Unsportsmanlike Conduct. Jessica Luther
kidnapping, and robbing the mother of another player. A grand jury refused to indict. One of the players went on to play in the NFL.
In 1989, two Oklahoma players were convicted of raping a fellow student in a dormitory on campus. In 1992, Nigel Clay, one of those players, told the Los Angeles Times, “I don’t know how to say it, but, bottom line, I just felt that sometimes, walking around . . . well, speaking for myself and a lot of other people, we felt like we were above the law . . . like OU would protect us from anything.”[22]
The list of cases with multiple football players accused goes on.
Miami and Tennessee in 1990. In 1992, two Arkansas players were acquitted of raping a thirteen-year-old girl. East Tennessee and Virginia Tech in 1994.[23]
In 1995, five current and former Idaho State football players were charged with statutory rape for having sex with fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls.[24] Charges were reduced to misdemeanor battery when the victims refused to testify. At least four of them pleaded guilty and the two then-current players were kicked off the team.
Grambling State in 1996 and Appalachian State the following year. Colorado in 1997 and 2001, and Oregon State in 1998.[25]
In 2000, a woman told her parents that four Oklahoma State players had raped her at a party five months prior in November 1999. “Criminal charges were never filed,” the New York Times reported she said, “because in the hours following the incident, she had signed a waiver of prosecution after being told by the police that her story had not been corroborated and she did not have a case.”[26] She later sued in civil court and settled with two of the players, one of them then a player in the NFL.
In 2000, a then-fifteen-year-old girl at the University of Alabama at Birmingham “was being passed around like a mix tape. In all, she alleges, more than two dozen Blazer athletes [mainly football and basketball players] took their turn.”[27]
That is twenty-three cases so far across twenty-five-plus years.
Three football players were kicked out of the Naval Academy in 2001 after a woman reported that they had raped her. In 2002, two players at Iowa State were charged with second-degree sexual abuse. That same year, a woman told police that four Notre Dame players raped her. One man pleaded guilty to sexual battery, one was acquitted, and the charges against the other two were dropped. That same year, a woman at Georgia reported that several members of the football and basketball teams gang raped her.[28]
Then it was Brigham Young University in 2004 and University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2005. Two players pleaded guilty to raping a woman in 2006 at SUNY Albany. Two Iowa players were eventually punished for charges stemming from a rape of a woman in 2007. That same year, four Minnesota players were arrested for rape.[29]
In 2010, multiple players at both Missouri and Montana were accused of rape. In 2011, a woman reported that two Appalachian State football players had raped her, and two players and another student had sexually assaulted her. Another woman also reported two of those players for raping her.[30]
In 2012, there were a slew of gang rape cases: McGill University, Presbyterian College, Old Dominion University, Naval Academy, the University of Texas, and Ohio State. 2013 was Vanderbilt and Brown.[31]
Two University of New Mexico players and another student were charged with kidnapping and raping another student in 2014, the players being suspended indefinitely from the team in response. The charges were dropped and the players returned to the team. That same year, two University of Miami players were charged with sexual battery after a woman reported that they had raped her. Two Texas players were arrested and charged after a female student said they raped her in a dorm room. Two Tennessee players were also charged with raping a woman.[32]
In total, of the 110-plus cases I have found, forty-nine of them (either accusations, charges, or convictions) involved multiple football players who allegedly participated directly in the sexual assault.
V.
So many of these cases are collective experiences. All of these cases that involve multiple players, either as participants, witnesses, or intimidators after the fact, seem to support Sanday’s thesis that these acts of sexual violence are as much about bonding between men as anything else. They also suggest that it is necessary to take a long, critical look at the culture of football teams and the famous mystique of the locker room.
There are a few cases where there are witnesses to the violence. For example, in 2013, a man at Hobart and William Smith Colleges lost track of his friend at a party. “He found her,” he told the New York Times in 2014, “bent over a pool table as a football player appeared to be sexually assaulting her from behind in a darkened dance hall with six or seven people watching and laughing. Some had their cell phones out, apparently taking pictures, he said.” The university cleared the players within twelve days. At Vanderbilt that same year, while four players were charged with raping a woman, at least four other student-athletes testified to seeing the woman that night and two helped move her body at one point into the room of one of the defendants from the hallway.[33]
Women who come forward to report being assaulted can face intense harassment, sometimes at the hands of the player’s teammates. In 1984, when charges were dismissed against a University of Florida player, the woman in the case told the local paper that she had been harassed by teammates of his and this played a role in her choosing not to testify. In 1991, Kathy Redmond, founder of National Coalition Against Violent Athletes, was a student at Nebraska when she reported that Christian Peter, a nose tackle on the football team, raped her twice two years earlier (the second time with two of his teammates standing guard at the door). Peter would later be found guilty of sexually assaulting a different woman, but he denies that he raped Redmond. She has said that after she came forward, she received death threats, prank phone calls, and her car was vandalized. A woman who reported being raped by a Michigan player in 2009 also reported receiving rape threats from one of the player’s teammates. In 2010, Lizzy Seeberg reported being sexually assaulted by a Notre Dame player. The next day, her parents say, she received a disturbing text message from a friend of the player that read, Don’t do anything you’d regret. Messing with Notre Dame football is a bad idea. Not long after, Seeberg committed suicide.[34]
In all, just over 40 percent of the cases I’ve studied are gang rape allegations involving multiple players. If you add in cases where teammates are witnesses or later accomplices in harassing the woman who reported the violence, it creeps up close to 50 percent. This is incredibly high compared to what is known about gang rapes in the overall population. In 2013, Sarah E. Ullman wrote in a book about multiple-perpetrator rape that research provides a wide range of possibilities for how common gang rape is: “From under 2 percent in student populations to up to 26 percent in police-reported cases.”[35] Granted, my research is unscientific and limited by my access to resources, but even if I am off by 10-plus percentage points, the rate of gang behavior in these cases is remarkable.
VI.
Other patterns suggest systemic issues that go beyond the confines of individual teams. Plenty of players, even if dismissed by their team or university, transfer schools. That move, of transferring after being accused of sexual violence, goes back to the earliest case I could locate: one of the six players accused of raping the woman at Notre Dame in 1974 transferred. It was true for a player at Arkansas in 1992 who went to Sonoma State after being dismissed. It happened again at Notre Dame in 1997, when the school expelled a player after a disciplinary hearing found him guilty of violating the school’s conduct code. He transferred to West Virginia. And again at Notre Dame in 2002: the player who pleaded guilty to sexual battery transferred to Kent State and eventually played for the New York Jets. In 2007, two Iowa players, one who was convicted of misdemeanor assault and the other who pleaded guilty to an assault charge, both transferred schools. Three Minnesota players accused in 2007 transferred to Cincinnati, Kentucky State, and Illinois State. A Missouri player was sentenced to five years in prison for sexually assaulting a fellow student, served only 120 days, and then transferred to Tuskegee. The two Vanderbilt players from the 2013 gang rape who still await trial both transferred to other schools.[36]