LOS ANGELES — For a year and a half, since the explosive news of his resignation amid an explosion of controversy, the name Mike Bohn has ghosted across USC’s campus.
Coaches, occasionally, have referenced back to Bohn, the athletic director who orchestrated USC’s Big Ten move and hired a slew of the most important faces in Heritage Hall before his career collapsed. But university leadership, still, has rarely much as acknowledged his presence. On the day Jen Cohen was announced as USC’s newest athletic director in August 2023, when asked about moving on from Bohn, USC president Carol Folt told the Southern California News Group “today, we’re talking about the celebration of Jen.”
But USC, now, will be forced to reckon legally and publicly with the aftereffects of Bohn’s tenure, with a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by former senior associate athletic director Joyce Bell Limbrick. The complaint, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Thursday, alleged USC “condoned Bohn’s blatant pattern of racial discrimination and harassment” against Bell Limbrick, a Black woman who served as USC’s senior woman administrator.
Bell Limbrick voiced concerns over Bohn’s behavior as part of an investigation into his conduct, the lawsuit states. But a few months after he resigned abruptly in mid-May 2023, amid a Los Angeles Times investigation, Bell Limbrick was terminated “based on a false claim that (she) had demonstrated a ‘pattern of poor performance,’” the complaint alleges.
There was an attempt made last April to “resolve the matter,” Bell Limbrick’s lawyers told the SCNG. It didn’t take, however, as the two parties disagreed on liability; USC believed “they were justified in making the decision to terminate her,” as Bell Limbrick’s lawyer J. Bernard Alexander told the SCNG.
In a statement, USC said it had “just received the complaint” and would respond once reviewing it fully. The university declined to comment on Bernard Alexander’s comments on pre-lawsuit discussions around liability.
“We believe that she was simply terminated because she had the audacity to complain about conduct inside the workplace,” Bernard Alexander said, “and USC doesn’t like when people say things negative about USC.”
Bell Limbrick had worked at USC since 2010, first as a director of athletic compliance. After serving for a few years as an associate A.D. in charge of risk management and student services, she was promoted to her title of senior woman administrator in 2020, which the NCAA defines as “the highest-ranking female in each NCAA athletics department or conference office.” Bell Limbrick, the lawsuit alleges, was one of a “handful” of Black women holding such a position across the country.
But the complaint alleges her career changed, however, after Bohn’s hire at USC in November 2019. She learned Bohn had told another athletic department employee he had only hired her as the senior woman administrator because “they needed a woman and some diversity,” and after complaining about the statement to Bohn and staff, Bohn began to “strip tasks away” from her, according to the lawsuit.
The complaint, subsequently, paints a picture of Bohn isolating Bell Limbrick: relegating her to a remote office in the Galen Center post-COVID, refusing to hold one-on-one meetings with her, and restricting her role in coaching searches. Bell Limbrick’s lawsuit, too, alleges numerous instances when USC enabled or was complicit in sexist or racist comments from Bohn: saying during a donor event female athletes should be responsible for male athletes “to ensure they don’t do anything that would get them in trouble,” asking Bell Limbrick specifically if she knew Black hip-hop artists, and punching Bell Limbrick in the arm at a women’s volleyball match.
Bell Limbrick, the complaint reads, brought all instances to USC’s attention. After the university later investigated Bohn’s conduct and his subsequent resignation, Folt brought in consultants from Huron Consulting amid changes in the athletic department’s leadership structure. Bell Limbrick, the lawsuit alleges, shared her complaints to consultants amid their review. On Sept. 21, 2023, Bell Limbrick was fired by USC despite having earned a ‘merit increase’ two months earlier, the complaint alleges.
“They claim that there was a history of her having performance issues, and her personnel file doesn’t reflect that,” Bernard Alexander said. “And what is actually reflected is, during the timeframe that Bohn was there, he took away duties and basically stripped away responsibilities so that she was not doing the job she was hired to do. So, that’s the real issue.”
Bell Limbrick is suing USC on violations of racial and gender harassment and discrimination and retaliation under the Fair Employment and Housing Act, among others. She’s seeking various forms of damages, and a variety of forms of affirmative relief requiring USC’s athletic department to train employees and develop disciplinary measures for discriminatory and retaliatory acts.
“It’s a small industry,” Bernard Alexander said. “So to lose your job in this industry makes it very difficult, particularly if you’re female and African-American, to get a similar job with similar responsibilities.”