2 Former Northwestern Football Players Sue Over Hazing Allegations

EVANSTON, IL — Two more lawsuits have been filed on behalf of former Northwestern football players who said they were victims of hazing and sexual abuse at the hands of their teammates during preseason workouts and throughout their playing careers and maintain that coaches —including former head football coach Pat Fitzgerald — were aware of the treatment they endured.

On Monday, former Northwestern linebacker Warren Miles Long and a player identified only as John Doe 2 filed lawsuits alleging they both were mistreated by teammates starting as freshmen when they were dropped off at Camp Kenosha.

Both players said that they endured ongoing physical, emotional and sexual abuse during their respective playing careers. Like others who have previously filed suit, Long and John Doe 2 claim that Northwestern coaches encouraged and sometimes participated in hazing rituals.

Both suits name filed on Monday that Northwestern University as the defendant and claim counts of negligence, willful and wanton disregard for player safety and well-being as well as a violation of the Illinois Gender Violence Act.

The school has said in previous statements that it does not comment on litigation filed against the university.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represents both players along with attorneys from Chicago law firm Levin & Perconti, said he estimates at least 30 lawsuits will be filed by former Northwestern athletes in the coming weeks. The lawsuits filed on Monday were the fifth and sixth to be filed by former football players over the past week.

“With each filing, we have a clearer picture of the routine abuse that occurred in Northwestern’s football program and continues to haunt these young men,” Crump said in a news release. “The code of silence has been broken. The brave survivors filing these lawsuits are standing up to their alleged abusers and the institutions that reportedly allowed this twisted culture to prevail.”

The suits claim that both Long and the other former players were 15 and 16 respectively when they began being recruited by Northwestern. Long, who played for the Wildcats from 2013-18, was one of two players to get playing time as true freshmen and signed with the Seattle Seahawks as an undrafted free agent after his playing career ended in Evanston.

The complaint states that Long was targeted for sexual abuse by upperclassmen when he first arrived at Camp Kenosha as a freshman for pre-season training camp. During Camp Kenosha in August 2013, Long says he was attacked by a group of upperclassmen while “purge" sirens played.

A group of upperclassmen filled the room and forcibly held him down and attempted to run him, the suit says. A “run” or “running”, the lawsuits state, is a Wildcat hazing ritual that consists of a group of players forcibly holding down a non-consenting teammate and rubbing their genital areas against the teammate’s genitals, face, and buttocks while rocking back and forth without consent from the teammate, according to the lawsuit.

Crump has over the two weeks that "extreme sexual hazing" has been ongoing at the university for decades and has been handed down from coach to coach.

The suit says that Long was so fearful of what might be done to him, he physically fought back in order to try to fend off players who were attempting to dry hump him. While he was restrained, Long was touched forcibly without his consent on many areas of his body, including his arms, legs, face, buttocks, and genitals.

He was also allegedly forced to endure another sexualized hazing ritual called the “Car Wash.” While he was in the car wash, his teammates touched parts of his naked body with their naked bodies, and Long was forced to touch his teammates’ naked bodies with his body to go through the “Car Wash” to get to the showers, the complaint says.

In another hazing incident, Long was forced to do the "Gatorade Shake Challenge" in 2013. He was forced to drink the sports drink to excess, causing him to vomit two to three times, and was sick for two days.

Long says he was elected to Northwestern’s leadership council and that he approached Fitzgerald with complaints and concerns both involving football and personal matters. He claims Fitzgerald told him to blow it off and not make a big deal out of it. Fitzgerald’s response to Long’s concerns created a hostility and environment that deterred him from coming forward about additional issues like hazing, which was so entrenched and normalized in the Wildcat culture while he was a player, the complaint says.

Fitzgerald was fired on July 10, just three days after school officials originally handed down an unpaid, two-week suspension for the former star linebacker.

The lawsuit brought by John Doe 2 claims the player who was part of Northwestern’s program between 2015-19 felt forced to do the drill, for fear of retaliation and not belonging to the team. He suffered extreme embarrassment and humiliation and emotional suffering following this public display. Assistant coach Matt MacPherson witnessed incidents of naked pull-ups along with other forms of hazing, according to the complaint. John Doe 2 was “ran” more than 10 times during his first season at Northwestern between August 2015 and January 1, 2016.

The complaint alleges, sexual, physical, and emotional abuse continued during his subsequent years at Northwestern. This is the third lawsuit to include details that MacPherson, the program's current associate head coach, was aware of the hazing and did nothing about it. School officials said last week that they are investigating claims against MacPherson but that for now, he remains part of the coaching staff.

“Playing Big Ten football is demanding enough. It should not require players to be brutalized and sexually, physically, and emotionally abused. But that was the case at Northwestern. It was ingrained in the football culture there,” said Steve Levin, founding partner of Levin & Perconti. “The university could have protected its student-athletes from all this suffering if it had just enforced its own anti-hazing policy.”

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