Baylor looks to rebuild after assaults review
AUSTIN, Texas — Baylor University will be looking to rebuild its reputation and perhaps its football program after an outside review found administrators mishandled allegations of sexual assault and the team ran with an attitude that it was above the rules.
The largest Baptist school in the U.S. took the first steps Thursday when regents demoted high-profile President Ken Starr, a former prosecutor who investigated the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, and fired football coach Art Briles, who turned the football program from a laughing stock into a Big 12 powerhouse.
But that may not end the scrutiny.
More fallout could be coming if the report by Philadelphia law firm Pepper Hamilton attracts the attention of the U.S. Department of Education, the NCAA or even criminal prosecutors.
Briles and the university are also still defendants in a federal civil lawsuit filed by a woman who says the school was casually indifferent to her pleas when she was assaulted in 2012.
The report didn’t identify specific cases the school is accused of mishandling. But two football players have been convicted of sexual assault since 2014, and in the past year, there have been multiple reports of other assaults and women who said the school did nothing to help.
“We were horrified by the extent of these acts of sexual violence on our campus,” Baylor regents chairman Richard Willis said. “The depth to which these acts occurred shocked and outraged us. Our students and their families deserve better.”
The review found that under Starr, school administrators discouraged students from reporting or participating in student conduct reviews of sexual assault complaints and even contributed to or accommodated a “hostile” environment against the alleged victims.
In one case, the actions of administrators “constituted retaliation against a complainant for reporting sexual assault,” the report said.
University leadership was also slow to enact federally required student conduct processes, and administrators failed to identify and eliminate the hostile environment toward victims.
