Unsportsmanlike Conduct - Jessica Luther

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be allowed to transfer, but more pointing out that there is no mechanism in place that holds anyone accountable. NCAA rules require athletes who change schools following disqualifications or suspensions for “disciplinary reasons” to sit out a year before being eligible to compete, but do not impose stricter standards or outright bans on athletes suspended or disqualified for sexual assault. Moreover, the one-year sit-out is often skirted using a one-time transfer exception available to almost all athletes, except those in revenue-producing sports (and even those athletes can use the exception if they drop down a division).

      “If a student is charged with sexual assault, or even found responsible in a university system, there is nothing to keep that individual from transferring to another school,” says a representative from End Rape on Campus, an organization that has helped many people file Title IX lawsuits with the Department of Education asking for investigations into how their universities have handled sexual assault allegations.[37] “Basically,” they tell me, “this means rapists can transfer freely, and commit the same crime with the only penalty being a completely new pool of victims at a different school.”

      Much like schools in general, campus athletic departments are under no obligation to review athlete disciplinary records before accepting transfers. And even when athletic officials are aware of someone’s troubled past, many look the other way. A wide receiver left Missouri for Oklahoma in 2014 after being dismissed from the school’s football team following an incident in which he pushed a woman down a flight of stairs. In 2013, a Providence basketball player was accused of sexually assaulting a fellow student and was “prohibited from participating in games for the rest of the season.” He transferred to Oregon, where he was eventually expelled with two other players after an accusation of gang rape. He played the 2014–15 season at Northwestern Florida State College, where school president Ty Handy said the player will have a chance to “succeed, to grow, and to develop.”[38]

      Coaches also leave behind the mess of these cases and any potential fallout. Mike Riley left Oregon State in 1998 after a season in which multiple players were accused of raping a student. He headed to the San Diego Chargers, had a brief stint with the Saints, and returned to OSU from 2003–2014. He is now at Nebraska. Mack Brown, the famed coach at the University of Texas, saw two of his players reported for sexual assault in 2012. Both remained on the team when no charges were pressed. A year later, Brown retired. Within six months, two more players from the team were arrested for sexual assault and the new head coach, Charlie Strong, dismissed them. James Franklin, head coach of Vanderbilt when four players were arrested in the summer of 2013, left the school the following January and now is head coach at Penn State. In a pretrial hearing before two of the players went to court, Franklin had to Skype in to give testimony and answer questions.[39]

      Problems with the criminal justice system reverberate out into the decisions coaches and teams make about these players. Many of the cases end with dismissed charges due to inadequate evidence or the woman who initially reported the crime backing out. Both are common to cases involving interpersonal or sexual violence, though when athletes are the ones named as perpetrators, the stakes get much higher for everyone involved, including law enforcement, prosecutors, and the woman herself. (Note: men are the victims of sexual assault too, but it is so rare to find a man who publicly reports his rape at the hand of an athlete, and those incidents are often reported not as sexual assault but rather as hazing, so they get lost in searches for this kind of violence.)

      For cases that did make it past the arrest phase, many were pleaded out to reduced charges and the players received light sentences. That is ridiculously common, regardless of the case. According to the New York Review of Books, “In 2013, while 8 percent of all federal criminal charges were dismissed (either because of a mistake in fact or law or because the defendant had decided to cooperate), more than 97 percent of the remainder were resolved through plea bargains, and fewer than 3 percent went to trial. The plea bargains largely determined the sentences imposed.”[40] At the state level, “it is a rare state where plea bargains do not similarly account for the resolution of at least 95 percent of the felony cases that are not dismissed.”

      Coaches often look to legal outcomes to decide how to handle players who are accused. That is fine, as long as we acknowledge that legal outcomes in these cases are complicated and often do not resolve the cases in a manner that withdraws all doubt about the crime. Yes, legally, when a case is pleaded or a trial completed, there is a cut-and-dry answer for whether the defendant is innocent or guilty in the eyes of the law; in the rest of the world, however, the one outside of the courtroom, we are left to coexist with people whose legal innocence or guilt does not seem satisfying or fair. When a coach decides to give or deny a player a “second chance” based only on the legal outcome, that too can seem unsatisfying or unfair because of the troubles with the legal system itself.

       VII.

       Let’s take one school as an example of how a case can appear isolated but often fits into a longer, larger history: Florida State.

      Early in the morning on December 7, 2012, a Florida State University student called the FSU Police Department (FSUPD) and reported that her friend, Erica Kinsman, had been raped. (Kinsman has released her name publicly, hence its use in this book.[41] )

      Over the next twenty-four hours, Kinsman gave statements to multiple officers and went to the hospital for a rape kit. But she did not know the name of the man she said raped her. In mid-January, thirty-four days after Kinsman initially reported to the Tallahassee Police Department (TPD), Kinsman recognized the man she had reported on December 7 when they both showed up for a class in the new spring semester. She contacted the TPD on January 10, 2013, and told detective Scott Angulo that she now knew the man’s name; it was Jameis Winston, she said.

      “This case is being suspended at this time due to a lack of cooperation from the victim. If the victim decides to press charges, the case will be pursued.” Those two sentences conclude Angulo’s February 11 TPD report. Angulo and his colleagues had not collected video from the bar where Winston and the woman had met earlier in the night. They had failed to find the cab driver who took the two of them, as well as Winston’s roommate Casher and another player, Ronald Darby, back to Winston and Casher’s apartment. They did not interview anyone other than Kinsman and two of her friends. They did submit her rape kit, and both her blood and urine tested negative for drugs. It wasn’t until late August, though, that the TPD received word that “semen was present on [her] anal swabs, panties, and pink shorts (later verified to be pink pants).” TPD never compelled Winston to provide his DNA for testing.

      After the story broke on November 13, 2013, Winston finally submitted his DNA for testing. It matched the DNA from the rape kit. Winston, through his attorney, said it was consensual sex. Kinsman’s family, in response, released a statement saying, “To be clear, the victim did not consent. This was a rape.” The media, as they do, boiled the case down to a typical he-said/she-said debate.

      But the real story was the long string of failures. It quickly became apparent that a full investigation was never done and the state’s attorney was never contacted to look into the case. That office began its own investigation. Kinsman was once again questioned, as were friends she had been with or whom she’d contacted that night. On the same day that TPD first released a heavily redacted version of the initial police report, before police ever interviewed them, Winston's lawyer submitted affidavits from Casher and Darby about what they remembered from that night eleven months earlier. TPD also interviewed them in the following days, when they found out that Casher had recorded Winston and the woman in Winston’s bedroom but had since deleted the video and gotten rid of the phone. They both maintained that Winston was innocent and that Kinsman had consented.

      Winston was never questioned by the police or the state attorney’s office.

      But Winston’s case was not in isolation even at his own school: in June 2013, just over six months after Kinsman first reported to the police, FSU wide receiver Greg Dent was suspended indefinitely from the team after he was charged with second-degree sexual assault. A woman told police he was “very aggressive in touching” her and did eventually penetrate her before she fought him off. Dent was eventually found guilty in September 2014 of misdemeanor battery, not sexual

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