COURTS: Swimmers cite ongoing sexual harassment from men’s swim team.
Strong women who joined Niagara University’s swim and dive team were scarred by the program’s culture of rampant sexual harassment, the athletes said in a public statement Wednesday.
Their remarks follow a federal lawsuit filed last week that alleged the school’s investigation into their complaints was biased against them and allowed their harassers to dodge potential accountability, the court documents said.
Current seniors Natasha Posso and Jaime Rolf, as well as an anonymous 2018 graduate, had decorated athletic resumes when they were recruited to NU. After joining, the women were repeatedly harassed by male athletes while their coach did nothing to intervene, the lawsuit charged.
The behavior permeated the program, they discovered only amounted to an “appendage” of the men’s program, the documents said. The female athletes were without their own practice schedule, their own coaching staff and, effectively, their own team, according to the lawsuit.
“We are competitive, strong women who were sectional swimming champs in high school,” Posso and Rolf said in a statement provided by their attorneys, Laurie Baker and Cheryl Meyers Buth. “This sexist, offensive behavior left us broken down, depressed and drained of confidence – this is not how any college athlete or woman on campus should be treated.”
All three plaintiffs’ mental health suffered from the environment. One became suicidal for a time.
The decision to go public with their identity and claims was a difficult one, Meyers Buth said. The filing is a result of the way the university handled the women’s internal complaints and is rooted in a desire that the school “provide equal opportunities to women,” the attorney said Wednesday.
And after the suit’s public filing in the federal courts, the firm’s office phone has been ringing, Meyers Buth said.
“We’ve talked to a number of young women since filing the complaint,” she said. “We’ve also gotten calls from parents whose daughters had similar experiences.”