighed to determine who is telling the truth."
After the team wore T-shirts to the Ivy League championship game, with Montague's nickname on the back, posters appeared on campus warning the Bulldogs to "stop supporting a rapist."
"To show support in the most public and provocative way possible, you know it was a nationally televised game. I think that's very, very irresponsible," said Helen Price, the director of Unite Against Sexual Assault Yale.
The team later apologized.