CONCORD — Dartmouth College has moved to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a Black college football player accusing the school of race and gender-based discrimination during a 2020 sexual assault investigation.

In their motion, filed March 29 in U.S. District Court in Concord, attorneys for Dartmouth wrote that the student’s claims are based on speculation about implicit bias among college officials who oversaw the investigation, rather than factual evidence.

“He alleges no facts that could justify an inference of purposeful discrimination affecting the outcome of his case,” Daron Janis, an attorney for the college, wrote in the motion, filed March 29 in U.S. District Court in Concord.

The legal case stems from an incident in February 2020 when a female student, who is only referred to in court documents by the pseudonym Sally Smith, claimed the male student, referred to as John Doe, sexually assaulted her when she was intoxicated following a party. The male student claimed the woman agreed to sexual intercourse after he walked her back to her dorm, according to court documents.

The school launched an investigation into the woman’s claims and in August, determined the woman did not consent to sex. Doe was suspended from the campus for two years. The female student did not pursue a criminal investigation.

In January, Doe filed a lawsuit against the school, accusing Dartmouth officials of being unfair to him throughout the investigation.

Doe claimed that the Title IX investigator, a white woman from New England, exhibited “implicit racial and sex-based bias,” as evidenced by the “aggressive and exaggerated” language the investigator used in her report, the lawsuit said.

Doe also asked the school to include a Black person on the panel, but was told that “no African American person” was available, according to his lawsuit.

Additionally, Doe claimed that the all-white panel that heard and decided on the sexual assault case exhibited bias of their own. That bias was made worse by recent pressure the school has felt to “crack down” on sexual assault cases, leading officials to favor accounts of women who report sexual misconduct, according to the suit.

The lawsuit also asserts that “at least eight Black football players before Doe had been suspended or expelled following Title IX proceedings” in the past 15 years, while no such action had been taken against white players.

Title IX is the federal civil rights law intended to protect people from sex-based discrimination in education programs and activities.

But in its response last week, Dartmouth argued that Doe provided no clear evidence of sex- or race-based bias.

“Doe cites no evidence in the record of bias on the part of the Investigator. He merely speculates that the Investigator was influenced by “implicit bias” because she is a white female who works as an attorney in states where the African American population is less than 2%,” Janis wrote in a memorandum of support for the motion to dismiss.

Janis added that Doe gives no evidence of bias on the part of the panel, and that the argument that Dartmouth is cracking down on sexual assault cases has no relevance to the lawsuit.

Additionally, attorneys argued that Doe’s lawsuit failed to “cast doubt on the accuracy” of the investigator’s finding.

The college also refuted Doe’s other arguments, including that Dartmouth was unfair to him in the investigation by denying his request for an in-person interview — something he claimed added to the panel’s bias against him.

“(Doe) offers no rationale, nor any specific facts, to explain how this supposed (and implausible) bias was exacerbated by requiring him to appear by video conference rather than in person at a distance with a mask,” Janis wrote.

As for the claim that Black football players had been sanctioned and white players hadn’t, Dartmouth said the claim doesn’t support Doe’s argument of discrimination “because it fails to account for the possibility that no students made or ultimately decided to pursue any Title IX complaints against white football players during that time.”

In an email Thursday, Doe’s attorney Amy Spencer responded to the college’s motion writing, “we disagree with Dartmouth’s legal arguments and will be filing an objection with the court.”

Messages to Janis for comment were not returned Thursday.

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