Third Northwestern football player to file hazing lawsuit
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A third former Northwestern football player plans to file a lawsuit against the school over hazing incidents that took place during the tenure of former coach Pat Fitzgerald. Like the first two lawsuits filed this week, the player in the suit expected to be filed Thursday is unnamed and represented by attorneys Patrick A. Salvi II and Parker Stinar. Listed in the lawsuit as “John Doe 3,” the player was on the Wildcats’ football team from 2018 to 2022. The defendants are Fitzgerald, former Northwestern athletic director Jim Phillips (now commissioner of the ACC), school president Michael Schill, former school president Morton Shapiro, the Northwestern board of trustees and Athletic Director Derrick Gragg.
The allegations in the third lawsuit mirror those in the other two, and the suit is also expected to be filed in Cook County Circuit Court. It claims the player was subjected to hazing and harassment that included sexualized acts and racial discrimination, that Fitzgerald took part in the hazing and harassment as other players watched, and that school leaders were negligent in allowing those incidents to occur.
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In December, Northwestern hired a law firm to investigate a hazing allegation lodged by an unidentified former player at the end of the 2022 season and suspended Fitzgerald for two weeks without pay after releasing an executive summary of the law firm’s findings July 7. The next day, the Daily Northwestern detailed additional allegations of hazing within the program, and the school fired Fitzgerald on July 10.
Fitzgerald said in a statement to ESPN that he had “no knowledge whatsoever of any form of hazing” within the program. He added that he has retained an attorney to “take the necessary steps to protect my rights in accordance with the law.” Fitzgerald’s lawyer, Dan Webb, on Wednesday said in a statement to ESPN that the lawsuits filed and news conferences held this week did not “present any substantive, detailed, factual allegations, let alone evidence, about Coach Fitzgerald’s conduct” and that they “still fail to cite any specific facts or evidence beyond the broad-based statements published in the July 8 article” in the Daily Northwestern.
Three days after Northwestern fired Fitzgerald, the school also fired baseball coach Jim Foster for “engaging in bullying and abusive behavior,” according to a Northwestern human-resources document obtained by the Chicago Tribune.
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On Wednesday, a second legal team headed by civil rights lawyer Ben Crump said it was representing a group of 15 Northwestern athletes — most of them football players but also one female athlete — who allege hazing at the school and plan to file a lawsuit. Former Northwestern quarterback Lloyd Yates, who is Black, said at Crump’s news conference Wednesday that “the abusive culture was especially devastating for many players of color.”
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Source: The Washington Post
