Ex-USC Football Player Accused of Assaulting Girlfriend Suing School Over 2017 Expulsion
Former USC kicker Matthew Boermeester has filed a lawsuit against the school due to proceedings that led to his expulsion in 2017.
Boermeester says in the suit that school administrators “committed an egregious miscarriage of justice” when they determined that he committed domestic abuses against his girlfriend, USA Today reported.
Boermeester played for USC from 2014 to 2016 and was the Trojans’ starting placekicker his junior year. The school issued an interim suspension to him in January 2017, his scholarship was then pulled and he was expelled in May 2017.
The expulsion came after a USC student reported that he saw Boermeester get into a physical altercation with his girlfriend, USC tennis player Zoe Katz.
The investigation determined that Boermeester put his hands around Katz’s neck, “causing her to cough, and shoved her into a cinder block wall in the alley near her apartment at least twice,” CBS Sports reported.
Both Boermeester and Katz deny the incident ever occurred, and they remain a couple. He was never arrested.
Boermeester’s lawyer says his client is the victim of “what can only be described as a game of telephone gone awry,” and the couple insist they were just joking around.
A few weeks after Boermeester was expelled, Katz released a statement saying she has never been abused.
She was ordered to meet with school officials. At that meeting, Katz was interviewed by the head of USC’s Title IX office, Gretchen Dahlinger Means, and the vice president of student affairs, Ainsley Carry, USA Today reported. Both are named as co-defendants in Boermeester’s lawsuit. A school psychologist also was present.
The lawsuit alleges Katz was manipulated into saying things about Boermeester during the meeting, and Katz contends she was stereotyped as being a “battered woman.”
An attorney for Boermeester told USA Today that the former kicker “lost his education and his future career in the NFL” because school officials made “a complete mockery of the Title IX process.”
“What happened to Matt Boermeester at USC should terrify anyone who believes in the right to due process and innocent-until-proven-guilty,” Boermeester attorney Andrew T. Miltenberg said.
This isn’t the first lawsuit that Boermeester has launched against USC. He lost one in Los Angeles Superior Court in March 2018.
However, this new one is a federal lawsuit.
USC told USA Today that it “stands by its investigation and the evidence in the Matthew Boermeester case.”
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