A lawsuit claims that a 17-year-old student was subjected to sexual assault by a fellow student while participating in a study abroad program in Costa Rica during the fall of 2021. The legal action alleges that Verto Education, the organization responsible for running the program catering to first-year college students, failed to adequately protect the teenager and subsequently abandoned her to deal with the aftermath alone in a foreign country.
The lawsuit was lodged in Multnomah County Circuit Court against Verto Education Inc., a company initially established in Oregon in late 2019 to oversee the study abroad initiative. Although the organization was originally registered in Oregon, it has since relocated its headquarters to Colorado after dissolving its status as an Oregon corporation.