College athletes and rape

                                 
                               ...  is justice ever served?
This young man led his team to a national championship last year and won the Heisman Trophy that is emblematic of the best college football player in the country. 
The New York Times Magazine (URL below) has a long expose about the problems in a rape investigation at Florida State against quarterback Jamais Winston. It is entitled "A star player accused, and a flawed rape investigation." It illustrates that many times, serious allegations against college athletes are often swept into an unopened closet and forgotten, as was done with Penn State Coach Jerry Sandusky for a decade or more. 
In college towns, such charges are often not filed so as to not upset the school, the coach, the large number of followers … and justice is often not served in cases like this. 

 This happened at Pitt-Johnstown in 1988 when two students were convicted of rape for a 1987 assault in a campus dormitory. A renowned athlete was accused of preventing the young woman from leaving the room by holding the door shut to allow the assault to take place, but no charges were ever filed against him.

 The Florida State case is important to Penn State for two reasons. The new president who will take over in a few weeks, Eric J. Barron, was the president at Florida State when this occurred and has said that he believes that a fair investigation took place. The Times story makes serious allegations against the school that would paint a very different picture. 

The other reason for me is personal. I can place this into perspective. In 1997, I attended a conference at the Nittany Lion Inn at Penn State. I met a young woman there who was a graduate of Penn State and who had been a news anchor at one of the TV stations in Philadelphia. She had recently opened her own public relations business.
We talked congenially for a while, and then somehow the talk turned to football. As soon as I mentioned football, the pupils of her eyes turned into daggers. "I hate that program."

This is the Cliff Notes version of the conversation. In the 1970s she and her best friend went to a party off-campus. She lost track of her friend and went home alone where she found her friend in bed. 

The next day, her friend told her that she had not slept all night after being raped by two football players. 

The anchor took her down to the State College police station where an officer took down the information. After they were done, he said, "I have the information, but I will not be filing charges against these men. Look, they are heroes in this town. You will have to go on the stand against them, and nobody is going to believe you. The best thing is to go home and forget it."

That response was callous and unjust, but it was an example of how police in college towns think. The Penn State football team in 1973 had completed an undefeated season, and the accused player received All-American honors and a special award at the end of that season.  (I will not use the name of the players because I cannot confirm the truth of the story.)

Obviously, I do not know if this story is true, but her friend was still incredibly angry more than 20 years later, which led me to think that this did actually occur. 

The woman who was raped did not want to pursue this because of the embarrassment, the publicity, and possibly the anger that it would generate -- so she dropped it. Later, she needed counseling to deal with it. 

That scenario sounds eerily similar to the alleged sexual assault by a Pittsburgh Steeler player in Milledgeville, Ga., a college town, in 2010. The woman's family wanted her to drop the charges for those same reasons.

The important aspect of this, one that is detailed in the Florida State story in the New York Times Magazine, is the reluctance -- and often incompetence -- of police who must serve in college towns like State College and Gainesville. The police do not want to incur the wrath of the coach, the football fans, the college community -- and their own families -- by filing charges against popular players, or any player. 

As a result, the police do everything they can to avoid the wrath of the college faithful.

That is sad in America ... but it too often is true.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/16/sports/errors-in-inquiry-on-rape-allegations-against-fsu-jamies-winston.html?hp&hp

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