A high-ranking former official in the University of Southern California athletic department has filed a lawsuit alleging that USC allowed former athletic director Mike Bohn to racially harass and discriminate against her, then fired her after she voiced concerns about Bohn’s conduct.
As reported by the Los Angeles Times, Joyce Bell Limbrick was the highest-ranking woman and Black official in USC’s athletic administration, as well as the only Black woman administrator on the department’s executive team. "Bell Limbrick says her once-promising career was irreparably changed when Bohn was hired to lead USC’s athletic department in 2019," according to Times staff writer Ryan Kartje.
“Ms. Bell Limbrick had a thriving career at USC and she loved her work. Then, Mike Bohn arrived,” her attorney, J. Bernard Alexander, said in a statement.
”[Bohn’s] incessant, racially charged remarks made Joyce feel uncomfortable and undervalued, but more than that — he actively isolated her from the executive team and undermined her work. She already was vulnerable as the only Black woman on the team, and rather than support her, the university allowed Bohn to make her life hell.”
Per Kartje's reporting, Bohn resigned in May 2023, a day after the Times asked him and USC about internal criticism of his management of the athletic department. The Times later found Bohn had been under investigation for racial and gender discrimination at the University of Cincinnati, his previous employer, at the time of his hiring.
The university said Friday in a statement to the Times that it just received Bell Limbrick’s complaint and would respond “once we have reviewed it fully.”
"Her lawsuit, which was filed Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court, offers the most detailed claims yet about the concerning conduct that led to Bohn’s resignation, including harassment and racially insensitive comments and one instance of unwanted touching by Bohn, who Bell Limbrick says punched her on the arm at a university volleyball match in October 2022, prompting a university investigation," Kartje wrote.
Results of a wider investigation into Bohn’s conduct led by an outside law firm, Cozen O’Connor, were never shared by USC, which hired the firm. Then, in September 2023, four months after Bohn resigned, the university fired Bell Limbrick citing a “pattern of poor performance.” The decision stunned Bell Limbrick, who was the only member of an 11-member executive team to lose her job and, according to the complaint, had just been awarded a “merit increase” on account of her “overall job performance.”
Bell Limbrick says her “upward trajectory was unlawfully stripped” and her career has been “derailed” since, as she’s been unable to find “substantially similar employment.”
She’s suing USC for race and gender harassment, discrimination, retaliation and the failure to prevent discrimination and retaliation. She’s seeking an unspecified amount in damages.
According to Kartje, Bell Limbrick worked at USC for nine years, initially as the director of athletic compliance, before Bohn was hired in 2019. Shortly after he became athletic director, Bohn promoted Bell Limbrick to senior woman administrator, one of the highest-ranking positions in the department.
But soon after she learned that Bohn told one of his close staffers he offered Bell Limbrick the position only because the department “needed a woman and some diversity, so [she] was a perfect fit.”
Bell Limbrick raised her concerns about Bohn’s comments to other officials. It was shortly after that, Bell Limbrick alleges, that Bohn began to retaliate against her, excluding her from activities, stripping her of responsibilities, refusing to meet with her one on one, and moving her office to another facility, far away from other department officials.
Bell Limbrick says Bohn prevented her from interviewing prospective volleyball coaches as part of a 2020 search, save for one Black female candidate, and during the 2021 search that landed women’s basketball coach Lindsay Gottlieb, Bell Limbrick says that Bohn, as a self-proclaimed “basketball guru,” took over the process. At one point, she says, he called Bell Limbrick to emphasize that one of the finalists for the position, a White woman, had a husband who was Black.
In October 2021, the lawsuit states, Bohn told a room of donors in Chicago for the USC-Notre Dame game that “female athletes should be responsible for looking out for male athletes to ensure they don’t do anything that would get them in trouble in their personal lives."
In October 2022, Bell Limbrick informed Bohn that fans outside of the Coliseum had put a jersey of Trojans wide receiver Mario Williams on a gorilla and the image had appeared on the game’s broadcast. “Well,” she recalled him saying, “[Williams] does kinda look like the gorilla.”
This came two weeks after Bohn had punched Bell Limbrick in the arm at a women’s volleyball match, which led to an investigation. As part of it, Bell Limbrick detailed to USC “Bohn’s history and rumors of inappropriate and unwanted touching involving … other females at both Cincinnati and USC.” Another five months passed before USC’s general counsel told athletics administrators in an executive meeting that an outside firm had been hired to review the department, Kartje reported.
Bohn resigned two months after that, and USC, according to Bell Limbrick, never discussed any of the issues raised in the Times reporting on Bohn.
"Following Bohn’s resignation, USC president Carol Folt announced there would be changes to USC’s athletics structure and brought in consultants," Kartje wrote in the Times Friday. "Bell Limbrick met several times with them and, according to the complaint, shared again Bohn’s conduct and retaliation against her.
"She hoped to get her career in college athletics back on track but was fired on Sept. 21, 2023."
