Suit Against Columbia

! Monday, August 18, 2008

August 18, 2008, 3:16 pm

Lawyer Files Antifeminist Suit Against Columbia By COREY KILGANNON

Roy Den Hollander, in a photograph from his Web site.

Roy Den Hollander is a Manhattan lawyer and a self-described antifeminist. Over the past year, he has sued Manhattan nightclubs for favoring women by offering ladies’ night discounts and has sued the federal government over a law that protects women from violence.

And now Columbia University has come within his sights. On Monday, he filed a lawsuit in United States District Court in Manhattan against Columbia for offering women’s studies courses, which Mr. Den Hollander sees as discriminatory toward men. His class-action suit accuses Columbia of using government aid to preach a “religionist belief system called feminism.”

A Columbia University spokesman, Robert Hornsby, said he could not comment on the lawsuit or even confirm that the university had been served with it.
 
 In Mr. Den Hollander’s suit, he called women’s studies “a bastion of bigotry against men” and said its women’s studies program “demonizes men and exalts women in order to justify discrimination against men based on collective guilt.”

Such academic programs at Columbia and at universities nationwide, he said, are “spreading prejudice and fostering animosity and distrust toward men with the result of the wholesale violation of men’s rights due to ignorance, falsehoods and malice.”

“Federal financial aid, state funds and other assistance help proselytize feminism at Columbia,” in violation of equal protection safeguards of the Fifth and 14th

Amendments, claimed Mr. Den Hollander, who said, “Columbia has thrown its influence and prestige into violating the rights of men by offering a women’s studies program but no men’s studies program.”

Mr. Den Hollander devotes much of his private practice to representing men in civil cases — “antifeminist cases or guys’-rights cases,” as he puts it – and said his bitter 2001 divorce from a woman he married in Russia helped tweak his anger toward feminists and laws he sees as favoring women.

In July 2007, Mr. Den Hollander filed a class-action suit against prominent Manhattan nightclubs like Copacabana, China Club, Lotus and Sol, claiming they discriminated against men with their ladies’ nights offering free or reduced admission, which violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, the suit said.

In February 2008, he filed a suit against the federal government calling parts of the Violence Against Women Act unconstitutional.

Those cases are still pending. Mr. Den Hollander said that today’s lawsuit completes a “trilogy of antifeminist lawsuits.”