Q: Will a name change background check result in a civil lawsuit for a crime in which the victim did not press charges?

A: Background checks serve two purposes: 1) obviously to find disqualifying history, and 2) to help establish your character for truthfulness. Many people forget that second part. You may have heard the saying "it's not the crime, it's the coverup"; same thing applies to background checks.

Your question presents a moral / ethical and pragmatic dilemma; the exact course of action you take will be determined by your ethics, and the outcome will be determined by who is doing the background check.

First, your college issue is administrative in nature. There are a host of laws that may keep that matter internal to the college. Most people who draft background check applications know that it may be hard or impossible for them to verify your answer; that's not the point of the question - it's a question of character. A background check isn't limited to public records, particularly with social media. And inferences can be made from a number of otherwise available records. For example, let's suppose your incident happened your junior year of college. You present a three year transcript from one college, and a senior year transcript from the college you graduated from. Not too many people transfer schools in there junior year...how do you plan to explain that?

If you are applying for the FBI or anything like that, including federal clearances, they will find out about the expulsion. How? Well obviously high level law enforcement agencies have their ways that ordinary businesses and other entities don't have, but typically, those sort of background checks involve you listing people who knew you at certain times and places in your life. They simply make contact with those people. Even if those people don't know or don't say anything, they will be asked "who else did he hang around / know?". And so eventually, they found out a lot of information that way because each person they talk to either confirms existing information or leads to new information. And in your particularly case, the risk you'd run is that the interviewer might say "I noticed he transferred to a different college at an interesting time. You know anything about why he did so?". Someone along the line will probably say something like "I heard he was asked to leave".

I would doubt you'll get in criminal trouble now. If whomever handled this matter at the time thought it was serious enough to warrant criminal charges, the police would have been involved and you would have been criminally charged (and likely still expelled). Your biggest risk is by not disclosing this incident and having it found out later; now you are not trustworthy.

Without knowing all the facts, it's hard to say, but many people in high profile and sensitive positions have some blemishes in their background. The reason they made it to where they are isn't because they were clever enough to hid it well. Many owned up to their past before having to be confronted by it.