University Doctor’s Financial/Sexual/Mentoring Arrangement with Non-Student Leads to Title IX Claim
In Doe v. Univ. of Michigan, decided last Thursday by Judge Shalina Kumar (E.D. Mich.), Doe claimed that, when she was a “a nineteen-year-old student at Michigan State University,” she met Dr. Schoenfeld, “a forty-nine-year-old gastroenterologist at the University” of Michigan “through an online website where they each sought a personal relationship.” (Michiganders of all institutional loyalties will appreciate that the two universities are not the same.) According to Schoenfeld’s filing in a related defamation suit he filed against Doe in California, the site was SeekingArrangement.com, and “Seeking Arrangement’s advertised purpose was facilitating relationships between younger ‘sugar babies’ and more established ‘sugar daddies.'”
From the Court’s summary of the facts and alleged facts,
Doe hoped to attend medical school. Doe and Schoenfeld entered a “mentoring relationship with intimacy,” in which Schoenfeld would pay Doe $1250 per month and help her attain her goal of attending medical school, and Doe would have sex with Schoenfeld and “maintain her appearance.” Over the course of this relationship, Doe alleges Schoenfeld subjected her to sexual violence and abused her. Their sexual relationship lasted a few months, from February 2013 to May 2013. But Schoenfeld continued mentoring Doe so that she could one day gain admission to the University’s medical school.
There appears to be no dispute that the financial and sexual arrangement existed (Schoenfeld seems to have acknowledged it the California defamation lawsuit). The allegations of sexual violence and abuse, however, are very much disputed: As a result of the California litigation, Doe entered into a judgment retracting the allegations, as part of a settlement in which Schoenfeld promised to pay her and her then-lawyer $150K, though she is trying to recant the retraction—a bit more on that at the end of the post. Back to the court’s statements of the allegations in Doe’s Complaint (which the court assumed for purposes of deciding the motion to dismiss):
In 2015, Schoenfeld offered Doe an internship at the University’s Taubman Center …. Doe accepted and began the internship without submitting any type of application, providing any identification, undergoing a background check, or completing HIPAA compliance training. Indeed, Doe did not receive any comm
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