March 9, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/sports/baylor-football-sexual-assault.html
Ms. Hernandez, who has appeared on ESPN and who spoke to The Times for this article, assumed that her rape was a horrible but isolated incident at Baylor, a private university of nearly 17,000 students that takes pride in its Baptist foundation. And she wasn’t alone in believing that: Even after Mr. Elliott was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in 2014, Baylor officials said they considered him to be a solitary bad actor preying on a campus of goodness.
As three leading members of Baylor’s Board of Regents later described their sense of him at the time: “an isolated case.”
Mr. Elliott has subsequently been accused of sexually assaulting several other women, and since the rape of Ms. Hernandez in 2012 the allegations of sexual assault by Baylor football players have multiplied, causing incalculable damage to the university’s reputation and leading to resignations and firings, including those of the president, the football coach and the athletic director.
The crisis has left alumni apoplectic, students outraged, donors turning on one another, and the Board of Regents bracing for the next blow. Lawsuits clutter the courts, with more than a dozen women, including Ms. Hernandez, claiming that they had been assaulted amid a campus culture that put them at risk.
Two months ago, John Clune, a Colorado lawyer who specializes in cases of campus assault and who had already resolved three other women’s claims against Baylor, filed a lawsuit on behalf of an alleged victim that sought, in part, to quantify the crisis. It made the startling claim that at least 52 rapes by at least 31 players had occurred from 2011 through 2014 — a period when the once-hapless Baylor football program became a dominant force in the highly competitive Big 12 Conference.
Baylor’s interim president has said in a statement that he cannot confirm Mr. Clune’s numbers, which followed other troubling figures that Baylor’s board gave to The Wall Street Journal in October: assaults on 17 women by 19 players, including four gang rapes.
Collectively, the cases have become a cautionary parable for modern-day college athletics, one in which a Christian university seemed to lose sight of its core values in pursuit of football glory and protected gridiron heroes who preyed on women.
Last week, the Texas Rangers, the statewide law enforcement agency, confirmed that it had begun a preliminary investigation into Baylor. That announcement came days after a state representative, Roland Gutierrez of San Antonio, filed a resolution urging Gov. Greg Abbott to have the Rangers investigate “the obstruction of justice surrounding the sexual assault of young female students at Baylor University.”
And this week, a federal judge rejected Baylor’s request to throw out a lawsuit filed against the university by 10 women who say they were sexually assaulted while they were students. Judge Robert L. Pitman of Federal District Court ruled that each plaintiff had “plausibly alleged that Baylor was deliberately indifferent to her report(s) of sexual assault, depriving her of educational opportunities to which she was entitled.”
Much more at link
There is lots of stink in WACO