The Columbia mattress lawsuit was filed in 2015 by Paul Nungesser, a student accused of sexual assault by classmate Emma Sulkowicz, whose protest art piece involved carrying a dormitory mattress around campus. Nungesser sued Columbia University, not Sulkowicz, arguing the school’s support for the mattress project amounted to gender-based discrimination under Title IX. A federal judge dismissed the case in March 2016, and the parties reached a confidential settlement in July 2017. The lawsuit is sometimes misremembered online as the “Gina mattress case,” but no case by that name exists.
The Protest Behind the Lawsuit
In September 2014, Emma Sulkowicz began carrying a 50-pound dormitory mattress around Columbia’s campus as her senior visual arts thesis, titled “Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight).” She pledged to keep carrying it as long as Nungesser, whom she had accused of sexually assaulting her, remained a student. A university disciplinary panel had already found Nungesser not responsible, and both the New York Police Department and the Manhattan district attorney’s office declined to pursue criminal charges. The performance ran until Sulkowicz’s graduation in May 2015 and became a widely covered symbol in the debate over campus sexual assault.
What Nungesser Claimed
In April 2015, Nungesser sued Columbia University, its board of trustees, president Lee Bollinger, and visual arts professor Jon Kessler, who had supervised the thesis. Sulkowicz was not named as a defendant. Nungesser’s central claim was that Columbia violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded education programs.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 20 USC 1681 – Sex
He argued that by awarding academic credit for the mattress performance and allowing it to continue on campus, Columbia effectively endorsed a harassment campaign that branded him a rapist in fliers, rallies, and international press. The complaint described a gender-based hostile environment that the university tolerated and, through course credit, sanctioned.
Why He Sued the School Instead of Sulkowicz
Title IX applies to educational institutions, not individual students. Only Columbia had the authority to change its policies, discipline faculty, or alter how it handled misconduct complaints. A defamation suit against Sulkowicz personally would have raised First Amendment questions about speech on matters of public concern and would not have forced any institutional change. Suing under Title IX also opened the possibility of recovering legal costs from the university.
How the Court Ruled
In March 2016, U.S. District Judge Gregory Woods dismissed the complaint. The opinion turned on a single question: does an accusation involving sexual conduct automatically make the fallout “sex-based” under Title IX? The court held it does not.2Justia. Nungesser v Columbia University – Memorandum Opinion and Order
Judge Woods wrote that Title IX uses “sex” to mean gender, not sexual activity. The fact that the allegation against Nungesser was sexual in nature did not convert Sulkowicz’s protest into gender-based discrimination. The judge called Nungesser’s contrary reading a “logical fallacy” and found that Sulkowicz’s conduct was driven by personal anger over the alleged assault and the disciplinary outcome, not by Nungesser’s gender. Personal animosity, the court said, is not gender-based harassment.
The opinion also warned about the broader implications of Nungesser’s theory. If accepted, any student accused of sexual assault could sue their school under Title IX by pointing to the school’s failure to silence the accuser. That would effectively turn accused students into a protected class, a result the judge said the statute did not support.
The Amended Complaint and Settlement
The court gave Nungesser 30 days to refile. He submitted an amended complaint that reframed the claims around gender-based harassment and misconduct by Columbia without leaning as heavily on Title IX. Before the court ruled on that version, the parties settled in July 2017. The financial terms were not disclosed.
Columbia’s public statement stopped short of an apology. The university reaffirmed that its investigation had found Nungesser not responsible and said his experience after the investigation was “very difficult for him and not what Columbia would want any of its students to experience.” It also committed to reforming its gender-based misconduct policies so that all students, “accuser and accused, including those like Paul who are found not responsible,” would be treated with respect. A settlement is not an admission of liability, though the university’s language was conciliatory.
What the Case Clarified
Because the lawsuit settled before any appellate ruling, it produced no binding precedent. The district court’s reasoning has still been influential. It drew a line between accusations that happen to involve sexual conduct and discrimination targeting someone because of their gender, keeping Title IX from becoming a tool to silence accusers whenever the underlying complaint is sexual.
The case also surfaced a harder institutional question the settlement left open: what a university’s responsibilities are when student speech about a misconduct allegation becomes part of the academic program. Columbia argued academic freedom prevented it from censoring Sulkowicz’s thesis. Nungesser argued that awarding course credit made the university an active participant rather than a bystander. That tension went unresolved as a matter of law.