Baylor University football players took part in gang rape attacks because they thought that if ‘you were one person’s woman, you were everybody’s’, one of their victims has claimed.
The toxic culture at the largest Baptist university in the world bred dozens of ‘predators’ who knew how to target women when they were most vulnerable.
A devastating new account of the sex scandal that shamed the Texas college says that there was an ‘epidemic’ of sexual assault that lasted for years.
‘Violated: Exposing Rape at Baylor University Amid College Football’s Sexual Assault Crisis’ lays out in unprecedented detail the story which forced out college president Kenneth Starr, the former special counsel who looked into Bill Clinton’s affair while he was US President.
A female official brought in to clean up the college describes it as a ‘real culture of gang rape’ that Baylor tried to keep quiet to avoid damage to its reputation.
Baylor tried to keep the ‘gang rape’ culture of the football program quiet to save its reputation. The famously conservative Texas school is the largest Baptist university in the world
The sexual assault scandals forced out Baylor President Ken Starr, the lawyer famous for being the former special counsel who looked into Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky
But in the new book some former coaches and players dismissed the whole scandal as overblown because ‘that’s just the way a locker room is’.
The authors believe that a ‘systemic failure’ led Baylor and police in Waco, Texas, to fail to take proper action sooner and blighting the lives of the accusers.
Baylor has not been alone in dealing with campus rape scandals and there have been similar cases at the University of Tennessee, the University of Minnesota and the University of Kansas.
The details of what happened at Baylor are laid out in ‘Violated’, written by ESPN investigative journalists Paula Lavigne and Mark Schlabach.
Baylor football players became celebrities on the back of their domination of the Big 12 Southern conference for the four seasons after 2011.
Under the guidance of head football coach Art Briles the Bears’ quarterback Robert Griffin III won the Heisman trophy before signing with the Washington Redskins.
At the time Starr said that it was a ‘Golden Era’ for the team, money flooded in from donors and Baylor planned a new $266 million football stadium.
But in reality, football under Briles had ‘run wild and Baylor was doing nothing to stop it’, according to a lawsuit filed in January this year.
At the height of Baylor University’s success, Robert Griffin III won the Heisman. A new book alleges during this winning streak, coaches ignored the fact that players were sexually assaulting women
Head football coach Art Briles allegedly brushed over the assault allegations. When he learned a woman complained that one of his players brandished a gun, he responded: ‘What a fool – she reporting to authorities?’ the authors say
The lawsuit against the university came from a female Baylor graduate who claimed that between 2011 and 2014 a staggering 31 Baylor football players committed at least 52 rapes – including five gang rapes.
The lawsuit described a shocking ‘show ’em a good time’ culture that sold the football program to recruits by using sex.
Underage students were taken to strip clubs where everything was paid for and coaches allegedly sent two female students to have sex with recruits, it claimed.
In May another lawsuit filed by a ‘Jane Doe’ claimed that Baylor football players gang raped women as part of a ‘bonding experience’.
She said she was raped by four to eight Baylor players in February 2012 and attacked the ‘deliberately indifferent response’ of the school authorities.
The lawsuit said that as part of a hazing ritual Baylor players drugged and gang raped women, which was filmed then the video circulated among players.
Incredibly, ‘Violated’ says that the alleged misconduct actually went much deeper than these allegations.
The authors say the abuse was occurring ‘long before’ former Baylor student Jasmin Hernandez claimed in April 2012 she was raped twice at a party by football player Tevin Elliott, the allegation that blew the lid off the story.
Jasmin Hernandez sued Baylor in 2016, claiming the University mishandled the allegations she made against football player Tevin Elliott. He was convicted on two counts of sexual assault
Elliott, 26, was convicted in 2014 of two counts of sexual assault and jailed for 20 years for the attack on Hernandez.
According to a woman who was friends with a number of football players in 2009 and 2010 – who spoke for the first time in the book – such behavior was common practice years before the winning streak.
On one occasion she was having consensual sex with one football player and other men would ‘slip into the room and try to start having sex with her’, according to ‘Violated’.
The book says: ‘One time she successfully put a stop to it but another time – when she’d been too intoxicated – she said a couple of guys coerced her into performing oral sex on them when she hadn’t wanted to.
The book ‘Violated: Exposing Rape at Baylor University Amid College Football’s Sexual Assault Crisis’ is out on August 22
‘The mentality among the football teammates was: ‘She’d slept with that player, and now she could sleep with all of us’, or to put it another way, she said: ‘You were one person’s woman, you were everybody’s’.
‘They would just corner you and they knew how to do it. They knew when you were most vulnerable. It’s just like they were predators’, she said, adding that mentality was present among the other male athletes at Baylor, even among the rugby team’.
The woman said ‘the younger guys say what was happening and that no one ever got into trouble for it, and the behavior continued’, according to the book.
She said: ‘It was just this weird mentality at Baylor that I haven’t seen anywhere else’.
According to ‘Violated’ officials at Baylor had known that Elliott was a predator since November 18, 2011 when he assaulted a teenager named Phoebe who was about to start school at Baylor.
Elliott forced his way into her room in her apartment, locked the door and refused to let her out until she screamed and begged him.
Phoebe reported it to Waco Police and Elliott was given a citation and a $500 fine.
Baylor’s response was to put him on disciplinary probation.
‘Violated’ says that Elliott responded by following her in his white Cadillac Escalade.
The day after his citation Phoebe discovered her own tires were slashed, her car had been keyed and the word ‘b****’ had been spray painted in gold on her rear fender.
Despite all this Elliott played all 12 regular season games for the Baylor Bears in 2011.
Even though the school was aware of allegations against Tevin Elliott regarding assaulting a teenager, he was still allowed to play all 12 regular season games for the Bears
One of the games was the day after he was told by the Baylor Judicial Affairs office he was being investigated for the incident with Phoebe.
During the 2011 season Elliott was tied for second on the team with eight tackles and three sacks.
The Bears ended the season ranked 13th in the Associated Press Top 25 college teams, their highest final ranking since 1986.
Starr said in a later interview that during this time the team were at the ‘mountaintop’ and that was ‘where people want to be, looking out’.
In April 2012 another of Elliott’s alleged victims, called Samantha, reported he raped her after offering to help her move a heavy desk in her apartment.
According to ‘Violated’ Elliott threw her over his shoulder, carried her upstairs and pulled her underwear down as he forced himself upon her.
When Samantha went to meet the Baylor chief judicial officer Bethany McCraw and said ‘he raped me’, McCraw told her: ‘Yeah, you’re the sixth girl to come in and tell me this’.
Samantha asked about a restraining order from Baylor on Elliott. McCraw told her the university would send him a letter telling him to stay away from her and ‘then you kind of hope for the best’.
Baylor allegedly took two years to investigate a sexual assault report made against two football players
The scandals eventually led to the ousting of coach Art Briles (eft). Ken Starr was forced to resign as president but remained chancellor
Elliott was finally suspended and expelled in May 2012 but over the next five years a slow drip drop of sexual assaults, allegations and horrific stories were met with stonewalling from Baylor officials and an inadequate response from Waco police.
According to a report by ESPN’s Outside the Lines, Baylor took two years to investigate a sexual assault report made against two football players, far longer than federal rules allow.
An assistant football coach told ‘Violated’ that he had not even heard of 90 percent of the allegations that were later made.
He claimed that several cases, some of which were reported to the police, did not even make it to the athletic department.
The coach said: ‘Because of the Baylor code of conduct they didn’t want it reaching our desk. It was one hundred per cent a systemic failure’.
Another victim described the problem as an ‘epidemic…it was just total denial about what was going on’.
Briles appears to have actively worked against the victims and ‘Violated’ includes texts that emerged in an investigated into the scandal ordered by Baylor officials from Pepper Hamilton, a Philadelphia law firm.
One text exchange was from February 2013 between Briles and an assistant coach about a female student who complained about a football player brandishing a gun.
Briles said: ‘What a fool – she reporting to authorities’.
During a text exchange with a colleague Briles talked about another woman who accused another football player of exposing himself.
The woman had a lawyer but wanted to handle it with ‘discipline and counseling’.
Briles texted his colleague: ‘What kind of discipline? She a stripper?’
One former football player from 2011 was unrepentant and claimed in the book that women were ‘going crazy’ for football players.
He thought that when women woke up the next day and realized what they did they would claim it was rape to salvage their reputations.
The former player said: ‘Certain people can’t live with those decisions they’ve made’.
In ‘Violated’ another former assistant football coach speaks out for the first time – and defended the conduct of the team.
He said: ‘You know, and you’ve got to understand, some of these guys, if I want to ask a question and say: “Hey, did these guys do this?”
Defensive end Shawn Oakman was charged with sexual assault after he ‘attacked fellow student’ in his apartment. His trial was originally scheduled for August 22 but will likely be postponed
Football player Sam Ukwuachu was convicted of sexually assaulting a female soccer player in 2015. The conviction was overturned in appellate court which ordered a new trial. He was still allowed to participate in certain team activities even after being indicted
‘I mean, those guys will immediately spin it to where: “Coach, that girl’s had sex with him ten times and with forty guys on this team”.
‘Right, wrong, or indifferent, I know that’s not politically correct to say. I know that’s not the right thing to say. But that’s reality.
‘That’s what those guys would say. Does that make it right if they were to do something wrong? Absolutely not. I think you know good and damn well that none of us would ever condone that. But that’s just the way a locker room is’.
According to Patty Crawford, a former Title IX coordinator or watchdog for victims, around 2012 there was a ‘real culture of gang rape’ at Baylor.
Baylor’s rape culture problem went beyond just the football team. Phi Delta Theta president Jacob Anderson was accused of sexual assault in 2016
So prevalent was the problem that Crawford’s former investigator Gabrielle Lyons was, on her first day in the job, greeted by four women wanting to report a gang rape that allegedly happened over spring break.
The cases kept on coming.
In October 2013 a female soccer player alleged she was sexually assaulted by football player Sam Ukwuachu. He was allowed to continue with certain team activities even after being indicted.
Ukwuachu was convicted in August 2015 of sexual assault though his conviction was later overturned by an appellate court which ordered a new trial.
In March 2016 Jacob Anderson, president of Baylor’s Phi Delta Theta house, is accused of sexual assault. The following month a woman accused Bears defensive end Shawn Oakman of raping her; his case is ongoing.
By May last year the outrage had built to fever pitch and the key findings of the Pepper Hamilton report were published.
It found that there was a ‘fundamental failure’ to respond properly to sexual assault allegations at all levels.
The athletic department and the football team in particular ‘hindered enforcement of rules and policies, and created a cultural perception that football was above the rule of law’.
Starr resigned as college president – though he was given the job of chancellor – and Briles and a handful of football team staff were fired.
Since then Baylor has tried to set itself up as a model for dealing with allegations of sexual assault.
It has hired Linda Livingstone, the former dean of the George Washington University School of Business, as its new president, the first woman in the college’s 172-year history to hold the post.
The staff of its Title IX office have been expanded, it has a new amnesty policy on assault allegations and a doubling of the staff at the counseling center.
And it may just work; a source tells the authors of ‘Violated’ that athletics departments which have spoken to Baylor have been telling them: ‘Hey man, that’s not going to be us, right?’