UVa 'Karen' expelled to avoid media firestorm over football game protest, lawsuit suggests

Week in Review

A White University of Virginia alumna who was expelled after she was accused of threatening a Black Women Matter protest in 2020 — which a school investigation later found she likely did not do — has alleged in a lawsuit that not only did UVa’s then-dean of students “purposefully tamper” to make an example out of her but that a student jury found her guilty in the early morning hours before a UVa football game under pressure from a student-led protest that threatened to stop the game.

Morgan Bettinger filed a lawsuit dated July 28 against the UVa Board of Visitors, President Jim Ryan and former Dean of Students Allen Groves in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia.

A previous draft of that lawsuit circulated earlier this year is 52 pages long. The lawsuit filed in July is 104.

In both, Bettinger’s counsel details how on July 17, 2020, Bettinger’s schoolmate Zyahna Bryant — a local activist who gained widespread attention for her successful petition to tear down Charlottesville’s Confederate monuments — was participating in a Black Women Matter protest organized by Charlottesville Beyond Policing.

Bettinger and her father

According to Bryant’s own account, Bettinger arrived at the protest which was occurring in the middle of the street and “told us that we would make ‘good speedbumps.’” Bryant shared video footage of the moments after the alleged incident on Twitter, led an email campaign urging students to “demand that Morgan face consequences for her actions and that UVA stop graduating racists” and filed a formal complaint with the student-led University Judiciary Committee.

That committee found Bettinger guilty of “threatening the health or safety of students,” arguing that her alleged words carried significant weight considering the deadly car attack that took place in Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017, during the Unite the Right rally-turned-riot. She was expelled in abeyance — which allowed her to continue her schooling but with a demerit in her file — and instructed to perform 50 hours of community service, meet with public policy professor Brian Williams to “discuss the history of police-community relations” and write an apology letter to Bryant.

Bryant has declined to comment to The Daily Progress on the matter since the draft lawsuit began circulating and she herself became a target of online harassment.

Bryant

According to Bettinger’s account, when she encountered the protest she told a truck driver blocking the road, “It’s a good thing that you are here, because otherwise these people would have been speed bumps.” Bettinger is the daughter of a policeman, who died of cancer in 2014, and is admittedly pro-police, but she claims she was misheard by protesters and taken out of context.

While Bettinger has said she is not ignorant of “Charlottesville’s violent history” or the tragedy of “A12,” it is not the first thing that comes to mind when she hears the date Aug. 12.

“While some people may drive through Charlottesville, or downtown Charlottesville, or walk ‘the Lawn,’ and recall those horrible events, many people in the community and visitors to it simply do not,” her lawsuit reads. “When Morgan hears the date ‘August 12,’ she thinks of one thing and one thing only — the day her father died.”

An inquiry later conducted by UVa’s Office for Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights would find that Bettinger’s narrative was the more likely case and that her remarks, whatever they were, were “not clearly threatening.”

Ryan

The decision of the judiciary committee, however, still stood. Bettinger was still expelled. That expulsion, she claims, remains a stain on her record and has interfered with her future education and employment opportunities.

Bettinger’s lawsuit argues that the university bent to the will of a nationally known Black activist at the expense of a White student, ultimately infringing on Bettinger’s free speech.

“President Jim Ryan knew, unequivocally, that Morgan Bettinger’s speech was free and protected under the First Amendment, that Morgan had been wronged, and that he was intentionally committing the University to violate those sacred rights,” reads the suit.

Bettinger is seeking redress in the form of a declaratory judgment, injunctive relief, attorneys’ fees and costs as well as compensatory and punitive damages.

“On the evening of July 16, 2020, the mob came for Morgan Bettinger,” the suit reads. “Less than forty-eight hours later and over the course of the next thirteen months and beyond, the Defendant University of Virginia and its most senior leaders — leaders who owed Morgan a duty to protect her ‘best interests’ — would, without any legal or evidentiary basis, join in, augment, amplify, and then take the lead in a racially motivated campaign to ruin Morgan Bettinger.”

Groves

One of those leaders was singled out in Bettinger’s suit.

In 2020, Allen Groves was the dean of students at UVa. He left the school almost exactly a year after Bettinger’s confrontation with protesters to serve as senior vice president of student experience at Syracuse University in New York.

Groves was physically assaulted on Aug. 11, 2017, during the White supremacist-led torch-lit march through UVa Grounds before the planned Unite the Right rally the next day. Groves was seen being struck in the arm by one of the torches, according to Daily Progress reporting from the time. That incident left him “deeply scarred,” according to Bettinger’s suit.

The suit presents Bettinger as a scapegoat.

It alleges Groves “personally initiated a complaint, himself and on his own behalf, against Morgan with the UJC” that “teed” her up for trial. Groves later participated as a witness against Bettinger during that trial, according to the suit.

Her counsel argues that the school was also seeking to prevent a media firestorm.

The student jury handed down its guilty verdict at 3:30 a.m. on Sept. 26, 2020. Later that day, UVa was scheduled to play Duke University in a football game at Scott Stadium in Charlottesville.

Bettinger’s counsel claims it has evidence that Bryant was prepared to lead students in a protest that could have shut down the game in front of national television crews.

“The University Police, who would have been required to alert the President of the University and the Dean of Students, received credible reports that if the University failed to convict and expel Morgan Bettinger, the teenager [Bryant] and her followers planned to riot, with plans to disrupt and cause mayhem on Grounds. The threat was specific: the targeted event was a football game against Duke University which would be a major University event, assumed to be nationally televised, in the University’s Scott Stadium. The details included the activists’ plans to have masses of protesters lie down in front of Duke University’s team buses, preventing them from entering and traversing Grounds to the stadium, and thereby causing untold problems and potential economic damages to the two universities and hundreds of involved players and other participants,” the suit reads.

Protesters approach Morgan Bettinger’s vehicle after they say they heard her say they would “make good speed bumps” during a Black Women Matter rally on Friday, July 17, 2020.

The UVa Police Department said it has “no records” of any such threats after The Daily Progress filed a request for documentation via the Freedom of Information Act.

UVa officials have declined to comment to The Daily Progress, which is not abnormal in the midst of pending litigation.

Bettinger, who has said she has kept a low profile since the events of 2020, was unavailable for comment, her counsel told The Daily Progress. Bettinger has previously granted interviews with libertarian magazine Reason.

“We refer to the file-stamped Complaint, which we believe speaks for itself,” Bettinger’s counsel said in an email.

Faith Redd (410) 245-4898

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@faithredd5 on Twitter

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