$5.3M defamation settlement thrown out in Clemson sexual misconduct case
Three years ago, a Clemson University student was awarded $5.3 million in a defamation case associated with sexual misconduct accusations. This month, the South Carolina Court of Appeals overturned that decision.
In April 2022, a Pickens County judge awarded the large sum to Andrew Pampu, who had been embroiled in a Title IX case following a sexual encounter with a fellow freshman student at an off-campus fraternity party in October 2015.
The female student had been heavily drinking when she found Pampu in a courtyard and propositioned him with oral sex, according to the court’s June 11 ruling. Pampu observed she was drunk, but the pair eventually had intercourse.
The next day, the woman explained to friends, including Colin Gahagan with whom she had a physical relationship, that she couldn’t remember all the details of the previous night but later told a friend that she thought she had sex with Pampu.
The woman did not initially want to report the incident, according to a legal filing, but a friend told a resident assistant, who in turn reported it to Clemson officials. The university’s Title IX coordinator met with the woman, who cried throughout the entire meeting and did not say “a single word.”
Gahagan later texted the woman that he had heard Pampu’s side of the story, and felt that ‘”[Pampu was] not a criminal[, b]ut he still did make an extreme unforgivable mistake,’” according to the appeals court decision.
The woman eventually filed a formal complaint against Pampu with Clemson’s Office of Community and Ethical Standards.
Clemson’s student discipline process determined that Pampu “should have reasonably known” the woman was unable to give consent because of her level of intoxication. In February 2016, he was suspended from the university for five months. After he appealed, the university president added another year to his suspension. Pampu did not appeal that decision.
But Pampu filed a lawsuit against the university in 2016 for violations of Title IX — the federal law which prohibits sex-based discrimination — and the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. The case was settled in 2019 for an “undisclosed sum and the removal of the disciplinary citation from his transcript,” but the university’s findings that Pampu should have known that the woman couldn’t give consent were upheld.
He filed a second, separate lawsuit in 2017 against the woman, her father and Gahagan, alleging that they sought to “defame, harass, abuse and punish” him following a consensual sexual encounter, though she had said she was too intoxicated to consent. That led to the $5.3 million verdict in April 2022.
But in overturning that verdict, the Court of Appeals noted that Pampu in his first lawsuit had agreed to the university’s findings that he should have reasonably known that the woman was too drunk to give consent. That agreement meant that Pampu couldn’t relitigate the same issue in another lawsuit, the appeals court ruled.
Pampu argued that his defamation claim was based on statements made “outside of the Clemson” disciplinary process. But the court disagreed, according to a legal filing. His complaint specifically contended that the statements he challenged were made within and outside of the Clemson proceedings.
According to court records, Pampu “enjoyed the benefits” of the settlement in the first lawsuit, while pursuing additional litigation over issues that the settlement was meant to resolve.
The court opined that Pampu had the opportunity to seek a full judicial review of his case against Clemson to address any inadequacies of the Title IX process but declined to do so. Instead, he accepted the settlement.
“He cannot now attack the credibility of those proceedings for purposes of pursuing redress ... it is fundamentally unfair to require (the woman, her father and Gahagan) to pay damages to Pampu when he already had an opportunity to mitigate those damages by seeking direct review of the Title IX findings and in fact accepted compensation from Clemson for his damages,” the legal filing read. “Pampu simply cannot have it both ways.”
The appeals court also ruled that because the settlement with Clemson left in place the finding that he should have known the woman was too drunk to give consent, he can’t claim that her statements about what happened defamed him.
The State has reached out to attorneys in the case.
This story was originally published June 19, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
