In an opinion yesterday, Judge Ramos dismissed a suit brought by a well-known dressage coach, Michael Barisone, against the United States Equestrian Federation based on the events that led Barisone to shoot a former student, Lauren Kanarek, and that were featured in a Netflix documentary earlier this year.
Barisone was a leading figure in the dressage community, and allowed Kanarek, a fellow USEF member and his trainee, to live temporarily on his New Jersey farm. He alleges that Kanarek refused to leave and became increasingly “unstable.” Matters escalated to the point that Barisone confronted, and then shot, Kanarek twice in the chest in 2019. She survived, and he was charged with attempted murder but ultimately found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Barisone’s suit against USEF alleged that the group violated its own “Safe Sport” policy by not investigating and addressing multiple complaints about Kanarek’s allegedly erratic behavior. Even though Judge Ramos found that Barisone had plausibly alleged facts that USEF breached its own policy, he found that the causal chain connecting that breach to Barisone’s alleged harm — his downfall from the shooting — was too speculative:
Barisone contends it to be an “inescapable fact” that, had USEF initiated an investigation into Kanarek, “the only reasonable conclusion one could reach is that” she would have been temporarily suspended pending an investigation, which “without a doubt” would have led to a more permanent sanction or lifetime ban imposed upon her in 2018 or early 2019, thereby prohibiting USEF member’s from engaging in professional equestrian activities with Kanarek. As a result, Barisone contends that he would have been obligated to terminate his training relationship with Kanarek and that she would have been required to leave his farm.
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Barisone’s damages theory fails . . . . His theory requires the Court to assume, in sequence, that an investigation would have been initiated which would have yielded findings sufficient to warrant a temporary suspension, that USEF had the authority to and would have elected to impose such a suspension, that in the interim, Kanarek would have changed her conduct due to the suspension, that the suspension would have ripened into a permanent ban, that the permanent ban would have compelled Kanarek to accede to vacate his farm or that the local police would have acted upon USEF’s determination to suspend Kanarek by evicting her.
Each of these assumptions is independently problematic. Even under the Safe Sport Policy’s mandatory investigative obligation, USEF retained broad discretion over the outcome. And even had temporary measures been imposed, it is a matter of pure speculation to assume that Kanarek would have voluntarily vacated the farm, as is whether local law enforcement would have treated a USEF disciplinary action as a basis for intervening.