Yale Law Students Sue Administrators for Violation of Harassment Policies
Two minority students say law school deans Heather Gerken, Ellen Cosgrove, and Yaseen Eldik retaliated against them when they refused to slime ‘Tiger Mom’ Amy Chua
Aaron Sibarium • November 15, 2021 6:25 pm
The Yale Law School administrators at the center of the “traphouse” incident are now the subject of an unrelated lawsuit alleging that they “worked together in an attempt to blackball two students of color from job opportunities as retaliation” for their refusal to make damning statements about a professor. The suit charges that their actions violated the university’s harassment policies, which prohibit the administration from taking “any adverse action” against a person “who has reported a concern” or “participated in an investigation.”
The lawsuit, which was filed in federal court on Monday, alleges that the law school’s dean Heather Gerken, associate dean Ellen Cosgrove, and diversity director Yaseen Eldik retaliated against two students after they refused to “make knowingly and materially false statements” against Amy Chua, a Yale Law professor who has courted, and attracted, controversy.
When the students refused, Gerken and Cosgrove allegedly asked a professor not to offer them a prestigious fellowship—in part by suggesting that both students were untrustworthy. In conversations with the two students, Eldik and Cosgrove also allegedly suggested they would suffer career repercussions for their refusal to comply.
The alleged tactics mirror those displayed by university administrators in their handling of the now infamous “traphouse” controversy, in which they suggested to second-year law student Trent Colbert that his refusal to apologize for an allegedly racist email might cause him trouble with the bar.
The new case centers on an entirely different Yale Law School controversy that resulted in Gerken removing Chua from a teaching post for allegedly violating an agreement with the administration not to host students in her home.
The main evidence against Chua came in the form of a “dossier” disseminated by a law student who alleged that the plaintiffs had attended and then lied about secret dinner parties at Chua’s residence. Instead of investigating those allegations—which the plaintiffs deny, and which professors characterized as “unpersuasive”—Cosgrove and Eldik told the plaintiffs they had a “moral obligation” to confirm the claims made against Chua in the dossier, according to the lawsuit.
At an April 2021 meeting, the administrators also threatened to tell a professor about the allegations against the students unless they turned on Chua, a threat Cosgrove and Gerken made good on days later.
Yale Law School did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The suit accuses Eldik, Cosgrove, and Gerken of making “defamatory statements” that they knew to be false. Monica Bell, a professor at Yale Law School, leveled the same accusation against the Washington Free Beacon on Nov. 2, claiming that this website hadn’t published a leaked memo because it contained “*provably* false information” that “conflicts with your account.” A “defamation suit,” the tenured professor said, “wouldn’t be difficult to win.”
The memo has been embedded at the bottom of the piece. The lawsuit can be found below in its entirety.
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