© Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports
Baylor University is facing another federal Title IX lawsuit related to the school's enabling of sexual assault on campus, particularly when it came to the football team. Earlier today a former Baylor volleyball player filed what is now the seventh such suit, which alleges that, in 2012, she was drugged and at least four and as many as eight members of the Baylor football team gang-raped her. The suit also alleges that a 21-second recording of the assault was passed around the football team.The Waco Tribune-Herald has more information:
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According to the suit, the football team had a system of hazing freshman recruits by having them bring freshman females to parties to be drugged and gang raped, "or in the words of the football players, 'trains' would be run on the girls."
The suit further alleges that the plaintiff told her mother about the assault and her mother then met with an assistant coach. She provided the coach with the names of the players involved, but never heard from him again. The plaintiff was then subjected to a pattern of abuse from the football players, including harassing phone calls to her and her family, public humiliation, and the burglarizing of her apartment.According to a statement released by Baylor, the school had been negotiating with the plaintiff "for many months," hoping to reach a settlement and avoid another suit. The statement makes pains to point out that this allegedly occurred "more than five years ago," which of course puts it right in the middle of the timeline during which Pepper Hamilton said it "found examples of actions by University administrators that directly discouraged complainants from reporting or participating in student conduct processes or that contributed to or accommodated a hostile environment." The law firm, which Baylor commissioned to investigate the scandal, also said some of the school's actions constituted retaliation against a victim reporting sexual assault[WTH]Considered a bonding experience by the players, according to the suit, the rapes were also photographed and videotaped, and the plaintiff confirmed that at least one 21-second videotape of two Baylor students being gang raped by football players had circulated.