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Oregon coach Dana Altman speaks to the media in May, making his first public comments since rape allegations came to light against three of his now former Oregon Ducks basketball players.

(Thomas Boyd/The Oregonian)

Under a little-known loophole in federal law, the University of Oregon has the right to access a rape survivor's therapy records and use them against her to defend itself in a lawsuit, a former law professor writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Katie Rose Guest Pryal, a former law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writes that the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act made it legal for the UO administrators access to the woman's counseling center therapy records to defend itself in court. Normally, such records would be off-limits, but the act specifically permits disclosure in certain cases, including when the student sues the university.

In an email response to Pryal's commentary, university spokesman Toby Klinger wrote, "The university only collected and preserved the records after receiving a written request to do so from the plaintiff's attorney. ... The university's actions are standard for the type of litigation, and we have said publicly that the records have not been reviewed in any way."

The alleged sexual assault took place in the early hours of March 9, 2014, as players and students celebrated the Ducks' basketball victory against No. 3 Arizona in the regular season finale. Investigators concluded that "no doubt the incidents occurred," but the Lane Country District Attorney declined to charge three members of the team, citing conflicting statements and actions by the victim.

In January, the unidentified rape victim filed a complaint against the University of Oregon and men's basketball coach Dana Altman, alleging that the coach showed "deliberate indifference" in recruiting one of the players who assaulted her after he had been suspended from his former college because of another sexual assault accusation. The 18-page Jane Doe complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Eugene, said the university violated the woman's Title IX rights and asked for unspecified damages.

The university countersued in February, offering a point by point response and seeking to have the original "frivolous, unreasonable" complaint dismissed and to recover legal fees from either the alleged victim or her attorneys. The university has since dropped the countersuit, but the legal proceedings exposed an unexpected wrinkle in the federal law that applies to student academic and health records.

The bottom line, Pryal advises students: "Don't go to your college counseling center to seek therapy. Go to an off-site counseling center. If, God forbid, you've been sexually assaulted, try to find a rape-crisis center. ... You simply do not have adequate privacy protections if you go to a college-provided counselor."