Gambril ran an Amateur Athletic Union team practice after the completion of Harvard practices that included many young swimmers, but he said Merritt was not involved with that operation. None of the former students contacted by The Crimson mentioned any incidents that would create cause for concern.

“My experiences with Merritt were all extremely professional,” Daniel G. Kobick ’72 said. “He was a coach. A coach is there for a number of reasons. One is to help you be the best athlete you can be, and secondly, to help you mature as a young adult. I won’t say Benn was heavily into that arena, to be honest about it. My experience and interactions with him were much more on the athletic side than who I was as a maturing adult.”

Both Kobick and Gambril described Merritt as a father figure, particularly to the freshmen whom he coached, and in a March 1972 article in The Crimson, Baaron Pittenger Jr., a former assistant director of athletics, called Merritt “a great guy.”

***

In 2008, Embry wrote to Harvard University to say that Merritt had caused him “years of misery” and had forced him to live “in a state of abject fear.”

According to Embry’s filing, Harvard responded two weeks later with a letter that read, “We have taken your allegation seriously and are in the process of investigating it. We will get back to you once we have an understanding of the circumstances surrounding your allegation.”

Two years later, Embry sent another letter to the University saying that he had not been contacted about the status of the investigation. In that letter, Embry explained the extent of the effects of the alleged abuse.

“I am now mentally shattered and am seeing a psychiatrist and rape crisis therapist for post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, panic attacks, anxiety disorder, and adjustment disorder,” Embry wrote. “I attempted suicide a year-and-a-half ago, was hospitalized, and continue to have a major sleep disorder.”

In the letter, Embry also claimed to have limited short term memory which has prevented him from working.

A Harvard attorney replied to that letter, according to the court filing, by saying, “The time has long since passed for bringing a legal claim against the university.”

—Staff writer Jacob D. H. Feldman can be reached at jacobfeldman@college.harvard.edu.