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1.

The Field

I.

A playbook only exists if you have a field on which to run your plays. That “field,” for this playbook, is a football culture saturated with a masculinity which can manifest in horrible ways.

Football is one of the premier lenses through which we define masculinity in our culture. Who is more masculine than men who take to the football field and run headlong into each other, battering their bodies together, doing what most of us would be terrified to do if placed in that space? But that masculinity can encourage terrible behavior.

In a piece for the Advocate in March 2015, Wade Davis, a former NFL prospect and the executive director of You Can Play, an organization whose mission is to help end homophobia in sports, defined masculinity as “the ways in which we expect ‘men’ to act,” but noted that there is no one standard definition.[13] There are a multitude of ways that one can be “masculine,” based on the person or grouping defining it. One of the most important ways it is defined is as the absence of the feminine. Davis writes, “If masculinity is idolized, then ‘femininity’ (another indefinable word) is, by default, demonized, and for many, never as worthy. Sexism, the root of homophobia, creates the conditions for individuals to feel as if they have to perform certain rigid tropes of masculinity and femininity in order to be perceived as normal and acceptable.”

In sports, football in particular, masculinity that is considered “normal and acceptable” can be dangerous, both to the players themselves who put their bodies on the line and the people around them in their off-field lives who have to interact with these hypermasculine men. A 1999 study found that the message boys receive when watching sports is that

a real man is strong, tough, aggressive, and, above all, a winner in what is still a man’s world. To be a winner, he must be willing to compromise his own long-term health by showing guts in the face of danger, by fighting other men when necessary, and by “playing hurt” when he’s injured. He must avoid being soft; he must be the aggressor, both on the “battle fields” of sports and in his consumption choices. Whether he is playing sports or making choices about which products to purchase, his aggressiveness will win him the ultimate prize: the adoring attention of beautiful women and the admiration of other men. [14]

The outcome of this in real life can be confusing. While players are celebrated and financially rewarded for being aggressive, strong fighters on the field, they are demonized for what that masculinity looks like in the rest of their life. As Andre Perry wrote in 2014, to be a man and participate in football culture is to “be a bounty hunter, a missile, a shamer, homophobe, punisher, beater, and extortionist who will get on his knees and be thankful for winning a game.”[15]

A large reason we had such a robust discussion around out gay NFL recruit Michael Sam is that homophobia is predicated on the sexist idea that being weak is to be female, or to be female in any way is to be weak. Football players are the height of masculinity, and since we have determined gay men to be feminine, how can you have a football player who is also gay? The answer is that you have to push on antiquated ideas about masculinity. And there’s no better space to do that in than football.

In March 2015, the same month Davis published his piece in the Advocate, I interviewed him. We were sitting in a large suite in Austin, Texas, the room’s wide windows looking out over the river and toward downtown. Reclining casually, one leg propped up so his foot was resting on his knee, Davis talked with me about masculinity and homophobia in football. He told me that gay players and the work that You Can Play is doing are “redefining how people view manhood and masculinity and femininity.” Referring to Michael Sam kissing his then-boyfriend on camera on ESPN when he was drafted into the NFL in 2014, Davis said, “What I really love about what Michael did, very few people from the age of probably twelve to seventy will ever be able to say they didn’t watch two men be intimate while watching football. And football is the holder of masculinity. To have two men be intimate in that space in a such a public way, you watch Masculinity cry, ‘No! Not me! NOT ME! No! No!’”

That matters because of the impact that football culture has on how we think about masculinity. And as Davis explained, football has the power to affect or change the bad parts of modern masculinity.

Still, right now, the masculinity fostered in football locker rooms is often homophobic and incredibly misogynistic. And sometimes it is downright dangerous.

And so, when we look at all the known cases of college football and sexual assault, there are certain patterns that emerge: the prevalence of gang rape, threats against the person who reported, and ease with which people avoid taking responsibility for any of it.

II.

I have collected a list of more than 115 cases of college football sexual assault allegations, spanning from 1974 to 2016. Over the last four decades, through each one of these, coaches, athletic directors, universities, the NCAA, police who investigate the crimes, the media who cover it, and the public who they all report to have learned how to think and talk about the athletes involved, the women who report the crime(s), and every institution that’s implicated when there’s a failure in the system.

One hundred and ten is not such a high number considering how many college football programs there are and how many men play on each team. But the numbers are not hard and fast. First, many of these cases involve multiple players. Also, the idea that you could be raped by someone other than a stranger is a fairly new concept in and of itself. The term “acquaintance rape” first appeared in print in the late 1970s and didn’t go mainstream for another decade. A ripple effect of this is that sexual assault is woefully underreported, especially on college campuses. Finally, it’s much easier for me to locate cases from the last decade or so, since newspapers and TV stations began putting their content online. My Google alerts over the last three years have flagged cases that probably would have gone completely under my radar in the past. The list then is top-heavy over the last few years.

Here’s a sense of the problem, though. In 2015, there were allegations against players at Florida International University, the University of Tennessee, UCLA, and Santa Barbara City College. 2014 saw cases at Utah State, Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Texas, Tulane, Bowling Green, Tulsa, Culver-Stockon College, Miami, Vanderbilt, Kansas, New Mexico, Ole Miss, and Eastern Washington University. In 2013, there were cases reported at Baylor, Brown, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Pacific University, Ohio State, Arizona State, Vanderbilt University, McGill University, Wisconsin, and the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2012, there were allegations against players at the University of Texas, Appalachian State University, Baylor, Old Dominion, Morehouse, and the US Naval Academy.

You get the idea.

III.

Many of the sexual assault cases I’ve found involve multiple athletes as either participants in or witnesses to the sexual violence, which is a particular facet of hypermasculine spaces. In Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus, Peggy Reeves Sanday says that this behavior is common when there is “a group of persons associated by or as if by ties of brotherhood.”[16] These men end up “bonding through sex.” Participating in a gang rape “operates to glue the male group as a unified entity,” Sanday argues. “It establishes fraternal bonding and helps boys to make the transition to their vision of a powerful manhood—in unity against women, one against the world.”

That multiple football players would participate in sexual violence together, a communal act that Sanday says is based around asserting one’s masculinity, makes sense considering how important masculinity is to football (and football to masculinity).

There are so many cases of gang rapes involving college football players. It is a depressing and terrifying phenomenon. The earliest case I can locate at all is from Notre Dame in 1974; it happens to be an allegation of gang rape. The New York Times reported it this way in 1976:

An 18-year-old South Bend high school student alleged that she had been raped by six black football players, that as many as 20 of the Fighting Irish were aware of the incident and that some even looked on. The unsigned complaint was made by the blonde senior at Sound Bend (Ind.) Memorial Hospital. She had driven there following the alleged rape—at a Notre Dame dormitory—to be examined for injuries. Although unharmed physically, the girl was later temporarily placed under psychiatric care. [17]

A university administrator called the woman “a queen of the slums with a mattress tied to her back.” The charges were dropped quickly, “the girl and her parents [having] requested that no charges be filed against the players—one of whom was her boyfriend.” The players were suspended for a year, though, for violating school rules. The New York Times piece from 1976 was about their return to the team and the coach who helped them through it all. It’s a piece that celebrates the coach for supporting these players through a difficult time, one created, the paper says, by the “so-called victim [who] was described as a football groupie.”

But in 2012, Melinda Henneberger, in a piece at the National Catholic Reporter (and about a case at Notre Dame from 2010), revealed that a woman had contacted her to say that in 1976, “two of the same young men accused in the [1974 case], along with a third man, were caught in the act of raping her in her dorm room.”[18] That woman was told by “a top St. Mary’s official” that “one of the men had raped another St. Mary’s student as well. And then? ‘I was told to shut up and mind my own business,’ and she did, until now.”

These two earliest cases could almost be described as generic ones. They are part of a pattern that has repeated for decades.

The list of these cases is truly devastating in its length. It is worth taking in how often this happens.

IV.

In 1980, a running back at Oregon, along with three former teammates, was indicted on charges of first-degree sodomy and coercion from a case dating back to 1978, and the Eugene police were looking into possible charges for other players, as they “had talked to a number of women who said they were rape victims.”[19]

In 1979, seven players at Kentucky were suspended after they were charged with raping another student. Two years after that, another two players were indicted on sexual assault charges.[20]

In 1986, after a woman reported that four Berkeley players had raped her, the school decided that adequate punishment was for the players to apologize to the woman, go to counseling, and do community service work.[21] The players were never charged. The same year, four players at Clemson were accused of sexually assaulting, kidnapping, and robbing the mother of another player. A grand jury refused to indict. One of the players went on to play in the NFL.

In 1989, two Oklahoma players were convicted of raping a fellow student in a dormitory on campus. In 1992, Nigel Clay, one of those players, told the Los Angeles Times, “I don’t know how to say it, but, bottom line, I just felt that sometimes, walking around . . . well, speaking for myself and a lot of other people, we felt like we were above the law . . . like OU would protect us from anything.”[22]

The list of cases with multiple football players accused goes on.

Miami and Tennessee in 1990. In 1992, two Arkansas players were acquitted of raping a thirteen-year-old girl. East Tennessee and Virginia Tech in 1994.[23]

In 1995, five current and former Idaho State football players were charged with statutory rape for having sex with fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls.[24] Charges were reduced to misdemeanor battery when the victims refused to testify. At least four of them pleaded guilty and the two then-current players were kicked off the team.

Grambling State in 1996 and Appalachian State the following year. Colorado in 1997 and 2001, and Oregon State in 1998.[25]

In 2000, a woman told her parents that four Oklahoma State players had raped her at a party five months prior in November 1999. “Criminal charges were never filed,” the New York Times reported she said, “because in the hours following the incident, she had signed a waiver of prosecution after being told by the police that her story had not been corroborated and she did not have a case.”[26] She later sued in civil court and settled with two of the players, one of them then a player in the NFL.

In 2000, a then-fifteen-year-old girl at the University of Alabama at Birmingham “was being passed around like a mix tape. In all, she alleges, more than two dozen Blazer athletes [mainly football and basketball players] took their turn.”[27]

That is twenty-three cases so far across twenty-five-plus years.

Three football players were kicked out of the Naval Academy in 2001 after a woman reported that they had raped her. In 2002, two players at Iowa State were charged with second-degree sexual abuse. That same year, a woman told police that four Notre Dame players raped her. One man pleaded guilty to sexual battery, one was acquitted, and the charges against the other two were dropped. That same year, a woman at Georgia reported that several members of the football and basketball teams gang raped her.[28]

Then it was Brigham Young University in 2004 and University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2005. Two players pleaded guilty to raping a woman in 2006 at SUNY Albany. Two Iowa players were eventually punished for charges stemming from a rape of a woman in 2007. That same year, four Minnesota players were arrested for rape.[29]

In 2010, multiple players at both Missouri and Montana were accused of rape. In 2011, a woman reported that two Appalachian State football players had raped her, and two players and another student had sexually assaulted her. Another woman also reported two of those players for raping her.[30]

In 2012, there were a slew of gang rape cases: McGill University, Presbyterian College, Old Dominion University, Naval Academy, the University of Texas, and Ohio State. 2013 was Vanderbilt and Brown.[31]

Two University of New Mexico players and another student were charged with kidnapping and raping another student in 2014, the players being suspended indefinitely from the team in response. The charges were dropped and the players returned to the team. That same year, two University of Miami players were charged with sexual battery after a woman reported that they had raped her. Two Texas players were arrested and charged after a female student said they raped her in a dorm room. Two Tennessee players were also charged with raping a woman.[32]

In total, of the 110-plus cases I have found, forty-nine of them (either accusations, charges, or convictions) involved multiple football players who allegedly participated directly in the sexual assault.

V.

So many of these cases are collective experiences. All of these cases that involve multiple players, either as participants, witnesses, or intimidators after the fact, seem to support Sanday’s thesis that these acts of sexual violence are as much about bonding between men as anything else. They also suggest that it is necessary to take a long, critical look at the culture of football teams and the famous mystique of the locker room.

There are a few cases where there are witnesses to the violence. For example, in 2013, a man at Hobart and William Smith Colleges lost track of his friend at a party. “He found her,” he told the New York Times in 2014, “bent over a pool table as a football player appeared to be sexually assaulting her from behind in a darkened dance hall with six or seven people watching and laughing. Some had their cell phones out, apparently taking pictures, he said.” The university cleared the players within twelve days. At Vanderbilt that same year, while four players were charged with raping a woman, at least four other student-athletes testified to seeing the woman that night and two helped move her body at one point into the room of one of the defendants from the hallway.[33]

Women who come forward to report being assaulted can face intense harassment, sometimes at the hands of the player’s teammates. In 1984, when charges were dismissed against a University of Florida player, the woman in the case told the local paper that she had been harassed by teammates of his and this played a role in her choosing not to testify. In 1991, Kathy Redmond, founder of National Coalition Against Violent Athletes, was a student at Nebraska when she reported that Christian Peter, a nose tackle on the football team, raped her twice two years earlier (the second time with two of his teammates standing guard at the door). Peter would later be found guilty of sexually assaulting a different woman, but he denies that he raped Redmond. She has said that after she came forward, she received death threats, prank phone calls, and her car was vandalized. A woman who reported being raped by a Michigan player in 2009 also reported receiving rape threats from one of the player’s teammates. In 2010, Lizzy Seeberg reported being sexually assaulted by a Notre Dame player. The next day, her parents say, she received a disturbing text message from a friend of the player that read, Don’t do anything you’d regret. Messing with Notre Dame football is a bad idea. Not long after, Seeberg committed suicide.[34]

In all, just over 40 percent of the cases I’ve studied are gang rape allegations involving multiple players. If you add in cases where teammates are witnesses or later accomplices in harassing the woman who reported the violence, it creeps up close to 50 percent. This is incredibly high compared to what is known about gang rapes in the overall population. In 2013, Sarah E. Ullman wrote in a book about multiple-perpetrator rape that research provides a wide range of possibilities for how common gang rape is: “From under 2 percent in student populations to up to 26 percent in police-reported cases.”[35] Granted, my research is unscientific and limited by my access to resources, but even if I am off by 10-plus percentage points, the rate of gang behavior in these cases is remarkable.

VI.

Other patterns suggest systemic issues that go beyond the confines of individual teams. Plenty of players, even if dismissed by their team or university, transfer schools. That move, of transferring after being accused of sexual violence, goes back to the earliest case I could locate: one of the six players accused of raping the woman at Notre Dame in 1974 transferred. It was true for a player at Arkansas in 1992 who went to Sonoma State after being dismissed. It happened again at Notre Dame in 1997, when the school expelled a player after a disciplinary hearing found him guilty of violating the school’s conduct code. He transferred to West Virginia. And again at Notre Dame in 2002: the player who pleaded guilty to sexual battery transferred to Kent State and eventually played for the New York Jets. In 2007, two Iowa players, one who was convicted of misdemeanor assault and the other who pleaded guilty to an assault charge, both transferred schools. Three Minnesota players accused in 2007 transferred to Cincinnati, Kentucky State, and Illinois State. A Missouri player was sentenced to five years in prison for sexually assaulting a fellow student, served only 120 days, and then transferred to Tuskegee. The two Vanderbilt players from the 2013 gang rape who still await trial both transferred to other schools.[36]

I’m not suggesting that players not be allowed to transfer, but more pointing out that there is no mechanism in place that holds anyone accountable. NCAA rules require athletes who change schools following disqualifications or suspensions for “disciplinary reasons” to sit out a year before being eligible to compete, but do not impose stricter standards or outright bans on athletes suspended or disqualified for sexual assault. Moreover, the one-year sit-out is often skirted using a one-time transfer exception available to almost all athletes, except those in revenue-producing sports (and even those athletes can use the exception if they drop down a division).

“If a student is charged with sexual assault, or even found responsible in a university system, there is nothing to keep that individual from transferring to another school,” says a representative from End Rape on Campus, an organization that has helped many people file Title IX lawsuits with the Department of Education asking for investigations into how their universities have handled sexual assault allegations.[37] “Basically,” they tell me, “this means rapists can transfer freely, and commit the same crime with the only penalty being a completely new pool of victims at a different school.”

Much like schools in general, campus athletic departments are under no obligation to review athlete disciplinary records before accepting transfers. And even when athletic officials are aware of someone’s troubled past, many look the other way. A wide receiver left Missouri for Oklahoma in 2014 after being dismissed from the school’s football team following an incident in which he pushed a woman down a flight of stairs. In 2013, a Providence basketball player was accused of sexually assaulting a fellow student and was “prohibited from participating in games for the rest of the season.” He transferred to Oregon, where he was eventually expelled with two other players after an accusation of gang rape. He played the 2014–15 season at Northwestern Florida State College, where school president Ty Handy said the player will have a chance to “succeed, to grow, and to develop.”[38]

Coaches also leave behind the mess of these cases and any potential fallout. Mike Riley left Oregon State in 1998 after a season in which multiple players were accused of raping a student. He headed to the San Diego Chargers, had a brief stint with the Saints, and returned to OSU from 2003–2014. He is now at Nebraska. Mack Brown, the famed coach at the University of Texas, saw two of his players reported for sexual assault in 2012. Both remained on the team when no charges were pressed. A year later, Brown retired. Within six months, two more players from the team were arrested for sexual assault and the new head coach, Charlie Strong, dismissed them. James Franklin, head coach of Vanderbilt when four players were arrested in the summer of 2013, left the school the following January and now is head coach at Penn State. In a pretrial hearing before two of the players went to court, Franklin had to Skype in to give testimony and answer questions.[39]

Problems with the criminal justice system reverberate out into the decisions coaches and teams make about these players. Many of the cases end with dismissed charges due to inadequate evidence or the woman who initially reported the crime backing out. Both are common to cases involving interpersonal or sexual violence, though when athletes are the ones named as perpetrators, the stakes get much higher for everyone involved, including law enforcement, prosecutors, and the woman herself. (Note: men are the victims of sexual assault too, but it is so rare to find a man who publicly reports his rape at the hand of an athlete, and those incidents are often reported not as sexual assault but rather as hazing, so they get lost in searches for this kind of violence.)

For cases that did make it past the arrest phase, many were pleaded out to reduced charges and the players received light sentences. That is ridiculously common, regardless of the case. According to the New York Review of Books, “In 2013, while 8 percent of all federal criminal charges were dismissed (either because of a mistake in fact or law or because the defendant had decided to cooperate), more than 97 percent of the remainder were resolved through plea bargains, and fewer than 3 percent went to trial. The plea bargains largely determined the sentences imposed.”[40] At the state level, “it is a rare state where plea bargains do not similarly account for the resolution of at least 95 percent of the felony cases that are not dismissed.”

Coaches often look to legal outcomes to decide how to handle players who are accused. That is fine, as long as we acknowledge that legal outcomes in these cases are complicated and often do not resolve the cases in a manner that withdraws all doubt about the crime. Yes, legally, when a case is pleaded or a trial completed, there is a cut-and-dry answer for whether the defendant is innocent or guilty in the eyes of the law; in the rest of the world, however, the one outside of the courtroom, we are left to coexist with people whose legal innocence or guilt does not seem satisfying or fair. When a coach decides to give or deny a player a “second chance” based only on the legal outcome, that too can seem unsatisfying or unfair because of the troubles with the legal system itself.

VII.

Let’s take one school as an example of how a case can appear isolated but often fits into a longer, larger history: Florida State.

Early in the morning on December 7, 2012, a Florida State University student called the FSU Police Department (FSUPD) and reported that her friend, Erica Kinsman, had been raped. (Kinsman has released her name publicly, hence its use in this book.[41] )

Over the next twenty-four hours, Kinsman gave statements to multiple officers and went to the hospital for a rape kit. But she did not know the name of the man she said raped her. In mid-January, thirty-four days after Kinsman initially reported to the Tallahassee Police Department (TPD), Kinsman recognized the man she had reported on December 7 when they both showed up for a class in the new spring semester. She contacted the TPD on January 10, 2013, and told detective Scott Angulo that she now knew the man’s name; it was Jameis Winston, she said.

“This case is being suspended at this time due to a lack of cooperation from the victim. If the victim decides to press charges, the case will be pursued.” Those two sentences conclude Angulo’s February 11 TPD report. Angulo and his colleagues had not collected video from the bar where Winston and the woman had met earlier in the night. They had failed to find the cab driver who took the two of them, as well as Winston’s roommate Casher and another player, Ronald Darby, back to Winston and Casher’s apartment. They did not interview anyone other than Kinsman and two of her friends. They did submit her rape kit, and both her blood and urine tested negative for drugs. It wasn’t until late August, though, that the TPD received word that “semen was present on [her] anal swabs, panties, and pink shorts (later verified to be pink pants).” TPD never compelled Winston to provide his DNA for testing.

After the story broke on November 13, 2013, Winston finally submitted his DNA for testing. It matched the DNA from the rape kit. Winston, through his attorney, said it was consensual sex. Kinsman’s family, in response, released a statement saying, “To be clear, the victim did not consent. This was a rape.” The media, as they do, boiled the case down to a typical he-said/she-said debate.

But the real story was the long string of failures. It quickly became apparent that a full investigation was never done and the state’s attorney was never contacted to look into the case. That office began its own investigation. Kinsman was once again questioned, as were friends she had been with or whom she’d contacted that night. On the same day that TPD first released a heavily redacted version of the initial police report, before police ever interviewed them, Winston's lawyer submitted affidavits from Casher and Darby about what they remembered from that night eleven months earlier. TPD also interviewed them in the following days, when they found out that Casher had recorded Winston and the woman in Winston’s bedroom but had since deleted the video and gotten rid of the phone. They both maintained that Winston was innocent and that Kinsman had consented.

Winston was never questioned by the police or the state attorney’s office.

But Winston’s case was not in isolation even at his own school: in June 2013, just over six months after Kinsman first reported to the police, FSU wide receiver Greg Dent was suspended indefinitely from the team after he was charged with second-degree sexual assault. A woman told police he was “very aggressive in touching” her and did eventually penetrate her before she fought him off. Dent was eventually found guilty in September 2014 of misdemeanor battery, not sexual battery. He was sentenced to time served and put on probation for six months. He hopes to return to the green grass of Doak Campbell Stadium after his probation is complete. When he heard the news about Dent only receiving a conviction for misdemeanor battery, Jimbo Fisher, FSU head coach, told the Orlando Sentinel, “I’m extremely happy for him that that turned out. I think Greg is an outstanding young man, always did, and you know, [the possibility of him returning] is out there. We’ll address that when it comes, but I’m extremely happy for him.” Adding that he had stayed in contact with Dent throughout the legal process, Fisher said, “Greg is one of our children and you have to be there and be very supportive.” In March 2016, Dent returned to Florida State to participate in their annual pro day, to set himself up for a chance at getting on an NFL roster.

In the coverage of the case against Winston, there was almost no mention of Dent.

This is troubling because when the news broke about Winston, there were multiple pieces drawing attention to how football culture and rape culture both operate within Tallahassee and on FSU’s campus. Stassa Edwards wrote at Ms. Magazine’s blog in November 2013 that “the town has gone mad, spouting conspiracy theories that ‘prove’ Winston’s innocence.”[42] She said she overhead victim-blaming at a local Mexican restaurant in the city, a woman saying to her teenage daughter, “She’s just ruining Jameis’s good character.” And Edwards charged that the local paper, the Tallahassee Democrat, was doing a poor job in covering the case. She said they were “pandering to some of the worst sensibilities of rape culture: the immediate need to suspect an accuser’s intention and tear apart her story before we even have it.”

“Here in Tallahassee, the victim-blaming is so overwhelming,” Edwards wrote, “that the editor of a Gannett-owned newspaper can, the day after the story was reported, declare the evidence against Winston to be ‘thin on the surface.’”

“Jameis Winston Isn’t the Only Problem Here: An FSU Teacher’s Lament” was the title of Adam Weinstein’s Deadspin piece around that same time period.[43] Weinstein said he and his colleagues, while loving football, were “increasingly flummoxed by the football culture surrounding Tallahassee, one that’s grown malignant with the wins and the scrutiny.” That malignancy resulted in “most of Tallahassee, even the local sports reporters,” not being able, Weinstein said, to “accept that the narrative [around FSU football] is overly simple, and that failure is always an option, whether it’s a physical failure in the fourth quarter, or a moral one in a strange bedroom after last call on Tennessee Street.” And so, like Edwards, Weinstein chronicles the vast range of theories people created to explain away the possibility that Winston had raped someone and why no one bothered to adequately investigate it:

It’s the timing of this thing going public—some Manziel or McCarron fan dropping a bomb before Heisman voting, before BCS selection. Maybe even a (voice drops to a whisper) Gators fan. It’s the height of discrepancy in the police report—and that chick doesn’t know what the hell went on, probably because she was drinking. It’s some lying jealous gold-digger. It’s racism. It’s a state attorney who is grandstanding or maybe corrupt or maybe just has a hard-on for unfairly persecuting football players for rape.

“The detective I spoke to said, ‘Are you sure you want to pursue this? It’s been three months, so it’s just he-said/she-said at this point. That doesn’t usually go well.’” That was Marci Robin’s experience with the Tallahassee police when she reported her rape in 1999 while a student at FSU.[44] She wrote about it in November 2013 for xoJane. “I told them I just knew I needed to report it: It happened, here’s his name, here’s my account, please do something. Nothing.” Robin said she told her story because it was eerily similar to what Kinsman said had happened to her when she reported her rape. For Kinsman, though, there was the added layer of reporting a star player at a university and in a town obsessed with football.

Florida State football’s history of players being accused and/or charged with sexual crimes, from harassment to rape, goes back to at least the mid-1990s. Months after kicking the winning field goal in the Orange Bowl against Nebraska, a win that secured FSU’s national championship for the 1993 season, Scott Bentley pleaded no contest to charges that he illegally taped a Florida A&M student while the two were having consensual sex. He later played the tape for his friends, some of them his teammates. He received forty hours of community service and a $500 fine. He said his reason for the recording was because he didn’t trust the woman he was with. ‘’I was protecting myself against potential false allegations that could be brought up in the future,” Bentley told local news.[45] He was suspended for that summer, and allowed to return to the team a week before the start of training camp. Bentley went on to play multiple seasons in the NFL.

That same year, only a month later, Kamari Charlton, a tight end, was arrested after he was charged with one count each of sexual battery and battery.[46] His ex-girlfriend reported that he had raped her and grabbed her throat. Charlton was suspended and then dismissed from the team. He was later acquitted and returned to the team the following year.

Just before Christmas in 1993, former Florida State running back Michael Gibson burst into Ashley Witherspoon’s apartment early in the morning. According to what she told Deadspin in April 2014, “We struggled. I was shot twice at point-blank range.”[47] But then, she says, “What I’ve never gotten over, never been able to stomach, is that at that point, after shooting me, he made me lie down on the bed and raped me.” Gibson was convicted and received six life sentences, one of them being for attempted felony murder. In 2003, when the Florida Supreme Court determined that “attempted felony murder” was not a crime, there was a sentencing hearing. Bobby Bowden wrote a letter of reference for Gibson in which he said Gibson was “no problem” while he was on the team. Witherspoon says, “The thing that sticks in my craw is that he signed the letter ‘Coach Bowden,’ as if we all wouldn’t know who Bobby Bowden was. Who signs ‘Coach Bowden’ unless you’re signing a poster or a football?”

The same year that Bowden penned that letter for Gibson, Travis Johnson, an FSU nose guard, was accused by a fellow FSU athlete and his former girlfriend of rape. According to the Orlando Sentinel, “Johnson’s lawyers said the sexual encounter was consensual and that his accuser became angry when she learned Johnson had another girlfriend.”[48] This case was particularly strange. The president of FSU at the time, T.K. Wetherell, spoke to both parties involved, which, the paper said, “FSU officials acknowledged . . . was unprecedented, as was Student Affairs Vice President Mary Coburn’s attempt to mediate [an] agreement before the criminal matter was resolved.” Coburn apparently asked the woman to drop the charges in exchange for Johnson going to counseling and leaving school for six months, which would have brought him back to campus in time for the start of the next year’s football season. The woman declined Coburn’s plan. The case went all the way to court, and Johnson was acquitted after only thirty minutes of deliberation. In November 2013, according to Johnson, “he passed three polygraph examinations and that two medical experts told investigators the attack was unlikely to have happened the way the complainant described.” He went on to play six seasons in the NFL.

In November 2015, late on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Florida State released court documents to the New York Times.[49] Included was the deposition of the former director of FSU’s Victim Advocate Office. Her testimony is part of Kinsman’s civil suit against Winston. According to the Times, “In the nine years she worked in that office, an estimated forty football players had been accused of either sexual assault or ‘intimate partner’ violence, and that to the best of her recollection, only one person had been found responsible. She said most of the women chose not to pursue the cases ‘based on fear.’ No names were mentioned.” When the Times asked FSU for a response to the former director’s testimony, the school released a statement saying, “We have no way to confirm or deny Ms. Ashton’s claims, given that her communications with such victims are confidential.”

VIII.

There is no isolated case when we talk about college football and sexual assault.

My alma mater, Florida State, has a history of problems when it comes to football players and sexual violence. Many of these cases are more clear now that journalists and a civil suit have unearthed this information due to the level of scrutiny the Winston case brought on the school.

The takeaway cannot be that Florida State is an anomaly, though. It is an example of the ordinary.

When we adopt routine responses to individual cases, it’s important to remember that this is a playing field. Recognizing that each case is part of a long-standing problem that has affected many people at different schools for decades now means that we can and should shift away from the narrow lens of obsessing over single cases.

Let’s broaden the conversation to one that tries to understand the overarching systems of power that inform how these cases are handled, how they are discussed, and ultimately why nothing about them ever seems to change.