Kasowitz Files Amended Lawsuit Adding New Plaintiffs and Detailing New Allegations of NYU’s Antisemitic Hostile Educational Environment and Egregious Civil Rights Violations
Kasowitz Benson Torres has filed an amended complaint against New York University (NYU) detailing new allegations concerning NYU’s egregious violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The amended complaint adds additional individual plaintiffs as well as an organizational plaintiff, Students Against Antisemitism, Inc., whose members include Jewish NYU students.
In their amended complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on January 31, 2024, plaintiffs allege that NYU has continued to act with deliberate indifference to a hostile antisemitic educational environment that excludes Jewish students from the protections of NYU’s codes of conduct, which NYU readily enforces for the benefit of other protected groups. As a result of NYU’s abject and ongoing failure to comply with Title VI, plaintiffs and other Jewish students are forced to run a campus gauntlet of verbal and physical harassment, threats, and intimidation, including being taunted with disgusting antisemitic slurs; having their complaints ignored, slow-walked, or met with gaslighting by the NYU administration, including NYU’s President, Linda G. Mills; and being subjected to anti-Jewish hate fests led by NYU students and faculty members extolling Hamas’s atrocities and calling for the annihilation of Israel.
The amended complaint alleges that far from taking measures to address and ameliorate the hostile environment detailed in the original complaint, NYU has continued to thumb its nose at its Title VI obligations by, among other things, permitting rampaging mobs of antisemitic students to terrorize Jewish students with chants of “go back to the gas chambers” and “go back to Poland where you came from.” The amended complaint further describes how NYU’s failure to protect Jewish students has emboldened their tormentors, who are permitted, without consequence, to denounce Jewish students as “kikes,” “white supremacists,” “fascists” and “bigots.”
Among other relief, plaintiffs are requesting that the Court order NYU to implement institutional, far-reaching, and concrete remedial measures, including by terminating NYU personnel and students responsible for such abuse.
The Kasowitz Benson Torres team representing the NYU students is led by partners Marc E. Kasowitz, Daniel R. Benson, Mark P. Ressler and Andrew L. Schwartz, and includes associates Joshua E. Roberts, Andrew C. Bernstein, Jillian R. Roffer, Yarden Hodes, William Wolfe Taub and Emily A. Lowe.
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