Sex abuse lawsuit from former NCSU athletes now has 31 plaintiffs

A total of 31 plaintiffs now have signed on to a lawsuit claiming they were “victims of sexual assaults, sexual exploitation, and sexual harassment” by North Carolina State University’s former director of sports medicine.

An amended complaint filed Friday in Wake County Superior Court expands on a case that started in federal court in 2022 with former NCSU soccer player Benjamin Locke. Locke and fellow plaintiff Parker Cross are listed by name in the amended state court complaint. The other 29 plaintiffs are listed as “John Doe.”

All plaintiffs played for NCSU sports teams between 2010 and 2024. Other than Locke, none of the plaintiffs’ sports are listed in the complaint. Twenty-eight plaintiffs were scholarship athletes, and 22 currently live in North Carolina.

The lawsuit alleges that Robert Murphy “violated his position of trust to abuse rather than treat male student-athletes under his tutelage.”

“Murphy’s sexual assaults and harassment of male student-athletes was so widely known within the NCSU Athletics Department that any student-athlete known to be on his way to a treatment or drug testing session with Murphy was said to be on his way to get ‘a Rob Murphy Special,’” according to the complaint.

“During Murphy’s decade-long tenure at NCSU, administrators and staff within the NCSU Athletics Department knew or should have known of the pervasive sexual assaults, sexual harassment, exploitation and grooming Murphy perpetrated on NCSU male student-athletes,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote. “NCSU administrators and staff turned a blind eye to the abuse suffered by Plaintiffs and failed to take any reasonable steps to protect Plaintiffs and other male student-athletes from Murphy.”

“Instead, administrators and staff in the Athletics Department chose to protect Murphy and the reputation of the institution by minimizing, condoning, ignoring and/or covering up his sexual assaults and harassment and the abusive culture that existed,” according to the complaint.

“Plaintiffs — and potentially hundreds of other male-student athletes — came to NCSU to pursue their dreams of playing NCAA Division I college sports,” the lawsuit continued. “Instead, Plaintiffs found themselves embroiled in a nightmare of systemic abuse, institutional betrayal, and calculated cover-ups perpetrated by the Defendants.”

Murphy served as NCSU’s director of sports medicine and head athletic trainer from January 2012 until June 2022. He now lives in Florida.

In addition to Murphy, the lawsuit lists as defendants former NCSU Chancellor Randy Woodson, former Athletic Director Debbie Yow, current Athletic Director Eugene “Boo” Corrigan, and five other current and former athletic department administrators.

Male student-athletes complained as early as 2012 about Murphy’s “unnecessarily intrusive urine sample collection methods for mandatory drug testing,” according to the lawsuit. After the 2012 men’s soccer season, the head coach told one of the defendants that Murphy was “engaging in inappropriate and overly familiar conduct” with players and asked that Murphy be removed as the team’s designated athletic trainer.

Murphy was removed from the team but “resumed treating and ‘hanging out with’ the soccer players” again in 2014. That year, an employee told one of the other defendants that Murphy “made male soccer players very uncomfortable during deep tissue massage treatments on their groins and during drug test urine sample collections,” according to the lawsuit.

The suit lists other reports about Murphy’s behavior throughout his NCSU tenure. Though administrators expressed concerns on multiple occasions, he “continued to sexually assault and sexually harass student-athletes under the guise of medical treatment and drug testing,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote. “[T]he effect of Defendant Administrators’ repeated directives on Murphy’s conduct was never reviewed, monitored, or supervised, and as such, gave Defendant Murphy continued free reign and unrestricted access to assault and harass male student-athletes through early 2022.”

“Despite persistent reports of Murphy’s sexual assaults and harassment of male student-athletes, Defendant Administrators failed to take any meaningful or effective action, granting Murphy, a known sexual predator, unrestricted access to student-athletes who had no choice but to comply with his recommended ‘treatments,’” the complaint added. “This utter failure of the Defendant Administrators enabled Murphy to sexually assault, harass, and groom an unknown number of male student-athletes throughout his decade-long tenure at NCSU.”

The suit invokes the legal concept of “equitable estoppel” to block the defendants from relying on the statute of limitations to have the complaints dismissed.

“It would violate the most basic concepts of decency, fair play, justice and the golden rule to permit the individually named former administrators and staff to assert any statute of limitations and thereby attempt to dodge liability and accountability for their decade of knowingly failing to protect the school’s student athletes,” according to the complaint.

The former players seek damages against Murphy for assault, battery, intrusion upon seclusion, and constructive fraud. They seek damages for negligence and “negligent retention and/or supervision” against the current and former NCSU administrators.

“Sex abuse lawsuit from former NCSU athletes now has 31 plaintiffs” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.