KU grad student says she suffered retaliation after reporting sexual misconduct
A University of Kansas doctoral student alleges in a new lawsuit that a professor disparaged and treated her unfairly after she accused one of his other grad students of sexual misconduct, which led to that man’s expulsion.
In the suit filed Friday in federal court, the woman accuses KU of violating her civil rights under Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools that receive federal tax dollars. She requests more than $100,000 in damages plus legal fees.
The woman joined KU’s bio-mechanics labs in the mechanical engineering department on the Lawrence campus as a graduate research assistant in 2011. That year she began dating another student in the lab who was her “quasi supervisor.”
Over time he became physically and mentally abusive, she says in the lawsuit, threatening to kill her once and threatening to kill himself another time and blame her for it in his suicide note.
She broke off the relationship in August 2016 after a series of incidents, including one where he broke into her home and was charged with trespassing, the suit said. That next month, she filed a complaint against him with the university, because she was fearful of him and suffered from panic attacks.
The woman is not being named because The Star generally does not identify victims of sexual assault without their permission.
Based on the evidence turned up in an investigation and presented at a hearing, the male grad student was expelled for three years and banned from campus. The suit says he was represented at the hearing by associate professor Lorin Maletsky, who was a teacher and adviser to both the male student and the woman.
After she filed the complaint but before the hearing, Maletsky had urged her to take a leave of absence so that her former partner could finish his degree, she says in the suit. She chose to continue her studies instead.
After the man was expelled in October 2016, the woman alleges that Maletsky retaliated by saddling her with work, shutting her out of meetings and “repeatedly made negative and harassing statements toward” her. She claims that the university was aware of but did nothing to protect her from that treatment.
As a result, she alleges, her research was impeded and the university has denied her request for unspecified “accommodations for the oral defense of her doctoral dissertation.”
The university has not yet filed a written response to the allegations in this case, but denied wrongdoing in a case the woman filed in 2018 in Douglas County District Court against KU, Maletsky, vice provost Tammara Durham and the student who was expelled.
Those other defendants also denied the allegation. A judge dismissed that suit in November for lack of subject matter jurisdiction as it concerned matters of federal and not state law.
A university spokeswoman did not immediately return requests for comment Monday, but KU does not as a matter of policy discuss pending litigation.
This story was originally published February 9, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
