A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a former Dartmouth College student stemming from a drunken encounter 15 years ago she has asserted turned into a sexual assault.

The other party in the case, who was a Tuck School of Business student at the time, says they had consensual sex and has filed a countersuit.

In the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in New York, Monica Morrison asked the court for a ruling that would protect her from future defamation claims if she ever spoke publicly about the May 2005 incident, saying the ability to speak about it constitutes a First Amendment right.

Morrison, who was a 19-year-old sophomore at the time, said she was drunk during the encounter and that Robert Langrick, then a 29-year-old Tuck student, sexually assaulted her.

The pair met at a Dartmouth fraternity party, and Langrick contends that he too had been drinking and that they had consensual intercourse that night in the cupola of Panarchy, a group house belonging to an undergraduate society where Morrison was living at the time. Hanover police investigated the incident and never charged Langrick with any sex crime.

Langrick argued in a motion this spring that Morrison’s lawsuit sought “hypothetical advisory opinions” that the judge could not issue.

In the order filed July 9, Judge Carol Bagley Amon sided with Langrick, saying that the court does not have “subject jurisdiction” to rule on hypothetical situations. She dismissed the claims with prejudice, meaning Morrison cannot file them again.

“The fact that Langrick may, at some point in the future, seek an agreement that would ‘silence’ Morrison is not an issue on which the Court may opine based on the allegations in the amended complaint,” Amon wrote in the order.

Langrick has filed his own counterclaims of libel and slander following the initial lawsuit in 2018, arguing that Morrison had told his boss about the allegations and had written about them online.

Those claims are still pending, and attorneys are in the midst of discovery now, according to Morrison’s lawyer, Henry Kaufman.

Kaufman said in an interview Tuesday that the counterclaims present an additional opportunity to “protect” Morrison.

“We were asking for unusual relief and we’re disappointed the judge didn’t give it to us,” he said regarding the dismissal of Morrison’s lawsuit. But he added of the counterclaims, “We still have the opportunity to protect Ms. Morrison’s First Amendment rights.”

Langrick’s attorney, Andrew Phillips, wrote in an email Tuesday that Langrick is pleased with the judge’s decision.

“These claims were meritless from the outset and brought solely in an attempt to garner publicity,” he wrote.

Though Morrison says the alleged assault happened nearly 15 years ago, the allegation surfaced years later in light of the national #MeToo movement, Morrison has said. In 2018, Morrison called the human resources department at Bloomberg, the company where Langrick worked at the time, to report her allegations.

Following that phone call, Langrick sought to have her sign a non-disclosure agreement to prevent her from speaking or writing about her allegations in the future, Morrison said in her complaint.

In the initial complaint, Morrison requested a judge issue declaratory judgments saying that her report to Bloomberg was not defamatory, that a nondisclosure agreement would be baseless and against public policy, and that the First Amendment protects her right to speak and write publicly without fear of defamation.

When Langrick objected to the lawsuit, Morrison dropped the first claim and refiled the suit. But Langrick’s attorney argued there was virtually no difference between the refiled claims and the original complaint.

In her decision this month, Amon agreed, calling any future amendments to the lawsuit “futile,” as a reason for dismissing the suit with prejudice, according to her order.

Anna Merriman can be reached at amerriman@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.

Correction

Monica Morrison’s lawsuit was dismissed “with preju dice,” meaning the claims can’t be filed again. An earlier version of this story gave conflicting information on that point.