By: Clark Hill Title IX and Campus Discipline Practice
When a female student and her supporters publicly label a male student a “rapist” and orchestrate his exclusion from university activities, that is sex-based harassment, and a university can be held liable under Title IX for deliberate indifference to that harassment.
A Maryland district court has held that a public campaign labeling a male student a rapist and pressuring for his exclusion from campus activities is sex-based harassment and a university can be held liable for deliberate indifference to that harassment. Doe v. University of Maryland, No. 8:22-cv-00872-PX, 2025 WL 2772018 (D. Md. Sept. 26, 2025). In that case, female student Jane Roe accused male student John Doe of sexual assault. After the university found Doe not responsible, Roe and others “embarked on a months-long public campaign to brand Doe a rapist and to exclude him from campus activities.” Id. at *1. Doe sued the university, and the court denied the university’s motion for summary judgment on Doe’s Title IX deliberate indifference claim. Among other things, the court rejected the university’s argument that the harassment of Doe was not “on the basis of sex.” Id. at *7. The court relied heavily on a Fourth Circuit case in which “neither the district court nor the Fourth Circuit hesitated to conclude” that “speech celebrating sexual violence against women and name-calling aimed at female promiscuity . . . constituted ‘conduct on the basis of sex.’” Id. (citing Feminist Majority Found. v. Hurley, 911 F.3d 674, 686 (4th Cir. 2018)). “Plainly, a reasonable juror could conclude that persistent public pronouncements that Doe is a ‘rapist,’ a ‘sexual predator’ and ‘dangerous to girls on campus,’ is language aimed at his sex and his sexual conduct. . . . Harassment based on sex is no more or less actionable when men call women ‘bitches’ and ‘hoes’ than when women brand men ‘rapists’ and ‘sexual predators.’ Accordingly, whether the conduct amounts to sex-based harassment remains a question for the jury to decide, and on this record a reasonable juror could so conclude. . . . Because rape is inherently sex-based, persistent and unfounded branding of a man as a ‘rapist’ cannot be easily dismissed as anything other than sex-based harassment.” Id. at *7-8. The court also held that a jury could conclude the university’s response to Doe’s complaint – refusing to consider it on the ground that the conduct “was somehow not ‘sex-based’” – was clearly unreasonable. Id. at *10.
The Maryland court did not cite the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Ames v. Ohio Dep’t of Youth Servs., 605 U.S. 303 (U.S. 2025), but its decision is fully consistent with (and arguably mandated by) Ames. Ames, which held that courts addressing discrimination claims cannot impose “a higher burden on some individuals based solely on their membership in a particular demographic group,” decisively confirmed that courts should apply the same basic standards to Title IX gender discrimination claims, whether brought by students who have been accused of sexual misconduct or by students who claim to be victims. Some courts have nonetheless persisted in applying double standards to claims by accusing students (usually female) and accused students (usually male), among other things by holding that targeting and ostracizing a male student as a “rapist” is not harassment based on sex and that a university’s indifference to such conduct is thus not actionable under Title IX. Echoing these courts, the University of Maryland justified its non-response to a complaint by Doe by saying he was not being harassed because of his sex, but because the harassers “perceived [Doe] as a perpetrator of a sexual offense against . . . [Roe].” 2025 WL 2772018, at *6. As the Maryland court held, this “def[ies] logic and common sense” in light of case law. Id. at *8.
The University of Maryland case, in conjunction with Ames, gives accused students a powerful tool to hold their universities accountable for failure to protect them from public harassment campaigns.
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