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Brooke Slusser remembers the day she moved into "the villa."
It was a four-bedroom apartment in San Jose, California with white walls and no decorations. Her mom and dad drove her and all of her things there, all the way from Texas.
She was the first tenant to show up that semester.
Slusser was about to begin her junior year, as a transfer from Alabama, to play her 2023 college volleyball season for SJSU and head coach Todd Kress.
Slusser alleged Kress is the one who encouraged her to live in that apartment. At the time, there were two apartments filled with SJSU volleyball players that were looking for one more tenant on the lease, she claims.
But Kress allegedly told Slusser to move into "the villa" because he thought she would "get along better" with the women in that unit, she claimed.
Slusser lived in the blank-white-walled apartment by herself for her first two days in San Jose. She experienced her first up-close exposure to a homeless man, and witnessed a convention of cosplayers wearing animal costumes, called "furries."
On day three, Blaire Fleming walked in.
"He was the first person I met when I got on campus, and we were together, just the two of us, I want to say for the first day or two, after he got there until any of my other roommates showed up," Slusser told Fox News Digital.
At the time, Slusser had no idea Fleming was transgender. She had no idea they would eventually end up on opposite sides of a national culture war.
Brooke Slusser #10 and Blaire Fleming #3 of the San Jose State Spartans call a play during the first set against the Air Force Falcons on Oct. 19, 2024, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. (Andrew Wevers/Getty Images)
Over the course of that school year in "the villa," Slusser shared many things with Fleming. They shared laughs, parties, food, germs, gossip and even secrets. Slusser, now regretfully, said she shared her deep personal family trauma with Fleming in moments of vulnerability.
And Slusser said she still hasn't even mentally processed one of the most regretful things she shared with Fleming back then.
"You find out you're just chilling in a bed with a man that you have no idea about… I [was] unknowingly sharing a bed at that time with a man," she said.
"It's hard to process. I don't even know if I can say I've fully processed it to this day. It's just, you're told something for so long, you think something for so long and you act very normally about a situation, and then come to find out it's all a lie."
Sometimes, the other teammates living in the house would all climb into bed with them, to watch movies or just talk, Slusser said. But other times Slusser said it was just her and Fleming.
"Watching movies snuggled up in bed, like, all the normal things you'd think girls do in an apartment, like, my bathroom is across the hall from my bedroom and I'm going back and forth and everyone's out doing their thing, and I probably would have covered up more," Slusser said.
"I would have changed everything about what I was doing in that apartment if I would have known that it was a man. So it's just hard to fully say I can grasp all of that when it was almost two years of me living with this situation."
About two months living together, Slusser said she began to share personal secrets with Fleming and the other teammates in the apartment.
"There was a time when one of our roommates was kind of struggling with something, and I just opened up with all of us in the living room talking about what I've been through with my family, and how there's a better side to things, and it gets better, and I've probably only told only two people in my life about what had happened back home in Texas, so opening up about that was just very vulnerable," Slusser said.
With Fleming around for that conversation, Slusser said she put sensitive information in the hands of someone who she wished she hadn't shared it with.
Slusser said the person she holds most responsible for causing it to happen is Kress, for allegedly suggesting she live in "the villa" with Fleming, all while there was another house of volleyball players she could have lived with.
"Todd Kress, knowing this person was a man, and saying that I'm going to ‘fit in better' with these girls on my volleyball team, couldn't have been further from the truth," she said.
"We were all in the same class, so if all of us are there next year it's not like we'd have to find another roommate, so he thought it would be nice that I was with all of the girls that are in my class so we could spend a full two years together."
One of Fleming’s teammates joined several other female athletes in suing the NCAA for Title IX violations. (San Jose State University)
Fox News Digital reached out to Kress and Fleming for comment, but did not hear back at time of publication.
Fox News Digital also reached out to SJSU for comment.
In response, the university provided President Cynthia Teniente-Matson's announcement that the SJSU and California University (CSU) system are suing the "federal government" in response to a U.S. Department of Education investigation that determined SJSU violated Title IX in its handling of Fleming, Slusser and the other players, adding, "We have no further comment."
Teniente-Matson announced Saturday that the school was going on the legal offensive.
The Education Department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) offered a set of compliance points for SJSU to resolve the alleged Title IX violations involving the trans athlete. Teniente-Matson claimed the OCR's findings "aren't grounded in facts."
"Because we believe OCR’s findings aren’t grounded in the facts or the law, SJSU and the CSU filed a lawsuit today against the federal government to challenge those findings and prevent the federal government from taking punitive action against the university, including the potential withholding of critical federal funding," Teniente-Matson said Friday.
Teniente-Matson also affirmed the school's allegiance to the LGBTQ community in the announcement.
"Our support for the LGBTQ members of our community, who have experienced threats and harms over the last several years, remains unwavering. We know the attention the university has received around this issue and the investigative process that followed have been unsettling for many in our community," the president said.
"We’ve heard the fear and anxiety that it has created and recognize that waiting for the university’s response has been difficult at a time already filled with uncertainty."
Slusser said she cried tears of joy when she initially learned the news that President Donald Trump's administration determined her former school violated Title IX.
"I didn't think it would hit me that way, but just seeing that finally something, even if it's not really affecting me much and what I went through, but something was being done," she said. "So that feeling brought tears to my eyes… everything I'm doing isn't for nothing."
Then, when she learned the news that instead of complying with OCR, the school was fighting back, she was so frustrated that she went on X and made her first original post since October.
"It makes me so mad that SJSU still refuses to see that everything they did is wrong. I think they’re just too scared to admit it and face the repercussions of their actions!" Slusser told Fox News Digital immediately after learning the news.
Now, a new legal precedent related to Trump's authority to enforce Title IX for the rest of his presidency potentially hangs in the balance.
