While the sex scandal at Penn State has become the gold standard when it comes to the truly horrifying, a lawsuit filed last Friday against the University of Notre Dame may come close to reaching that dubious milestone. According to the lawsuit, an academic coach allegedly coerced young male athletes on campus to have sex with her daughter.
It only gets more bizarre from there.
What’s brewing at Notre Dame is nothing short of bizarre. According to the lawsuit, the fulcrum in this case is a middle-aged white woman who tutored basketball and football students. She is alleged to have coerced the players she tutored into having sexual intercourse with her daughter, who is a student at a nearby school and works on the Notre Dame campus. On top of the coercion, the academic coach is further alleged to have provided condoms, transportation, and hotel rooms for the hookups she orchestrated between the players and her daughter.
What’s even more insane about this allegation is, according to the lawsuit, the academic coach routinely targeted African-American players. The lawsuit describes her behavior as “racially motivated,” especially considering that after the student filing the lawsuit had sex with her daughter, the academic coach praised him with “racially-charged comments about his sexual prowess and genitalia.”
It doesn’t stop there.
The lawsuit further alleges that the academic coach wasn’t the only person coercing the student, but that she had also brought in a member of Notre Dame’s psychiatric support staff to “medicate” the student as a means “to keep him passive, cooperative, and under control,” so as to not expose the academic tutor or her alleged diabolical scheme afterward.
And just because there’s just not quite enough crazy to this story, the academic tutor is alleged to have tried to convert the student to Catholicism.
Just… wow.
According to an internal report acquired by The New York Daily News, the University of Notre Dame has terminated the academic tutor on grounds that she violated the school’s harassment policy. However, the university is denying every accusation in the lawsuit, calling the lawsuit “unfounded” and a mere publicity stunt, according to university spokesman Paul Brown.
“The allegations against the University of Notre Dame in the complaint are unfounded, as are gratuitous and unfounded references to ‘student athletes’ — an allegation that is nothing more than a cynical attempt to attract publicity.”
According to Peter J. Agostino, the university has been fostering a “sexually abusive and hostile work environment.” The student who filed the lawsuit has said he brought the situation to Notre Dame officials two weeks ago, but the university has “failed to act to remedy the situation.”
There’s bound to be more to develop with this story. When it comes to sex scandals at American universities, there usually is.
Featured image by Know1One1, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
