New Mexico State to pay $8 million to settle hazing, sexual assault lawsuit from former basketball players
Former players Deuce Benjamin and Shak Odunewu filed a lawsuit against the university earlier this year
Content warning: This story contains depictions of alleged sexual assault.
New Mexico State reached an $8 million settlement Wednesday with two former basketball players who said they were sexually assaulted and hazed by teammates last season, according to the Associated Press.
Deuce Benjamin and his father, who was a co-defendant in his lawsuit, will receive $4.125 million, per the report. Shak Odunewu will receive $3.875 million.
As part of the settlement, New Mexico State and the board of regents did not admit liability. Former basketball coach Greg Heiar, who was fired by the school in the wake of the incident, was dismissed from the lawsuit Wednesday. Another coach and three players were also released from liability.
“To New Mexico State’s credit, they took the lawsuit very seriously,” Benjamin’s attorney, Joleen Youngers, told the Associated Press. “They obviously recognized that our clients had been harmed.”
In their lawsuit, both Benjamin and Odunewu alleged that they were hazed and sexually assaulted multiple times during the season last year, and that nobody, including Heiar and his staff, stopped what was happening.
Odunewu alleged in the lawsuit that three teammates pinned him down in the back of a bus on a road trip and pulled his pants down before they “slapped his bare buttocks, and he felt fingers inserted into his anus while his scrotum was simultaneously squeezed.” Benjamin detailed several similar allegations against those three players, too. The attacks, he said, usually happened in the locker room.
Benjamin said he filed a complaint with university police in February and said that Heiar knew of the abuse in November but did “little, if anything” to address his complaints.
“It just got to a point where I just can’t bear anymore,” Odunewu said last month. “And it’s just sad my college experience had to go like this. … I hope me and Deuce will have the strength to move past this and become dominant in whatever path we choose.”
The hazing and sexual assault allegations were the latest issue the New Mexico State basketball program dealt with last season, following a fatal shooting at New Mexico earlier in the season. Aggies player Mike Peake was allegedly “lured” to New Mexico’s campus the night before a game and UNM students allegedly ambushed him. Peake was reportedly shot in the leg by a student, and Peake returned fire and killed the student who allegedly shot him.
After the shootings, police said Peake met up with teammates and put his gun and a tablet in the back of their car. That gun was left with an assistant coach at the hotel, and the team then left town to head home. The two incidents are not related.
New Mexico State shut down its basketball program in February once Benjamin filed his complaint with university police. Heiar was fired, and the school hired Sam Houston State coach Jason Hooten to replace him.
