Sixteen former Michigan hockey players walked into federal court this week and described something the sport has spent decades calling tradition. Their complaint calls it “sexualized abuse” that would be “immediately recognized as torture under any other circumstance.” That is the language sitting in the docket now, not mine.
The filing, Doe v. University of Michigan, landed September 9 in the Eastern District of Michigan. The 16 John Does played between 1984 and 2001. Nearly all on athletic scholarships. Some, the complaint says, were 17. What they allege happened inside the program under Red Berenson is not locker-room ribbing. Forced genital shaving. Pubic hair burned with blowtorches. Anal penetration with disposable razor handles. Testicles tied to hockey helmets or five-gallon buckets and weighted with pucks. The complaint frames these as mandatory initiation rites run by upperclassmen, often after heavy drinking, sometimes with trainers or equipment managers present.
I have covered enough institutional sports stories to know how these filings get minimized. This one is harder to shrink.
The Wins Never Audited the Culture
Berenson coached Michigan from 1984 to 2017. Thirty-three seasons. Two national titles, 1996 and 1998. Eleven Frozen Fours. 848 career wins, fourth-winningest in NCAA hockey history. That résumé is real and it is also the shield. The complaint alleges the hazing was part of his “abusive coaching style,” known to him, directed by him, facilitated for years. One specific claim: Berenson told upperclassmen to shave only “from the neck down” so nothing showed under clothes. Another: he moved rituals into team facilities after they started outside. A player who complained, the suit says, saw his ice time cut.
Then-assistant Mel Pearson, later the head coach from 2017 to 2022, allegedly knew. The complaint says he told at least one player seeking help to keep his head down and “just get through it.” Equipment manager Ian Hume and trainer Rick Bancroft are named as people who allegedly observed or facilitated and did nothing. Staffers who heard complaints, the filing claims, answered with “be a Michigan man.”
That phrase is the mechanism. Not the acts alone. The enforcement system that turned reporting into a loyalty test and reduced ice time into the penalty for breaking silence. Berenson told the Ann Arbor News in 2012 he was ending freshman hazing and admitted some captains “got too carried away.” The complaint argues he knew the full scope long before that soft public cleanup and that the university never ran a real investigation off the acknowledgment.
University spokesman Paul Corliss answered the suit the way institutions answer when the calendar is their best defense. “The allegations outlined in the plaintiffs’ complaint are disturbing, but many elements of the complaint are misleading,” he said. The former athletes “attended the university more than 25 years ago” and described “behavior at the hands of fellow teammates” from the 1980s and 1990s. “To the extent that any former student-athlete engaged in hazing or other misconduct, they were violating university policy.”
Notice the geometry. Teammates. Policy. Distance. The complaint names coaches, staff, and a university that allegedly had notice going back to a 1980 hazing incident under the previous coach and Clery Act obligations from 1990. Berenson, now 86 and still listed as a special advisor, has disputed that coaches promoted or encouraged the rituals. Pearson has not responded to media requests. Allegations remain unproven. The case is at the filing stage.
Michigan’s Athletic Department Already Knows This Shape
I keep lining this up against the rest of the department’s ledger because the pattern is the story. In 2022 Michigan paid $490 million to more than 1,000 survivors of Robert Anderson, the team doctor who abused athletes from 1966 to 2003. Football coach Sherrone Moore was fired over a relationship with an executive assistant. A $1.2 million settlement went to a woman who accused a former football staffer of sexual assault. Former offensive coordinator Matt Weiss awaits trial on charges he hacked accounts and accessed intimate photos of female athletes nationwide. Athletic director Warde Manuel took a buyout and leaves at year’s end. Pearson’s own contract was not renewed in 2022 after a third-party review flagged culture problems in the hockey program.
The plaintiffs say they only fully mapped the university’s role after comparing notes starting in September 2024. They allege substance abuse, insomnia, sexual dysfunction, depression, PTSD, and damaged careers as the residue. They want punitive and liquidated damages, fees, and mandatory sexualized-hazing prevention training for every Michigan athlete. The university, the complaint claims, knew a suit was coming for over a year and declined meaningful settlement talks.
College hockey still sells toughness as curriculum. Berenson’s teams won because they were hard, structured, and relentless. The lawsuit alleges the same structure that produced banners also produced a pipeline of silence, and that adults ran the valve. Title IX is the vehicle because the plaintiffs frame this as sex and gender discrimination the school failed to stop. A jury will decide what the evidence holds. The filing already decided something else: the championships do not get to write the full history.
Michigan built a hockey empire on deference. The complaint says that deference ran downhill until freshmen were the ones carrying the weight, literally, and that the people paid to stop it called the weight character. The docket is open. The banners are still hanging. Both facts can sit in the same sentence now.
