The Arizona Board of Regents has paid outside law firms more than $1.1 million combined to defend the University of Arizona against lawsuits brought by a former administrator, a former student-athlete, a tenured professor and a longtime faculty senator, according to billing records obtained by Tucson Spotlight.

Under Arizona law, the state's risk management division covers legal defense costs for both state employees sued individually over job-related conduct and state entities named as defendants.

The totals above cover only payments to outside law firms. They don't include the cost of in-house UA attorneys or Arizona Attorney General's Office staff who may also have worked on these cases.

The records, obtained through a public records request to the Arizona Department of Administration, cover four separate cases dating back as far as 2019. In each, more than 99% of the money went to attorneys' fees, with travel, filing and court reporting costs making up a small fraction of the total.

The two largest bills stem from cases alleging retaliation tied to sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation, both of which have already reached the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

"Litigation, and the use of outside counsel, is not unusual in state government," Megan Gilbertson, ABOR's associate vice president for public affairs, told Tucson Spotlight. "It is how disputes get settled lawfully, and it is how ABOR and the universities make sure they are doing right by taxpayers and employees alike."

Bullying claim still active after 7 years

ABOR has paid law firm Rusing Lopez the most of any firm in this review, $568,296 since 2019, to defend against a lawsuit from Michael Grabowski, a former UA track and cross-country athlete.

Grabowski, a high school All-American runner from New York who chose UA over other scholarship offers, alleges teammates subjected him to homophobic bullying starting in 2017, based on their perception that he was gay, and that coaches made him a scapegoat and canceled his athletic scholarship after he complained.

The lawsuit, filed in 2019 and seeking $10 million, cites a video from a 2017 team party and text messages allegedly telling teammates to bully Grabowski at a coach's direction.

Grabowski's attorney accused the university of protecting its coaches and athletics program over its students, while UA denied interfering with the case.

Grabowski's Title IX discrimination claim was dismissed with prejudice in March 2025. The judge found he'd misrepresented to the Ninth Circuit that he immediately transferred schools after losing his scholarship, when he hadn't, and applied judicial estoppel to bar the claim.

That left only his retaliation claim, which alleges the university pulled him from the track team after he complained about bullying.

On Feb. 26, the judge denied ABOR's bid to also toss that remaining claim, so it stays alive. The same order denied Grabowski's request to file a fifth amended complaint, citing four earlier amendments over six years of litigation and no new facts to justify another.

The case has continued in active discovery since. The court issued a scheduling order in May, and both sides have filed a steady stream of deposition and discovery notices through July, the most recent entry in the docket.

Administrator fired after warning about hire

The law firm Cohen Kennedy Dowd & Quigley has billed the state $366,678 since 2020 to defend UA officials against a lawsuit from Anthony DeFrancesco, a former senior director of operations at UA Health Sciences who was fired in 2019.

DeFrancesco's legal claim says then-UA President Robert Robbins hired Dr. Michael Dake to run the university's medical schools at a salary of $875,000 a year, despite Dake ranking near the bottom of the search committee's candidate list and warnings from DeFrancesco's husband, then-CFO Gregg Goldman, that the hire could cost Robbins his job.

DeFrancesco's complaint says Goldman told Robbins and other senior officials that the search process had been rigged in Dake's favor and that hiring him would be a mistake.

DeFrancesco alleges Dake fired him in retaliation for those warnings and discriminated against him over his sexual orientation. His discrimination and equal protection claims were dismissed, and that dismissal was affirmed on appeal in January 2023.

The Ninth Circuit affirmed dismissal of DeFrancesco's retaliation claim in May 2025 on qualified immunity grounds, finding it was not clearly established in June 2019 that retaliating against an employee over a spouse's speech violated the First Amendment.

The court left open whether public employees have First Amendment protection tied to a relative's speech.

In a concurring opinion, Ninth Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon wrote that she would have gone further and ruled that Robbins and Dake did violate DeFrancesco's constitutional rights, saying the protection is "well-grounded in Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit precedent."

Faculty senator says testimony triggered retaliation

Stinson LLP and Ice Miller Legal Counsel have billed $125,378 since late 2025 representing UA officials named in a federal lawsuit from Theodore Downing, an 83-year-old tenured research professor, faculty senator and former state legislator who helped write Arizona's 1992 faculty shared-governance law.

Billing began in November 2025, three months after Downing's attorney formally notified the university of the claim, and continued through the filing of his lawsuit in July.

Downing alleges the university disciplined him twice in retaliation for protected speech. The first came after he testified before a state Senate committee in March 2024 against a bill that would have repealed that governance law.

The second came last September, weeks after his attorney sent formal notice of a civil rights claim, when a university vice president accused him of misconduct toward an unnamed IT employee.

That accusation stemmed from comments Downing made about an email policy he said would restrict the speech of roughly 5,800 university employees.

The lawsuit, filed July 6 in U.S. District Court, names Robbins and five other current or former officials as defendants and seeks compensatory and punitive damages, plus removal of both disciplinary records from Downing's personnel file.

Professor's DEI complaints span nearly a decade

Ballard Spahr has billed $80,412 since December defending ABOR against a federal lawsuit from Matthew Abraham, a tenured UA English professor represented by the Liberty Justice Center and a Phoenix law firm.

Abraham alleges a multiyear pattern of retaliation for opposing what he calls race-based DEI hiring practices, including a four-year public-records fight against ABOR, EEOC discrimination charges dating to 2021, and repeated exclusion from faculty governance committees.

The dispute has since escalated. UA removed Abraham from the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure last August, where he had been serving as vice chair, citing his outside employment at the Arizona Attorney General's Office.

Then, on April 1, UA fired Abraham from his tenured position, citing that same outside-employment reason. Abraham says the reason was false and the firing was the end result of years of retaliation. He's since taken a lower-paying job out of state and says in his complaint that he now only sees his wife and teenage son on weekends.

An amended complaint filed June 30 seeks Abraham's reinstatement, back pay and compensatory damages tied to both the committee removals and the termination.

The UA is facing several other lawsuits from current and former employees in federal and superior court.

The Arizona Daily Star reported last year that the board paid $190,000 to settle a pay-equity lawsuit brought by three former UA deans, and that a separate $20 million class-action gender-pay lawsuit against the university remained pending at the time.

Caitlin Schmidt is Editor and Publisher of Tucson Spotlight. Contact her at caitlin@tucsonspotlight.org.

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