TALLAHASSEE — A federal appeals court Wednesday said a former Florida Gulf Coast University student cannot remain anonymous in a lawsuit he filed against the school after being disciplined for sexual harassment.
The former student filed the lawsuit against the university as “John Doe” and argued that an investigation into allegations that he had non-consensual sex with another student was a “sham” and that he was a victim of discrimination, according to arguments filed by his attorneys at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
U.S. District Judge Sheri Polster Chappell last year ruled that the former student could not pursue the lawsuit anonymously, and a three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based appeals court agreed Wednesday. The panel rejected a series of arguments, including that requiring the former student to use his name in the lawsuit would result in “social stigma.”
“Doe also hasn’t demonstrated the district court abused its discretion when it found that any alleged social stigma Doe will face didn’t outweigh the presumption that his proceeding should be a public one,” said Wednesday’s ruling shared by Judges Robert Luck, Andrew Brasher and Nancy Abudu. “Put simply, he does not cite any evidence of these harms, and instead only asserts in briefing that they are (nearly certain) to occur.”
The ruling added that “the district courts in our circuit are more than capable of balancing plaintiffs’ privacy interests against the constitutional right to access judicial proceedings and exercising their broad discretion to grant anonymity in appropriate cases.”
The lawsuit stems from allegations that the former student had non-consensual sex with another student, identified in court documents as Jane Roe, in October 2019. Roe, who had previously dated the male student, alleged that he had sex with her when she was too intoxicated to consent.
In August 2020, the university notified the male student that Roe had filed a complaint against him. Florida Gulf Coast investigated and “determined Doe was responsible for sexual harassment in the form of non-consensual sexual activity,” Chappell wrote in last year’s decision on the anonymity issue. He received an eight-month disciplinary probation and a four-month suspension from school.
The former student filed a lawsuit alleging, in part, that Florida Gulf Coast violated a federal law known as Title IX because he was a victim of discrimination based on sex, according to court documents.
“Specifically, Doe alleges that appellee’s (the university’s) investigation was a sham and that appellee automatically sided with Jane Roe, and against him, due to gender discrimination,” the former student’s attorneys wrote in arguments at the appeals court.
Chappell last year dismissed the underlying lawsuit but said the former student’s attorneys could file a revised version. She earlier had ruled that he could not pursue the case anonymously and said any revised lawsuit would have to include his name. The district-court case has been on hold amid the appeal on the anonymity issue.
“At bottom, weighing the risk that requiring Doe to proceed with his suit without anonymity would require him to disclose ‘information of the utmost intimacy’ against the presumption of openness, anonymity must be denied,” the district judge wrote. “This just is not one of those ‘exceptional cases’ that warrant such treatment.”