Vermont School District Ordered To Pay $466,666 After Football Hazing Assault

In October 2012, nine or ten members of the Milton High School football team, including a 14-year-old freshman identified here as Z.B., gathered for a team dinner at a teammate's home in Milton, Vermont. At some point that evening, Z.B. was dragged into the basement and thrown onto a couch, where one player held him down while another forced a pool cue into his rectum. The Milton Town School District already knew its football players had a history of hazing and sexual assaults against underclassmen teammates.

The District had another chance to act the following year. In August 2013, the Milton High School principal heard rumors that incoming freshmen were avoiding the football program because of stories about broomsticks used in team initiations. She told Z.B. she would shut the program down if the rumors were true. Afraid of retaliation from other students, he denied them, and the principal then directed him to tell an incoming freshman he had lied. When she raised the rumors with the superintendent, he declined to do anything further.

Z.B. and his family sued the school district in Vermont Superior Court, Chittenden Unit, Civil Division, dropping separate claims against the Town of Milton and the school board along the way. The complaint alleged negligent supervision and a violation of the Vermont Public Accommodations Act. Jerome F. O'Neill and Celeste E. Laramie of Gravel & Shea PC in Burlington represented him at a five-day jury trial before Judge Helen M. Toor that concluded in November 2019.

The jury sided with Z.B. on the negligence claim and against him on the public accommodations claim. It awarded $280,000 for pain and suffering and found the District 60 percent negligent, assigning the remaining 40 percent to Z.B. himself. The trial court initially entered judgment for the full $280,000, on the theory that the jury had already built the 40 percent reduction into its number.

Z.B. moved for a new trial or an additur, arguing the court should never have let the jury weigh a 14-year-old assault victim's own fault in the first place. The court agreed it had erred in allowing the comparative-negligence defense in a case built on a sexual assault, and it ordered a new trial unless the District accepted an additur of $186,666, the 40 percent the jury had deducted. That brought the total judgment to $466,666. The District accepted, conditioned on the outcome of an appeal, and both sides appealed.

The Vermont Supreme Court affirmed on January 15, 2021, in an opinion identifying Gravel & Shea's Jerome F. O'Neill, Celeste E. Laramie and Chase S. Whiting as counsel for Z.B. The court upheld the trial judge's decision to strike the comparative-negligence defense and left the $466,666 judgment intact.

Z.B. later identified himself publicly and pushed Vermont lawmakers to close the loophole his own case had exposed. In 2024 the legislature added 12 V.S.A. section 1036(b), barring defendants from raising comparative negligence at all in a negligence claim arising from a sexual act. The law took effect April 22, 2024, more than a decade after the dinner in the basement that started the case.