Liberty University fined record $14 million under federal crime-reporting law
Written by on March 5, 2024
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(Reuters) – Liberty University, founded by Christian televangelist and conservative activist Jerry Falwell, was ordered to pay a record $14 million fine for breaking a federal law requiring schools to report sexual assaults and other campus crimes, the U.S. Education Department said on Tuesday.
The department issued the fine, the largest ever levied under the Clery Act, alongside a 108-page report that detailed how the Lynchburg, Virginia, school had repeatedly misclassified and failed to disclose crimes on campus between 2016 and 2023.
Federal investigators also found that the school had prematurely dismissed as unfounded several allegations of sexual offenses, “including rape and fondling cases,” inhibiting some victims from reporting them to the university at all.
Liberty’s failures to “meet its agreed-upon regulatory responsibilities in numerous and serious ways” caused “real harm to members of the campus community and are indicative of a lack of institutional control,” the report said.
The Christian school has become enmeshed in multiple controversies in recent years. In 2021, the university sued its former president, the founder’s son, Jerry Falwell Jr., for $30 million in damages for undermining its moral standards by concealing his wife’s affair with a pool attendant who attempted to extort them.
That year, 12 “Jane Doe” plaintiffs sued Liberty over ongoing safety concerns and revictimization by the university after reporting acts of sexual violence, according to the Education Department report released on Tuesday.
The younger Falwell stepped down from his leadership posts in 2020 after a series of damning reports about his ties to Trump’s convicted lawyer, Michael Cohen, his steering a $1.2 million piece of university property to his personal trainer, and emails showing he had for years disparaged students, staff and parents to Liberty administrators.
The older Falwell, who died in 2007, was a founder of the Moral Majority, a conservative political lobby group credited with galvanizing support among evangelists during Republican Ronald Reagan’s successful first campaign for the presidency in 1980.
As a result of the Education Department’s findings announced on Tuesday, Liberty agreed to spend $2 million over the next two years for on-campus safety improvements and compliance enhancements that will be audited by an outside firm and monitored by the department.
Further violations of the federal crime-reporting law “could jeopardize the terms of the university’s participation in the federal student aid programs or result in other administrative sanctions,” the department warned on Tuesday.
(Reporting by Julia Harte; Editing by Sandra Maler)
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