Behind the Curious Case of USC’s Star-Crossed Student Athletes

In late July, USC closed its investigation into what happened in Katz’s driveway during a few minutes one night last winter. At the conclusion, the university upheld its initial decision to suspend her boyfriend, Matt Boermeester, 23, and kick him off the football team: They apparently determined late last month that Boermeester had “more likely than not” manhandled Katz that fateful night and that this incident was part of an underlying history of abuse. Meanwhile, Katz herself maintains, “Nothing happened that warranted an investigation, much less the unfair, biased, and drawn out process that we have been forced to endure quietly.”

“I want to be very clear that I have never been abused, assaulted or otherwise mistreated by Matt,” she wrote in a two-page statement in late July, which was released by her attorney, Kerry Steigerwalt. “I understand that domestic violence is a terrible problem, but in no way does that apply to Matt and me.” Her statement also notes, “I am afraid of USC’s Title IX office. I hope that my comments will not cause USC’s Title IX office to further retaliate against me in any way.”

Katz is a champion tennis player and captain of the USC women’s tennis team, and Boermeester a star kicker on the USC football team—or he was. His 46-yard field goal capped the Trojans’s epic comeback win over Penn State in the Rose Bowl, just weeks before the night when, Katz insists, “nothing happened.” They’d been dating for “well over a year,” she writes, and for the couple, Steigerwalt tells me, the Friday in question was a night much like any other.

They got dinner together and then went out with friends separately—planning to meet up later. As he had a bulky brace on his non-kicking knee from a surgery he’d agreed to undergo shortly after the Rose Bowl, Katz picked him up from his friend’s house and drove them back to her apartment, stopping at a fast-food drive-thru on the way. They dallied in the driveway at her building, where members of the men’s and women’s tennis teams live in neighboring apartments. They tossed french fries at each other and laughed; she went in to get her dog, who’d been cooped up at least since before dinner. They laughed and played with the dog, and before long, retired upstairs.

But before they did, one of the players from the men’s tennis team saw the couple through his window. And he believed—and told his roommate—that he might have seen something untoward. His roommate also happened to be the son of their coach. Two days later, after practice, the son told his father that Boermeester had been seen treating Katz roughly. And his father, as a coach of the men’s tennis team, was mandated under federal Title IX policy to report the incident—regardless of whether it actually was an “incident”—to the university.

Which is how, on Monday morning, Zoe Katz was called into a meeting by USC’s Title IX coordinators. At their insistence, she was shuttled to a “safe room,” given a restraining order against her boyfriend, and told by disbelieving administrators—in response to her insistence that she hadn’t been abused—“I’m sorry that you feel that way.”

“She went there,” her lawyer Kerry Steigerwalt says of Katz’s initial Title IX meeting, “not fully understanding what was going on.” According to Katz’s statement, she was told what happened to her, not asked. By Wednesday of that week, Steigerwalt says, Boermeester had been barred from campus and told not to make any contact with his team, his coach, or anyone at the university—especially his girlfriend. Another week passed before the Title IX office granted Boermeester an interview. He thought it would be an opportunity to tell them what really happened. But by then, “The investigation had taken on a life of its own,” Steigerwalt says. “They’d concluded Zoe was a scared victim, and Matt was lying.”

Boermeester’s suspension for a “conduct violation” and his removal from the team were national news. Deadspin ran with a tip right away. Soon, the LA Times and the campus daily piled on. Katz, seeing her boyfriend’s “conduct violation” and her associated victimhood splashed across the internet, outed herself and tweeted a firm rebuttal:

She was instantly reprimanded for her attempt to correct the record, Steigerwalt tells me. “The Title IX office told her, ‘You’re jeopardizing and interfering with an ongoing investigation. You do that again, there could be consequences for you. Don’t ever tweet anything like that again.’”

Both Boermeester and Katz appealed the initial allegation months ago, through their respective lawyers, to no avail. Since then, they’ve kept their heads down—until now. With Boermeester’s suspension finalized and the investigation now closed, Steigerwalt and Mark Schamel—the Washington, D.C.-based defense attorney representing Boermeester—are preparing a formal complaint against USC.

It won’t be the first to hit USC’s Title IX shop: Past actions against them came from the opposite direction, however, finding fault with an insufficiently aggressive investigatory team. USC appears to have met these charges with a regime change, better to serve the federally -ordained overcorrection campaign.

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced USC was under federal investigation in late July of 2013—a widely-reported public flogging they shared with Swarthmore, Dartmouth, and Berkeley at the time—in response to student complaints that they’d failed to respond to sexual misconduct claims within the recently reinterpreted guidelines of Title IX. Fearing reputational damage and a loss of the public funding on which all schools depend—“They hired a whole new group of Title IX investigators with an aggressive approach,” Steigerwalt points out.

The woman brought into lead that group was Gretchen Means, a former sexual assault consultant for the Marine Corps in San Diego who, before that, served as San Diego’s deputy district attorney for sex crimes. In 2016—her first year as USC’s Title IX coordinator and executive director of a ten-person office, including three senior complaint investigators—she was caught calling an accused student and his lawyer “motherf******s,” as in, “Do these motherf******s know who I am?”

This significantly timed turnover—taken together with the prosecutory fervor of university Title IX cases across the country—places Boermeester’s punishment, and Katz’s protests, in the context of a predictable pattern. But in this case, the commitment to “believing the victim”—the moral force behind federally-mandated Title IX overreach—appears to have overtaken even the victim’s actual testimony. Or, as Schamel says, “At USC Title IX, it is apparently ‘Believe her, unless it doesn’t fit with your narrative.’”

USC’s insistence on Katz’s victimhood might even run counter to standard Title IX procedure. Brett Sokolow, an attorney and Title IX expert whom THE WEEKLY STANDARD reached via email, explained that an initial inquiry based on a third-party report that both the accused and the victim dispute won’t typically escalate to a full-blown disciplinary proceeding under Title IX—unless there is evidence that a victim has been cowed into covering up her assault.

Sokolow—who founded the Association for Title IX Administrators to help colleges and universities navigate the growing swarm of cases like this one they’ve faced in the last half decade—said: “If there is reasonable cause to believe that a risk is posed to the alleged (non) victim, or others, the institution should act. If not, the institution should respect the alleged (non) victim’s wishes, offer remedies and resources, and not take the matter through a formal (Big ‘I’) investigation.”

It’s unclear to the outside observer what, if any, reasonable cause USC found to ramp up its investigation. USC’s Title IX officers interviewed friends of the couple and found “no credible history of violence between them,” according to Steigerwalt. Boermeester’s alleged manhandling of Katz was first reported by a third-hand witness whose roommate had been watching from upstairs—and this version of events was, weeks later, roughly corroborated by a passer-by who suddenly revised his testimony and then “went silent.” This passer-by was in the driveway with them that night—a neighbor taking out the trash—and was even caught on a surveillance video on his way in and out of the alley. On the tape, he appears unperturbed. He initially said he’d seen “nothing unusual”—but changed his testimony weeks into USC’s investigation: He suddenly recalled having seen Boermeester treat Katz roughly, even slam her head into the wall. The Title IX team, however, had found no signs of head trauma when they first took her in, and since correcting this recollection, the lawyers tell me, this witness has “refused to talk.”

Beyond the lawyers’ accounts and Katz’s recent statement, we don’t know the full details of what the investigation uncovered—but from what we do know, USC’s pursuit of a favorable narrative seems notably aggressive.

In a recent statement to the Orange County Register, the university expressed willingness to open the records of their investigation to public scrutiny: “[S]tudent disciplinary records are confidential. If the students involved waive their confidentiality rights, the university will offer a detailed response.”

The lawyers have considered the offer, but rather than clear their clients they claim public eyes on the 70-page report Means compiled would hurt their case. According to the attorneys, her report does not accurately represent what Katz or, later and to a lesser extent, Boermeester said in their interviews. “A fair investigation would have gone out and said to students, ‘What did you see?’ and allowed the students to give their own answers,” Steigerwalt says. “If witness testimonies were the evidence, I would 100% want them released.” Katz’s first lawyer tried to challenge Means’s report—in which, Katz claims, her words are “incompetently or intentionally misrepresented, misquoted and taken out of context”—and did not succeed.

From the outside, there’s plenty that seems amiss about this case, even by the typical standards for a Title IX he-said-she-said. The formulaic “he” and “she” are, here, shifted: She says “nothing happened”—and points to USC’s Title IX office as her actual aggressor. The college rabidly fulfilling its federal mandate says one thing, and the young woman another. She’s fallen victim, apparently, to a politically motivated overcorrection campaign. In her statement, Katz responds to a kind of retrograde typecasting: “When I told the truth about Matt, in repeated interrogations, I was stereotyped and was told I must be a ‘battered’ woman, and that made me feel demeaned and absurdly profiled.”