A former Northwestern University football player on Tuesday accused former coach Pat Fitzgerald and the school of condoning hazing, including alleged rituals involving a naked human “car wash” and a punishment called “Shrek cheers,” in the first lawsuit filed since the scandal rocked the college Big Ten.
Fitzgerald and school leaders “endangered, enabled, and concealed the exploitation” of the student-athletes under the coach’s supervision and took no action against “credible reports of hazing, dating back to 2014,” the attorney wrote in the lawsuit. of the plaintiff, Patrick Salvi.
The John Doe plaintiff’s civil action was filed in Cook County Court in Chicago. The plaintiff was a student at the prestigious school outside Chicago from 2018 to 2022.
Northwestern’s football program “has had long-standing problems involving hazing and bullying that take on a sexual and/or racist overtone,” the civil action said.
The lawsuit went into troubling detail, describing rituals that allegedly took place within the program, but on campus and at the team’s preseason training camp in Kenosha.
Many of the acts included forced nudity, groping and “dry fucking,” the lawsuit says, as Fitzgerald allegedly “engaged in the harassment, hazing, intimidation, assault, and/or abuse of athletes.”
The football coach was fired last week amid allegations that he did not “know or avoid significant hazing in the football program,” said university president Michael Schill, who was named as a defendant in Tuesday’s lawsuit.
Among the alleged institutional acts, according to the lawsuit, were carried out within the Northwestern soccer program:
- “Running”: a punishment that “consisted of 8-10 upperclassmen, wearing masks, holding down a player and dry-fucking the player in a dark locker room.”
- “Shrek Claps” – When “the upperclassmen on the team were running” a player who made a mistake in practice “while clapping over the head” of that teammate.
- “Car Wash”: A “tradition” that consisted of “players lining up, standing naked, and spinning around the entrance to the showers so that all the freshmen were forced to rub against the line of men to get to their showers”.
- “Naked Center Quarterback Swap” – Another “tradition” that required freshmen to execute a routine center quarterback snap while both were naked.
- “Gatorade Shake Challenge” – When freshmen are forced to drink as many Gatorade shakes as possible in 10 minutes, and if they refuse, they will be subject to “running”.
Northwestern spokesman Jon Yates declined to comment on the lawsuit Tuesday, but insisted the school takes student welfare seriously.
“As a policy, we do not comment on details of pending litigation,” Yates said in a statement to NBC News.
“Protecting the well-being of all Northwestern University students is central to our mission and something we take with the utmost seriousness.”
The school first learned of the allegations of hazing within the football program last November and “acted immediately with an independent investigator to conduct a thorough review of the allegations,” according to the school’s representative.
“We have taken a number of subsequent actions to remove hazing from our soccer program and will file additional actions in the coming weeks,” Yates said. “The administration is committed to working together with the Board of Trustees, faculty and the student body to ensure that hazing has no place at Northwestern.”
A representative for former coach Fitzgerald could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday.
Days after Fitzgerald was fired, Northwestern fired baseball coach Jim Foster.
