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2.

What the Playbook Doesn’t Show

I.

When you look at a single play in a playbook, it is usually fairly simple in design. It is sketched with lines, arrows, and symbols that indicate what each position is supposed to do, and there is often a short explanation, sometimes as few as three words, that describes the movement in more detail. What goes without saying is that the play is sketched out on a football field. That is a given. Where else, in fact, would those plays happen?

In the current playbook about college football and sexual assault, the things not said, the things that are taken for granted, the things that are simply known, are the racial and gendered hierarchies that inform how we think about these cases. In our society, there is a reason cases involving African American players garner more attention than those of white ones. We are trained to see black men as perpetrators who need to be punished and controlled by the state. We also believe women to be dramatic and/or liars when they share their experiences, especially their interactions with men. No one needs to tell us these things each time a new college case breaks, before we hear any evidence or analysis. Who else would commit such a crime, if not young black men? Who else would lie about having sex after the fact, if not young women?

The given in this playbook is that the intersection of race, gender, and money matters deeply to understanding the intersection of college football and sexual assault. It goes without saying because we already know it. But it shouldn’t go without saying because, while we focus on the black-man-as-criminal and the woman-as-liar, what is lost is that most of the people who create and maintain the culture of college football are white men, from coaches to athletic directors, from university presidents to the media who cover the sport. And all those white men make a lot of money off the backs of the players and they have no problem hushing up the voices of mainly women when they feel those women could threaten their players, their game, and their money.

This chapter is the discussion of what we so rarely say. This topic has to be discussed with the utmost care, though, in a country that likes to so easily criminalize and stigmatize black men, and so readily deems women as untrustworthy.

II.

I remember Travis Johnson. Our time at Florida State as undergraduates overlapped and there was one semester where we shared a class. I knew he was a football player. There were a handful in the class and our teacher, a large, jovial graduate student in the classics department, seemed smitten with the idea that he was sharing space with these campus rock stars. I was too. I never directly interacted with Johnson (there were probably fifty to seventy students in the class) but my memory of him is one of a loud goofball, the class clown. During the middle of an exam, the room silent as pencils scratched on paper, Johnson, seemingly out of nowhere, yelled, “Sexual chocolate!” The room erupted in laughter, a huge smile broke across his face, the instructor shushed us, and we went back to our work.

Johnson was also a big black man in small Southern town.

In April 2003, a year after I graduated from FSU, Johnson was charged with sexual battery and suspended from the team.[50] The woman who reported the assault was a shot-putter on the FSU track team and had a prior relationship with Johnson. She said that in early February that year, Johnson took her to another player’s apartment, held her there against her will, and raped her. She then reported it to a coach and twelve days later to the police. At trial, according to the St. Petersburg Times, the woman said she waited because “I was embarrassed, and I wanted him to leave me alone,” and, the paper says, “she also didn’t want to ‘ruin’ Johnson.”[51]

Nine days after the woman reported to law enforcement, Mary Coburn, the university’s Student Affairs vice president, sent her an e-mail. The Orlando Sentinel published that e-mail:

“Even though Travis does not admit this wrongdoing, to avoid embarrassment to himself, his family, the university, and you, Travis has agreed to withdraw from spring semester and not return until August 8 which is football reporting day. He has also agreed to receive counseling and provide documentation to me that this has taken place.” The e-mail also stipulated that “all parties agree to keep this matter confidential” and “not pursue any further legal action.” [52]

It appears that Coburn attempted to make the case go away, and she tried to do it around the football schedule to make sure that the team’s starting defensive tackle didn’t miss a game. Football is big business.

Three days later, the woman pressed charges.

Johnson maintained throughout the investigation and eventual trial that it was consensual sex and that he, having had shoulder surgery weeks earlier and the woman being only slightly smaller than him, could not have raped her.

Willie Meggs, the state attorney, took the case to court. The trial lasted two days, Johnson did not testify, the woman was on the stand for three hours, and it took the six women who made up the jury thirty minutes to find him not guilty. The Sun-Sentinel reported at the time that the woman and her family, as well as Johnson and his family, cried after the verdict was read.[53] Afterward, Johnson’s attorney said the fact that “this case was even brought this far is troubling.”[54] Johnson played for FSU the next season and was drafted into the NFL in 2005, where he played for six years.

When news broke in November 2013 that Willie Meggs’s office was investigating Jameis Winston, Travis Johnson emerged as a vocal critic of the state attorney. Johnson tweeted repeatedly about Meggs throughout November and into December. He called Meggs “the most Racist&Biased individual” and “the Most Corrupt Criminal in all of Florida.” “Willie Meggs will never give anyone let alone a black man a fair shake in the state of flordia he is a media hoe,” read one tweet. He also told Yahoo! Sports, “Facts don’t matter when you are dealing with a guy like Willie Meggs. Willie Meggs isn’t out for the facts . . . At the end of the day, this is still the Jim Crow South. You think, ‘It’s Florida.’ Well, it’s not Florida. It’s South Georgia. Tallahassee is South Georgia.”

Tallahassee is only a twenty-minute drive from the border with Georgia, and much of what surrounds it is rural. The refrain that it is really southern Georgia was one I heard while attending school. The county votes Democrat generally, but often with close margins. And, like most cities in the US South, it has a history saturated with segregation and racism.[55] Tallahassee was the site of a seven-month boycott of city buses in 1956 after two black women were arrested for sitting beside a white woman. The KKK held rallies in the city and burned crosses from the 1940s on. Young black people in the 1960s and 1970s held sit-ins, picketed segregated businesses, and marched through the city.

The past is never left in the past, though. There are ongoing arguments about the school’s mascot, the Seminoles, which has a red-faced man in profile as its main symbol. A social media post at the start of the school year in 2013 referred to black FSU students as “monkeys,” sparking justified outrage and a university investigation. The following year, a lecturer who had been with the university for eighteen years quit after her racist Facebook rant went public. In late 2014, multiple black churches in the rural area around Tallahassee were vandalized within a week of one another.[56] On March 18, 2015, the local paper, the Tallahassee Democrat, reported that the KKK had distributed leaflets in the city.[57] “Imperial Wizard of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Frank Ancona said the fliers found in Tallahassee driveways over the past few days were an effort to spread awareness of the values the organization holds and hopefully draw in new members.” In December 2015, a black student at Florida State wrote a letter to the president of FSU, John Thrasher, after Thrasher’s State of the University address.[58] After a long, detailed list of issues of discrimination and racism at FSU and within the state of Florida more generally, the student wrote, “Acts of racism and intolerance are not, as you claim, ‘isolated acts’ at Florida State; they are the culmination and furtherance of ideals this university has perpetuated for decades.” All of this is probably what Travis Johnson meant when he said that Tallahassee is “still the Jim Crow South.”

As evidence of Meggs’s particular interest in football players, people often point to a 2003 interview he gave to the Sun-Sentinel where he said, “To whom much is given, much should be expected. Sometimes we ought to hold those folks to a little bit higher standard. Thousands of people would give their right arm to play for FSU or Notre Dame or Miami or Georgia, and when somebody messes up doing something stupid, it’s a shame.”[59] The idea that FSU football players are given much is questionable. There is also an implication in the phrase “hold to a higher standard” that the people Meggs is talking about should be brought down a peg. Those can be loaded words in a Southern town in northern Florida, especially when spoken by a white man about mainly black men.

Also, it is not just football players who maintain that race plays a role in how Meggs practices law. In February 2012, Leon County Commissioner Bill Proctor said Meggs “just beats the hell out of black folk day in and day out,” prosecuting them at higher rates. In a press release, Proctor wrote that Meggs “prosecutes black officials with great haste and fervor but is hesitant and indifferent to white public officials who commit crimes.”

Willie Meggs might be racist in how he practices law, as Proctor and Johnson say. He might not. In the end, it ultimately may not matter because Meggs, a white Southern man who is an agent of the state, practices law in a system that many feel is racist in whom it labels as criminal and how it punishes them.

III.

This country has a long history of tying blackness to criminality (and vice versa) in ways that have devastating effects in real life: “African Americans make up 13 percent of the general US population, yet they constitute 28 percent of all arrests, 40 percent of all inmates held in prisons and jails, and 42 percent of the population on death row.”[60] What this means is that we find it easier to talk about crime, especially crime as a problem within our larger society, when we have an African American in the role of perpetrator.

In 2014 I met up with Ben Carrington, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas who specializes in sports and race, at a swanky coffee shop in downtown Austin to talk to him about this. Carrington, a native Londoner with a smooth English accent and himself a former semipro footballer in Europe, told me that often “race is the trigger for society to express their moral outrage about another issue.” (In this case, sexual violence.) In fact, he said, when a crime is perpetrated by black people, that “helps to make us more angry because of what [the alleged perpetrators] look like.” Football, Carrington noted, because it employs so many black men and is so popular, reflects a skewed racialized image of violence back into our society. We care about football a lot, we pay attention to what the players do on and off the field, we critique their behavior on and off the field, and when black players are accused, charged, or convicted of criminal behavior, it slots nicely into our cultural imagination regarding black men.

Other experts echo Carrington’s concerns. In September 2014, while working on a piece about how the NFL was handling a slew of domestic violence accusations and charges against its players, all of whom happened to be black, I spoke to Mariame Kaba on the phone.[61] Based in Chicago, Kaba is an antiviolence organizer who founded the Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls & Young Women. Her work is not about sports but rather about violence. She echoed Carrington’s points, telling me she’s “dubious to the reaction to [these cases] versus the reaction to white [players] who commit violence,” because when it is black men we are discussing, there are implications of these men being “inherently violent,” and that makes for an easy leap to saying “they should be locked up, we need to manage and control them.” This is particularly true when the crime is sexual assault.

I then called up Louis Moore, a professor of history at Grand Valley State University, to talk about a historical phenomenon that he called “black men as the natural rapist.” Moore told me, “If you just look up ‘negro’ and ‘lynched’ in any kind of history database, most of the time [the lynching was justified by] an accusation of rape never founded because there was no due process.” What this means, Moore said, is that in all discussions of rape culture in the US, no matter how far back you go in history, “race is always forefront of the conversation just because of the history of race and alleged rape in America.” A paucity of black men on many campuses feeds into an image that they are outliers in the community. People “think they are on campus for two reasons,” Moore said, “affirmative action or athletics. So there is this sense that they don’t belong, sense that they never belonged, and when the crime happens it becomes, ‘See, I told you so.’”

This is all heightened when we talk about black male athletes in particular. Carrington told me that he traces the outlier status of black athletes within sports, even when they are a numerical majority, to the history of integration of sports in this country. He says that black athletes—ever since Jack Johnson became the first black heavyweight champion in 1908—have been painted as “angry, rebellious, violent, uncontrollable.”

This is further troubled when talking about cases where a black athlete is reported to have raped a white woman. The lynchings that Moore mentioned were often justified under the racialized and paternalistic gendered scare tactic of saying that the women these angry, rebellious, violent, uncontrollable natural rapists attacked were white. That horrific part of US history and the ongoing racial disparities within the criminal justice system mean that accusations of black men sexually assaulting white women carry within them additional cultural baggage that has to, at the least, be acknowledged in these conversations. Fears about powerful black men being punished via false accusation are not irrational or dramatic; they are borne of actual experience.

In cases where people do not know the race of the accuser, it’s often assumed that it is a white woman. (This narrative, it should be noted, erases and ignores black female victims, which is an ongoing issue within these conversations as well as in victim-centered antiviolence campaigns.)

Lisa Lindquist Dorr studied the history of the myth of black men raping white women in White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900–1960.[62] This narrative enforced, Dorr argues, a racist and sexist system of power by reifying “white women’s subordination to white men and the social, economic, and political power of whites over blacks.” In the complicated gendered and racialized postslavery South, white men were in control of everyone else; the appearance of protecting white women from black men helped cement that reality.

The system of power that gave that myth force is still with us. In June 2015, after Dylann Storm Roof reportedly said, “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go,” before murdering nine black people in a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, Jamelle Bouie wrote succinctly, “Make any list of anti-black terrorism in the United States, and you’ll also have a list of attacks justified by the specter of black rape.”[63] From Emmett Till to the Central Park Five, the history of young black men wrongly accused or convicted of harassing or raping white women is ever-present. Till was just fourteen in 1955 when a group of white men in Money, Mississippi, brutally mutilated him before killing him, supposedly because he spoke with a white woman and maybe whistled at her. Decades later, the Central Park Five were four young black men and one young Latino who were arrested and charged with the rape and assault of a white female jogger in Central Park in 1989. After coercive interrogations by the police, they each confessed to some part of the crime and were convicted and sent to jail. Just over a decade later, another man confessed to the crime and DNA evidence supported his account. The convictions for the five were vacated in 2002, though each had already served his sentence.

A 2012 study by Samuel Gross and Michael Shaffer from the University of Michigan School of Law looked at 873 exonerations in the United States between 1989 and 2012.[64] They found that race did play a significant role in exonerations in sexual assault cases: while 25 percent of prisoners convicted of sexual assault were black, African American men made up 63 percent of the exonerations in these cases. And of all those exonerations of black men, nearly three-quarters involved a white victim. The reason for this, they found, is not malicious lying but rather eyewitness misidentifications. Gross and Shaffer say that for rape cases, “The false convictions we know about are overwhelmingly caused by mistaken eyewitness identifications—a problem that is almost entirely restricted to crimes committed by strangers.”

Additionally, Shaffer and Gross found that rape, compared to other crimes (except robbery), has the lowest rate of people lying and it leading to false convictions. Perjury and false accusations led to 64 percent of homicide exonerations, 74 percent of child sex abuse exonerations, 43 percent for other violent crimes, and 52 percent for exonerations of nonviolent crimes. Looking at all 873 exonerations cases, half were due to perjury or false accusations. When it came to sexual assault cases, that number was only 23 percent. In other words, compared to other types of crime, people who report rape are much less likely to lie.

In the end, this is what the study tells us: it is both a myth that black men rape white women at some extraordinary level and that women lie profusely to falsely convict men. Yet the system, as it is set up, seems to suggest both things are true. Many people in this society believe these things to be true.

This is a particularly damaging intersection of racism and sexism, then, for both women and black men. As Byron Hurt wrote on December 5, 2013, in a piece for NewBlackMan (in Exile) about the Jameis Winston case, “It is true that Black men continue to be cruelly stereotyped as rapists. As a Black man, I carry that label—and all of the other stereotypes associated with Black men—wherever I go in our country. However, it is also a stereotype that women lie about being victims of rape more often than not. According to FBI statistics, less than 3 percent of all rapes are falsely reported.”[65]

Yet the exoneration study shows that false convictions for rape are most likely made when the woman does not know her perpetrator and when there is a mistake in his identification; it is not done with malicious intent. That does not mean the woman is not racist or that because the intent is not malicious that the effects of a racist system do not have terrible real-life consequences for black men.

It’s important to note one potential horrific consequence for men behind bars, whether they committed a crime or not: they can become victims of sexual violence themselves as prison rape is at crisis levels in the United States. According to Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, the data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that “a prisoner’s likelihood of becoming a victim of sexual assault is roughly thirty times higher than that of any given woman on the outside” and “inmates in state and federal prisons and local jails all reported greater rates of sexual victimization involving staff than other inmates.”[66] Kirsten West Savali has argued that ignoring prison rape further marginalizes the struggle to get people to care about mitigating or ending sexual violence altogether.[67] “Until we create safe spaces for these victims, for all victims, to be truly seen and heard,” West Savali writes, “rape culture will continue to be viewed as a ‘woman’s problem’ or a ‘man-hating, feminist agenda’—something society has always found easy to deny or vilify, and ultimately ignore.” These things are complicated issues: racism in the system and in our daily lives means that more black men are criminalized overall and are often misidentified in criminal prosecutions of sexual assault cases; they then go into a prison system where they very well may become victims of sexual violence themselves; and by us ignoring the issue of prison rape (probably because we believe it is a justified punishment or because we simply do not care about what happens to the population of people behind bars), we continue to perpetuate the very rape culture we say we want to end.

In college football, many (though not all) of the sexual assault cases involving college players fall outside of the “stranger danger” rape scenario that leads to misidentification of the perpetrator and so to false convictions. Most of the time, the woman knows the man she is reporting. Additionally, many of these cases involve gang rapes by multiple players (roughly 40 percent), a scenario that does not lend itself to overarching problems with eyewitnesses misidentifying perpetrators. This does not mean that race and racist beliefs about black men’s criminality have no place in these cases, only that most of these cases are more complicated than our nuance-averse narratives allow.

There is no way to determine with 100 percent certainty that the person reporting the crime is telling the truth. Yet the statistical odds are very high that the person reporting in these cases is not lying. Still, we have to also hold in our minds that race does play a role, clearly, in false rape convictions.

One other area where race most definitely has an impact is our appetite for consuming crime reportage when the person accused, charged, or convicted is a black athlete. We find it easy to talk about crime, especially crime as a problem within our larger society, when we have a black person in the role of perpetrator.

IV.

Willie Meggs, the prosecutor who took Travis Johnson to court, was the same state attorney in charge of Jameis Winston’s case in 2013. In the end, Meggs chose not to press charges against Winston. What he did, though, was take the opportunity to make the announcement of not charging Winston into a spectacle. He laughed multiple times during the press conference. At one point, Meggs was on screen standing behind a podium, and a female reporter off camera asked him, “Because there was more than one DNA evidence in the rape kit, can you conclude that there was perhaps sex with more than one male?” Meggs paused and then replied, “That would be a logical conclusion.” The man standing just behind him on camera, former Florida state senator Alfred Lawson, laughed in response, as did other people in the room. That was toward the beginning of the strangely lighthearted press conference about a high-profile sexual assault case. Meggs repeatedly cracked jokes with the media. When asked if the deadline for Heisman voting influenced how quickly or when Meggs determined that he would not press charges, he jokingly asked when the voting ended and then smirked while saying it did not affect his timeline. Then Meggs and Lawson kidded about whether Lawson had called him a “politician,” leading Meggs to grin widely for the camera, seemingly pleased with his own humor.