A high-ranking former official in USC’s 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 USC’s senior woman administrator, Joyce Bell Limbrick was the highest-ranking female and Black official in USC’s athletic administration, as well as the only Black female administrator on the department’s executive team. But in a lawsuit, Bell Limbrick says that her once-promising career was irreparably changed when Bohn was hired to lead USC’s athletic department in 2019.
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 at USC.
“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.”
Her lawsuit against the university, which was filed Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court, offers the most detailed picture yet of the concerning conduct that eventually led to Bohn’s resignation at USC, including several examples of 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 Oct. 2022, prompting a university investigation.
Her allegations, according to the complaint, would later become part of a wider investigation into Bohn’s conduct led by an outside law firm, Cozen O’Connor, which was hired by USC.
The university told athletics employees in March 2022 that the firm, which specializes in cases of discrimination and harassment, was merely evaluating the department’s culture ahead of its move to the Big Ten Conference. But Bell Limbrick says Linda Hoos, USC’s vice president and Title IX coordinator, told her the same day that the firm’s actual intent was to investigate complaints and reports of misconduct by Bohn, including her own.
USC never shared the results of that investigation. Then, in Sept. 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 believes the timing of her firing, just months after she voiced concerns about Bohn, is no coincidence. She says her “upward trajectory was unlawfully stripped” by the university’s decision to terminate her employment and that her career has been “derailed” since, as she’s been unable to find “substantially similar employment”.
Bell Limbrick worked at USC for nine years, initially as the school’s 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. According to her complaint, she was one of the few Black women to hold such a position at a major American university.
But soon after Bell Limbrick was promoted into the position, she learned that Bohn had told one of his close staffers that he only offered Bell Limbrick the position 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 university officials. It was shortly after that, Bell Limbrick alleges, that Bohn began to retaliate against her, excluding her from department activities, stripping her of the usual responsibilities of the Senior Woman Administrator and refusing to meet with her one-on-one. When the department returned to the office in July 2022, Bohn relegated Bell Limbrick to an office in Galen Center, far away from other department officials.
The lawsuit details two different coaching searches, one for USC’s women’s volleyball coach and the other for USC’s women’s basketball coach, in which Bell Limbrick says Bohn attempted to undermine her work.
She 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.
This is a developing story. Please check for updates.
