Ex-student suing MSU for hiring sex offender as conductor

6-5-15 Montana:

A former student suing Montana State University has asked a judge to rule that MSU was negligent in hiring a convicted sex offender as a music professor and failed to protect her from being manipulated by him and raped.

MSU denies the allegations and contends that the former student willingly consented to a sexual relationship, that she suffered no emotional distress, and that her own negligence should reduce or eliminate any money damages a jury might award.

Legal arguments in the nearly 3-year-old civil lawsuit, filed in Lewis and Clark County District Court before Judge James Reynolds of Helena, reveal new details from the 2011 sex scandal surrounding Shuichi Komiyama, once an MSU conductor with rock-star status.

Legal briefs disclose that MSU paid the former student $75,000 to settle her sexual harassment claim brought before the Montana Human Rights Bureau.

Because of that settlement, the judge allowed the former student, who has graduated, to sue MSU for damages on the separate grounds that MSU “negligently hired, retained and supervised Komiyama with the result that he had non-consensual sex with her.”

Part of the university’s defense is that “MSU management” had no way of knowing and had not been put on notice that Komiyama might sexually assault a student.

MSU President Waded Cruzado said in a sworn statement that MSU’s top officials at Montana Hall learned on Friday, April 8, 2011, of the student’s email to the music department, alleging that Komiyama pressured her into unconsented sex, and immediately placed him on administrative leave. They launched an investigation and by the following Monday had university police bar Komiyama from campus. ..Continued.. by By Gail Schontzler