The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (15 page)

On August 19 the Associated Press ran the following headline:
POLICE, BYU INVESTIGATING GANG RAPE ALLEGATION
. Citing a police affidavit for the initial search warrant, the AP reported what little information was available—that a seventeen-year-old girl had been given alcohol, passed out and later woke up to being raped by a series of football players. None of them was named.

The news broke hours before a “meet the team” night at LaVell Edwards Stadium to kick off the 2004 season. It didn’t go so well. Instead of pumping up the fan base, athletic director Val Hale got inundated with questions about an alleged gang rape. So did the university’s communications office. Crowton issued an official statement: “Anytime allegations of misconduct surface regarding our players, it’s a matter of serious concern for us. We want to get to the bottom of this and when we do, we will work with the University to do what is appropriate.”

ESPN’s
Outside the Lines
began working on a segment about BYU’s troubles. It aired on September 3, the night before ESPN carried BYU’s home opener against Notre Dame. By then, reports had surfaced that earlier in the year BYU had expelled its top running back and suspended three other players after another woman said she had been gang-raped at a party. She later recanted and said she had consented to sex with six of them. That was bad enough.

On September 8, one week into the season, BYU’s vice president, Fred Skousen, fired athletic director Val Hale. He called the move an “important first step in creating a distinctive, exceptional athletic program that is fully aligned with the mission and values of Brigham Young University and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

After firing Hale, Skousen paid Crowton a visit at football practice. “He told me to be careful and make the right decision,” Crowton said.

The only decision to be made at that point was whether to suspend the
accused players. But the honor code review was not yet complete, and the police had still not charged anyone with a crime. “The police never told me what happened,” Crowton said. “The next thing I know they are questioning every minority player on the team. If I knew a guy had done what they were accused of, I would kick him off the team in two seconds. But I didn’t know. The players were saying they didn’t do it.”

Crowton chose a wait-and-see approach.

Since becoming a prosecutor in 1990, Donna Kelly had done nothing but sex crimes and child abuse cases. She’d handled more than three hundred in all, including roughly a hundred jury trials. She was among the more experienced sex crimes prosecutors west of the Rocky Mountains. And she’d spent her entire career in Provo. She fully appreciated the politics of a case against a bunch of BYU football players.

Kelly was convinced that a sexual assault had taken place. The question was whether she could prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s tricky when the crime scene is an athlete’s bedroom and the accuser went there willingly.

A few years before Kelly got the BYU case, researchers studied 217 criminal complaints of felony assault attributed to college and pro athletes between 1986 and 1995. The outcome in those cases was compared with national arrest and conviction rates for sexual assault. Two key findings emerged:

One way of looking at this apparent discrepancy is that law enforcement is overzealous when athletes are accused. But the research suggests the opposite. It’s a well-known fact that elite athletes—like other celebrities—garner a disproportionate amount of publicity when accused of a crime. That cuts two ways. The image of an accused athlete takes a hit before anything has been proven. The flip side is that these cases put police and prosecutors under a microscope, too. Besides the glare of the press, law enforcement faces a team of top-flight lawyers when athletes are accused of sex crimes. Even college football players without resources inevitably end up with the kind of legal defense and support system rarely afforded to accused sex offenders.

As a result, prosecutors are much less likely to charge an accused athlete in a date rape case unless the evidence and the accuser are rock solid. Consider that of the 217 felony sexual assault complaints levied against athletes between 1986 and 1995, only 66 went to a jury trial. In other words, those were the cases with the most compelling evidence and the most credible victims. Still, only 10 of them (15 percent) resulted in convictions. That’s far below the national average. There are a variety of reasons for this. But the big one is that jurors are reluctant to convict athletes of sexual assault when the accuser has willingly gone to a player’s bedroom or otherwise put herself in a compromising situation. That raises doubt in the eyes of jurors.

Kelly faced that precise scenario with the BYU case. The accuser had gone there willingly, consumed alcohol and not bothered to leave when the players started showing porn. The defense was predictable—admit sex, deny force.

BYU’s Honor Code Office didn’t have to prove that a rape took place. It only had to find that sex occurred, not to mention that alcohol was consumed or porn was viewed. After a three-month internal review it became clear that players had lied to Coach Crowton. The university suspended Bennett and Mathis at the end of November. William Turner—the one with the SpongBob boxers—and Ibrahim Rashada were put on probationary status.

By that time, criminal investigators had questioned at least ten football players in connection with the incident and narrowed the number of suspects to the same four who had been disciplined by the school. Bennett and Mathis packed their bags and returned to Texas. Turner went home to the Bay Area. Only Rashada remained in Provo. He was still on the team.

On November 20, Utah blew BYU out 52–21 in the final game of the 2004 regular season, dropping the Cougars to 5-6 and marking their third consecutive losing season. A week later, Mendenhall ducked into Crowton’s office to discuss a recruit. But Crowton looked preoccupied. Earlier he had met with Peter Pilling and Tom Holmoe, two senior associate athletic directors who were brought in to run the athletic department after the previous AD became a casualty of the gang rape case. Pilling and Holmoe told Crowton he had to resign. Crowton had refused, saying they’d have to fire him. But after talking to his wife and thinking it over, he came to grips with the fact that fighting to keep his job would be messy. The last
thing he wanted was to embarrass the institution. He decided to bite the bullet.

“I’m not gonna make it,” Crowton finally muttered.

Mendenhall didn’t understand. Too numb to be angry, Crowton didn’t elaborate.

“I’m not gonna make it,” he repeated. “And I’ve recommended that you and Lance Reynolds be considered for the head job.”

Mendenhall felt sick to his stomach. The next day—December 1—Mendenhall stood in the back of the room as his best friend held a press conference on campus. “At this time I feel it’s time for me to step down and let the football program move on in a different direction,” Crowton told the media. “I love this university. I wish we could have got more wins. In this business, that’s what it’s about—getting wins.”

“Was it a forced resignation?” one reporter asked.

Crowton didn’t want to point fingers or appear bitter. Instead, he thanked everyone and complimented his staff and players. Another reporter asked how much the off-the-field problems—most notably the alleged gang rape—had factored into the resignation.

“I was appalled by it,” Crowton said. “I don’t want to bring any embarrassment to the university as their coach and their leader, but there was some embarrassment to the university.”

Crowton didn’t say it at the time, but the rape case had placed him in a no-win situation. “That was the hardest thing I ever dealt with,” Crowton explained. “BYU didn’t want me to talk about it, and Provo police put a gag on it. I just followed what I was told to do. But as a father who knows how to treat my daughters and my wife, this was killing me. Yet I had recruited these kids as their head coach. For most of the season I didn’t know who had done what. It broke my heart that that girl was harmed. But all I had to go on was he said, she said.”

As Crowton left the press conference, it was all Mendenhall could do to keep his emotions in check. He felt the coaching staff had let Crowton down and the athletic department had thrown him under the bus. “There were kids who were making poor choices that we as assistants had brought here,” Mendenhall said.

One day after Crowton stepped down, a Utah County grand jury indicted four players—B. J. Mathis, Karland Bennett, Ibrahim Rashada and William Turner—on rape charges, along with furnishing alcohol and pornography
to a minor. Bail was set at $100,000 each. Turner, seventeen at the time of the incident, agreed to surrender and say what happened on the night in question in exchange for being prosecuted as a juvenile.

News of the indictments hit like a bomb in Provo. Rashada, the only one of the four still on the team, was arrested the following morning and thrown in jail. BYU immediately kicked him out of school. Bennett and Mathis returned from Texas and were jailed pending a bail hearing.