Courtesy of the University Police Department
By Emily Wunderlich
After accounting for attorneys fees and costs, it cost the university more than $95,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by a former female student who was accosted in the campus parking garage four years ago.
The settlement, reached on Dec. 5, stipulated that the university pay the woman $75,000 — but the agreement stresses that the payment cannot be “construed as an admission of liability.”
According to the Florida Division of Risk Management, the university’s insurance carrier, the university paid Goodis Thompson and Miller, a private law firm in St. Petersburg, $19,620.15 to handle the case.
Donna Tisch Inc., the Sarasota-based mediator who helped negotiate the settlement, was paid $1,600, with the two sides splitting the cost.
The Division of Risk Management did not immediately respond to a request for elaboration from The Crow’s Nest.
The lawsuit, filed in Pinellas County Circuit Court on June 5, 2017, played out in a lengthy array of filings and hearings over two and a half years. It contends that the former student – identified as L.E. in court documents – was “sexually assaulted” by a man who masturbated behind her in a parking garage elevator on the afternoon of Feb. 22, 2016.
The university acknowledged that L.E. was a victim of “lewdness and/or indecent exposure,” but argued that she had not been sexually assaulted under the definitions in federal law.
The university also argued that as an agency of state government, it had “sovereign immunity” and was protected from a civil lawsuit.
The doctrine of sovereign immunity stems from a longstanding tenet of English law that the sovereign – or government – can do no wrong.
The woman’s social media indicates that she graduated from the university in 2017. Although some court documents fail to redact her name, The Crow’s Nest does not name victims of sex-related crimes.
A non-student named Willie Fudge III was arrested seven days after the parking garage incident.
He was charged with one count of exposure of sexual organs – a misdemeanor – and four counts of battery, for touching a person against her will. He was not charged with sexual assault.
The parking garage charges, plus an earlier conviction for grand theft and a later penalty for violating probation, landed Fudge in the Pinellas County jail between May 2016 and February 2017 and in state prison between July 2017 and February 2018.
