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Blog and Media Roundup - Wednesday, December 20, 2017; News Roundup
Topic Started: Dec 20 2017, 05:53 AM (67 Views)
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Sportswriter’s credentials revoked after racial tweet at Duke basketball game

By Camila Molina, Ray Gronberg And Abbie Bennett

cmolina@newsobserver.com
rgronberg@heraldsun.com

December 19, 2017 12:50 PM


A Duke University student is accusing a College Insider sports reporter of tweeting a racial comment and attaching a photo of her and her friends without their permission at a Blue Devils men’s basketball game.

College Insider reporter John Stansberry allegedly took a photo of Greta Chen, a Duke first-year student, and her friends at the Dec. 2 game against South Dakota in Cameron Indoor Stadium. The photo was tweeted along with a racial comment, The Chronicle, Duke's student newspaper, reported Monday.

Chen and her friends were standing behind Stansberry at the game, according to the Chronicle report, and noticed that he was tweeting about them when they looked over his shoulder.

Chen was standing in the front row of Cameron Indoor Stadium, right behind the reporters, according to a post she made on Facebook. She posted two screenshots of Stansberry’s tweets, who used the Twitter handle @LonelyTailgater.

One tweet reads, “The Asian chick Cameron Crazies behind me are openly swooning over Grayson Allen the way their moms swooned over Cheap Trick.”

The other tweet is a photo of Chen and her friends accompanied by the text, “I haven’t been this scrunched up with Asian chicks since I came out of my Korean mother’s womb.”

Stansberry apparently has since deleted his Twitter account.

Stansberry had media passes to the game on Dec. 2 and two other non-Atlantic Coast Conference games in Cameron this season, said Michael Schoenfeld, Duke’s vice president for public affairs and government relations.

Those credentials are now “revoked, and his employer was informed,” Schoenfeld said, adding that the Duke athletics department acted as soon as it could confirm Stansberry’s identity.

“If he requests credentials again, we will not honor it,” said Jon Jackson, Duke’s senior associate athletics director for external affairs. “Based on his actions, he will not have the [future] opportunity to be in Cameron.”

Confirmation of Stansberry’s actions came from the photos Chen posted to Facebook, Schoenfeld said.

“If you’re going to tweet offensive things, don’t do it from the one place in Cameron where your identity can be confirmed, and then delete your account as soon as you’re discovered,” Schoenfeld said.

Schoenfeld also said campus administrators don’t think Stansberry was a regular at Duke games.

Web archives indicate that Stansberry has been affiliated with College Insider – which is aligned with CBS Sports – for about 20 years. The site has been on the web since 1996.

A request for comment from the site’s executives has not been answered.

Jackson said Duke officials have talked to their counterparts at College Insider. He declined to discuss details of their conversation.

The athletics department learned of the incident on Dec. 4, “the Monday following the game,” and “followed up on it immediately” to figure out who was involved and talk with student groups, Jackson said.

The “Cheap Trick” reference in one of the tweets Chen criticized was an apparent allusion to the late-1970s record “Cheap Trick at Budokan,” a live album documenting the band Cheap Trick’s 1978 concert appearances in Tokyo’s Nippon Budokan judo hall. As mixed and released, the recording includes prominent crowd noise.

Ray Gronberg: 919-419-6648, @rcgronberg

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article190537794.html#storylink=cpy
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Hmmmm. A "licensed" sportswriter. This proves there's no such thing as a sports "reporter." They're sportsWRITERS. They write what they're told to.

Otherwise, they lose access.
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https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/education/wvu-settles-title-ix-lawsuit-in-alleged-mishandling-of-rape/article_529a1f89-99bf-55d1-a3a1-bd3e0bc0a266.html

WVU settles Title IX lawsuit in alleged mishandling of rape report

By Jake Jarvis
12/19/17


Nearly a year and a half after a former West Virginia University student filed a lawsuit alleging the school mishandled her report of a rape, the school has agreed to settle the dispute.

As a part of the settlement agreement, the university agreed in November to pay former student Bianca Saporito $100,000 to drop the case. In turn, she had agreed not to talk or post anything on social media about the settlement.
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“Really all I can say is the entire matter has been resolved,” said Bader Giggenbach, an attorney representing Saporito.

Saporito brought her lawsuit under Title IX, a federal law that mandates institutions receiving federal money must protect their students from sex-based discrimination, which includes sexual harassment and assault.

This is the third Title IX lawsuit against a West Virginia college since 2011, the year the U.S. Department of Education released a set of controversial guidelines on how to comply with the law. Those Obama-era guidelines were meant to beef up protection for sexual assault survivors. Betsy DeVos, the new education secretary, rescinded the guidelines earlier this year.

Saporito’s lawsuit was the first against a major university in the state — the two others were against Glenville State College and New River Community and Technical College.

In April 2014, Saporito told WVU officials that another student raped her in the bathroom of an off-campus apartment. Because the incident was so traumatic and the man was allowed to stay on campus, she suffered emotional distress and withdrew from the school, according to the complaint she filed in federal court in the Northern District of the state.

The man she said assaulted her, Nathan Nkwaya, was an international student born in Rwanda. Three months after the incident, a student conduct board at WVU found him “not responsible” for sexual misconduct and allowed him to remain a student.

Student conduct boards are secretive, quasi-judicial bodies — separate from the criminal justice system — composed of students and faculty members. This group is charged with determining whether a student broke any school rules and how they should be punished for it. Except for the students involved, board members do not open their proceedings to the public.

Two months before the conduct board determined Nkwaya wasn’t responsible, a grand jury in Monongalia County indicted him on a charge of sexual assault in the second degree. In January 2016, well after WVU had wrapped up its investigation, Nkwaya pleaded guilty to two lesser charges stemming from the incident — battery and unlawful restraint.

Nkwaya was sentenced in July 2016 to serve one year in jail at Northern Central Regional Jail, according to a clerk in the Monongalia County Circuit Court. He could not be reached for comment.

Once a school learned of a possible sexual assault, the 2011 guidance required them to immediately start an investigation, regardless of any criminal investigation that might be ongoing. The federal education department previously said a school usually could expect to wrap an investigation in about 60 days.

Peggy Runyon was the school employee charged with investigating Saporito’s complaint. She allegedly tried to dissuade Saporito from going through with a hearing where Nkwaya might have been expelled, according to the complaint.

In her role overseeing the school’s investigation, Runyon prepared a report of her findings for the student conduct board. Her report and testimony to the student conduct board was “not appropriate, not impartial, not equitable, not adequate and not reliable,” the complaint reads.

Runyon allegedly told board members during the hearing that Saporito “consented to sexual events,” the complaint says.

Runyon worked for the school’s police department from 1999 until 2014, when she joined the school’s office that investigates Title IX complaints. Three days before Nkwaya entered into a plea agreement, Runyon returned to the police department and stopped investigating Title IX complaints, according to WVU spokeswoman April Kaull.

Kaull said that, because it is a personnel issue, she would not say why Runyon left the Title IX office.

Runyon now works as a crime prevention coordinator, and is responsible for community relations, Kaull wrote in an email. When asked if the school had changed any procedures for handling reports of sexual assault, Kaull said it is “constantly reviewing our practices and procedures.”

The Gazette-Mail obtained a copy of the settlement agreement through the state’s Freedom of Information Act. A WVU official signed the agreement in mid-November, and Saporito did the same at the end of the month. The Gazette-Mail has been working to obtain a copy of the settlement since November.

Reach Jake Jarvis at jake.jarvis@wvgazettemail.com, Facebook.com/newsroomjake, 304-348-7939 or follow @NewsroomJake on Twitter.
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Quasimodo

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The other tweet is a photo of Chen and her friends accompanied by the text, “I haven’t been this scrunched up with Asian chicks since I came out of my Korean mother’s womb.”


If he half-Korean? If so, I would suppose he has leeway to tease about 'Asian chicks", in the same way that black people have leeway to use the N word.

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