U.S. Justice Department finds UMBC violated Title IX in its response to swim coach’s misconduct

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County failed to protect student athletes from a former swim coach’s sexual harassment and discrimination, the U.S. Department of Justice concluded after a three-year investigation.

In a letter Monday, the Justice Department informed the research university in Catonsville that it had violated Title IX, a federal law barring gender discrimination in education, concluding an investigation that began in November 2020.

Investigators said the university failed to oversee its athletics department appropriately or devote enough resources to Title IX compliance, according to the letter sent to UMBC, allowing the late swim coach Chad Cradock to harass male swimmers and discriminate against female swimmers for years.

“From approximately 2015 to 2020, the University was on notice of allegations that these student-athletes had been subjected to a hostile environment based on sex but failed to address it adequately,” the department wrote in an 11-page letter, allowing continued sexual harassment.

“Too many school officials and administrators knew something for UMBC to have done nothing,” Assistant U.S. Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a news release Monday.

The department has proposed a settlement agreement that will change how the university complies with Title IX in the future.

UMBC said it expects to sign that agreement and make it public within the next few weeks.

In a video posted Monday afternoon, UMBC President Valerie Sheares Ashby apologized to the students, saying they deserved better.

“Let me be very clear: We take full responsibility for what happened and I am committed to addressing these failures through our words and actions,” she said.

Justice Department investigators reviewed nearly 200,000 pages of documents and conducted 70 interviews, visiting campus four times.

They found that between 2015 and 2020, UMBC failed to respond to allegations that Cradock filmed students while showering and touched male students on the pool deck and in the locker room. The university’s athletics department also failed to report dating violence by male swimmers against female teammates from 2016 and 2020, the department found.

“These students’ experiences revealed profound systemwide problems in the University’s response to allegations of sex discrimination that persisted for years,” wrote investigators, noting that many more students likely shared their experiences of abuse.

Cradock died by suicide in 2021, months after resigning amid an investigation into his conduct.

In addition to criticizing how the university investigated allegations against Cradock, the department’s letter also faulted the school for its more recent attempts to reform its process, including failing to hire a victim support coordinator and sharing Title IX staff with the school’s Office of the General Counsel.

“And so, despite numerous lawsuits, outside consultants, a campus-wide Title IX review, and two re-brandings of the Title IX Office, our investigation found that the University has yet to take the necessary steps to reform how it responds to sex discrimination, including sexual harassment,” investigators wrote.

Six swimmers have filed lawsuits together — one in state and one in federal court — against UMBC. A judge dismissed a separate lawsuit last year from a former female swimmer, but her attorneys are appealing.

“We’ve been waiting for this moment for so long, for someone to tell us that we weren’t crazy and what happened was really wrong,” said Vanessa, one of the former swimmers suing the school, of the department’s findings. The Baltimore Sun does not identify victims of sexual abuse or assault without their consent. She agreed to be identified by her first name.

“It was a surreal validation in a way,” she said. “Hopefully, at least at UMBC, they will change and no individual who is ever assaulted will have to feel what I felt.”

It’s unclear how the settlement will impact the ongoing litigation. The university has committed to providing financial relief to certain student athletes, according to the letter.

“This letter represents a complete vindication for the students, not just the swimmers, but all students who complained of gender discrimination at UMBC from 2015 to present and highlights the university’s absolute failure to fix what was clearly an ongoing problem,” said attorney Rignal Baldwin V, of the law firm Baldwin | Seraina, who is representing the former swimmers.

His co-counsel, Jeffrey Bowman of Annapolis firm Bowman Jarashow Law, said he hopes the report will provide a better environment for current and future students.

“We are also happy that the report found that there was an institutional failure on behalf of UMBC to protect our clients and other student athletes as mandated by Title IX,” Bowman said.

Sheares Ashby, who became UMBC’s president in August 2022, encouraged the university to read the results of the investigation.

“It revealed not only despicable actions by one individual but profound failures in the university’s response during that period,” she said.

She said the school did not want the announcement to come while students were away on spring break this week, but that’s when the Justice Department chose to release its findings.

“Nothing is more important than the well-being of our students. We will never lose sight of that again,” Sheares Ashby said in the video. “You have my word.”