Ex-student sues Washington State University over 2015 incident at frat house
A former student is suing Washington State University over its handling of a 2015 incident that sparked marches protesting racism on the Pullman campus.
Dominique Stewart, who is black, said she was humiliated on the night of Feb. 21, 2015, while she was waiting for a friend in front of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity house. During a party that produced multiple witnesses, a white member of the fraternity allegedly shouted racist and misogynistic slurs before slamming a door in Stewart's face.
Afterward, fraternity members were seen laughing on the balcony. Stewart, who was 18 and a freshman at the time, told the Moscow-Pullman Daily News: "After the guy said those words to me and slammed the door in my face, a member of the fraternity opened the door and said, 'He's just intoxicated, he didn't mean it,' and shut the door again in my face. We've never heard any apologies other than 'He was drunk,' which isn't an answer, not an acceptable justification and it just brings up bigger issues."
Stewart's lawsuit was filed last month in the U.S. District Court for Western Washington. It claims that school officials, including late WSU President Elson Floyd, engaged in "victim-blaming" and didn't do enough to protect Stewart from a "viral upstir of racism" that followed the fraternity incident.
Read more: http://lmtribune.com/northwest/ex-student-sues-wsu-over-incident-at-frat-house/article_5aa827d7-c898-53b3-965a-e84d631a9678.html