A federal appeals court upheld a ruling that quashed a woman’s lawsuit against Ohio State University after the school’s diving coach sexually abused her when she was a 16-year-old training with the team.
Though the abuser pleaded guilty to sexual battery, the court’s ruling Monday means Eszter Pryor can’t win money in a lawsuit against the school that employed him. The appellate judges didn’t rule on the merits of the case, only finding that she brought the suit too late – the abuse occurred in 2014 and needed to be brought in a lawsuit by 2017, two years after she became a legal adult, they ruled.
“Because she waited until January 2022, she filed her claim too late,” Circuit Judge Stephanie Dawkins Davis wrote in the court’s ruling.
Pryor, who from a young age wanted to compete as an Olympic diver, was abused by William Bohonyi between September 2014 and February 2015 when he was her coach, according to a lawsuit she filed. The abuse included oral, anal and vaginal sex.
In Ohio, the age of consent is 16. However, the state’s sexual battery laws prohibit college coaches, among others with authority and power in different settings, from engaging in any sexual activity with a minor.
Both Pryor and the university agree on much of the underlying facts. They said that another diving coach received two reports that prompted an official investigation around August 2014: One report warned of the apparent abuse and another about intimate images shared between Bohonyi and Pryor. Bohonyi at that point was placed on administrative leave. Ohio State notified Franklin County Children Services, the Ohio State University Police Division and USA Diving. While Ohio State police obtained the contents of their text messages, Pryor requested the university close its investigation.
It wasn’t until February 2015 that USA Diving banned Bohonyi as a coach, according to Pryor’s lawsuit. USA Diving did not respond to inquiries.
Pryor went public with her story in 2018 in lawsuits and media appearances, all at the height of the #MeToo movement in which women accused men, often in positions of power or authority, of longstanding patterns of sexual assault and abuse. In a televised network interview, Pryor described why she avoided entanglement in a criminal case.
“My thing is, they couldn’t do their job, so they put it on me. I was 17 years old, and they made it my responsibility to take action for somebody else’s mistake,” she said.
Her attorney at the time, Robert Allard, accused Ohio State of “releasing a predator to the community,” arguing that its investigation and firing served only to “protect their own image” while allowing Bohonyi to continue coaching elsewhere until USA Diving blacklisted him about seven months later. Her lawsuit emphasized the power Bohonyi and other coaches wield over young athletes in an Olympic-caliber athletic setting.
Prosecutors in 2018 revived the case against Bohonyi, who eventually pleaded guilty to sexual battery. He was sentenced to four years in prison, though he was released after two. Pryor sued Ohio State, accusing the school of violating her rights under federal anti-discrimination law.
The courts never addressed her lawsuit on the merits.
Pryor, through her attorney, declined to comment.
Ohio laws work against child victims
The ruling against Pryor follows a pattern in which Ohio laws have sometimes blocked sexual abuse victims, often children, from winning lawsuits against their abusers.
Statutes of limitations exist to give defendants reasonable protections against accusations that might otherwise go back years in time, after memories have faded and evidence is lost. But some states have eased or erased their civil statutes of limitations for sex crimes, especially when the victims are children, given how many sex crimes go unreported.
According to the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network, about 80% of people who were sexually abused as children wait until adulthood before disclosing their abuse. Many cite a lack of trust in the system as their reason for withholding.
How Bohonyi case compares to Richard Strauss case
Hundreds of victims of another Ohio State employee, physician Richard Strauss, continue to litigate their cases against the school after hundreds more have settled. Even while the university’s own internal investigation established that Strauss preyed on hundreds of mostly male athletes between 1978 and 1998 when Ohio State employed him, university lawyers insisted his survivors couldn’t bring valid lawsuits against them because of the statute of limitations.
While a trial judge at first agreed with the school, the Sixth Circuit Court allowed the Strauss lawsuits to continue, given what the judges described as Ohio State’s active role in concealing Strauss’ crimes until its internal investigation. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take the case, making the ruling final.
Stephen Snyder Hill, a Strauss victim and one of the driving forces behind the class action lawsuit, said he was sad to hear about the Pryor ruling.
“This is exactly why the statute of limitations for rape is just so unfair,” he said in an interview. “You don’t need to examine this any further than just – put your own child in that position.”
Other laws have at times worked against assault survivors. The Ohio Supreme Court in 2022 issued a decision reinstating a $20 million judgment won by a woman who was raped as a child. Lower courts, under an early-2000s “tort reform” law backed by the Ohio Chamber of Commerce and other business interests, had taken that jury award and reduced it to $250,000. That same law in 2016 reduced a child rape victim’s $3.6 million judgment to $500,000.
Jessica Miranda, now the Cincinnati auditor, spent years as a Democratic lawmaker at the Statehouse trying to reform Ohio’s sexual abuse laws. Regularly invoking her personal experiences as a victim of abuse, Miranda sought to – among other changes – eradicate the civil statute of limitations on sex crimes.
Every one of those bills that stalled, she said, signaled to the institutions behind sexual abusers that they only need to run out a clock to avoid accountability.
“This most recent court ruling is just one tragic result of those failures,” she said. “Ohio’s survivors serve better. They deserve a legislature that believes them and a justice system that doesn’t turn its back when they finally come forward.”
