Newly surfaced documents in a lawsuit against LSU show that a former student who accused former LSU football coach Les Miles of sexual harassment in 2013 requested that he and LSU pay $2.15 million to settle her case, in which her lawyer said she was “groomed, sexually and emotionally manipulated, and damaged.”
While a report LSU released last year about its failures on sexual misconduct noted that Miles had been accused of sexually harassing a student in 2013, the documents released Friday paint a fuller picture of the student’s attempts to report the abuse and how the university responded. They do not say whether Miles or LSU paid the full amount that she requested, but include emails from attorneys saying they were “not far apart on numbers or structure” by July 2013.
The documents emerged in a lawsuit former LSU Associate Athletic Director Sharon Lewis filed against LSU last year. Lewis’ legal team obtained the records through discovery, and filed them into the court record this week. Lewis alleges LSU retaliated against her for trying to report Miles’ harassment.
The documents include an eight-page narrative that the former student’s lawyer, Houston-based Charles Peckham, sent to attorneys who represented Miles and LSU in May 2013. Peckham said Friday that his client objects to the release of the documents.
“Public policy tells us that we want victims of sexual harassment to be able to come forward and make legitimate complaints, and make agreements as to confidentiality, without being revictimized,” Peckham said Friday.
An attorney for Miles, Peter Ginsberg, also said Friday that Lewis' release of the documents was wrong.
“Making scandalous accusations does not make something true,” said the lawyer, Peter Ginsberg. “Sharon Lewis has already had her claims dismissed against Coach Miles in federal court. Her lawyers have already been sanctioned for filing false and erroneous pleadings in state court. Lewis and her lawyers have nothing left but to make more false claims in the hopes of extorting the parties in this litigation.”
An LSU spokesperson declined to comment Friday.
In Peckham’s 2013 memo, he wrote that attorneys for LSU and the NCAA spent several hours interviewing the student and that Miles’ lawyer met with the student’s parents at their home. But Peckham wrote that the student and her parents never received a report or notice of an outcome of their investigation, prompting him to contact LSU and Miles directly.
Peckham wrote that in 2012, Miles visited sororities on LSU’s campus to try to find student workers, which is how he first encountered the young woman. He interviewed her privately for a job in the athletic department, flattering her and flirting with her, according to her attorney. He alleged that Miles asked how she would react to being “hit on” by football players and commented on the softness of her hair.
Soon after, he hired her to work in his private office.
“As (redacted name) was a young student, she was instantly infatuated with the attention of Coach Miles and the power he represented at LSU,” her lawyer wrote.
Miles also started to harass a second student who babysat for his family around the same time, Peckham wrote. He wrote that Miles “jumped on her in a sexual fashion” in an LSU-supplied condo where she was living, and that after she complained in 2012, Miles called her a liar and described himself as a victim.
An LSU memo from that year included in the court filings says that the student told LSU officials, including Senior Associate Athletic Director Miriam Segar, that she’d had no inappropriate physical contact with Miles. Most of the alleged harassment was through inappropriate texts, the student said. LSU officials decided to review its sexual harassment guidelines with Miles and remind him that he could not hire student workers privately.
“LSU also ‘investigated’ this harassment by Coach Miles but did nothing to prevent him from striking again,” Peckham wrote.
Peckham wrote that Miles got more aggressive in his advances in 2013, when his client was 19 years old. He started touching her shoulders, arms and knees, complimenting her looks and suggesting that she could make millions working with him on a marketing scheme for an idea where fans would take a cruise with football coaches.
He asked for her cell number to talk about the proposal, telling her to put her name in his phone under his agent’s last name, according to Peckham’s memo. He hugged her at the end of the meeting, according to the memo.
On Feb. 21, 2013, Miles took the student for a drive in his Escalade. He took her by his LSU condo, where he suggested they could be alone together, and also brought her to L’Auberge Casino, where he said they could get a free suite and massage one another, the memo says. He later drove her back to campus and parked in a lot without security cameras, according to the memo.
It says that he reached under the back of her blouse, touched her back and kissed her.
“She did not kiss back, but she was stunned and said nothing,” according to the memo. “He started in again and she recoiled, but he still forcibly kissed her.”
She came up with an excuse to leave and asked Miles to drop her back off at the LSU bookstore, according to the memo.
Peckham wrote that his client later told her supervisor in the LSU Athletic Office what had happened. The court documents include several first-person memos from former LSU Athletic Department employees who described their efforts to respond to both the student’s reports.
Those include a memo from Lewis, in which she said she reported the first student’s sexual harassment in 2012. Former LSU Athletic Director Joe Alleva — who pushed for Miles’ firing after the incident — also wrote in a memo that he met with the young woman and Miles separately. He said the student said she did not want to make a formal complaint, and that he told Miles to no longer meet one-on-one with female students.
“LSU has wholly failed to establish and enforce proper guidelines for the conduct of its staff at the highest levels,” Peckham’s memo says. “When reports were made by another student employee about the sexual misconduct of Les Miles, nothing was done to stop him from hurting others with his sexual grooming and manipulation.”
Peckham made 13 demands of Miles, including that he would attend sex addiction treatment, stop meeting students one-on-one, stop attending sorority functions and stop using LSU-paid housing, aside from his family home. Peckham also requested that LSU create better policies to prevent similar situations in the future, and that LSU train students and staff on sexual harassment and grooming.
He also asked that Miles be moved into an office that did not allow for privacy — either surrounded by glass windows or with a door that did not fully close. And he requested that LSU fire Miles if he did not abide by any terms of the agreement.
The student, he wrote, was in counseling and could not return to campus.
It’s unknown what the final settlement terms in the case were — LSU has never turned over any settlement agreements, and attorneys involved in the case have declined to answer questions about the amount of the final settlement and who paid for it. Peckham wrote in a July 2013 email to attorney Vicki Crochet — who represented LSU on behalf of law firm Taylor Porter — that “as the numbers get closer, the ability to compromise becomes more difficult.”
In September 2013, Crochet emailed Miles’ attorneys indicating that the deal was finalized.
“Gentlemen — while I would have preferred that the circumstances that brought us together had not occurred, I have enjoyed working with you,” she wrote. “Thanks for your professionalism and humor!”
Miles, meanwhile, kept his job at LSU until 2016 without the incident spilling into public view. When he was fired, it was over LSU’s poor performance on the football field — not personal misconduct. Miles was fired from his job as the University of Kansas’ football coach last year when the reports of his sexual harassment case from LSU emerged.
His case — along with several botched sexual misconduct cases over the past several years on LSU’s campus — prompted LSU last year to add more funding for its Title IX office, which investigates sexual misconduct on campus. The Legislature also passed laws to tighten lines of reporting and to penalize university employees who fail to report sexual misconduct.
A spokesperson for Lewis said Friday that the newly released documents will be “at the center of arguments” in a hearing set for 10 a.m. on Dec. 19.
