Hayes believed every word of Gavin’s story, especially her explanation for why she had initially withheld information from the police. The other thing Gavin explained was that the environment in the tutoring program was hot-wired for sexual abuse. She fully admitted that the tutors shared in the blame. It wasn’t just the athletes. It was a mutually destructive situation. But Braeckel, she assured Hayes, was never involved with athletes and never wanted to be. She was just there to tutor.
Gavin said she would testify to all of this at trial.
After meeting with Gavin, Hayes expanded her investigation. She interviewed more girls affiliated with the tutoring program. The deeper she dug, the worse it looked. “Listening to what the girls were saying, people have a real ‘thing’ with football players,” Hayes said. “Too many tutors were having sex with the athletes, and really filthy conversations were going on between players and girls. It was a sexually charged environment. It was a joke—the whole tutoring situation.”
Five days after Hayes met with Gavin, police responded to a disturbance call at an apartment complex in Columbia at 1:30 a.m. on September 12. Upon arrival they found Washington’s girlfriend—identified in police records as GR—with blood on her nose and shirt. Her forehead was swelled, and her left eye was hemorrhaging. She told police that they had been arguing when Washington grabbed her by the throat and pinned her down on her bed, struck her multiple times and pressed two fingers on her eyes.
Two hours later Washington was arrested. According to the arrest report, he told police, “I did not hit her because if I did she would still be asleep.”
News of his domestic violence arrest turned the tide for Braeckel.
By the time she flew back to Columbia to provide a pretrial deposition on January 11, 2011, Washington was the one looking for a plea deal. But now it was Braeckel’s turn to say no deal. “He was willing to plead to felony burglary,” Braeckel said. “But his lawyers wanted me to drop the sex offense part. But that’s what this case was about. So even though I was a wreck at the time, I was unwilling to accept that.”
With Derrick Washington’s trial set to begin in four days, Judge Kevin Crane convened pretrial proceedings in his Boone County courtroom on September 16, 2011. The defense had filed a last-minute motion. The prosecution wanted it denied. In a closed-door session, Washington’s attorney, Christopher Slusher, and prosecutor Andrea Hayes appeared before Judge Crane.
“Okay. What’s up?” Crane began.
“The testimony in the case has been that the complaining witness in this sexual assault case was a virgin,” Slusher said. “She worked in the tutoring program over at the athletic department and that she was teased by people about being a virgin. I had discussions with the state and it came to my attention that they intend to bring out that fact that she was a virgin. Our motion is filed to keep that evidence out.”
Crane turned to Hayes.
“The state does plan to introduce evidence that the victim is a virgin, and we would also be able to establish Mr. Washington was aware that she was.”
“What’s the relevancy?” Crane asked.
“It’s relevant because the other girl isn’t a virgin, and this is a joke, it’s funny, it’s an accomplishment, it’s an achievement,” Hayes said. “She’s a virgin. He’s made jokes about that before. It’s a common thing at the athletic department. ‘Teresa is a virgin.’ It’s like this big feat.”
Crane turned back to Slusher. “Let me ask you this. Insofar as the defendant’s state of mind is concerned, whether or not she’s a virgin, he seems to think so, right?”
“Well, there is evidence from the roommate that he was told she was a virgin,” Slusher said.
“And—” Crane said.
“Yes,” Slusher said.
“He finds that attractive?” Crane asked.
“That would be our evidence,” Hayes said.
The thing that had Crane scratching his head was that Slusher was using the rape shield law in his attempt to keep the victim’s virginity out of evidence. But the rape shield was intended to protect victims, not defendants. Its purpose was to keep victims from having irrelevant aspects of their sexual history paraded before a jury. Braeckel had no sexual history. And there was no provision in the rape shield law enabling defendants to invoke it in their own defense.
“Have you got any case law where the defendant in a sex case has ever invoked the rape shield in the history of the planet?” Crane asked.
“No,” Slusher said. “But our objection is it’s not relevant.”
“So your real objection then is relevance.”
“Yes.”
Crane turned back to Hayes. “Are you going to have the locker room talk in front of this jury about this gal being a virgin?”
“It is so pivotal in our case with motive,” Hayes said. “She tutored the athletic department. And that was something that people did kind of give her a hard time about.”
“How would people know that?”
Hayes explained that the victim’s roommate was also a tutor to the athletes and she frequently had sex with Derrick Washington and other athletes. “So a lot of athletes were at my victim’s apartment and would make comments about Teresa not having guys over and stuff, and they would make comments about threesomes. And she’d say, ‘Teresa doesn’t do that. Teresa is a virgin.’ And they were thriving on that.”
“How are you going to get that in?” Crane asked. “That he knew she was a virgin?”
“Because Lauren Gavin, her roommate, told him that she was a virgin. And they had conversations about it.”
“And what did he say?” Crane asked.
“ ‘Tell Teresa I fuck,’ ” Hayes said.
“Oh, she’s a virgin, so let her know—” Crane said.
“ ‘I fuck,’ ” Hayes said, quoting Washington.
“Hmm,” Crane said.
“I know,” said Hayes, “it’s not, you know, conversations I’m having with people. But that was …”
“You’d almost think telling that to a virgin would be a negative,” Crane said.
It was all a little bewildering to the court. Who knew that top football players at the state’s flagship university were engaged in such vulgar behavior toward female academic tutors? Crane was a University of Missouri alumnus. Unsure what to do, he said he’d wait to make his ruling until hearing some testimony.
Days later, when the trial started, Braeckel was the first witness. Hayes wasted no time getting her to describe the incident.
HAYES: How did you know someone was in your room?
BRAECKEL: I woke up. I felt weight behind me and then I felt fingers inside of me.
HAYES: And what did you do?
BRAECKEL: I tensed up. I realized what was happening. I had no reaction. I’ve never been so scared in my whole life.
On cross-examination, Slusher asked Braeckel questions that explored a number of theories: she invented the story; she invited the sexual conduct; and she did not know who was in her room. The shotgun approach did little to shake Braeckel. But it convinced the judge to allow the state to bring in evidence that Braeckel was a virgin. When Gavin took the stand, she told the jury what she had told Hayes months earlier: that she had slept with Washington on the night of the incident and that at one point he left the room and returned, claiming he had played with Braeckel’s cooch. She also confessed to withholding that information from the police when she was first interviewed.
In an attempt to discredit Gavin, Slusher asked her difficult questions about the tutoring program on cross.
SLUSHER: Did you feel that there was a sexually inappropriate environment in the tutoring program?
GAVIN: Yes.
SLUSHER: Now, college students, people your age during this time period, pretty open about sex?
GAVIN: Yes.
SLUSHER: And true with respect to the athletes in the tutoring program?
GAVIN: Yes.
SLUSHER: When you entered the program you ha
d to sign an agreement?
GAVIN: Yes.
SLUSHER: And part of that agreement that you signed was that you not have relationships outside of the tutoring context with athletes.
GAVIN: Correct.
SLUSHER: You violated that pretty quick, right?
GAVIN: Yes.
SLUSHER: But it wasn’t just with Derrick. There were other athletes.
GAVIN: Correct.
SLUSHER: And you described this as friends with benefits, right?
Gavin cried as she testified and said she was not proud of her behavior. She also said that Braeckel was the one who never participated in the friends-with-benefits system that was prevalent in the tutoring program. Her unwavering testimony won over the jury. “I was really nervous,” she said. “I knew I was doing the right thing. But I really didn’t want my family to know. That was hard. My mom knows now. But after I told the truth, I had peace.”
On his lawyer’s advice, Washington did not testify in his own defense. The jury deliberated for less than three hours before announcing the verdict: guilty of deviate sexual assault, a class C felony. His lawyers vowed to appeal. Meanwhile, sentencing was scheduled for November. Until then Washington was released into the custody of his parents. Later that day, Donald and Sarah Washington drove their son back to Kansas City. He cried the entire way home.
Andrea Hayes pushed for Washington to receive prison time. But she recognized that the university bore some responsibility for what had transpired. “The university has created this environment,” Hayes said. “When you put a room of athletes together with attractive girls, some of whom like to sleep with athletes, you are just asking for trouble. It creates a sexually charged environment, and athletes get an opinion of girls that is skewed. Tutors who are in it for the right reasons get lumped in with the others. [Their] tutoring program needs to be revamped.”
On November 15, 2010, Judge Crane sentenced Washington to five years in prison. But as a first-time offender, Washington was eligible for early release after 120 days. He also had to register as a sex offender. He left the courtroom in handcuffs.
Two days after Washington headed off to prison, Missouri’s head coach, Gary Pinkel, was arrested for drunk driving, and the university suspended him for that weekend’s game. In a statement released the next day, he expressed remorse for his actions and apologized to the team and the university.
In the meantime, while Washington was in prison, he pleaded guilty to domestic assault against his ex-girlfriend. His ninety-day sentence for that offense ran concurrently with his sexual assault sentence.
Teresa Braeckel never returned to Columbia. “I think I’m one of many girls that had something happen to them,” she said. “After seeing what I’ve seen and knowing what I know, I think there are better places than the tutoring program to make an extra dollar.” She resides in North Carolina, where she works in athletics.
Lauren Gavin graduated from Missouri. Her experience prompted her to pursue a life of service. So she entered nursing school. She works at a hospital. Her friendship with Braeckel is tighter than ever.
On March 16, 2012, Washington was released from jail after serving 120 days. “Fresh Out!” he tweeted. With his parents’ help, he got accepted to Tuskegee University in Alabama, where he joined the football team. In the fall of 2012 he rushed for 1,494 yards and fourteen touchdowns, leading the team to a 10-1 record. He was named the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference Player of the Year. At the end of the season—on January 8, 2013—the Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed his sexual assault conviction. Three months later, Washington was not selected in the NFL draft.
Part I, “We have no money. Nobody is giving money. We are not on TV”
Bill Moos couldn’t imagine how life could get much better. At fifty-nine, the retired former Oregon athletic director had his health, a happy marriage and a six-figure pension, and his son Bo was playing football at Arizona State. Best of all, Moos finally had time to check off the item at the top of his bucket list—build and operate his own cattle ranch. The minute he stepped down at Oregon in 2007, he and his wife, Kendra, broke ground on Special K Ranch near Spokane, Washington. They did everything themselves, from dig the wells to erect the fences to develop the strictly organic diet for their herd of Black Angus cows. Moos’s suits and ties were packed away in storage, replaced by Wrangler jeans, cowboy boots, leather gloves and a denim coat that fit snug across his thick chest and square shoulders.
In many ways, Moos was poised to finish out his life the same way it had begun. He had grown up on a wheat farm and cattle ranch in eastern Washington. Then his father got into state politics, serving in the legislature before being named director of agriculture and eventually running the state’s fisheries. As a boy, Bill Moos dreamed of being a cowboy like his dad. But he also loved football and ended up with a scholarship to Washington State University. He became team captain and in his senior year—1972—was an All-Pac-8 offensive lineman. That experience propelled him to a career in college athletics as an administrator. He climbed the ladder for two decades before landing the athletic director’s job at Montana. Then, in 1995, he took over as AD at Oregon. Under his leadership Oregon’s annual budget for athletics grew from $18 million to $40 million. The school built state-of-the-art athletic facilities, expanded the football stadium and increased the number of women’s sports. But the hallmark of Moos’s leadership at Oregon was that the football team went from being an afterthought in the Pac-10 Conference to being a national powerhouse.
Nike co-founder Phil Knight fueled Oregon’s rapid ascension under Moos. An Oregon alum, Knight pumped hundreds of millions into athletic facilities, and Nike outfitted Oregon teams with everything from footwear to uniforms to gear. Unlike NFL teams, college football programs don’t have owners. Not officially, anyway.
But it’s impossible to ignore the will of someone who almost single-handedly underwrites the construction of new and updated stadiums and practice facilities. Moos knew that from firsthand experience. On the one hand, his job as AD was made a lot easier thanks to Knight’s giving. But when Knight’s vision clashed with Moos’s administrative approach, the job lost its luster. It was a battle Moos knew he couldn’t win. So he reluctantly announced in November 2006 that he would step down in March 2007. In Moos’s final press conference at Eugene, a reporter asked him why on earth he’d walk away from one of the premier programs in college athletics to work with cows. Moos famously said, “I guess I’m at a point in my life where I’d rather step in it than put up with it.”
The upside to early retirement was that he finally had time to be a cowboy. Ranching was hard work. But it lacked the stress that comes with the bang-bang demands of big-time college athletics. He no longer began his mornings reading the sports pages. His days were spent in the quiet, wide-open spaces of the western prairie. Life was good.
But in mid-February 2010, an old friend called and reported that WSU’s athletic director had abruptly resigned to take the AD job at San Diego State. WSU was on the hunt for a successor. Moos immediately felt restless. For the first time since leaving Oregon, he had the itch to get back in the game. The chance to be AD at his alma mater would be nothing short of a dream come true. Plus, Pullman wasn’t very far from his ranch.
For the next few days, Moos scoured the sports page of the Spokesman-Review for any news on WSU’s plans. Then his phone rang. The call was from the president’s office at Washington State University.
“Bill, this is Elson Floyd.”
Floyd had an unmistakable deep voice that resembled that of singer Barry White. Moos recognized it immediately. Since leaving Oregon, he had consulted for Floyd on some athletic department issues and knew him on a first-name basis.
“Hello, Elson.”
“I want to cut to the chase,” Floyd said. “I want to know if you are interested in serving as the athletic director.”
“I am.”
Floyd had been caught off guard by his previous AD’s
sudden departure. A national search committee had already been assembled. But Floyd had been privately polling key alumni, boosters and top administrators in athletics to get their input on whom to hire. The feedback was unanimous: Bill Moos. Floyd planned to let the national search run its course. But he already had his target in his sights.
“Bill, I have to go through a process,” he said. “It’s going to be a very public process. But you are my guy.”
They agreed to meet on campus within days.
Tall, with imposing broad shoulders and big muscular hands to go with his tightly cropped salt-and-pepper Afro, Elson Floyd could be easily mistaken for a retired pro football player. But engage him in conversation, and he comes across like a mix between a polished diplomat with old English manners and a CEO with a practical can-do approach. The fact is that he never played football and is less than a casual fan of the game. He’s an academic to the core. His top priorities were increasing enrollment and building on WSU’s reputation as a leading academic institution. He viewed football as a ticket to both.
“Like it or not, football serves as the front door to institutions, with the exception of the Ivy League,” Floyd explained. “The reputation of a school is predicated on athletics. Football is first. Basketball is second. If you have a successful football program, it will support all the other revenue and non-revenue sports.”
Floyd’s view of college football is consistent with more and more presidents and chancellors at leading colleges and universities in America today. But the reality is that very few football programs are profitable. At that point, only 20 of the top 120 Division I football programs were in the black. The remaining programs were losing on average close to $10 million per year. But it’s reached a point where virtually every college president has bought into the idea that in order for a university to be successful, it must have a successful football program.
The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football Page 23