Fresno State woman’s basketball coach Stacy Johnson-Klein entered into a case that involved alleged sex discrimination and retaliation for the former women's basketball coach's advocacy for female athlete’s lawsuit in 2007. This is just an incredible story of the abuse of Fresno State’s powers and resources to back an athletic director to wage a campaign against women who fought for woman advocacy. A little background, Johnson-Klein was fired in March 2005 after less than three seasons as the coach of the Bulldogs. Johnson-Klein stated that she was fired because she advocated for women's rights. In its defense, the university claimed that Johnson-Klein was dismissed because she was dishonest, potentially dangerous and abusive to her players and assistant coaches (Hostetter 2007). The varsity's legal counsel depicted Johnson-Klein as a self-centered manipulator who ignored her players' welfare and ran roughshod over university policies in her pursuit of money, fame and power (Redden 2007). She was smeared by the university defense team with witness after witness entertaining the jurors with allegations of a team meeting that turned into a bizarre sex …show more content…
The jury of 11 women and 1 man needed less than four hours of deliberations to unanimously decide the university had discriminated and retaliated against her (Redden 2007). She was awarded $19.1 million dollars, one of the largest payouts in title ix history. The jurors embraced her lawyers' explanation for her firing nearly three years ago: She's a woman, she was an unrelenting champion of women's equality and Fresno State couldn't tolerate such an employee. I think another reason she won due to the fact there were 11 woman jurors and Fresno State had a rash of title ix lawsuits, 3 all in 2007, which didn’t help them in the public’s eye which there were all found guilty of title ix discrimination (Redden