Jury decides if CCU was fair in ruling against football player in date rape case

A jury on Monday found for Coastal Carolina University and against a former football player who claimed that he was a victim of gender discrimination in a disciplinary process in a date rape case that resulted in his expulsion from the university.

The verdict in favor of the Horry County state-funded public university came on the fourth day of a civil trial that started last Wednesday in federal court in Florence, according to federal court records.

The 10-person jury was out less than two hours.

The specific question before the jury was: “Did the plaintiff prove by a preponderance of the evidence CCU intentionally deprived him of educational opportunities or benefits because of his gender?”

Had the jury found that the plaintiff, identified in court records only as “John Doe,” proved his case, jurors would then have determined the amount of damages to award him.

Coastal Carolina had no immediate reaction. The university has some 10,000 students and is about 10 miles west of Myrtle Beach.

A key issue before the jury involved how Coastal handled a date rape allegation against the football player that had been brought by a university cheerleader with whom he had a relationship.

In a first hearing, a five-person faculty panel ruled unanimously that there had been no date rape. The Conway police department investigated the case but didn’t find enough evidence to charge the football player with a crime.

But in an unusual rehearing of the matter, a new disciplinary panel several months later, , prompted by the cheerleader’s appeal, reversed the first panel and found against the football player, who was then formally expelled.

By then, the football player had transferred to Clemson and was working out with that university’s football team in the spring of 2017.

When Clemson coach Dabo Swinney learned that “John Doe” had been expelled from Coastal Carolina, he prohibited the football player from working out with the team, according to records in the case.

The football player contended that because of Coastal’s allegedly unfair disciplinary process — a process he said was tilted against him because he was a male — he had been deprived of a full-tuition scholarship at Coastal and also lost a “full tuition athletic football scholarship for the 2017-2020 Coastal football seasons and academic years.” He also claimed he would not be able to transfer to an NCAA Division I college football program, either as a walk-on or as someone seeking a full or partial athletic scholarship, his lawsuit said.

Coastal denied the allegations.

Coastal had asked U.S. District Judge Sherri Lydon to throw out the football player’s case, but Lydon said Coastal’s disciplinary process — involving the second panel’s reversal of the first panel’s decision — was a matter for a jury to consider. Lydon called the reversal “perplexing” because there had been no new evidence.

It is possible that in this case Coastal was “unusually generous towards the female appellant,” Lydon wrote. “The Court finds that Plaintiff has put forward evidence that would allow a reasonable jury to doubt the outcome of his disciplinary proceeding and find a causal connection between the erroneous outcome and gender bias.”

The case was unusual in that it offered a look at the secretive process of how universities handle student date rape allegations. In court records the player is called John Doe because he contends he is a victim in a case that resulted in his unfair expulsion from college for a crime he says he did not commit. The State is not naming the football player because he was never charged with a crime.

“We knew we had a high hurdle to prove gender discrimination, but we felt we had a good case,” said one of the football player’s attorneys, Clarence Davis, who tried the case with attorney Jim Griffin. Both are from Columbia.

The lawsuit was brought as a Title IX case, a federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational program offered by an institution receiving federal financial assistance.

Coastal “receives tens of millions of dollars in federal funding for research and development, as well as student financial aid,” John Doe’s lawsuit says.

Coastal’s attorneys included James Gilliam and Hunter Freeman, both of Greenville.

This story was originally published March 15, 2021 at 4:42 PM.