Oldham v. Pa. State Univ., 138 F.4th 731, 737-738 (May 29, 2025) Phipps, Circuit Judge.
This case arises from allegations that during a cross-country flight following a fencing tournament, a state university’s assistant fencing coach sexually harassed and assaulted the woman in the seat next to him. That woman was also a member of the fencing community: she was a coach at a private fencing school that she owned. She alleges that when she told the university’s head fencing coach about this incident, the coach rebuffed her, pressured her not to report it, and then along with the assistant coach initiated a retaliation campaign against her within the fencing community. Even more, she claims that when the university eventually investigated the matter in response to her formal complaint, it confirmed the truth of her assertions but concluded that the assistant coach had not violated any university policy.
Based on those allegations, the private fencing coach sued the university, the two coaches, and the university’s Title IX coordinator in the federal district where she resided, even though neither the university nor any of the sued employees resided in that state. She claimed that the defendants violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, and she also brought several state-law tort claims. All of the defendants moved to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a claim for relief, and all but one of the defendants – the assistant fencing coach – also challenged venue in at least one respect, such as by moving to dismiss the case for improper venue or by moving to transfer the case for either improper venue or the convenience of the parties. In response to those motions, the district court transferred the case to a new judicial district – partially to cure improper venue with respect to the head coach, the Title IX coordinator, and the state university, and partially for judicial efficiency with respect to the assistant coach.
After the transfer, the plaintiff amended her complaint, and the defendants moved to dismiss the claims against them. The transferee district court dismissed the entire suit. As a matter of first impression, it held that to bring a Title IX claim, a plaintiff must be within the zone of interests protected by that statute and that the plaintiff – as neither a student nor an employee of the university – was outside of that zone. As for the state-law tort claims, the transferee district court applied the choice-of-law rules of the transferee forum and dismissed all of those claims as untimely or implausible.
On de novo review, most of those conclusions are correct. A Title IX claim must be within the zone of interests protected by that statute. But the student-or-employee formulation of the Title IX zone-of-interests test is inaccurate, and under a correct understanding of the zone of interests protected by Title IX, the private fencing coach’s Title IX claims against the university related to her exclusion from fencing events that were hosted or supervised by the university, as well as any aspects of the retaliation campaign that occurred or had harm therefrom manifested on campus, are within that zone. Also, many of the state-law tort claims are untimely or fail to state a plausible claim for relief. But because the claims against the university’s assistant fencing coach were transferred for judicial efficiency, the choice-of-law rules for the transferor, not the transferee, forum apply. And application of those rules allows for a longer statute of limitations such that the tort claims against the assistant coach are not time barred. Thus, as elaborated below, we will vacate in part, affirm in part, and remand for further proceedings.
That ruling presents a question of first impression for this Court, viz., whether the zone-of-interests test applies to Title IX claims. For the reasons below, it does, and some of Oldham’s claims are plausibly within that zone.
Applied here, for Oldham’s claims to be within the zone of interests protected by Title IX, Penn State must have (i) had substantial control over the alleged offenders and (ii) had substantial control over the contexts in which the complained-of discrimination either occurred or manifested.
Using Pennsylvania’s formulation, Oldham fails to state a claim for the infliction of emotional distress, either negligently or intentionally, because she does not allege any companion physical injury within the two-year limitations period. See Toney, 961 A.2d at 200; Swisher, 868 A.2d at 1230; see also Redland Soccer Club, 55 F.3d at 848; Davis, 82 F.4th at 216. It was therefore not an error for the District Court to dismiss those claims against Glon, Harris, and Penn State.
