A lawsuit filed against Lane Kiffin back in September was dismissed on Wednesday night. However, the plaintiff is refusing to give up despite the loss.
DeSanto Rollins and his legal team plan to appeal the dismissal.
He hopes that a judge will give him the opportunity to be reinstated to the team and pick his position, and award him $40 million in damages from the head coach and Ole Miss. Those are the demands in his lawsuit, which cannot be ruled upon if it is dismissed.
Yes, a player that is suing Lane Kiffin over treatment of his mental health hopes to one day return to that team at a position of his choice. That is a real thing! Rollins wants to play for the coach that he is actively attempting to sue for being an abusive racist.
His entire case is focused on mental health and race. It asserts that Rollins was kicked off of the team after missing team activities, including practice, during a “mental health crisis.” The Rebels push back on that claim because he is still on scholarship with the program.
Rollins claims that Kiffin “ignored” signs of depression and subjected him to “grossly reckless, and indifferent” treatment on basis of race. The legal team representing Ole Miss and its head football coach argue that the Plaintiff “has not alleged Kiffin treated him differently than other similarly situated individuals, much less that he did so with discriminatory intent because of Plaintiff’s race or sex.”
However, new evidence that was filed in the lawsuit in December appeared to disprove his entire case. And now, approximately seven weeks later, it has been dismissed.
Lane Kiffin is vindicated.
There are a lot of people in the media who owe Kiffin and the Rebels an apology. The way that national outlets covered the entire saga was an embarrassment.
ESPN neglected to mention that Rollins demanded reinstatement. It also failed to mention how Rollins and his attorneys compared a position change to the death of his teammate’s father.
Most of the narratives surrounding the lawsuit painted Kiffin in a negative light. Even when Rollins recorded a meeting with his head coach without consent (legally), the focus was on what Kiffin did and said wrong — but not what led him to do and say the things he did and said.
And now that it has been thrown out, it is largely crickets from the same folks who were so quick to cover the lawsuit without presenting the full story when it first dropped. They have been awfully quiet!