But some critics say that the university should not be so quick to flatter itself — pointing out that, among other things, it was slow to make a clean break from the Briles era. Although it hired an acting football coach last year, it retained nearly all of Mr. Briles’s staff, including his son and son-in-law. These Briles loyalists made known their continued allegiance to those accused of presiding over a football culture in which sexual violence seemed to thrive.
Armstead was one of the first Baylor football players to be accused of rape under Art Briles. Waco police investigated the allegations in 2013, but the school didn’t begin an investigation of their own until 2015. Armstead was later kicked off the team for an ambiguous “violation of team rules,” and the sexual assault investigation only became public last year after ESPN’s Outside The Lines reported on Armstead’s dismissal.
“This is a result of newly discovered evidence and continued investigation,” McLennan County District Attorney Abel Reyna said late Wednesday. That included cooperation from Baylor, he added, noting that the university has released information about the case to his office.
Tracy noted that she appreciates Rhule and believes he is trying to address the problem. But she also thinks he is just “one piece of the puzzle” to fixing the deep-rooted problems at Baylor that have brought issues of sexual violence and dangerous cultures of entitlement in sports to the forefront.
“I think I was told what people knew of at the time,” Rhoades said. “Certainly there have been some things that have happened since then people didn’t know. I knew that coming in that there was going to be bumps in the road. And there’s going to be more bumps in the road as we move on down. It’s about how we handle them, and if we handle them the right way every time, things will take care of themselves.”
But it’s Bliss and John Segrest, the former district attorney of McLennan County, who make the most damning statements. Segrest makes clear he never agreed to the plea deal that was offered by Dotson’s attorneys and approved by the judge. Segrest states that Dotson was ill-served by his attorneys, and he further states that those attorneys, along with the judge (all being Baylor graduates) were more concerned with protecting the reputation of Baylor than they were with seeing that justice was done. And it is later revealed that Abel Reyna, one of Dotson’s attorneys, has been the McLennan County DA during the Baylor football sexual assault scandals of the past several years.
Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, proposed bills to fix well-known trouble areas in reporting these crimes:
Senate Bill 968 would allow anonymous, electronic reporting of sexual violence on each college and university website.
Senate Bill 969 would exempt sexual assault victims and witnesses from being held accountable for school code violations, like under-age drinking, when they report a crime.
Senate Bill 970 would implement an “affirmative consent” policy at higher education institutions.
Baylor’s attorneys wrote in the motion to dismiss that the plaintiff’s case exceeds the two-year statute of limitations. Texas’s statute of limitations for sexual assault is five years; the statute for Title IX lawsuits is two years. But in a separate Baylor lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman ruled that accrual should start when the public became aware of Baylor’s handling—or lack thereof—of sexual assault cases.
The university’s assertion that it is not the school’s responsibility to protect students from one another is an argument in support of its claim that the university was not negligent because it “did not breach any legal duty owed to the Plaintiff.” But what about Title IX, the federal law that mandates all schools receiving federal dollars take action to prevent sexual violence? The motion selectively quotes from another case, in which an appeals court ruled that a private teaching hospital wasn’t an educational program under Title IX, to then say that “Title IX does not ‘encompass every experience of life’ that a student may encounter.”
“My main focus has been to help those who were with me land on their feet… It just didn’t affect me. It affected numerous office personnel, strength staff and all the coaches. My main focus, honestly, this year has been to make sure they can continue doing what they love doing and provide for their families. So, that’s where I’ve been.”
