Liberty University hit with record $14M fine for flouting federal crime reporting laws

Liberty University will pay a record $14 million fine for flouting campus crime reporting laws, the U.S. Department of Education announced Tuesday.

The conservative Christian school will also spend another $2 million on campus safety improvements related to the Clery Act, which requires campuses that receive federal funds to report crime statistics, the department said.

The school in Lynchburg, Virginia, founded by the late Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell, will be monitored for two years to ensure it follows the safety guidelines, the department said in the settlement agreement.

Rich Cordray, chief operating officer for student aid with the Department of Education, said the goal of the Clery Act is to create "safe and secure campus communities" and "responsibly disclose information about crimes and other safety concerns."

"We will continue to hold schools accountable if they fail to do so,” he said.

The fine is the largest on record for Clery Act violations, the federal student aid office said. It capped a two-year investigation that found Liberty officials systemically underreported complaints about crime and dissuaded students from reporting them.

It also found the school lacked the resources to investigate complaints, failed to report a stalking incident involving a student athlete, retaliated against a worker who raised a Clery Act concern, and erased evidence related to the DOE investigation.

Liberty University spokesman Ryan Helfenbein acknowledged the settlement agreement in a statement, conceding "there were numerous deficiencies that existed in the past."

"We acknowledge and sincerely regret past program deficiencies and have since corrected these errors with great care and concern," he said, adding that Liberty has spent more than $10 million since 2022 to bring its safety programs into compliance with the Clery Act and Title IX rules.

Title IX forbids sex-based discrimination in higher education and requires schools to have a system in place to respond to sexual assault allegations.

But Helfenbein also alleged that it was the victim of "selective and unfair treatment" by the Department of Education.

"In the report, many of the Department’s methodologies, findings, and calculations were drastically different from their historic treatment of other universities," he said in the statement. "Liberty disagrees with this approach and maintains that we have repeatedly endured selective and unfair treatment by the Department."

Liberty University was founded in 1971 and has 93,000 on-campus and online students. It remains one of the most influential Christian colleges in the country, even after the acrimonious departure in 2020 of Falwell's son and successor, Jerry Falwell Jr., amid a sex scandal involving his wife.

The DOE probe was launched in 2022, a year after a dozen women filed lawsuits in 2021, claiming that Liberty discouraged sex assault victims from reporting abuses by weaponizing “The Liberty Way,” which is the school’s honor code. It bars students from engaging in premarital sex, being in a place where alcohol is being served or being alone with a member of the opposite sex.

The "Jane Does" charged that Liberty retaliated against people who reported sexual violence, and they accused the school of tacitly condoning it by giving more weight to the denials of the alleged predators, often male athletes, than the women who claimed to have been assaulted.

While Liberty is a private school, many of its students receive federal financial aid, which means Liberty is required to follow Clery rules on reporting crime statistics and other information about campus safety to the government.

In October, two young women at another influential Christian school, Hillsdale College in Michigan, accused the school in a lawsuit of conducting “phony investigations” into their sex assault allegations and then blaming them “for being raped.”

Hillsdale College officials have denied the women's claims. Because the school does not take any government funding, including federal aid to students, it is not subject to Title IX.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com