19 Baylor football players involved in sexual, domestic assaults since 2011
Seventeen women have reported sexual or domestic assaults involving 19 different Baylor football players dating back to 2011, TheWall Street Journalreports.
Baylor regents disclosed those numbers in interviews with the Journal, which include four reported incidents of gang rapes. There is at least one instance in which former head coach Art Briles knew of an alleged incident involving a player and did not alert authorities.
Briles’s lawyer told the Journal that neither he nor Briles were ever given details of the various allegations, and continues to argue that Briles is being used as a scapegoat for a broader institutional failure to report and handle sexual assaults, including the school’s Title IX program. Former president Kenneth Starr was also removed in wake of the scandal. Briles was fired in May after the results of an external investigation were released.
• Baylor sexual assault scandal: A timeline
Two former Baylor football players have been convicted of sexual assault in the last four years. Another, Shawn Oakman, is under indictment and has pleaded not guilty. Baylor faces more than a dozen lawsuits from former students who say the school ignored to reports of sexual assault.
“There was a cultural issue there that was putting winning football games above everything else, including our values,” J. Cary Gray, a member of the Baylor board of regents, told The Wall Street Journal. “We did not have a caring community when it came to these women who reported that they were assaulted. And that is not OK.”
Briles has said in the past that he feels responsibility for what happened.
