Houston Nutt lawsuit against Ole Miss has been dismissed but matter is far from settled
The federal lawsuit against Ole Miss levied by former head football coach Houston Nutt has been dismissed, but Nutt will re-file his suit in a state court soon.
Houston Nutt has been seeking an apology for what he saw as defamation of character from his former employer, the University of Mississippi, for months. With the dismissal of his federal lawsuit on Wednesday without any objection from Nutt, it looks like Nutt agrees that the best course of action from here is continuing his fight in state court.
Filed in federal court on July 12, Nutt’s suit alleged that Ole Miss impugned Nutt’s reputation unjustly when in Nutt’s view, it placed a large part of the blame for the on-going NCAA investigation into football recruiting violations at the school on Nutt’s shoulders.
The suit looked to be on course for trial, until Monday. Nutt offered to settle the suit for a public apology from the university in which the school would acknowledge that it made false statements about Nutt. Additionally, the school would make a $500,000 donation to an unspecified charity which Nutt did not have any personal stake in. No public response was offered by Ole Miss at that time.
Two days later, the ruling from the federal court is that the court lacked subject matter jurisdiction to issue a ruling in the suit, thus resulting in the suit’s dismissal. Federal courts are often used to weigh in on civil suits when plaintiffs and defendants occupy different states, which isn’t the case in this suit. Nutt is still a Mississippi resident.
With the uncontested dismissal of the suit coming so soon after Nutt’s offering of a settlement, it seemed a foregone conclusion that if Nutt was going to continue his suit, it would be done in a Mississippi state court. According to his attorney, Thomas Mars of Little Rock, Arkansas, that’s exactly the game plan.
"I concurred with [Nutt’s other attorney] Bubba’s [Morrison] suggestion that we oblige Ole Miss, ask the court to grant their jurisdictional motion, and file an updated state court lawsuit next week with more details than those that were known to us when we first filed suit,” Mars said."
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It’s not yet certain what those “more details” will include, but the pending state court filing should fill in the blanks next week. What’s certain is that like the fight with the NCAA over the lack of institutional control charge, this matter is far from over.