New lawsuit alleges sexual misconduct, retaliation against 14-year-old at Interlochen arts school 

A new lawsuit against the Interlochen Center for the Arts, filed in federal district court in the Western District of Michigan on Sept. 16, alleges that a 14-year-old student at Interlochen’s boarding school was subject to sexual assault and harassment by fellow students as well as a teacher, and claims that after she reported that conduct, school administrators retaliated against her by preventing her from re-enrolling.

The complaint alleges that the student, who is not named in the lawsuit but identified by her initials A.C., faced “severe, pervasive, and offensive sexual assault(s) and harassment” by her roommate and suitemate, as well as by staff at the Interlochen school, while she was a first-year student at the boarding school in the 2024-25 academic year.

An Interlochen spokesperson said that the events laid out in the complaint “simply did not occur as alleged,” and that the lawsuit is “filled with false allegations.”

The complaint also alleges that, when A.C. and her mother, Emily Cohen, who is named in the lawsuit on her daughter’s behalf, reported the alleged assault and harassment, Interlochen “did not investigate, repeatedly denied or delayed requests for a room/roommate reassignment, and refused to discipline A.C.’s assailants,” and that those perpetrators “grew bolder as Defendant ICA’s culture permitted it,” referring to the Interlochen Center for the Arts.

Todd Flood, who is representing the student in the lawsuit, said that the school’s lack of response is a central point in the lawsuit. 

“It’s a 14-year-old young girl away from home for the first time, and she cries for help,” he said in an interview with Michigan Advance. “When she cries for help, they don’t help, and then they retaliate against her. It really boils down to that.”

Scathing report shows decades of sexual abuse at Interlochen arts school, Epstein among those named

An astronomy teacher at the school is also a named defendant in the lawsuit, with the student A.C. having taken his class, which was generally reserved for older students, during her first year due to prerequisites for a summer program.

The claims against the teacher center around a series of “alternative assignments” to make up lost points on classwork, which included having the student “record herself using a protractor in the bathroom mirror,” and the complaint alleges that he “refused to accept the video unless A.C. emailed it to him directly, rather than submit it through the schools approved curriculum program,” after which point he informed the student that she was “required to attend his private office hours alone so that he could review her hand position and stance as depicted in the video.”

According to the complaint, a second alternative assignment required the student to write a poem entitled, “Gravity Does Not Ask for Consent,” and a third alternative assignment required students to examine and draw a telescope. The student in the lawsuit, after turning in her assignment, was allegedly granted a grade of zero and told by the teacher “that she would need to examine ’his telescope’ during a private meeting to earn the points back.”

Cohen filed a Title IX complaint in February against the teacher on behalf of her daughter, according to the complaint. That report was closed, the suit claims, even though the school “had not conducted any formal or meaningful investigation into A.C.’s complaints.”

A second Title IX complaint was filed in April, which was closed three days later, “without conducting any meaningful investigation,” according to the lawsuit, which continues on to say that “Through this sham investigation, Defendants effectively concluded that A.C., a fourteen-year-old minor, had consented” to the teacher’s alleged sexual harassment.

Flood said that the incident in which the teacher requested the video be sent to his private email represented an escalation of previous concerns, saying, “I don’t know what the teacher is doing with a 14-year-old girl sending a video to his private email, but normally, as I understand it, when you’re doing official school work, class work, you send it through proper channels.”

The complaint also alleges that Interlochen Center of the Arts leadership retaliated against the student for filing complaints against the teacher and against other students by preventing her from re-enrolling in Interlochen courses for the following school year.

Her enrollment for the 2025-26 academic year was formally rescinded on April 9, 2025, though “one week after A.C.’s enrollment was rescinded, A.C. participated in a course planning meeting with an advisor to discuss her academic plans for future years in preparation for college, reflecting that the rescission was not the product of any ordinary or anticipated academic process,” the lawsuit states. 

The claims of retaliation also include the grading practices that the teacher began after the initial Title IX complaint was filed, at which point he began giving the student no credit on her academic assignments. 

“The retaliation claim is clear. In April of 2025, the school offered to fix her grades if she left for good, right? So there was a faux pas in the grading system, but it sounded to me like a quid pro quo. We’ll take care of your grades; you just leave,” Flood explained. “And that’s in the complaint. About six weeks after the Title IX report, it took back her acceptance and re-enrollment. So, I think the retaliation is clear on its face.”

The Interlochen Center for the Arts, a prestigious arts school in northern Michigan with a history of successful alumni in the arts, also has a long history of sexual abuse — as detailed in a scathing investigative report that was released earlier this year showing that more than 70 alumni reported experiencing sexual abuse and misconduct from adults in Interlochen’s leadership.

The report showed that the majority of the alleged abuse began between the 1970s and 1990s, and four instances of abuse were reported as starting after 2000, implicating 47 adults in sexual abuse — including two reports tied to notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. 

It detailed an overwhelmingly permissive culture for this type of conduct to have occurred at Interlochen — made possible by a number of factors, including limited contact with family members by students and the power dynamic between students and teachers. But the report concluded that the lack of response from Interlochen made the overall environment one where adults were able to get away with this type of behavior. 

The report, however, seeks to place the school’s issues with sexual abuse in its past, with President Trey Devey and Chair of the Board Barrett Rollins saying that “Interlochen will not tolerate predators or those who enable them. Our campus exists to protect, educate, and empower every student.”

This lawsuit, however, alleges that the problems of sexual abuse — and the school’s lack of response to that abuse — continues through the present, with the allegations taking place in 2024 and 2025. 

“Whether or not human nature has changed, I don’t think it has until there’s real reform,” Flood said. “Unfortunately, if we don’t work on studying history and studying human behavior, we unfortunately end up repeating it, and you know that that seems to be something that the school should be on uber lookout to make sure and protect students from harassment, from Title making sure that your Title IX protocols are, you know, every T crossed and every I dotted, and that there are guardrails put in place so we don’t end up repeating history.”

Matthew Curtis, a Southfield-based lawyer who represents four former Interlochen students abused by faculty in the 1970s, said that the new lawsuit shows that “Interlochen’s history of abuse is not a relic of the past.”

“Interlochen has spent the past several months telling the public it has reformed the systems that allowed decades of abuse to occur on its campus. A new lawsuit, filed within weeks of that public messaging campaign, describes the same pattern the school claims to have fixed,” he said in a statement. “Survivors of institutional abuse deserve more than a statute of limitations that expires before most of them are ready to come forward.”

This is the second lawsuit filed relating to these allegations — the first, which was filed in April 2024 by Emily Cohen, the mother of the 14-year-old student, was dismissed without prejudice due to the mother lacking standing to claim harms against herself for the abuse that she alleged her daughter experienced. 

Flood Law was not involved in that litigation, which alleged violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act, whereas the current lawsuit centers on Title IX concerns.

“The prior lawsuit, which raised related issues, was dismissed. Like the first lawsuit, this one is baseless,” the Interlochen spokesperson’s statement said. “Interlochen will vigorously defend this matter in court and is evaluating its own legal rights concerning the false allegations that this parent has made.”

Flood, however, noted that the cases are entirely separate, and he currently represents the minor student in this litigation specifically.

We don’t file frivolous cases,” Flood said. “All they’re trying to do is distract the shooter and have him take his eye off the ball. So I would make their defense akin to the distraction of those fans behind the basketball net.”