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Blog and Media Roundup - Monday, January 8, 2018; News Roundup
Topic Started: Jan 8 2018, 04:31 AM (107 Views)
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https://pittnews.com/article/125983/sports/college-athletes-shouldnt-get-a-free-pass-for-sexual-assault/

College athletes shouldn’t get a free pass for sexual assault
January 8, 2018

When Tampa Bay Buccaneers starting quarterback Jameis Winston takes the field, the crowd is focused on one thing — the game.

Winston, at only 24 years old, is one of the best in the league. A former Florida State Seminole, he has had a stellar professional career so far — 12,149 all-purpose yards in only three seasons.

But when Winston was 18 years old, he was a part of a major incident in 2013 that left but a teeny tiny scratch on his record, an incident that cost FSU nearly $1 million in eventual settlements — a rape charge.

A charge that has largely been forgotten, especially by a dedicated fan base.

As the #MeToo movement continues to empower victims of abuse, many powerful but abusive men are losing their jobs over allegations, charges and court proceedings. But in a male-dominated industry like sports, where the voices of men heavily overpower those of women, it is harder to hear to the victims. Especially in college sports.

Fellow student Erica Kinsman filed the Title IX assault report, which the university and athletic department promptly and quietly dismissed. Kinsman alleged Winston raped her on the bathroom floor of his apartment in December of 2012 after meeting the star freshman quarterback at a bar.

Kinsman did everything right after the horrific incident. She went to the hospital for treatment and received a rape kit — which, months later, did conclude Winston had intercourse with her — and filed a police report.

The police did nothing for 10 months, and when Kinsman expressed her concerns, she was met with skepticism and shoulder-shrugging.

Sadly, this is a familiar story for many women in the United States who are victims of sexual assault.

On top of it all, what happened to Winston’s career was egregious — it got better.

At the school’s eventual code of conduct hearing in 2016, days before the college football playoffs, Winston was cleared of any wrongdoing and allowed to play for the Seminoles.

This incident is not isolated. Last summer, Stanford swimmer Brock Turner was discovered brutally raping an unconscious woman in a back alley. He was found guilty, but was only sentenced to jail for a mere six months. The judge felt that giving the young scholarship athlete a longer sentence would have a “severe impact” on Turner, and his life would suffer severe “collateral consequences.”

Of course, these examples of abuse toward women are not exclusive to the collegiate level. According to data compiled by USA Today, about 12 percent of arrests of NFL players since 2000 have been for domestic violence.

The NFL has been taking steps to punish players who are accused of violence against women.

If an athlete is accused of or charged with violence against women, the player will be penalized without pay. According to the NFL personal conduct policy, put into place in 2014, “violations involving assault, battery, domestic violence or sexual assault will result in a baseline six-game suspension without pay, with more if aggravating factors are present, such as the use of a weapon or a crime against a child.”

“Domestic violence and sexual assault are wrong. They are illegal,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell wrote in a letter to team owners that announced the new policy. “They have no place in the NFL and are unacceptable in any way, under any circumstances.”

But in college sports, no such policy exists. And on a collegiate level — athlete or not — the numbers aren’t good to begin with. A little more than 23 percent of female undergraduate college students are sexually assaulted. Of those, only 12 percent will report, according to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association released a new sexual assault policy in 2017, but it was hardly comprehensive. The policy iterated multiple times that student athletes and coaches must attend yearly training on sexual violence prevention and that administrators must be held accountable for these sessions.

There was no mention of punishment in the press release, and there is no previous policy that contains it, either.

As students held to a higher standard on campus, student athletes should be treated with more scrutiny when it comes to sexual violence, not less. As more women say #MeToo to being victims of sexual assault, collegiate athletic departments should consider adjusting their policies accordingly.

After Winston was accused of sexual assault, he went on to win the 2013 Heisman Trophy, an award that honors a player “whose performance best exhibits the pursuit of excellence with integrity.”

Meanwhile, his victim was still receiving death threats from peers and football fans who claimed she was attempting to ruin his career. Kinsman was forced to drop out of FSU — a school the Tallahassee native had dreamt of attending since she was a child.
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Quote:
 
http://www.heraldsun.com/news/local/counties/durham-county/article193426559.html

Judge has to decide if discrimination claim against Duke sees trial
BY RAY GRONBERG
rgronberg@heraldsun.com

JANUARY 08, 2018 06:00 AM

UPDATED 6 HOURS 2 MINUTES AGO

Hoping to stave off a mid-summer trial, Duke University has once again asked a federal judge to dismiss a former student’s gender-discrimination lawsuit that claims it botched the handling of a sexual-misconduct investigation.

University officials uncovered the incident, found the woman and encouraged her to report it, investigated it and offered her support services, all in line with their obligations under federal Title IX anti-discrimination law, lawyers for Duke said in a recent motion asking U.S. District Court Judge Catherine Eagles to end the case.

All that’s very far from the the sort of “deliberate indifference” that would justify a finding of discrimination, they said, adding that when schools investigate misconduct complaints, federal courts in this part of the country “have not allowed juries to second-guess” the choices they’ve made along the way.

Pending since 2016, the lawsuit concerns an incident that happened in March 2011 and an investigation that concluded in 2013. Durham lawyer Bob Ekstrand – of Duke lacrosse case fame – is representing the former student and has argued the fact that one of the two men she accused is the stepson of former Provost Peter Lange, which he alleges influenced the university’s handling of the case.

Ekstrand’s original filings alleged his client was the victim of a “drug-facilitated rape” that one of the men secretly videotaped.

The court file, however, paints a much more convoluted picture.

Originally, Ekstrand’s client wasn’t even the focus of a campus police investigation that began in April 2011 when Duke’s student affairs office learned of rumors that a woman had shown up outside a campus dorm “apparently very intoxicated and unaware of her location.”

That initial report didn’t pay off directly, as police never found that woman, who wasn’t a student. But it tipped them to the March incident, leading them to the two men, the video and eventually Ekstrand’s client.

She turned out to have no direct memory of the incident, and apparently flip-flopped at least once on whether she’d consented. She admitted to having used alcohol, and inferred from her lack of memory that someone might have drugged her.

Campus police consulted Durham prosecutors, but eventually decided not to pursue a criminal case, in part because she waffled about her willingness to testify. Another factor, former campus policeman David Dyson said in a 2012 report, was “serious doubts that the incident was non-consensual,” based on a video where the woman’s “speech was not slurred and she was making quick responses to what the males said.”

A parallel campus student-conduct investigation, meanwhile, was slow to develop momentum again because the woman wasn’t sure how she wanted to proceed. She took a semester off in the spring of 2012, and by Duke’s account didn’t give the student affairs office a statement on the case until the spring of 2013.

That led to a mid-summer student-conduct hearing that, by the woman’s account, led to one of the men being “fully acquitted” and the other receiving a light punishment – probation, other court filings indicate. Rather than appealing that ruling, she complained to Duke’s Office of Institutional Equity, which eventually decided there was “insufficient evidence” to say the university had “denied rights under Title IX or subjected [her] to a hostile environment.”

Ekstrand, meanwhile, likely is on the back foot because a 10-month pretrial “discovery” evidence-gathering period came and went in 2017 without him asking to depose any witnesses in the case. He essentially ceded the field on that to Duke.

At the end of November, he asked for another two months, but Judge Eagles said no.

“Deadlines are in place for a reason,” namely so cases can move “efficiently and fairly” toward a conclusion, she said.

Former Provost Lange’s attorney, Kerry Sutton, is tracking the case and on Friday said she thinks Duke’s stance is “well-supported by the facts and the relevant law.”

Duke has asked Eagles to shut down the case before, but in late 2016 she declined that request.


Whatever the merits of the case, nothing good can come of the Durham legal system when one
fights Duke... (MOO)


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Doe v Penn State
https://kcjohnson.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/penn-state-mtd.pdf
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