The Hazing Lawsuit Against Real Salt Lake: What Happened and What the Law Says About It
If you are reading this page, you or someone you love may have lived through something like what the lawsuit describes — the moment a locker room stopped being a place where you changed cleats and became a place where you were targeted. Maybe you are a parent who learned your child was hazed by older teammates, and the club’s first response was a press release that said “we take athlete safety extremely seriously.” Maybe you are a young athlete whose career ended the way the lawsuit says this one did — not with a trade or a retirement press conference, but with a silence that got too heavy to carry. We are writing this page for you. Everything that follows — the law, the medicine, the money, the evidence clock, the defense playbook — is here so that when you pick up the phone, you already know what the fight looks like before the first word is spoken.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC. We are a trial firm that takes hazing, catastrophic-injury, and civil-rights cases, and we are currently lead counsel in an active hazing lawsuit seeking more than $10 million in damages. The page you are reading is not about that case. It is about the lawsuit filed in Utah against Real Salt Lake and what the law says when a professional sports club brings a child into an adult locker room and fails to protect him. But we tell you about our active case because hazing litigation is not a side practice for us — it is a case we are in right now, and the experience of building it is what lets us write this page with the depth you are about to read. Call us at 1-888-ATTY-911. The consultation is free. We do not get paid unless we win your case.
Utah’s Hazing Law: The Criminal Statute That Powers the Civil Case
Utah is one of forty-four states that have criminalized hazing. The statute is real, it is specific, and it matters in a civil lawsuit for a reason most people do not understand until a lawyer explains it.
Utah’s hazing statute criminalizes conduct that endangers another person for the purpose of initiation or affiliation with an organization — and it specifically reaches forced physical activity and sexualized conduct. Under Utah law, hazing can be charged as a misdemeanor carrying up to six months, but harsher charges arising from more serious conduct can carry sentences up to fifteen years. The precise grading depends on the severity of the conduct and the harm caused.
Here is why a criminal statute matters in a civil lawsuit: when a legislature writes a criminal law designed to protect a class of people from a specific kind of harm, and someone violates that law and causes exactly that harm, the civil lawyer can use the criminal statute as evidence of the standard of care. The doctrine is called negligence per se, and it works like this — the hazing statute was written to protect people from being sexually humiliated and physically abused as a condition of belonging to a team. If the conduct described in the lawsuit happened as alleged, it violated that statute. And a violation of a safety statute enacted for the protection of persons in the plaintiff’s position is evidence — in many jurisdictions, strong evidence — that the defendants breached their duty of care.
This matters enormously because it shifts the argument. The defense cannot simply say “it was just locker-room culture.” The legislature already decided that this kind of conduct is criminal. The question in the civil case is not whether the conduct was acceptable by locker-room standards. The question is whether it violated a law written to stop exactly this.
Utah also follows a modified comparative negligence rule with a fifty-one percent bar, meaning a plaintiff who is fifty percent at fault can still recover, but a plaintiff who is fifty-one percent or more at fault is barred. In intentional-tort and sexualized-abuse cases, comparative fault is less relevant — a minor who is forced to undress and dodge a ball is not contributorily negligent for being there — but the defense will try to pin percentage points on the plaintiff anyway, and we prepare for that fight from day one.
Who Can Be Held Liable: The Defendant Map
A hazing case against a professional sports club is rarely one defendant. It is a stack of defendants, each with a different role and a different theory of liability. Here is the map.
Real Salt Lake (Utah Soccer, LLC) — the operating entity that signed the player, controlled the training facilities at the Zions Bank Training Center in Herriman and the stadium at America First Field in Sandy, and employed the coaches and players. The club faces two theories: vicarious liability for the actions of its employees and players, and direct liability for negligent supervision — the failure to implement and enforce anti-hazing protocols for the integration of a minor player into a professional adult environment.
Major League Soccer — the league itself. The potential theory here is joint employer or principal liability, depending on the degree of oversight MLS exercised over club-level safety protocols and player conduct. MLS sets the SafeSport policies and the collective bargaining agreement standards. If the league’s own rules were adequate and the club ignored them, the club bears the primary liability. If the league’s oversight was itself deficient — if the league knew or should have known that clubs were not enforcing SafeSport policies for minor players — the league has its own exposure.
Ignacio Hernandez, the former goalkeeper coach — named individually. A coach who is present in the training environment when a minor is being sexually hazed by adult players faces direct liability for breach of duty. A coach is not a bystander. A coach is a mandatory protector. If the coach saw the conduct, heard about it, or should have seen it, his failure to report it and stop it is its own negligence — and under the SafeSport framework, his failure to report may be a violation of a specific duty.
The individual players — Aaron Herrera, David Ochoa, Tate Schmitt, and Justen Glad, as named in the lawsuit. These are the alleged perpetrators. They face individual liability for intentional torts: assault, battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The battery claim is the non-consensual physical contact — hitting the teenager with a ball while he was naked. The assault claim is the apprehension of harmful contact. The IIED claim is the extreme and outrageous nature of the conduct — conduct so beyond the bounds of decency that it warrants its own cause of action.
Each of these defendants has a different insurance tower, a different defense strategy, and a different story they will tell. The club will say the players acted outside the scope of their employment. The players will say it was consensual horseplay. The coach will say he did not see it. The league will say it was a club-level matter. Our job is to build a case that holds the right defendants accountable under the right theories and to make sure no one walks because the plaintiff’s lawyer named the wrong entity or missed a tower of coverage.
The Injury: Sexualized Hazing, PTSD, and the Suicide Attempt
The medicine of this case is not complicated to describe, but it is devastating to live through. What the lawsuit alleges — forced nudity, genital exposure, being struck with a ball while undressed, all directed at a minor who expressed discomfort — is, in the language of trauma psychology, sexualized abuse. It does not require sexual contact to qualify. The sexualization of the conduct — the exposure of genitals, the comments on the minor’s body, the forced nudity — is what makes this sexualized abuse rather than ordinary physical hazing.
The psychiatric medicine is clear on what follows. Post-traumatic stress disorder is not a feeling. It is a formal medical diagnosis with eight specific criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. A clinician does not simply decide a patient has PTSD. The patient must meet every one of those criteria: exposure to a traumatic event, intrusive symptoms like flashbacks or nightmares, avoidance of reminders, negative changes in cognition and mood, alterations in arousal and reactivity, symptoms lasting more than one month, functional impairment, and the symptoms cannot be attributed to substance use or another medical condition.
Sexual assault is the single most PTSD-generating event researchers have measured — more likely to produce lasting post-traumatic stress than combat, than motor vehicle crashes, than natural disasters. For a sixteen-year-old, trapped in an environment he could not leave, targeted by adults he could not resist, the psychological injury is the most foreseeable outcome in trauma medicine. The defense will call it “team building gone wrong.” The science calls it the most predictable psychological injury there is.
The lawsuit alleges the player attempted to take his own life. This is the most severe manifestation of untreated psychological trauma. The defense will try to separate the suicide attempt from the hazing — they will argue the attempt was caused by other stressors, by pre-existing conditions, by something other than what happened in that locker room. The counter is the timeline: a documented progression from the onset of the hazing to the expression of discomfort to the escalation of the conduct to the psychological decline to the suicide attempt. The medical record — the therapy notes, the psychiatric evaluations, the prescriptions — is what draws that line. And the law’s eggshell-plaintiff doctrine says the defendants take the victim as they found him. If the hazing was the trigger — even if the minor was already vulnerable — the defendants are responsible for the full measure of the harm, not a discounted version of it.
The lifetime cost of this injury is not a single bill. It is a stream of costs stretching across decades: ongoing psychiatric care, medication, the lost earning capacity of a professional soccer career that was terminated before it began, the loss of enjoyment of life, and the daily cost of living with a psychological injury that does not heal on a schedule. A life-care plan built by a certified planner prices each of these elements, year by year, and a forensic economist reduces them to present value. That is how the number is built — not from a lawyer’s imagination, but from the same methodology used in every catastrophic-injury case.
The Defense Playbook: What the Club’s Lawyers Will Try
The defense in a hazing case against a professional sports club does not concede. It runs a sequence of plays designed to shrink the case, shift blame, and exhaust the plaintiff. We know these plays because Lupe Peña, our associate attorney, spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm — the rooms where adjusters and their software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue people exactly like the reader. He sat in those rooms. Now he sits on this side of the table. Here are the plays and how we counter them.
Play 1: “It was consensual team bonding.” The defense will reframe forced nudity and sexualized conduct as voluntary locker-room culture. The counter is the plaintiff’s age — a minor cannot consent to sexualized conduct by adults — and the lawsuit’s own language: the conduct targeted him because he expressed discomfort. Discomfort is the opposite of consent. A minor’s discomfort, ignored and escalated, is evidence of intent, not of bonding.
Play 2: “He did not report it, so it could not have been that bad.” Delayed reporting is the norm in sexualized-abuse cases, not the exception. The psychology is well documented — shame, fear of retaliation, the power imbalance between a sixteen-year-old and adult professional athletes, the belief that no one will believe him, and the freezing response that trauma produces. The defense knows this. They use it anyway, because it works on juries that do not understand trauma. Our job is to make sure the jury understands that silence is a symptom, not a defense.
Play 3: “His music career shows he moved on and is not damaged.” The defense will mine the plaintiff’s current life for evidence of normalcy. A social-media post showing him performing. A public appearance that looks fine. The defense will argue he has moved on, the harm is in the past, the damages are minimal. The counter is the medical record — the PTSD diagnosis, the therapy notes, the psychiatric timeline. The fact that a trauma survivor functions in public does not mean the injury is gone. It means the survivor is coping. Coping is not healing, and the defense knows the difference.
Play 4: “The club did not know.” This is the club’s primary shield. If the club can show it had no notice of the conduct, it argues it cannot be liable for failing to stop it. The counter is the evidence clock — the investigation reports, the access logs, the cell phone data, and any complaint or report that was made and ignored. If the club had a SafeSport policy and no one enforced it, the absence of enforcement is the negligence. If a coach was in the building and saw nothing, the failure to see is the negligence. The question is never just “did they know?” It is “should they have known, and what would a reasonable club have done to find out?”
Play 5: “The suicide attempt was caused by something else.” The defense will argue the suicide attempt was the result of pre-existing depression, family stress, academic pressure, or anything other than the hazing. The counter is the timeline and the treating clinicians. The medical professionals who treated the plaintiff are the ones who draw the causal line. If a therapist documented the link between the hazing and the psychological decline, the defense’s alternative-cause argument runs into the medical record.
The First 72 Hours: What to Do Now
If you or your child has been hazed, sexually abused, or targeted by teammates or coaches, the first seventy-two hours are about three things: medical care, evidence preservation, and silence.
Get medical care first. If there is any physical injury, go to an emergency room. If the harm is psychological — and in hazing cases it usually is — contact a mental-health professional immediately. The sooner a clinician documents the connection between the conduct and the harm, the stronger the causal chain. Symptoms of psychological trauma can appear immediately or can be delayed — nightmares, intrusive thoughts, avoidance, hypervigilance, suicidal ideation. Do not wait for symptoms to resolve on their own. Get evaluated.
Do not sign anything. If the club, the league, or any representative of the organization asks you to sign a release, a settlement, a statement, or an agreement, do not sign it. Do not give a recorded statement. Do not agree to an “informal resolution.” Anything you sign now will be used to limit your rights later. The club’s interests and your interests are not the same. The club’s lawyer works for the club. You need your own.
Do not post on social media. The defense will mine every post, every photo, every comment for evidence that you are fine, that you moved on, that the harm is exaggerated. Delete nothing — deleting posts can look like evidence destruction — but post nothing new about the incident, the club, the players, or your emotional state until you have spoken to a lawyer.
Preserve everything. Do not delete text messages, group chats, photos, videos, emails, or social media posts. If you have screenshots, save them. If you have a journal or notes documenting what happened, keep them. If anyone witnessed the conduct, write down their names while you remember. The single most important step in the first seventy-two hours — beyond medical care — is locking down the evidence before it disappears.
Call a lawyer. Not next month. Not after the club responds to your email. Now. The preservation letter that freezes the club’s records and the players’ cell phone data is the first thing a lawyer does, and every day it does not go out is a day the evidence decays. The consultation is free. We do not get paid unless we win your case. Call 1-888-ATTY-911.
Why This Firm: Ralph Manginello and Lupe Peña
Ralph Manginello has spent twenty-seven-plus years in courtrooms, including federal court. He is the managing partner of Attorney911 and is currently lead counsel in an active hazing lawsuit seeking more than $10 million in damages — a case that has taught this firm what it takes to build a hazing claim from the inside out, from the preservation letter to the demand number. Ralph was a journalist before he was a lawyer, which means he knows how to find a story in a stack of documents and how to tell it to a jury. He is a competitor who hates losing. He built this firm to take cases that other firms are afraid of — cases against institutions, against organizations, against defendants who think their size or their brand will protect them.
Lupe Peña is our associate attorney and a former insurance-defense lawyer. He spent years inside a national defense firm — the rooms where adjusters and their valuation software decided how to deny, delay, and devalue injured people. He knows how the other side sets reserves in the first forty-eight hours, how the recorded-statement call is engineered, how the surveillance works, and how the quick settlement check arrives before the medical results do. He uses that insider knowledge for our clients now. Lupe is fluent in Spanish and conducts full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. Hablamos Español.
The firm has recovered more than $50 million for clients across its practice. We work on contingency — 33.33 percent before trial, 40 percent if the case goes to trial. The consultation is free. We do not get paid unless we win your case. The phone is answered twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, by live staff — not an answering service. Call 1-888-ATTY-911.
This page is legal information, not legal advice. Every case is different. The allegations described here come from a public lawsuit and have not been proven in court. If you or someone you love has been hazed, sexually abused, or targeted by teammates or coaches, the most important step is the first one — calling a lawyer who knows how to freeze the evidence before it disappears and how to build a case the defense cannot ignore. We are Attorney911. We are Legal Emergency Lawyers. And we are ready when you are.