Unsportsmanlike Conduct. Jessica Luther
receiving a conviction for misdemeanor battery, Jimbo Fisher, FSU head coach, told the Orlando Sentinel, “I’m extremely happy for him that that turned out. I think Greg is an outstanding young man, always did, and you know, [the possibility of him returning] is out there. We’ll address that when it comes, but I’m extremely happy for him.” Adding that he had stayed in contact with Dent throughout the legal process, Fisher said, “Greg is one of our children and you have to be there and be very supportive.” In March 2016, Dent returned to Florida State to participate in their annual pro day, to set himself up for a chance at getting on an NFL roster.
In the coverage of the case against Winston, there was almost no mention of Dent.
This is troubling because when the news broke about Winston, there were multiple pieces drawing attention to how football culture and rape culture both operate within Tallahassee and on FSU’s campus. Stassa Edwards wrote at Ms. Magazine’s blog in November 2013 that “the town has gone mad, spouting conspiracy theories that ‘prove’ Winston’s innocence.”[42] She said she overhead victim-blaming at a local Mexican restaurant in the city, a woman saying to her teenage daughter, “She’s just ruining Jameis’s good character.” And Edwards charged that the local paper, the Tallahassee Democrat, was doing a poor job in covering the case. She said they were “pandering to some of the worst sensibilities of rape culture: the immediate need to suspect an accuser’s intention and tear apart her story before we even have it.”
“Here in Tallahassee, the victim-blaming is so overwhelming,” Edwards wrote, “that the editor of a Gannett-owned newspaper can, the day after the story was reported, declare the evidence against Winston to be ‘thin on the surface.’”
“Jameis Winston Isn’t the Only Problem Here: An FSU Teacher’s Lament” was the title of Adam Weinstein’s Deadspin piece around that same time period.[43] Weinstein said he and his colleagues, while loving football, were “increasingly flummoxed by the football culture surrounding Tallahassee, one that’s grown malignant with the wins and the scrutiny.” That malignancy resulted in “most of Tallahassee, even the local sports reporters,” not being able, Weinstein said, to “accept that the narrative [around FSU football] is overly simple, and that failure is always an option, whether it’s a physical failure in the fourth quarter, or a moral one in a strange bedroom after last call on Tennessee Street.” And so, like Edwards, Weinstein chronicles the vast range of theories people created to explain away the possibility that Winston had raped someone and why no one bothered to adequately investigate it:
It’s the timing of this thing going public—some Manziel or McCarron fan dropping a bomb before Heisman voting, before BCS selection. Maybe even a (voice drops to a whisper) Gators fan. It’s the height of discrepancy in the police report—and that chick doesn’t know what the hell went on, probably because she was drinking. It’s some lying jealous gold-digger. It’s racism. It’s a state attorney who is grandstanding or maybe corrupt or maybe just has a hard-on for unfairly persecuting football players for rape.
“The detective I spoke to said, ‘Are you sure you want to pursue this? It’s been three months, so it’s just he-said/she-said at this point. That doesn’t usually go well.’” That was Marci Robin’s experience with the Tallahassee police when she reported her rape in 1999 while a student at FSU.[44] She wrote about it in November 2013 for xoJane. “I told them I just knew I needed to report it: It happened, here’s his name, here’s my account, please do something. Nothing.” Robin said she told her story because it was eerily similar to what Kinsman said had happened to her when she reported her rape. For Kinsman, though, there was the added layer of reporting a star player at a university and in a town obsessed with football.
Florida State football’s history of players being accused and/or charged with sexual crimes, from harassment to rape, goes back to at least the mid-1990s. Months after kicking the winning field goal in the Orange Bowl against Nebraska, a win that secured FSU’s national championship for the 1993 season, Scott Bentley pleaded no contest to charges that he illegally taped a Florida A&M student while the two were having consensual sex. He later played the tape for his friends, some of them his teammates. He received forty hours of community service and a $500 fine. He said his reason for the recording was because he didn’t trust the woman he was with. ‘’I was protecting myself against potential false allegations that could be brought up in the future,” Bentley told local news.[45] He was suspended for that summer, and allowed to return to the team a week before the start of training camp. Bentley went on to play multiple seasons in the NFL.
That same year, only a month later, Kamari Charlton, a tight end, was arrested after he was charged with one count each of sexual battery and battery.[46] His ex-girlfriend reported that he had raped her and grabbed her throat. Charlton was suspended and then dismissed from the team. He was later acquitted and returned to the team the following year.
Just before Christmas in 1993, former Florida State running back Michael Gibson burst into Ashley Witherspoon’s apartment early in the morning. According to what she told Deadspin in April 2014, “We struggled. I was shot twice at point-blank range.”[47] But then, she says, “What I’ve never gotten over, never been able to stomach, is that at that point, after shooting me, he made me lie down on the bed and raped me.” Gibson was convicted and received six life sentences, one of them being for attempted felony murder. In 2003, when the Florida Supreme Court determined that “attempted felony murder” was not a crime, there was a sentencing hearing. Bobby Bowden wrote a letter of reference for Gibson in which he said Gibson was “no problem” while he was on the team. Witherspoon says, “The thing that sticks in my craw is that he signed the letter ‘Coach Bowden,’ as if we all wouldn’t know who Bobby Bowden was. Who signs ‘Coach Bowden’ unless you’re signing a poster or a football?”
The same year that Bowden penned that letter for Gibson, Travis Johnson, an FSU nose guard, was accused by a fellow FSU athlete and his former girlfriend of rape. According to the Orlando Sentinel, “Johnson’s lawyers said the sexual encounter was consensual and that his accuser became angry when she learned Johnson had another girlfriend.”[48] This case was particularly strange. The president of FSU at the time, T.K. Wetherell, spoke to both parties involved, which, the paper said, “FSU officials acknowledged . . . was unprecedented, as was Student Affairs Vice President Mary Coburn’s attempt to mediate [an] agreement before the criminal matter was resolved.” Coburn apparently asked the woman to drop the charges in exchange for Johnson going to counseling and leaving school for six months, which would have brought him back to campus in time for the start of the next year’s football season. The woman declined Coburn’s plan. The case went all the way to court, and Johnson was acquitted after only thirty minutes of deliberation. In November 2013, according to Johnson, “he passed three polygraph examinations and that two medical experts told investigators the attack was unlikely to have happened the way the complainant described.” He went on to play six seasons in the NFL.
In November 2015, late on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Florida State released court documents to the New York Times.[49] Included was the deposition of the former director of FSU’s Victim Advocate Office. Her testimony is part of Kinsman’s civil suit against Winston. According to the Times, “In the nine years she worked in that office, an estimated forty football players had been accused of either sexual assault or ‘intimate partner’ violence, and that to the best of her recollection, only one person had been found responsible. She said most of the women chose not to pursue the cases ‘based on fear.’ No names were mentioned.” When the Times asked FSU for a response to the former director’s testimony, the school released a statement saying, “We have no way to confirm or deny Ms. Ashton’s claims, given that her communications with such victims are confidential.”
VIII.
There is no isolated case when we talk about college football and sexual assault.
My alma mater, Florida State, has a history of problems when it comes to football players and sexual violence. Many of these cases are more clear now that journalists and a civil suit have unearthed this information due to the level of scrutiny the