2 very damaging reports LSU's handling Miles just released

Mar 8, 2021, 12:04 PM

L.S.U. Says It ‘Betrayed’ Students Who Accused Athletes of Attacks

The university’s acknowledgment came after two reports in two days showed how L.S.U. mishandled complaints of harassment and assault.

March 5, 2021

Louisiana State University, one of the most prominent institutions in the South and a powerhouse of college sports, failed to prevent abuse or harassment by some of its athletes and its onetime football coach or sufficiently investigate accusations against them, according to two reports released this week.

Although the coach, Les Miles, was fired more than four years ago for his poor on-field record and was later hired by the University of Kansas, investigators found in a 2013 report that was made public only on Thursday that he had acted improperly toward at least one female student who worked for the L.S.U. athletic department.

Then on Friday, hours before Kansas said it had placed Miles on leave, a more sweeping 148-page account documented a long record of errors, missteps and secrecy around misconduct allegations across L.S.U. The report, prepared by a law firm that L.S.U. hired last year after USA Today detailed accusations against former athletes, prompted the university to suspend two athletics executives without pay.

“Our job is to protect our students and support them in their times of need,” L.S.U.’s interim president, Thomas C. Galligan Jr., said on Friday. “It has become clear we haven’t always fully lived up to our commitment.”

Instead, he said, the university had “betrayed the very people we are sworn to protect.”

The lawyer who led the new investigation, Scott Schneider, said Friday that there was no evidence student-athletes were deliberately favored, but he found a pattern of delays and missteps around their cases. He also depicted systemic issues at L.S.U. that impeded prompt, rigorous investigations of reported assaults, no matter who was accused.

Some of the most troubling allegations of recent years involved two football players: Drake Davis, who played for L.S.U. from 2016 until he was dismissed before the 2018 season after being arrested, and Derrius Guice, who was at L.S.U. for three seasons before being drafted into the N.F.L. in 2018.

At least three women said that Davis had abused them when he was a student or soon after his expulsion from the university in 2019. One woman who dated Davis accused him of physically abusing her at least 10 times. At a meeting with the woman after one episode in 2016, a football staff member said that Davis’s “career at L.S.U. will be over, but we can totally call the police if that’s what you feel like he deserves after this.” The woman declined to contact the police because, as she put it, she “was still what I felt like was in love with Drake.”

L.S.U. offered no other immediate support, the report concluded. The university’s Title IX office, which investigates gender discrimination cases under the federal law of the same name, was not told about any trouble between Davis and the woman until October 2018.

In the intervening years, the report said, there was “no question” that Davis had physically abused a woman who played tennis at L.S.U. — conduct that also made its way to the Title IX office after a delay, only for the office to take little action.

Schneider said that it had been “a clear error” not to suspend Davis quickly after he acknowledged striking the woman, who had severe injuries that left her ribs swollen for weeks, and that “the failure of the athletics department to report the earlier incident” had “compounded the error.”

More reports connected to Davis’s abuse of the woman followed in subsequent months, and eventually Davis was criminally charged and suspended from L.S.U.

He pleaded guilty in January 2019 to three misdemeanors and was expelled from the university that July. Months later, another L.S.U. student accused Davis of shoving her to the ground.

“The reality is that the university was not equipped to handle a case this complicated,” Schneider wrote. “Equally clear is that these are precisely the sort of cases Title IX offices must be prepared to respond to.”

Guice, who was released by the Washington Football Team last August after he was accused of domestic violence, was repeatedly accused of sexual violence while he was at L.S.U. Friday’s report said that, for varied reasons, the university had never investigated the allegations or imposed discipline against Guice, who has denied wrongdoing.

“There also are no records that he was ever notified of these reports or that the university even intervened to provide him some targeted training,” Schneider wrote in Friday’s report, which also said that Ed Orgeron, L.S.U.’s current football coach, had “credibly denied” telling a player who dated one of Guice’s accusers that “everybody’s girlfriend sleeps with other people.”

Orgeron also denied knowing that Guice had been accused of rape, though Schneider said he had been aware of some misconduct allegations against players.

(CONTINUED) See paper

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/sports/ncaafootball/lsu-sexual-harassment.html