Three more women have come out to criticize the university for the mishandling of their complaints of sexual harassment. In April, a mix of seven current and former students filed a Title IX lawsuit against the university. Three additional women were added to the list of plaintiffs after a Friday filing in Louisiana’s Middle District.
The complaint includes more rape allegations against former university star running back Derrius Guice.
Ashlyn Robertson, who enrolled at the university in 2015, is named as a new plaintiff. Robertson hosted a party at her apartment in 2016 and said she was raped by Guice while passed out on her bed and was told by her friends on the football team that Guice bragged about having sex with her, according to the lawsuit.
Corinn Hovis said she went to a Tigerland Bar in 2020 and left in a highly intoxicated state with a “highly recruited quarterback on LSU’s football team” and that he raped her while she was blacked out in an SUV. Hovis pursued a Title IX investigation, and the football player was found responsible for the sexual assault and suspended from May 10, 2020, through May 31, 2021. The player transferred to another university in 2020, a profile match of Peter Parrish who is now on the football roster at the University of Memphis.
The third new plaintiff in the lawsuit is former graduate student Sarah Beth Kitch who was enrolled in the political science Ph.D program in 2009. Kitch was sexually harrassed by her adviser, who is referred to as “John Moe” in the lawsuit. Kitch finished her doctorate in 2014 and reported her adviser to the university’s Title IX office in 2019.
LSU officials told Kitch that “it was a good choice not to report the harrasment when she was a student because ‘no one would have done anything’ and she would have faced consequences as a result of the report,” the lawsuit says.
“We are reviewing this update to a previously filed lawsuit, but as stated before, we are focused on taking actions to ensure that we can create a campus that is safe, just and worthy of the trust that has been placed in us,” Ernie Ballard, LSU Media Director, said to The Reveille in a statement.