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Woman drops lawsuit that alleged Grinnell College mishandled rape complaint • Iowa Capital Dispatch [1]
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Date: 2025-08-05
A former Grinnell College student has agreed to drop her lawsuit against the school for its alleged handling of her claim that she was raped by a student athlete who was the son of a major donor.
Court records indicate attorneys for the student, who is identified only as Jane Doe, have filed a notice of “stipulated dismissal” in the case. The phrase “stipulated dismissal” typically refers to a formal, written agreement between all parties in a lawsuit documenting the particulars of an out-of-court settlement.
Mattia Wells, Grinnell’s director of strategic communications and media relations, said Tuesday the school has a policy not commenting on litigation, current or otherwise, and also has a policy that prohibits disclosure of any settlement agreements.
Doe was a student at Grinnell College from September 2018 until May 2022. Doe alleges that on April 20, 2019, she was violently raped in her dorm room on the Grinnell campus by a Grinnell student athlete and the son of a major Grinnell donor. Doe claims her attacker, who is not identified in the lawsuit by name, used extreme physical force and violently knocked her head into a bookshelf, toppling it.
About two weeks later, Doe alleges, she was assaulted by the same individual who pinched her and poured a drink on her at an off-campus party.
In her lawsuit, filed in October 2023 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa, Doe claimed she sought treatment for sexual trauma through Grinnell’s student health program, sought assistance from Grinnell’s administration, and ultimately filed a formal sexual-assault complaint through Grinnell’s Title IX program.
Only after she retained legal counsel and demanded that a Title IX action be initiated against the alleged perpetrator did Grinnell take any action, the lawsuit claimed. Even then, the adjudication of the Title IX action took more than a year and resulted in what the lawsuit calls a “superficial sanction” against the alleged perpetrator days before his graduation in 2022.
The school denied the allegations in court. At the time, Wells said Grinnell had “robust policies, procedures, and resources in place addressing all aspects of the Title IX process.”
In May of last year, the court found that portions of Jane Doe’s Title IX claims were barred due to Title IX’s two-year statute of limitations. However, the court allowed other legal claims made by Doe to proceed.
Doe claimed that in the wake of the assault, her mental health deteriorated to a critical level and she constantly felt unsafe on Grinnell’s campus. In January 2020, during a period of suicidal ideation, she contacted Grinnell Student Health and the office of the college nurse to inform them of an urgent need for a sexual-trauma therapist, according to the lawsuit.
The college nurse allegedly referred Doe to the school’s mental health counselor, Erik Kohl, who immediately recognized the seriousness of Doe’s mental health issues and ultimately diagnosed Doe with post-traumatic stress disorder due to sexual trauma, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleged that a short time later, amidst the growing national “MeToo” movement, an anonymous Instagram account was established with the handle @MeTooGrinnell. By August of 2020, the account contained approximately 120 posts from students who claimed they had been victims of sexual assault or rape on campus. Through those posts, Doe’s family concluded that Doe’s alleged rapist “had engaged in an ongoing pattern of rape and sexual assault on Grinnell’s campus,” the lawsuit claimed.
Doe’s father then contacted Grinnell’s president, Anne Harris, to alert her to the allegations. According to the lawsuit, Harris notified the family of Title IX protections that were available for students at Grinnell and referred the family to Bailey Asberry, the school’s Title IX coordinator. Asberry allegedly discouraged Doe from formally reporting the sexual assault and referred Doe to the school’s dean of religious life who, in turn, referred Doe back to Asberry, according to the lawsuit.
Lawsuit: School proposed mediation with alleged attacker
The lawsuit claims Asberry told Doe the only way for the school to respond to the allegation against the perpetrator was if she filed a formal complaint — a step Doe was reluctant to take for fear of retaliation and retribution. At that point, the lawsuit claims, Asberry “made the highly inappropriate and unfathomable suggestion that (Doe) sit down with the perpetrator ‘face-to-face’ to ‘mediate’ her violent rape and sexual assault with the perpetrator.”
After Doe demanded the school pursue a formal investigation, Asberry allegedly informed her the incidents she had described were “not severe enough” and would not be investigated by Grinnell, the lawsuit claimed.
Eventually, a Grinnell investigator conducted 11 interviews of six people, and concluded his investigation on Aug. 25, 2021. His preliminary report was “riddled with factual errors, misstatements of the applicable policy provisions, and obvious instances of gender bias,” the lawsuit claimed.
At a Title IX hearing, an adjudicator found the accused student to be responsible for “sexual assault, non-consensual sexual intercourse” and for “sexual assault, non-consensual sexual contact.” Grinnell then imposed sanctions against the alleged perpetrator that the lawsuit describes as “wildly inappropriate and ineffective.”
The school placed the alleged perpetrator on probation for the remainder of his attendance at Grinnell, a period of 23 days; imposed a no-contact order; barred him from participating in graduation if Doe chose to attend; and barred him from participating in future alumni events attended by Doe.
The lawsuit accused Grinnell College of deliberate indifference to sexual abuse, creation of a hostile educational environment, failure to prevent retaliation, retaliation by withholding protections conferred by Title IX, gender bias, discrimination on the basis of gender, violations of constitutional rights, and breach of contract.
In 2015, Grinnell College was investigated by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in response to complaints filed by six students. The complaints alleged the school failed to impose adequate consequences for students accused of sexual assault, that administrators improperly revealed the identity of a victim, and that one student faced retaliation for their views on Grinnell’s handling of sexual assaults on campus.
In 2017, the Office for Civil Rights notified Grinnell the case had been administratively closed with a determination that there were no active “systemic issues” that warranted a continuation of the investigation.
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