Former Wisconsin wide receiver Quintez Cephus said in an open lawsuit against the university on Tuesday that he was used as a scapegoat during a sexual assault investigation that resulted in his temporary expulsion.
Cephus seeks unspecified damages in his federal court action in Madison, accusing the defendants of violating their rights to due process, violating Title IX provisions and breach of contract.
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Cephus was suspended from the Badgers football team in August 2018 and expelled from the University of Wisconsin-Madison for violating his non-academic code of misconduct as part of a Title IX investigation following his arrest on second and third sexual assault charges degrees.
After a jury acquitted Cephus, he was reinstated and led Wisconsin in receiving during the 2019 season when the Badgers went 10-4 and reached the Rose Bowl. Cephus recently completed his debut season with the Detroit Lions, which took him into the fifth round of the 2020 draft.
University officials did not immediately respond to an e-mail on Tuesday asking for comment on the process.
Cephus’ lawyer, Andrew Miltenberg, said he spoke with NFL agents and recruiting analysts who believe Cephus would have been drafted earlier had it not been for his expulsion.
“He wants to set a precedent for schools to be more careful and more diligent about how to proceed in these cases, and not just rush to trial when they know in fact that they don’t have all the evidence,” said Miltenberg.
The complaint says Wisconsin was “trying to press for harsh lawsuits from men in order to remedy its long-standing failure to deal with complaints of sexual assault”. The complaint adds that Cephus’s status as a well-known football player has made him “the perfect candidate for the university to prove his investigative efforts and to punish the accused men in a notorious way”.
Defendants include Chancellor Rebecca Blank, Title IX coordinator for the Lauren Hasselbacher campus and the school’s board of governors.
The criminal charges resulted from an incident at Cephus’s Madison apartment in April 2018. Cephus was involved in sexual acts with two 18-year-old Wisconsin students, who later said they were raped and too drunk to consent. Cephus said the sex was consensual.
Cephus ‘lawyers said in the complaint that the schools’ Title IX investigation was “a blatant judicial error”. That investigation concluded that Cephus “more likely than not” sexually abused women.
Cephus’ lawyers argue that the university should have delayed the investigation until the criminal proceedings were concluded because there was relevant evidence that would not be released until the criminal proceedings closed. They say this included video evidence contesting women’s claims that they were intoxicated that night.
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They say the school acknowledged that it had tried unsuccessfully to obtain such evidence and continued its disciplinary hearing anyway.
The complaint also says that the statements of two students were consistently taken at face value and that the investigation was biased, with a lack of transparency.
The suit comes five months after one of the students involved in the case sued the university for its 2019 decision to reverse Cephus’s expulsion and allow him to return to the football team.