Paula Lavigne is an investigative reporter for ESPN, and co-author with ESPN writer Mark Schlabach of Violated: Exposing Rape at Baylor University amid College Football's Sexual Assault Crisis, 2017, published by Center Street, a division of the Hachette Book Group USA Inc.
When Baylor University in Waco, Tex., fired its head football coach, removed its president and suspended its athletic director in the wake of a sexual assault investigation in May, 2016, the moves were unprecedented.
Never before had a major, top-ranked college football program in the United States fired its head coach amid allegations of athletes raping and abusing women. And this was no run-of-the-mill college football coach. This was Art Briles. When he was named head coach in 2008, the Baylor Bears were one of the worst programs in the country. By 2014, Baylor was considered one of the nation's elite programs. President Ken Starr, known globally for investigating former president Bill Clinton's affair with an intern that led to impeachment proceedings, would leave Baylor altogether. Athletic director Ian McCaw – a native of Burlington, Ont. – resigned and went on to a job as athletic director at Liberty University in Virginia, which he kept despite student protests at the time of his hiring.
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Colleges, and especially college football teams, across the U.S. have had players accused, arrested and sometimes even convicted of sexual assault and domestic violence for decades, and the status quo remained. With few exceptions, dismissals were few and generally involved lower-level employees.
But Baylor was a game changer.
The significance of Baylor was again at play this week when Mr. Briles was named an assistant head coach with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the CFL on Monday, only to find the offer rescinded hours later after public backlash to his hiring.
First, consider the scope of what happened in Waco. There are disagreements about the actual number, but leaders at the 16,000-student university stated last year that they were reviewing 125 cases of sexual assault or harassment from 2011 to 2015. About 10 per cent of reports have been said to involve student athletes, which is a minority, but still an over-representation: male student athletes make up about 4 per cent of the undergraduate population at Baylor.
Second was the timing. Baylor's myriad sexual violence cases coincided with a national change in tone regarding campus sexual assault, in large part because of the mandate the Obama administration and members of Congress put on colleges and universities to investigate incidents and increase awareness.
The rise of social media and the increased media coverage of campus sexual assaults, especially the high-profile ones involving student athletes, also made it difficult for schools and law enforcement agencies to keep the lid on accusations or suppress key details, which led to public pressure.
In the past, it seemed as if cases of sexual assault or domestic violence involving student athletes were treated as one-off occurrences. They were investigated only by police and government prosecutors to determine whether the alleged perpetrator should be punished. When the U.S. government forced universities to start rigorously investigating cases, and the media started diving deeper into the issue, people started to question not just the incidents themselves, but also the culture that surrounded them and possibly enabled them.
This is exactly what happened at Baylor. After a Baylor football player was convicted in August, 2015, of sexual assault – the second such conviction of a Bears player in less than two years – an outside law firm hired by Baylor began investigating the school's handling of sexual violence complaints.
At the same time, my ESPN colleague Mark Schlabach and I began to uncover more instances of reported rape or physical abuse involving football players that had never been made public. And, worse, we were hearing from the women in these cases that they were essentially turned away by the people at Baylor who could – and should – have helped them, such as campus police officers, coaches, faculty and administrators. From top to bottom, Baylor was failing to properly investigate allegations of sexual violence and was ignorant to the problem on its campus, which it admitted in May, 2016.
An excerpt from the findings read: "In addition, the investigations were conducted in the context of a broader culture and belief by many administrators that sexual violence 'doesn't happen here.' Administrators engaged in conduct that could be perceived as victim-blaming, focusing on the complainant's choices and actions, rather than robustly investigating the allegations."
It found particular problems within the football program, and at one point stated that football staff, "reinforced an overall perception that football was above the rules and that there was no culture of accountability for misconduct." Women told coaches of allegations of rape and domestic violence that never went beyond the athletic department at Baylor.
While no evidence has emerged that Mr. Briles personally stopped a woman from reporting a rape or actively hid a specific case from police or university investigators, he did oversee a program where – as he himself admitted – "bad things happened."
In an interview last year with ESPN, Mr. Briles positioned himself as one who delegated down to his assistants and who was the "last to know" when players got in trouble. Both are seen as problematic: being actively involved in giving athletes a pass on punishment or being intentionally distant from discipline and behaviour. Top college football coaches in the U.S. are paid millions of dollars. There's an expectation that the head coach will do the right thing when an athlete gets in trouble, as well as oversee the overall culture of off-field behaviour. At Baylor, the regents said they didn't feel like Mr. Briles was the right person for that job.
Many have seen Mr. Briles' unprecedented firing as the setting of a new precedent, and not just in college sports but in athletic leadership in general. In Violated, we quote W. Scott Lewis, partner at the U.S.-based National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, about the impact of Baylor among other college sports programs: "There was a tenor change. They're saying, 'Hey, man, that's not going to be us, right?'" Mr. Lewis, who also founded an association of college administrators whose duties include investigating sexual violence complaints, added: "Things that happened 20 years ago as a matter of course – sort of 'boys will be boys' and we're going to turn a blind eye – those days are over."