Judge dismisses lawsuit alleging sex abuse by ex-IU doctor

A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit Indiana University in which former men’s basketball player alleged inappropriate sexual conduct by a former team physician because the players’ complaints far exceeded the two-year statute of limitations.

The Title IX lawsuit, filed in October 2024, alleged that university officials – including former head coach Bobby Knight, who died in 2023 – failed to prevent alleged misconduct by former team physician Dr. Bradford Bomba, despite evidence that they were aware of complaints about his behavior.

Bombay routinely gave rectal exams to male athletes during physicals in the 1980s and ’90s, even though medical guidance at the time did not recommend them for college-aged men, which the lawsuit claimed constituted sexual misconduct.

“We are disappointed by the Court’s decision, but are taking time to consider our options and make an informed decision about next steps,” plaintiff Haris Mujezinovic, who played for Indiana in the late 1990s, wrote in an email from his attorney.

A university spokesperson did not respond to multiple messages from ESPN.

The players’ attorneys had argued that their clients were within the state’s two-year limit on reporting alleged sexual abuse because they did not know until 2024 that Bomba’s actions constituted sexual abuse under Title IX, the federal gender equality law that prohibits gender-based discrimination in educational opportunities, including athletics.

In her order dismissing the lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt of the Southern District of Indiana wrote that the players weakened their argument by saying that they knew, decades before they said the abuse had occurred, that the alleged assaults were “widely known among university employees” and that officials “had the authority to take corrective action.”

“Plaintiffs therefore plead that they knew that Defendants were the cause of their alleged injuries well before 2024,” he wrote.

Plaintiffs’ arguments have been successful in other cases of alleged sexual abuse, including a 2018 case against Dr. Richard Strauss, a former Ohio State University physician who was found to have routinely abused male students during medical exams from the 1970s to the 1990s.

In that case, An appeals court ruled That the plaintiffs were within Ohio’s two-year statute of limitations because the clock started only when the plaintiffs knew or should have known that Ohio state officials were aware of Strauss’s conduct and failed to take appropriate action. The case is still pending.

Pratt wrote that his court was not subject to the decision in the Ohio state case, which was in a different jurisdiction, and pointed to other decisions that establish that the plaintiff’s knowledge of the conduct, not his knowledge of its unlawfulness, “triggers the limitations period.”

Bomba, who served as the Indiana men’s basketball team’s physician for nearly 30 years, died last May at the age of 89. He was not a named plaintiff in the lawsuit, and an external investigation launched by the university cleared him of sexual misconduct last year. He refused to answer several questions about the allegations during a statement In 2024.

Tim Garrel, who was named as a defendant, was Indiana’s head athletic trainer from 1981 until last year, when the university announced it would not renew him for a 45th season. Garrel’s attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment.