Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Is Sexual Assault An ND Football Tradition?

There definitely appears to be a trend of accusations and intimidation of accusers:
Seeberg's treatment certainly woke up the echoes. There was the 2002 case in which three football players and a former player were expelled after they were accused of gang-raping a woman (only one none of the four men was charged with a crime convicted, and none served time in jail). "No one's going to believe you," the accuser says she was told. When she went to the cops anyway, Notre Dame officials "treated me horribly at every opportunity." They wouldn't let her park her car on campus, despite her fears that the players would come after her. The counseling center turned her away because of "pending legal matters," the accuser says, "though the legal matter they were talking about was the state versus these four rapists." There was a woman who in 1974 accused six Notre Dame football players of gang-raping her. She was hospitalized and spent a month in psychiatric care, but that didn't stop a university administrator from calling her "a queen of the slums with a mattress tied to her back." There was the 17-year-old St. Mary's student who in 1976 was raped by three men, two of whom had been accused in the 1974 case. The men were caught in the act. The woman says her resident assistant brought her to a top St. Mary's official, who informed her one of the men had raped another St. Mary's student. After that, she tells Henneberger, "I was told to shut up and mind my own business."
In February 2011, another woman said she was raped by an ND football player at an off-campus party. A resident assistant—who herself had been raped and subsequently shunned by campus officials—took her to the hospital, then to her (the resident assistant's) parents' home.
There, her mother made breakfast and her father watched in horror as the young woman received text after text from the player's friends. "My wife and I looked at them, and they were trying to silence this girl." After the father informed Notre Dame officials about the texts, he said, they promised to get the guys to "knock it off."
Big time college sports have completely corrupted our university system.  Notre Dame's record appears abysmal and more should be expected of it than many other schools, but most major colleges allow players to get away with lots of things.  Anything to keep the money spigot flowing.

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