Jack Montague was the captain of the Yale basketball team, but last played on February 6 before he was expelled four days later. He was set to graduate on May 23 of this year.
On Thursday, Montague’s attorney filed a lawsuit against the Ivy League school.
Montague was expelled after a school committee on sexual misconduct found that he had engaged in non-consensual sex with a female student in the fall of 2014.
Montague’s attorney, Max Stern, said he and the female student slept in Montague’s room four times in the fall of 2014. The lawyer said the woman consented to staying in the room and/or having sexual relations with Montague three times. The fourth time they were together they had intercourse, and then the woman left the room and returned sometime later and stayed the night.
She later said that last time was not consensual, though Montague maintains that it was.
According to a statement released with the lawsuit, the victim didn’t want to file a formal complaint against Montague, but spoke to the school’s Title IX committee because she wanted a representative to speak with Montague about the incident.
The lawsuit alleges the school saw the victim’s complaint as “an opportunity” after a scathing report on campus sex assaults specifically called out Yale, and the school promised to address sex assault concerns. It states the representative that the victim approached told her “falsely” that she could not remain anonymous or keep the process informal because Monague had already been the subject of a sexual assault complaint and gotten a warning. That led the victim to file the formal complaint.
But, the lawsuit also said Montague hadn’t been accused of sexual assault before, but instead “immature and offensive conduct” for putting a rolled up paper plate down the front of a girl’s shirt three years earlier. He got training in gender sensitivity after that.
In March, Stern said the decision to expel Montague was “wrong, unfairly determined, arbitrary, and excessive by any rational measure.”
“The expulsion not only deprives Jack of the degree which he was only three months short of earning, but has simultaneously destroyed both his educational and basketball careers,” Stern said.
Earlier this year, Montague’s case was widely talked about on campus: T-shirts were made in support of him and posters made against him.
At least 75 men have sued their schools since 2013, complaining largely of reverse discrimination and unfair disciplinary proceedings. Most of the men were never charged with a crime because the accuser didn’t go to police or authorities decided there wasn’t enough evidence.
