Former swimmer Riley Gaines and others file a lawsuit against the NCAA
The group are accusing the governing body of violating its Title IX rights and Lia Thomas’ participation at the 2022 World Championships.
unbranded – Sport
Carmel’s Grace Estabrook swam at Penn with Lia Thomas, a transgender woman who was first to win a DI NCAA national title.Estabrook and two Penn teammates filed a lawsuit citing harassment, abuse and federal law violations.Estabrook is a two-time individual state swimming champion and three-time team state champ at Carmel High School.
Former Carmel High state swimming champion Grace Estabrook says she felt “shame” swimming with her University of Pennsylvania teammate Lia Thomas because she believed Thomas, a transgender woman, “tainted the results of their swims and made the competition unfair for their opponents.”
Estabrook says she would stand in the Penn locker room always wary, “a disruption to her peace and preparation for her swims knowing that Thomas could walk in at any moment while she was changing.”
The Penn administrators, Estabrook says, would tell Estabrook and her teammates that “if the women spoke publicly about their concerns about Thomas’ participation on the women’s team, the reputation of those complaining about Thomas being on the team would be tainted with transphobia for the rest of their lives and they would probably never get a job.”
These complaints by Estabrook, echoed by two of her former Penn teammates, are laid out in a 90-page lawsuit the three women filed against the university, the NCAA, the Ivy League Conference and Harvard University, citing harassment, abuse and federal law violations during the 2021-2022 women’s college sports season.
The lawsuit alleges that Thomas’ eligibility to compete as a woman for Penn violated their Title IX rights. It also argues the NCAA’s rules which, at the time, allowed biological males to compete in the women’s category based on their preferred gender identity, was “discriminatory.”
Estabrook, a two-time individual state swimming champion and three-time team state champ at Carmel, along with Penn teammates Margot Kaczorowski and Ellen Holmquist filed their lawsuit Feb. 4. It is backed and supported by the Independent Council on Women’s Sports.
It claims the NCAA and Ivy League fostered a culture of intimidation while forcing young women to deny biology, jeopardizing their opportunities, privacy and safety. The complaint says these actions violated Title IX and failed to protect female athletes.
“I never expected my Ivy League education to teach me that women must silently accept losing their opportunities and privacy,” Estabrook said in a statement. “Women’s sports and the leaders who oversee them should not prioritize men’s feelings over fairness and integrity.”
Two days after the lawsuit was filed and one day after President Donald Trump signed an executive order, the NCAA announced the Board of Governors had voted to update the association’s participation policy for transgender athletes.
The NCAA’s new policy “limits competition in women’s sports to student-athletes assigned female at birth only. The policy permits student-athletes assigned male at birth to practice with women’s teams and receive benefits such as medical care while practicing. This policy is effective immediately and applies to all student-athletes regardless of previous eligibility reviews under the NCAA’s prior transgender participation policy.”
But that updated policy doesn’t change the experience his clients faced in the past, according to sports attorney Bill Bock, a partner with Kroger, Gardis & Regas in Indianapolis who is representing the women. Bock resigned from his role with the NCAA last year over the organization’s trans athlete rules.
IndyStar reached out to Penn athletics, the Ivy League and the NCAA for comment on the lawsuit. Only the NCAA responded, sending a statement via email.
“College sports are the premier stage for women’s sports in America,” the statement read. “And while the NCAA does not comment on pending litigation, the Association and its members will continue to promote Title IX, make unprecedented investments in women’s sports and ensure fair competition in all NCAA championships.”
In a USA Today story in 2022, Thomas said she “belongs on the women’s team.”
“The very simple answer is that I’m not a man. I’m a woman, so I belong on the women’s team,” Thomas, a 22-year-old transgender woman, told Sports Illustrated in an interview published in 2022. “Trans people deserve that same respect every other athlete gets.”
Lawsuit: ‘All the focus was upon Thomas’
Estabrook was 7 years old when she started swimming competitively and quickly became a standout athlete for the Carmel Swim Club, one of the best youth swimming programs in the country. She went on to excel at Carmel High, where she was the captain of the swimming and diving team during her senior season in 2018.
While at Carmel, Estabrook was a breaststroke specialist, competing in the 100- and 200-yard breaststroke, the 200- and 400-yard individual medley and the 100- and 200-yard backstroke.
She was a three-time team state and national champion, a two-time state champion in the 200-yard medley relay, a three-time scholastic All-American, a four-time Scholar Athlete, a two-time selection to the Indiana All-State Team and a three-year Junior National Qualifier.
Estabrook had multiple Division I scholarship offers to swim in college, the lawsuit says, but became particularly interested in Penn because of its excellence at both the athletic and academic level.
She joined the Penn team in the fall of 2018 and qualified for the Ivy League championships every year she swam, except the 2021 championships, which were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
But during Estabrook’s senior season of 2021-22, when Thomas joined the women’s team after swimming on Penn’s men’s team, things were different, according to the lawsuit. Estabrook and her teammates allege in the lawsuit that “week after week, media focus and attention upon the UPenn’s women’s swim team grew.”
And it had nothing to do with the women swimmers, they allege in the lawsuit.
“This, too, deprived the women swimmers of focus and caused the 2021 to 2022 season to be chaos filled, demoralizing and draining,” the lawsuit says. “All the focus was upon Thomas, the man on the women’s swim team, and not upon the women on the team. This, too, deprived the plaintiffs and their teammates of their equal opportunities as women swim team members.”
IndyStar reached out to Bock requesting an interview with Estabrook but did not get a response.
Her ‘saddest moment’ on Penn swim team
The Penn women’s swim team regularly trained at a public waterpark during their Florida training trip and during these training sessions, according to the lawsuit, the Penn women’s team shared the waterpark and the women’s locker room at the waterpark with members of the public.
“The members of the UPenn women’s team were shocked that Thomas used the public women’s locker at the waterpark and undressed in the presence of children that appeared to be as young as four years old,” the lawsuit alleges. “Members of the UPenn women’s team do not believe their coach, Lia Thomas or anyone from UPenn advised the operators of the waterpark that a male was using the women’s locker room.”
Watching Thomas using a public locker room with little girls “was traumatizing to many members of the Penn swim team,” the lawsuit states, and it was one of Estabrook’s and Kaczorowski’s “saddest memories of their time on the UPenn women’s swim team.”
Estabrook recalls “a constant feeling of tension and unspoken hostility between those who wanted Thomas to participate and those who did not but had been intimidated into silence,” the lawsuit states.
That tension reached its highest levels, the lawsuit says, at the 2022 Ivy League Championships at Harvard when Estabrook and her teammates witnessed what they said was a “public spectacle centered around Thomas.”
The women at the Ivy League Championships, according to the lawsuit, “reported a chaotic environment dominated by a singular focus upon Thomas in a near total disregard for the women competing. The Ivy League’s standard statement regarding transphobic comments was repeated again and again throughout the meet.”
Female participants in the Ivy League Championships, according to the lawsuit, “saw their most important athletic competition purposefully turned into a public spectacle geared to maximizing Thomas’ notoriety and support for Thomas shattering sex-based gender norms.”
Estabrook says in the lawsuit, the championships should have been “a celebration of the achievements of the women who had worked all season to compete in their respective events.”
In March 2022, Thomas became the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I national championship in any sport after winning the women’s 500-yard freestyle with a time of 4:33.24; Olympic silver medalist Emma Weyant was second with a time 1.75 seconds behind Thomas.
After the NCAA updated its trans athlete policy Feb. 6, NCAA president Charlie Baker issued a statement.
“We strongly believe that clear, consistent, and uniform eligibility standards would best serve today’s student-athletes instead of a patchwork of conflicting state laws and court decisions,” Baker said. “To that end, President Trump’s order provides a clear, national standard.”
Follow IndyStar sports reporter Dana Benbow on X: @DanaBenbow. Reach her via email: [email protected].
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Publish date : 2025-02-19 00:40:00
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