Football standout settles Title IX lawsuit with Colorado State University at Pueblo

Grant Neal was suspended from Colorado State University at Pueblo following a 2015 incident involving alleged sexual misconduct. (Keyser Images Photography)

A former football standout has settled a lawsuit against Colorado State University at Pueblo stemming from a multiyear suspension involving allegations of sexual assault.

In a statement issued Friday, attorneys for Grant Neal announced that he had amicably settled the lawsuit against CSU-Pueblo.

“Colorado State University-Pueblo and Mr. Grant Neal have come to a satisfactory resolution in the legal matter involving the two parties,” Neal’s attorneys, Andrew Miltenberg and Michael Mirabella, said in a joint statement with officials from CSU-Pueblo. “Neither party admits to any wrong doing and both parties look forward to moving on from this matter.”

Neal’s lawsuit contended the university had violated his rights under Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded schools.

The news of Neal’s settlement comes within a week of another high-profile case coming to a similar end. That case, involving Columbia University and a young woman who protested against the administration’s handling of her allegations by carrying a mattress around campus, was settled on the same day that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos held meetings to discuss what she described as “unfair” Obama-era guidelines for how colleges adjudicate incidents of sexual assault.

Neal filed the lawsuit in response to what he described as gender bias in an interview with The Washington Post this spring. The lawsuit revolved around a night of sexual intimacy during his sophomore year in 2015 that later spiraled into competing narratives about the circumstances of the encounter. The result was Neal’s lengthy suspension for an incident that he contended had been consensual.

“One day all of your dreams are in front of you and you’re on a path and a trajectory for you to achieve those dreams — only then for it to be yanked from you, totally out of your control,” Neal told The Post in April.

Neal later filed his suit alleging that his due-process rights were violated during the university’s adjudication of the matter.

In April, Miltenberg described his clients such as Neal as a “new class of victims, and those victims are young men who essentially have been railroaded.”

Neal said in the spring that he was intending to continue to seek justice to clear his name.

“I’m willing to fight to the end and do whatever it takes to seek justice,” Neal said in April. “I have nothing to hide. I have no shame.”

The conditions of the settlement were confidential. As part of the agreement, Neal and his attorneys along with CSU-Pueblo and its employees will not comment on the case.

Neal’s attorney Miltenberg said in a statement that “Grant is pleased that this matter has been resolved and is looking forward to moving on with his life.”