TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Florida State University settled a lawsuit Monday with a former student who said the school failed to respond when she accused former star quarterback Jameis Winston of rape.
FSU will pay Erica Kinsman $250,000 and her attorneys $700,000, university President John Thrasher said in a press release. He said FSU is settling to avoid spending millions on the lawsuit.
"Although we regret we will never be able to tell our full story in court, it is apparent that a trial many months from now would have left FSU fighting over the past rather than looking toward its very bright future," Thrasher said in the release.
Attorney Nancy Hogshead- Makar, a legal consultant for Kinsman's defense attorneys, said the $950,000 settlement is the largest lump sum a university has ever paid to settle a Title IX lawsuit.
“Under Title IX, schools have to make sure that men and women can feel comfortable and take advantage of what the school can offer, educationally,” Hogshead-Makar said. “And certainly sexual violence gets in the way of making people take advantage of their opportunities."
As part of the settlement, FSU is making a five-year commitment to sexual assault awareness and prevention.
The university also has agreed to publish annual reports for the next five years about those programs, attorneys for Kinsman said in a separate statement.
Kinsman has said the university failed to respond to allegations that Winston sexually assaulted her and has a separate lawsuit pending against Winston. The former student has said she was drunk at a Tallahassee bar in December 2012 when Winston and others took her to an apartment, where she says the quarterback raped her.
READ: Kinsman's attorney's release on settlement
READ: FSU announces settlement
Winston has said the allegations are false and that he and Kinsman had consensual sex. Prosecutors said there wasn't enough evidence to win a conviction and that there were gaps in Kinsman's story.
Kinsman's attorneys said FSU officials, including the athletic director and football coach Jimbo Fisher, were aware of the allegations against Winston a month after they surfaced but that they failed to notify the Title IX coordinator or the Office of Student Rights.
FSU, however, is not accepting any liability and said in a statement: “With all the economic demands we face, at some point it doesn't make sense to continue even though we are convinced we would have prevailed."
But Hogshead-Makar said it was Winston's celebrity status that led to university officials looking the other way when a female student cried rape.
“Had Jameis Winston not been a game-changer for Florida State's football team, I doubt this case would have gone the way it did,” Hogshead-Makar said. “For a normal student to allege that this sexual assault happened, under Title IX, the school has to investigate, and if they find probable cause they can charge within 90 days. Here, they waited for at least a year before they got the ball rolling at all. They waited until at least his playing days were over before they conducted a hearing on what happened."
The name's of possible rape victims are not typically released by the media, but Kinsman told her story publicly in a documentary.
"My hope is that the federal investigation of my complaint by the Office of Civil Rights will produce even more positive change, not just at FSU, but across the country," Kinsman said in a statement.