Sixteen former Michigan hockey players filed a federal lawsuit in Detroit on September 9 and used a word college programs treat like radioactive waste. Torture.
According to the complaint, sexualized hazing was the operating system on the Wolverines men’s team from 1984 to 2001. The 16 John Does allege older players stripped freshmen naked, forcibly shaved their genitals, inserted razor handles during that process, singed pubic hair with a blowtorch, and tied helmets loaded with pucks to younger players’ genitalia. The suit calls the abuse “ritualized, meticulously planned, and sadistic.” I am not going to treat the inventory like a scoring summary. The legal claim is bigger than any single act.
The lawsuit states: “Men as young as seventeen years old — new to adult life and in many cases dependent on hockey to access education at Michigan — were subjected to sexualized abuse that would be immediately recognized as torture under any other circumstance.” Those seventeen-year-olds needed the roster spot for the degree. The complaint alleges the adults in the room turned that dependency into leverage.
Be a Michigan Man Meant Stay Quiet
The suit does not stop at teammate-on-teammate violence. It alleges coaches, staff, and administrators knew, concealed it, and treated participation as mandatory. Players who complained, the filing says, got told to “be a Michigan man,” that they were not “good teammates,” or saw their ice time cut. The lawsuit is blunt: “Coaching staff made clear to players that participation in the sexualized abuse was a mandatory condition of playing hockey for Michigan.”
I have heard “Michigan Man” sold as character for as long as I have covered the Big Ten. The complaint turns the phrase into an enforcement tool. According to the plaintiffs, trusted adults taught them the abuse was normal. Once a kid believes the people holding his scholarship define normal, the locker room becomes a closed system. That is how a ritual survives across classes.
The filing names only the university and its Board of Regents as defendants. It still puts legendary coach Red Berenson and later coach Mel Pearson in the narrative as figures who allegedly encouraged the culture. Berenson ran the program from 1984 to 2017. One plaintiff account in the suit says teammates understood that “Red’s practice was to shave you from the neck down,” so no one would notice. The Free Press could not immediately reach Berenson or Pearson when the story broke.
The 2012 Cleanup Line Looks Different Now
In 2012 Berenson publicly announced the end of freshman hazing. “We’ve taken all of the little freshmen things out of our program,” he said, per The Ann Arbor News. “It’s hard enough to make the transition as a freshman without going through some of that. It’s borderline embarrassment or humiliation.”
Borderline embarrassment. The lawsuit’s window is 1984 to 2001. The acts it describes sit in a different universe from carrying pucks or eating last. I read the 2012 quote next to the complaint’s language and the distance is the whole case. What a Hall of Fame coach framed as little freshmen things does not map onto what sixteen men now allege happened under that same roof. Pearson was already pushed out in 2022 after a WilmerHale review found cultural rot—berating, mistreatment of staff, retaliation. Athletic director Warde Manuel spoke then about student-athletes needing a “positive and meaningful experience.” The new suit reaches further back and claims the rot had a sexualized core the public never heard.
Attorney Michael Pitt told the Free Press the university knew of the potential lawsuit for more than a year and “declined to engage our clients in meaningful discussions about resolution.” The plaintiffs want accountability with their privacy intact. They also want mandatory sexualized-hazing prevention training for every U-M athlete. After the $490 million Robert Anderson settlement—which included hockey players among the survivors—that year of silence is not a paperwork delay. It is a choice.
I do not get to decide liability. A court will. What I can say is that the mythology already took the hit. A program that sold belonging allegedly required, per the complaint, sadistic initiation enforced by the brand’s favorite slogan. Recruits hear “Michigan Man” and think pedigree. Sixteen men say they heard it and understood the price. Until the university answers in detail, that is the record the filing leaves on the ice.
