This problem is not new. Nebraska’s back-to-back national championship teams in 1994 and 1995 were tarnished by repeated police reports detailing violence against women. In the midst of the championship run, the Cornhuskers’ top lineman pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting Miss Nebraska, a fellow student. In 2002, four Notre Dame football players were accused of gang rape. One of them pleaded guilty to sexual battery; the other three were exonerated. In the past decade, Penn State, Wisconsin, Kansas State, Arizona, Miami, USC and Iowa were just some of the programs that faced publicized allegations of sexual abuse by players. Things got so out of hand at the University of Montana that it had to conduct its own investigation into nine sexual assaults by football players between September 2010 and December 2011.
But those are just the cases that make the news. Most incidents of sexual assault involving college football players never see the light of day. As a general rule, sex crimes are widely underreported. Even fewer of them are prosecuted. That’s especially true when the accused are athletes. A comprehensive national study on the prevalence of sexual assault among male student-athletes sheds some light on this. The study—the only one of its kind—was done in the mid-1990s. Researchers targeted Division I colleges and universities with top twenty football and basketball programs to provide the following information:
total number of male students enrolled
total number of male student-athletes enrolled
total number of sexual assaults reported
total number of reported sexual assaults involving a student-athlete
Thirty institutions participated in the study. Information was gathered from twenty campus police departments and ten judicial affairs offices. In all, 107 cases of sexual assault were examined. The primary finding was that male student-athletes made up just 3 percent of the male student population yet were responsible for more than 19 percent of the reported sexual assaults on campus. Very few of these cases were publicly reported.
Subsequent research has suggested a range of factors contributing to why some athletes are more prone to abuse women, from a sense of entitlement to a higher frequency of casual sex with multiple partners to a warped sense of women as sexual prey. But the biggest factor may boil down to opportunity or access.
In the case of college football, there is no denying that just about everyone on campus is in awe of the young men who wear the uniform and fill the stadium on Saturday afternoons, including plenty of beautiful girls. The fact that some girls want to be seen with a football player does not, of course, necessarily mean they want to have sex with a football player. But the lion’s share of sexual assault cases against college football players—and athletes in general—usually involve a victim who willingly goes to an athlete’s turf—his dorm room, apartment or hotel—and later claims that something happened that she didn’t sign up for. In almost every instance, the accused player admits to sexual contact and claims it was consensual. It sets up the classic she-said-he-said scenario with a unique twist—when athletes are involved it is often she-said-they-said.
These cases usually come down to the freshness of the complaint, the strength of the physical evidence and, most important, the credibility of the accuser.
Detective DeVon Jensen is an investigator in the Special Victims Unit for the Provo Police Department. It was 5:30 p.m. on Monday when a desk sergeant notified him that a young girl, her parents and a cousin were in the waiting area. They wanted to file a rape report stemming from an incident the previous night. Jensen buzzed them in.
Through tears Brown gave a detailed account of what had happened in apartment 124 eighteen hours earlier. But she was pretty sketchy on names. She identified Bennett as the one she had gone to see and the one who had escorted her out afterward. She was pretty sure he had not assaulted her. She claimed his roommate, B. J. Mathis, had assaulted her. She only knew the faces of the others.
Jensen contacted BYU campus police and requested head shots of the African-American football players. He told Brown she could return the next day to ID them. He also took Smith’s statement. She said that Brown had been pressured to drink and that porn scenes she had viewed mirrored the acts later performed on Brown. She also helped identify a couple more players. Jensen completed his report and called the hospital.
Dr. Sandra Garrard, a physician at a family practice clinic, performed an examination of Brown. Experienced in handling sexual assault victims, Garrard began by asking Brown about her medical history, noting the various medications she took—Paxil for depression; trazodone for sleeping; and Ortho Tri-Cyclen for irregular menstruation. Then Garrard went head to toe, documenting outward signs of trauma—abrasions on the left breast, a bruise on the right thumb, and tenderness along her neck and around her navel. She also noted two small lacerations on the outer area of the vagina.
The rape kit results were on Detective Jensen’s desk by Tuesday morning, August 10. Across town, Gary Crowton and his team were in a meeting with Athletic Director Val Hale. It was the first day of fall camp, and Hale was lecturing the players about the honor code and the need to avoid trouble. He specifically warned the team against getting into compromised situations with girls that might lead to allegations of sexual assault. While that went on, Detective Jensen and two partners executed a search warrant at the apartment belonging to Bennett and Mathis. They immediately detected a strong chemical odor—cleaning solution of some sort. The place was spotless. Even the trash cans were empty. It was as if a maid service had just been through.
The first bedroom—Mathis’s—was the one room in the apartment that Brown had not entered. It was also the only room that wasn’t cleaned up. The officers gathered up the bedsheets and dusted the desk for fingerprints. There were dozens.
Bennett’s room was a different story. It was immaculately clean. Even the desk was spotless—literally. When Jensen swept it for fingerprints, he found none. The surface had been wiped clean with bleach. They collected Bennett’s sheets, a couple washcloths containing semen residue and a box of condoms found in his duffel bag. But there was no sign of alcohol—no empty bottles or plastic cups—anywhere in the unit. The officers checked the dumpster out back, but it had been emptied the previous day. Jensen did, however, find a pornographic DVD left on top of the living room television. He seized it as evidence.
At precisely 3:35 that afternoon, Gary Crowton started a meeting with his quarterbacks. Then there was a knock at the door. It was tight ends coach Mike Empey. “We have an issue,” he said.
Crowton stepped out.
Empey, who was also the recruiting coordinator and oversaw housing for freshmen players, informed him that one of the apartment managers had just been by. He had reported that the police had just searched one of his units—number 124. They were investigating a sexual assault that allegedly took place Sunday night. They were also looking for evidence of alcohol consumption.
“Who’s in that room?” Crowton asked.
Empey told him.
Crowton wanted both players in his office immediately.
Minutes later Bennett and Mathis showed up.
“Was there alcohol and a sexual situation in your room on Sunday night?” Crowton asked them.
Both players acted surprised. “No,” they told him.
“Was there any kind of party at that house?” Crowton asked.
They told him there had been a Madden Football party.
“Was there any alcohol?”
“Coach, there was no alcohol,” one of them said. The other agreed.
“Was there any sexual nature of any kind?”
They told him there was a girl present but insisted there had been no sexual contact whatsoever.
“I want you to go down to the police department and tell them your story,” Crowton said.
Bennett and Mathis started talking over each other.
“Stop,” Crowton said. “Just go tell the police your story.”
He yelled for his secretary, gave her his car key
s and told her to drive the boys to the station. The minute they left, Crowton rushed back to his quarterbacks meeting. By the time he got back to his office, his secretary had returned from the police station. She handed Crowton his keys and directed his attention to some paperwork that Bennett and Mathis had brought back—a copy of the warrant and an inventory of what was collected during the search.
Crowton scanned the evidence list for alcohol and found none. But he noticed that a pornographic DVD and condoms had been found. Not a good sign. The two players were waiting outside his office. He called them in and asked them how things had gone at the station.
They said they had told the police the same things they had told him: there had been no alcohol and no sex. Crowton asked them about the DVD. They said it belonged to someone else, and they denied watching it. They had an answer for the condoms, too. “Both of them explained that their mothers had given them condoms since they were fourteen years old because of all the teenage pregnancies in Texas,” Crowton said. “Their parents wanted them to always have a condom with them.”
Crowton took them at their word. Still, a criminal investigation was under way. He followed the protocol and telephoned Val Hale the minute Bennett and Mathis left his office.
Hale was in Crowton’s office minutes later. They got on the speaker-phone with Steve Baker, the director of BYU’s Honor Code Office. After getting up to speed, Baker gave Crowton some simple advice: Don’t say or do anything that can hurt the investigation.
Next, Hale called the university’s vice president, Fred Skousen, who subsequently notified the president. Late that night, Hale called Crowton at home with word from the top. “The athletic director told me that the president and vice president said … if these kids did anything, we need to get rid of these guys,” Crowton said.
At that point, all Crowton knew was that an investigation was under way. The players were denying everything, none of them had been charged, and the Provo police were not talking. They weren’t releasing any reports, either. The university was in the dark. So were the local media.
On August 19 the Associated Press ran the following headline: POLICE, BYU INVESTIGATING GANG RAPE ALLEGATION. Citing a police affidavit for the initial search warrant, the AP reported what little information was available—that a seventeen-year-old girl had been given alcohol, passed out and later woke up to being raped by a series of football players. None of them was named.
The news broke hours before a “meet the team” night at LaVell Edwards Stadium to kick off the 2004 season. It didn’t go so well. Instead of pumping up the fan base, athletic director Val Hale got inundated with questions about an alleged gang rape. So did the university’s communications office. Crowton issued an official statement: “Anytime allegations of misconduct surface regarding our players, it’s a matter of serious concern for us. We want to get to the bottom of this and when we do, we will work with the University to do what is appropriate.”
ESPN’s Outside the Lines began working on a segment about BYU’s troubles. It aired on September 3, the night before ESPN carried BYU’s home opener against Notre Dame. By then, reports had surfaced that earlier in the year BYU had expelled its top running back and suspended three other players after another woman said she had been gang-raped at a party. She later recanted and said she had consented to sex with six of them. That was bad enough.
On September 8, one week into the season, BYU’s vice president, Fred Skousen, fired athletic director Val Hale. He called the move an “important first step in creating a distinctive, exceptional athletic program that is fully aligned with the mission and values of Brigham Young University and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”
After firing Hale, Skousen paid Crowton a visit at football practice. “He told me to be careful and make the right decision,” Crowton said.
The only decision to be made at that point was whether to suspend the accused players. But the honor code review was not yet complete, and the police had still not charged anyone with a crime. “The police never told me what happened,” Crowton said. “The next thing I know they are questioning every minority player on the team. If I knew a guy had done what they were accused of, I would kick him off the team in two seconds. But I didn’t know. The players were saying they didn’t do it.”
Crowton chose a wait-and-see approach.
Since becoming a prosecutor in 1990, Donna Kelly had done nothing but sex crimes and child abuse cases. She’d handled more than three hundred in all, including roughly a hundred jury trials. She was among the more experienced sex crimes prosecutors west of the Rocky Mountains. And she’d spent her entire career in Provo. She fully appreciated the politics of a case against a bunch of BYU football players.
Kelly was convinced that a sexual assault had taken place. The question was whether she could prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s tricky when the crime scene is an athlete’s bedroom and the accuser went there willingly.
A few years before Kelly got the BYU case, researchers studied 217 criminal complaints of felony assault attributed to college and pro athletes between 1986 and 1995. The outcome in those cases was compared with national arrest and conviction rates for sexual assault. Two key findings emerged:
1. A criminal complaint against a college or pro athlete for sexual assault is far more likely to result in arrest and in an indictment.
2. Athletes are significantly less likely to be convicted.
One way of looking at this apparent discrepancy is that law enforcement is overzealous when athletes are accused. But the research suggests the opposite. It’s a well-known fact that elite athletes—like other celebrities—garner a disproportionate amount of publicity when accused of a crime. That cuts two ways. The image of an accused athlete takes a hit before anything has been proven. The flip side is that these cases put police and prosecutors under a microscope, too. Besides the glare of the press, law enforcement faces a team of top-flight lawyers when athletes are accused of sex crimes. Even college football players without resources inevitably end up with the kind of legal defense and support system rarely afforded to accused sex offenders.
As a result, prosecutors are much less likely to charge an accused athlete in a date rape case unless the evidence and the accuser are rock solid. Consider that of the 217 felony sexual assault complaints levied against athletes between 1986 and 1995, only 66 went to a jury trial. In other words, those were the cases with the most compelling evidence and the most credible victims. Still, only 10 of them (15 percent) resulted in convictions. That’s far below the national average. There are a variety of reasons for this. But the big one is that jurors are reluctant to convict athletes of sexual assault when the accuser has willingly gone to a player’s bedroom or otherwise put herself in a compromising situation. That raises doubt in the eyes of jurors.
Kelly faced that precise scenario with the BYU case. The accuser had gone there willingly, consumed alcohol and not bothered to leave when the players started showing porn. The defense was predictable—admit sex, deny force.
BYU’s Honor Code Office didn’t have to prove that a rape took place. It only had to find that sex occurred, not to mention that alcohol was consumed or porn was viewed. After a three-month internal review it became clear that players had lied to Coach Crowton. The university suspended Bennett and Mathis at the end of November. William Turner—the one with the SpongBob boxers—and Ibrahim Rashada were put on probationary status.
By that time, criminal investigators had questioned at least ten football players in connection with the incident and narrowed the number of suspects to the same four who had been disciplined by the school. Bennett and Mathis packed their bags and returned to Texas. Turner went home to the Bay Area. Only Rashada remained in Provo. He was still on the team.
On November 20, Utah blew BYU out 52–21 in the final game of the 2004 regular season, dropping the Cougars to 5-6 and marking their third consecutive losing season. A week later, Mendenhall ducked into Crow
ton’s office to discuss a recruit. But Crowton looked preoccupied. Earlier he had met with Peter Pilling and Tom Holmoe, two senior associate athletic directors who were brought in to run the athletic department after the previous AD became a casualty of the gang rape case. Pilling and Holmoe told Crowton he had to resign. Crowton had refused, saying they’d have to fire him. But after talking to his wife and thinking it over, he came to grips with the fact that fighting to keep his job would be messy. The last thing he wanted was to embarrass the institution. He decided to bite the bullet.
“I’m not gonna make it,” Crowton finally muttered.
Mendenhall didn’t understand. Too numb to be angry, Crowton didn’t elaborate.
“I’m not gonna make it,” he repeated. “And I’ve recommended that you and Lance Reynolds be considered for the head job.”
Mendenhall felt sick to his stomach. The next day—December 1—Mendenhall stood in the back of the room as his best friend held a press conference on campus. “At this time I feel it’s time for me to step down and let the football program move on in a different direction,” Crowton told the media. “I love this university. I wish we could have got more wins. In this business, that’s what it’s about—getting wins.”
“Was it a forced resignation?” one reporter asked.
Crowton didn’t want to point fingers or appear bitter. Instead, he thanked everyone and complimented his staff and players. Another reporter asked how much the off-the-field problems—most notably the alleged gang rape—had factored into the resignation.
“I was appalled by it,” Crowton said. “I don’t want to bring any embarrassment to the university as their coach and their leader, but there was some embarrassment to the university.”
Crowton didn’t say it at the time, but the rape case had placed him in a no-win situation. “That was the hardest thing I ever dealt with,” Crowton explained. “BYU didn’t want me to talk about it, and Provo police put a gag on it. I just followed what I was told to do. But as a father who knows how to treat my daughters and my wife, this was killing me. Yet I had recruited these kids as their head coach. For most of the season I didn’t know who had done what. It broke my heart that that girl was harmed. But all I had to go on was he said, she said.”
The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football Page 9