San Diego State to pay $10K to former student accused of sexual assault

San Diego State University has agreed to pay $10,000 and take other steps to settle a lawsuit filed by a former student who said he was suspended and wrongly accused of sexual assault.

Francisco Sousa was a 20-year-old foreign exchange student from Portugal when he was arrested by SDSU police Dec. 9, 2014, and charged with

sexually assaulting and imprisoning a woman near campus. About a dozen reports of sexual assault had been reported in the area that semester.

Sousa denied the accusations and the charges were dropped in January 2015, but the school would not lift the suspension. He sued SDSU that April to demand information about the accusation against him.

The school lifted the suspension against him that September, and Sousa later sued for monetary damages and to seek an apology from SDSU for sending a campus-wide email announcing his arrest.

Besides the monetary award, the settlement changes the record of his arrest to a police detention, and the school has agreed to additional training for employees who investigate sexual assault claims.

Specifically, the settlement states three employees would be sent to a civil rights investigator training and certification course or a similar training program.

It also will result in the school’s Clery Act director and campus police participating in a webinar about “timely warning notices and immediate notifications.” The Clery Act is a federal law that relates to crime reporting, security and the prevention of and response to sexual assaults at publicly funded colleges and universities.

Attorney Domenic Lombardo, who represented Sousa in his first lawsuit against SDSU, said the request for training was an attempt to prevent others from being wrongly accused.

“If they’re going to identify an offender, they need to do it in a measured, thoughtful and methodical way,” he said.

Gina Jacobs, interim chief communications officer at SDSU, said the school does not comment on settlement agreements, but it did have a statement about sexual assault.

“San Diego State University takes the issue of sexual assault very seriously,” the statement read. “It is our institutional responsibility to investigate all complaints to ensure the safety of our students. The university is committed to preventing sexual violence through education, training and accountability.”

Sousa did not return to SDSU after the suspension was lifted and now lives in Los Angeles, where he is enrolled in another school and plans to graduate this semester with a business degree and a minor in economics. He did not seek a large monetary settlement, he said, because he did not want taxpayers burdened with the cost. The settlement money will go to his parents, who helped pay his legal bills, he said.

“No amount of money can compensate for what I went through,” he said. “My main objective was to vindicate my name.”

gary.warth@sduniontribune.com

Warth writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune