CLARKSBURG – A former West Virginia University student says a professor made false accusations about him, defamed him and discriminated against him.
Bryant Keith Young filed his complaint March 20 in federal court against WVU, the WVU Board of Governors and Dr. Kathleen O’Hearn Ryan, who is an English professor at WVU.
Young, who originally is from New York, now lives in Houston. He is a 58-year-old Black man, and he says he is a SAG-AFTRA union actor and minored in theater arts in college. He includes some of his work in his pro se complaint, and he says he sometimes films, shoots and directs independent short films.
He filed a similar complaint against WVU and Ryan in federal court in 2021, and it was dismissed mostly without prejudice last March.
According to the new complaint, Young was an undergraduate theater major when he transferred to WVU. He then switched his major to English. In the spring semester of 2020, Young was in Ryan’s English 200 class. There, he says he asked several male and female students if they would like to receive a role in an independent short film he was going to shoot in West Virginia.
Later, he says Ryan called him into her office to discuss some accusations made against him. She told him some female students said Young was pressuring them to be in the short film. He says he told Ryan the accusations were false and that the students willingly agreed to be part of his project and that he saw talent in the students.
“Well, let them use that talent for something else,” Ryan allegedly replied, leading Young to believe Ryan already had decided he was guilty of pressuring the students.
After that, Young says he noticed a change of behavior toward him by Ryan and several female students.
“In one instance, Dr. Ryan stated that she did not want plaintiff to write a poem for a class assignment of a sexual nature,” the complaint states. “Ironically, Dr. Ryan read a Shakespeare poem with sexual connotations to the class and asked the class to write a poem as part of the assignment.
“When reviewing plaintiff’s poem, Dr. Ryan stated to plaintiff, ‘due to the climate, you should not read a poem with sexual innuendos.’ Plaintiff ultimately had to rewrite his poem as a result.”
Young says Ryan didn’t want him to write such a poem because it appeared she had decided he was a sexual deviant and had committed sexual malfeasance. Young notes he has no history of any sexual malfeasance, no criminal record or no drug history.
He says some female students who had been friendly became distant toward him. He says he later learned Ryan had called every female student to her office to ask if Young had done anything to make them uncomfortable or committed any sexual malfeasance.
“She then warned them to ‘be careful’ in plaintiff’s presence and she discouraged any interaction with him,” the complaint states. “One of the female students even confided in the plaintiff and told him that all the female students had nothing but ‘positive’ things to say about him.”
Young says Ryan told female students who had agreed to take part in his short film to not be involved with the film “or anything that had nothing to do with English, as if plaintiff was a criminal and as if they would be in imminent danger.”
Young says he requested an investigation with the Office of Student Conduct in July 2020, but officials there said, after some research, there never was a complaint made against him.
“All parties appear to be contradicting themselves, and untruths are being told,” the complaint states. “Ryan also went to West Virginia University’s Title IX Sexual Misconduct Department on her own to have plaintiff investigated.”
He says Title IX Coordinator James Goins Jr. told Young he had denied Ryan’s request because Young’s actions “did not constitute any actions of sexual misconduct.”
Young accuses the defendants of age discrimination, race discrimination and defamation. He seeks compensatory damages for the discriminatory acts, defamation, embarrassment, humiliation and emotional distress. He also seeks punitive damages of $75,000, court costs, attorney fees and other relief.
U.S. District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia case number 1:23-cv-00029