By: ED TRELEVEN | Aug 13, 2020
A lawsuit filed by a woman who was repeatedly sexually assaulted as a teenager by her youth basketball coach in Madison has been dismissed by a federal judge, who found the federal court no longer has jurisdiction in the matter.
U.S. District Judge James Peterson ruled Monday that because the only remaining claim brought by the woman was one under Wisconsin law, and not federal law, the case no longer belongs in federal court.
According to court documents, the 34-year-old woman, who filed the lawsuit as Jane Doe, was one of two women who said they were sexually assaulted as teens by Shelton Kingcade in the 1990s. After a trial in 2016, Kingcade was convicted of assaulting the girls and sentenced to 13 years in prison.
The woman said Kingcade had begun sexually assaulting her when she was 13 years old.
The woman’s lawsuit originally sought damages from the Madison School District, Dane County and Stephan Blue, who was director of the Dane County Neighborhood Intervention Program. It also sought damages from the Amateur Athletic Union, which the lawsuit states had organized and sanctioned basketball tournaments the woman, as a teen, attended with Kingcade as her coach. Some of the assaults occurred on those trips, the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit claimed Blue was aware of a previous conviction Kingcade had for sexual assault of a minor and that the county Department of Human Services failed to adequately investigate Kingcade before hiring him as basketball coach of the Madison Spartans Youth Basketball program, which was part of NIP. That earlier conviction was vacated in 1995 after Kingcade finished a first offenders program.
The lawsuit also claimed the school district also should have known about Kingcade’s conviction when it hired him as a coach at Cherokee Middle School.
