Finalist: The New York Times, by Walt Bogdanich and Mike McIntire
For stories exposing preferential police treatment for Florida State University football players who are accused of sexual assault and other criminal offenses.
Nominated Work
April 16, 2014
By Walt Bogdanich
Tallahassee, Fla. — Early on the morning of Dec. 7, 2012, a freshman at Florida State University reported that she had been raped by a stranger somewhere off campus after a night of drinking at a popular Tallahassee bar called Potbelly’s.
As she gave her account to the police, several bruises began to appear, indicating recent trauma. Tests would later find semen on her underwear.
For nearly a year, the events of that evening remained a well-kept secret until the woman’s allegations burst into the open, roiling the university and threatening a prized asset: Jameis Winston, one of the marquee names of college football.
Three weeks after Mr. Winston was publicly identified as the suspect, the storm had passed. The local prosecutor announced that he lacked the evidence to charge Mr. Winston with rape. The quarterback would go on to win the Heisman Trophy and lead Florida State to the national championship.
In his announcement, the prosecutor, William N. Meggs, acknowledged a number of shortcomings in the police investigation. In fact, an examination by The New York Times has found that there was virtually no investigation at all, either by the police or the university.
The police did not follow the obvious leads that would have quickly identified the suspect as well as witnesses, one of whom videotaped part of the sexual encounter. After the accuser identified Mr. Winston as her assailant, the police did not even attempt to interview him for nearly two weeks and never obtained his DNA.
The detective handling the case waited two months to write his first report and then prematurely suspended his inquiry without informing the accuser. By the time the prosecutor got the case, important evidence had disappeared, including the video of the sexual act.
“They just missed all the basic fundamental stuff that you are supposed to do,” Mr. Meggs said in a recent interview. Even so, he cautioned, a better investigation might have yielded the same result.
The case has unfolded as colleges and universities across the country are facing rising criticism over how they deal with sexual assault, as well as questions about whether athletes sometimes receive preferential treatment. The Times’s examination — based on police and university records, as well as interviews with people close to the case, including lawyers and sexual assault experts — found that, in the Winston case, Florida State did little to determine what had happened.
University administrators, in apparent violation of federal law, did not promptly investigate either the rape accusation or the witness’s admission that he had videotaped part of the encounter.
Records show that Florida State’s athletic department knew about the rape accusation early on, in January 2013, when the assistant athletic director called the police to inquire about the case. Even so, the university did nothing about it, allowing Mr. Winston to play the full season without having to answer any questions. After the championship game, in January 2014, university officials asked Mr. Winston to discuss the case, but he declined on advice of his lawyer.
When The Times asked Mr. Winston for an interview, an Atlanta lawyer advising his family, David Cornwell, responded, “We don’t need an investigation, thorough or otherwise, to know that Jameis did not sexually assault this young lady.” Mr. Cornwell, who has represented major sports figures and the N.F.L., added, “Jameis has never sexually assaulted anybody.”
Mr. Winston has previously acknowledged having sex with his accuser but said it was consensual. His account has been supported by two friends from the football team who were with him that night, Chris Casher, who took the video, and Ronald Darby.
A month before the rape accusation became public, the university’s victim advocate learned that a second woman had sought counseling after a sexual encounter with Mr. Winston, according to the prosecutor’s office. The woman did not call it rape — she did not say “no.” But the encounter, not previously reported, “was of such a nature that she felt violated or felt that she needed to seek some type of counseling for her emotions about the experience,” according to Georgia Cappleman, the chief assistant state attorney, who said she had spoken with the advocate but not with the woman.
The victim advocate was concerned enough about the episode to have alerted Mr. Winston’s first accuser.
Ms. Cappleman said that based on what she was told, a crime had not been committed. Nonetheless, Ms. Cappleman said she found the encounter troubling, because it “sheds some light on the way Mr. Winston operates” and on what may be “a recurring problem rather than some type of misunderstanding that occurred in an isolated situation.”
Mr. Cornwell called her comments “out of bounds,” adding, “I’m not interested in a prosecutor expressing an opinion based on a personal moral compass.”
The university, after initially speaking with The Times, recently stopped doing so. A university spokeswoman, Browning Brooks, said she could not discuss specific cases because of privacy laws but issued a statement, saying that the university’s “code of conduct process has worked well for the vast majority of sexual assault cases” and has “provided victims with the emotional and procedural help they need.”
On Feb. 13, before the university stopped granting interviews, Rachel Bukanc, an assistant dean who oversees student conduct issues, said she knew of no student who had secretly videotaped sex. After The Times questioned that response, the university began an inquiry and recently charged Mr. Casher with a student-code violation for taking the video. Mr. Darby has also been cited in connection with the episode.
It would be difficult to overstate the importance of football to Florida State and its hometown. In Tallahassee, rooting for the Seminoles is a matter of identity and economy. The 2013 championship season generated millions of dollars for the athletic department and city businesses, and favorable publicity beyond measure.
Patricia A. Carroll, a lawyer for Mr. Winston’s accuser, said the police investigator who handled the case, Scott Angulo, told her that because Tallahassee was a big football town, her client would be “raked over the coals” if she pursued the case.
Officer Angulo has done private security work for the Seminole Boosters, a nonprofit organization, with nearly $150 million in assets, that is the primary financier of Florida State athletics, according to records and a lawyer for the boosters. It also paid roughly a quarter of the $602,000 salary of the university president, Eric Barron, who was recently named president of Penn State.
The Tallahassee police declined to make Officer Angulo available for an interview, but his report states that he suspended the investigation because the accuser was uncooperative, which she denies.
The department issued a statement, saying that police reports in the Winston case “document that our department took the case seriously, processed evidence and conducted a thorough investigation based on information available when the case was reported.”
The case came at a time of turmoil for the Tallahassee police. In March 2013, a grand jury investigating police misconduct in an unrelated matter called police supervision “careless, uncaring, cavalier and incompetent.” The grand jury said supervisory deficiencies were so deeply ingrained that the city police, which has more than 350 sworn officers, should merge with the sheriff’s department, with the sheriff assuming overall control.
Late last year, Mr. Winston’s accuser and another Florida State student filed internal-affairs complaints, charging that Tallahassee police officers had investigated them, rather than the accused, and then prematurely dropped their cases.
“My attorney’s repeated calls to Tallahassee Police Department prove that I had not dropped the case,” Mr. Winston’s accuser wrote in her Dec. 19 complaint.
Two days earlier, the other student had written, “Why did the detective insist my case was closed and refused to answer calls and emails?” She added, “I am SO ANGRY!”
Both complaints were quickly dismissed.
Potbelly’s is a classic campus bar: big and boisterous, a place to drink, dance and mingle inside or at a tiki bar outside. A Thursday tradition, Purgatory at Potbelly’s, allows students to drink all the alcohol they want for $10 from 9 p.m. to midnight.
On Purgatory Thursday, Dec. 6, 2012, Mr. Winston’s accuser, who at 19 could not legally buy alcohol, shared at least five mixed drinks with friends, according to police records. At one point, a man she did not know grabbed her arm, pulled her close and introduced himself as Chris, a football player. He said he was looking for his roommate, and when he requested her phone number, she gave it to him. She did not recall seeing him again that night.
The woman did not appear drunk, her friends said. But after a stranger gave her a drink, she recounted, her memory became hazy and fragmented. Soon, she found herself in a taxi with three unfamiliar men, all of whom turned out to be Florida State football players.
Jameis Winston was one of them. A redshirt freshman quarterback, 6 feet 4 inches and 235 pounds, Mr. Winston had been a prize recruit, well-known in football circles but not yet a widely recognizable name.
Because of the young, combustible clientele, Potbelly’s protects itself by operating more than 30 security cameras. If something untoward happens, the cameras are there to record it. They were in position to fill in the blanks from that evening, recording how the woman came to leave without her friends, her general behavior and the face of the man who gave her the final drink.
Taxi records also contained a footprint for investigators to follow: The woman recalled that someone in the car swiped a Florida State student identification card to get a discounted fare.
After partially blacking out, the woman said, she found herself in an apartment with a man on top of her, sexually assaulting her. She said she tried unsuccessfully to push him away, but he pinned down her arms. Meanwhile, according to her account, another man walked in and told her assailant to stop. He did not. Instead, she said, he carried her into the bathroom, locked the door and continued his assault.
Afterward, the woman told investigators, the man put her on a bed, dressed her and drove her on a scooter to an intersection near her dormitory and dropped her off.
Upon returning to her room, she posted a plea online for someone to call her. Two friends did. One was Jenna Weisberg, another Florida State student.
“I was awake and I called her and she was hysterically crying,” Ms. Weisberg said. “‘I think I just got raped,’” she recalled her saying. Ms. Weisberg drove immediately to the friend’s dorm.
Ms. Weisberg said her friend was reluctant to call the police because she did not “want anybody to be mad at her.” Eventually she relented, and at 3:22 a.m., Ms. Weisberg called 911.
A campus police officer responded, listened to the accuser’s account and then drove her to the hospital for a sexual assault examination. Because the woman believed the encounter occurred off campus, a city police officer, Clayton Fallis, interviewed her next.
Soon, Officer Angulo, an investigator with the special victims unit who joined the force in 2002, arrived at the hospital and took over the case. Again the woman began to recount what had happened, until the investigator, seeing she was tired, told her to go home and come to Police Headquarters later in the day.
She returned, accompanied by a friend, Monique Kessler, who was with her at Potbelly’s, and they recounted what they had seen and heard, including the encounter with Chris, the football player.
Officer Angulo had three solid leads to identify the suspect: the name Chris, the bar’s security cameras and the cab where a student identification card had been used.
What the investigator did next — or did not do — would later confound prosecutors and muddied the outcome of the case.
Officer Angulo’s investigation was halting at best. His first report, filed more than two months after the encounter, includes no mention of trying to find Chris or looking at Potbelly’s videotapes.
Not only would Chris have been easy to find, but the police already had an investigative file that identified Chris Casher as Mr. Winston’s roommate. A little more than a week before the sexual encounter, the Tallahassee police had interviewed both men in connection with 13 damaged windows at their off-campus apartment complex, all caused by football players engaging in a long-running BB gun battle. The Florida State athletic department promised that the $4,000 in damages would be paid, and no charges were filed.
Officer Angulo did contact the cab company, without success. “The GPS units on the vehicles are not precise enough to eliminate enough cabs to focus the search,” he wrote.
He then asked the cab company to email all drivers who had worked that night, with “the demographics of the passengers and the pickup location.” No one responded, and there is no indication that he attempted to interview drivers.
Officer Angulo, who had told his superiors that he “had no real leads,” suddenly got a big one on Jan. 10, a little more than a month after the encounter. As a new semester was beginning, the accuser called to say she had identified the suspect — Jameis Winston — after seeing him in class and hearing his name called out.
Again, Officer Angulo hesitated. Nearly two weeks passed before his backup investigator contacted Mr. Winston — by telephone, records show.
“Winston stated he had baseball practice but would call back later to set a time,” Officer Angulo wrote. The police did get a response — from Mr. Winston’s lawyer, Timothy Jansen, who said his client would not be speaking to anyone.
With Mr. Winston identified, the next logical step would have been to quickly obtain his DNA. Officer Angulo decided against it. Ms. Carroll, the accuser’s lawyer, said the officer told her that testing Mr. Winston’s DNA might generate publicity. “I specifically asked and he refused,” Ms. Carroll said.
Officer Angulo concluded his six-page report by saying: “This case is being suspended at this time due to a lack of cooperation from the victim. If the victim decides to press charges, the case will be pursued.”
Two parts of that statement struck Ms. Carroll as strange. The officer, she said, never informed her client that he had suspended his investigation, and her client never said she would not cooperate. She said that while her client was indeed concerned about the prospect of pressing her case against a star-in-waiting, “at no time did we call him and tell him we don’t want you to do an investigation.” Her client, she added, simply wanted more information before deciding what to do.
Such reluctance should not keep the police from investigating, according to Ms. Cappleman of the prosecutor’s office.
“It makes the most sense to me, if somebody comes in to report a violent crime, investigate it, and we’ll talk about what to do with it after we’ve collected the evidence and have the most thorough picture,” she said. If an accuser later decides she does not want a trial, Ms. Cappleman added, her office might offer a suspect a better plea deal.
Officer Angulo’s investigation apparently stirred no concern within his department. His superior officer signed off on his work, records show.
In the weeks that followed, not knowing the investigation had been suspended, Ms. Carroll called the police periodically to see if lab tests had come back. Sometimes, her calls were returned, she said, but not always.
Early last October, a 19-year-old Florida State student was studying on a Saturday night while her roommates went drinking. She said they returned drunk, and a roommate’s former boyfriend, also a student, raped her in her room.
The student reported the encounter to the Tallahassee police. The episode had nothing to do with Mr. Winston, but it, too, raised questions about how the city police deal with rape accusations. The police response was so inappropriate, according to the father, that later on, in a complaint filed with the police, he compared it to the Winston inquiry, which had recently drawn criticism in the news media.
The father, a part-time deputy sheriff in another county, said he was away on business when he called his daughter and found her crying and confused. With prodding, she disclosed that she had just spoken to the police about “a situation,” but would say no more. An officer had told her that “it might be better not to inform me,” her father said.
Alarmed, he asked his wife to call. She did, and their daughter said she had been raped. The mother and a family friend, also a law enforcement officer, immediately drove more than two hours to Tallahassee. They found the daughter with what appeared to be choke marks on her neck.
According to the father, a Tallahassee police officer named Christopher Pate characterized the young woman as confused and having had a hard time communicating. “Why was I not given an advocate to speak with?” his daughter said in a complaint she filed later with the police. “I was raped and was stressed and scared.”
In a report, Officer Pate said he had offered the woman “many different avenues of help (victim advocate, female officer etc.). She refused them all.”
Rape crisis counselors, while not speaking specifically about this case, say traumatized victims often experience memory problems. “Victims themselves feel like they are losing their minds when they can’t remember, when they remember fragments that don’t seem to connect up,” said Meg Baldwin, executive director of the Tallahassee-based Refuge House, a haven for victims of domestic violence and rape. “The interpretation so often is, well, she’s lying, she’s in any event an unreliable witness who won’t be believed.”
Officer Pate’s blunt interviewing style did not help, the student said. “The first thing he asked me,” she recounted, “was if I was sure this was rape or if I just didn’t want a baby or wanted the morning after pill.” He also made comments, she said, “like, ‘Are you sure you want to file a report? It will be very awkward, especially for a female.’”
In his complaint to the police, the father wrote that Officer Pate had suggested that an investigation “would be futile, as ‘this kind of stuff happens all the time here.’” The family also said the police had focused more on the accuser than on the accused.
“From my perspective, T.P.D. demonstrated a poor initial response, poor investigative techniques and perhaps most importantly failed to support the victim of a violent crime,” the father said.
Unlike in the Winston case, the police did ask prosecutors to review the evidence, but they declined to bring charges because statements from the roommates conflicted with the accuser’s account. After receiving the family’s request for an internal affairs investigation, the police found no basis for punishment.
“While no policy violation was identified, Officer Pate was counseled on the public perception of officer actions and speech during investigations,” according to police documents. The department declined to make the officer available for an interview.
The woman, an A student, dropped out of school, left the city and underwent therapy for extreme depression, according to the family. “Going to F.S.U. had been a longtime dream for her,” her mother said.
It was Wednesday of homecoming week last year and Florida State, ranked No. 2 in the nation with a 9-0 record, was preparing to play Syracuse. Mr. Winston, described by teammates as both playful and intense, had already thrown 26 touchdown passes, amassing 2,661 passing yards with a completion percentage just south of 70 percent. After his first game, an ESPN draft expert had identified him as a legitimate No. 1 choice in the 2015 N.F.L. draft.
If Florida State was going to ascend to the national championship game on Jan. 6, it would do so on the arm and poise of Jameis Winston. The Heisman voting was but a month away, and his crowning as America’s best college football player appeared all but certain.
Then, suddenly, that glorious vision began to go out of focus.
On Nov. 13, the Tallahassee police, responding to a public-records request from The Tampa Bay Times, released documents on the sexual assault case, setting off a frenzied scramble in the news media and prosecutor’s office to learn what had happened.
As the news broke, and before investigators could talk to them, Mr. Winston’s lawyer had the two witnesses, Mr. Casher and Mr. Darby, submit affidavits attesting to their recollection of that now-distant night. They gave similar accounts: A blond woman who was not intoxicated willingly left the bar with the three football players, they said, and joined Mr. Winston in his room. Because the door was broken and would not close, they looked in and saw the woman giving the quarterback oral sex.
At one point, Mr. Casher said, he entered the room, but the woman told him to leave, got up to turn off the light and then tried to close the door. At no time, both men said, did she appear to be an unwilling participant. (The men did not respond to phone messages, conveyed through university officials, seeking comment.)
Mr. Meggs immediately directed his staff to reinvestigate the case.
In the recent interview, Mr. Meggs said he was surprised that the police had not quickly found Mr. Casher. “How long does it take to identify a freshman football player — about 10, 15, 16 seconds?” he asked, adding, “Anybody that looked at this case would say you get a report at 2 in the morning, by noon you could have had the defendant identified and talked to.”
Why Officer Angulo had not asked to see the Potbelly’s security video is unknown. A Times review of sexual assault complaints handled by the campus police last year found that in one case, officers asked for the Potbelly’s video when they were trying to identify a suspected assailant who had been seen at the bar.
As for not finding the taxi driver, “I am convinced that we would have identified the cabdriver that night and had an interview with him,” Mr. Meggs said. “Don’t know what we would have learned, but we would have learned the truth. I am also convinced that had it been done properly, we would have had the video from Potbelly’s.”
By the time the prosecutor asked for that video, the tape had long since been recycled.
Unlike the police, prosecutors said they interviewed every cabdriver they could find who had worked that night, but they turned up no new information. Mr. Meggs said that while his investigators probably spoke to the driver they were seeking, “at 11 months later, maybe he didn’t remember, maybe he didn’t want to remember.”
Mr. Meggs said he was shocked that the police investigator’s first attempt to contact Mr. Winston was by telephone. “He says, ‘I have baseball practice, I’ll get with you later,’” Mr. Meggs said. That call allowed Mr. Winston to hire a lawyer who told him not to talk.
“It’s insane to call a suspect on the phone,” Mr. Meggs said. “First off, you don’t know who you are talking to.” He said he would have gone straight to the baseball field. “If you walked up to Jameis Winston in the middle of baseball practice and said, ‘Come here, son, I need to talk to you,’ he would have said, ‘Yes, sir.’”
Mr. Meggs added: “He’s not in custody, you don’t have to read him his rights. He might have said, ‘I didn’t have sex that night.’”
Only after the prosecutor took over the case did the authorities obtain Mr. Winston’s DNA. It was a match to DNA found on the accuser’s clothing.
Belatedly, Officer Angulo and his backup were asked to conduct a crucial interview — to question Mr. Casher about the events of Dec. 7, 2012.
Mr. Casher made a startling admission: he had secretly videotaped part of the sexual encounter through the partly opened bedroom door, and deleted the video from his phone a couple of days later. Had the police found him quickly, they might have obtained that video.
Mr. Casher had never mentioned the video in the affidavit he submitted with the help of Mr. Winston’s lawyer. Even so, officers did not ask why he had omitted that important fact, why he had deleted the video or whether he had shared it with anyone. And though Mr. Casher said he had a new phone, the officers did not ask what he did with the old one.
Neither the police nor the prosecutor’s office subpoenaed the phone records of Mr. Casher, Mr. Darby or Mr. Winston — even though they investigated all electronic communications to and from the accuser around the time of the sexual encounter.
The failure to seek similar electronic communications from the three football players surprised one former assistant state attorney, who prosecuted a Florida State football player on a rape charge a decade ago. “Why that was done, I don’t really know the answer to that,” said the former prosecutor, Adam Ruiz. “To me, that’s a no-brainer.”
Mr. Ruiz said his children, aged 7 to 21, all had iPhones, and even for something as mundane as rain: “You’re texting 30 people about it. I can’t imagine there would not have been something coming off that cellphone after the incident.”
Three weeks after it began, with evidence lost and memories faded, the state attorney’s investigation was over.
“I have personal concerns about what happened in that room that night,” Ms. Cappleman said, “but that’s completely separate from whether I’m able to prove a crime occurred.”
The news that Mr. Winston had been accused of rape moved through campus like an electric charge. On social media, the discussion quickly lost any semblance of civility, prompting one female student to send an email expressing her anger to Mary Coburn, vice president for student affairs.
“All day every day I am bombarded with messages of hatred for the alleged victim,” the woman wrote. “I am sad and ashamed to be part of a student body that is quick to support a man who is accused of sexual assault, simply because he is a good football player, and even quicker to condemn the alleged victim of the crime as a liar.”
Ms. Coburn replied: “I agree with you and have been thinking about how we address the ugliness that has been circulating.” She promised to gather a group of students in January to discuss the problem.
The athletic department had known early on that Mr. Winston had been accused of a serious crime. According to an internal Tallahassee police email on Jan. 23, 2013, one officer wrote that Officer Angulo’s backup on the case “received a call from the Athletic Directors Assistant inquiring about the case.”
This knowledge should have set off an inquiry by the university. According to federal rules, any athletic department official who learns of possible sexual misconduct is required to pass it on to school administrators. Florida State declined to respond when asked if top officials, including the university president, had been informed of the encounter.
“Why did the school not even attempt to investigate the matter until after the football season?” said John Clune, another lawyer for the accuser.
His client filed a complaint with the civil rights office of the federal Department of Education, and the agency recently agreed to examine whether Florida State properly responds to sexual violence complaints. The inquiry was first reported by USA Today.
It was not just the Winston case that was causing concern on campus. In January, the mother of a student who said she had been sexually battered at a fraternity the previous April contacted the campus police asking why the university “doesn’t do more to protect women from rape,” records show. The police response was to inform the mother of a self-defense class for students.
That did not satisfy the mother, who told an officer, “The university should take a harder stand on the men who are identified as having committed rapes.” According to the campus police, the student had said she did not want officers to investigate the case.
Determining the extent of the problem is difficult, because so many students are reluctant to report sexual assaults. President Obama, in announcing the creation of a task force earlier this year to protect students from sexual assault, cited surveys showing that one in five women is a victim of “attempted or completed sexual violence” while in college.
“I’d like to see a higher reporting rate so that we can address the problem,” said Ms. Cappleman of the state attorney’s office. “A lot of these cases go unreported, so having a higher reporting rate will lead to a higher success rate of prosecution and hopefully a deterring effect.”
If cases are reported, the university is obligated to investigate, regardless of what the police do. According to the federal Education Department’s civil rights office, “a school that knows, or reasonably should know” about sexual harassment, including rape, “must promptly investigate to determine what occurred and then take appropriate steps to resolve the situation.”
Universities must also inform the federal government of reported sexual assaults on their property or in the immediate vicinity.
Florida State has not yet reported its 2013 sexual assault numbers, but in the three previous years it reported four, five and five. Those numbers place Florida State in the lower half nationwide of similar-size public universities, according to federal data analyzed by The Times. The number of reported rapes can be affected by the percentage of students who live off campus.
Ms. Baldwin, the Refuge House director, said accusers report that the university’s internal complaint system tends to bury their experience rather than address it responsibly. “When I compare F.S.U. with other universities within the last five years that have done a great deal to address this issue, I’m not seeing that level of energy here,” said Ms. Baldwin, a former Florida State law professor.
In its statement, the university said that, in complying with federal rules, “The need to investigate possible harassment must be balanced against the rights of and consent from the complainant.”
A decade before the Winston case, the inspector general found that Florida State had violated its policy when the athletic department failed to inform the campus police of a rape accusation against one of its standout football players. Mr. Ruiz, the former prosecutor who handled the case for the state attorney’s office, recalled that the coach at the time, the revered Bobby Bowden, attempted to convince him that a crime had not occurred. A jury eventually acquitted the player.
“I learned quickly what football meant in the South,” said Mr. Ruiz, who grew up in New York State. “Clearly, it meant a lot. And with respect to this case I learned that keeping players on the field was a priority.”
July 13, 2014
Inside One College's Response When A Student Came Forward
By Walt Bogdanich
GENEVA, N.Y. — She was 18 years old, a freshman, and had been on campus for just two weeks when one Saturday night last September her friends grew worried because she had been drinking and suddenly disappeared.
Around midnight, the missing girl texted a friend, saying she was frightened by a student she had met that evening. “Idk what to do,” she wrote. “I’m scared.” When she did not answer a call, the friend began searching for her.
In the early-morning hours on the campus of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in central New York, the friend said, he found her — bent over a pool table as a football player appeared to be sexually assaulting her from behind in a darkened dance hall with six or seven people watching and laughing. Some had their cellphones out, apparently taking pictures, he said.
Later, records show, a sexual-assault nurse offered this preliminary assessment: blunt force trauma within the last 24 hours indicating “intercourse with either multiple partners, multiple times or that the intercourse was very forceful.” The student said she could not recall the pool table encounter, but did remember being raped earlier in a fraternity-house bedroom.
The football player at the pool table had also been at the fraternity house — in both places with his pants down — but denied raping her, saying he was too tired after a football game to get an erection. Two other players, also accused of sexually assaulting the woman, denied the charge as well. Even so, tests later found sperm or semen in her vagina, in her rectum and on her underwear.
It took the college just 12 days to investigate the rape report, hold a hearing and clear the football players. The football team went on to finish undefeated in its conference, while the woman was left, she said, to face the consequences — threats and harassment for accusing members of the most popular sports team on campus.
A New York Times examination of the case, based in part on hundreds of pages of disciplinary proceedings — usually confidential under federal privacy laws — offers a rare look inside one school’s adjudication of a rape complaint amid a roiling national debate over how best to stop sexual assaults on campuses.
Whatever precisely happened that September night, the internal records, along with interviews with students, sexual-assault experts and college officials, depict a school ill prepared to evaluate an allegation so serious that, if proved in a court of law, would be a felony, with a likely prison sentence. As the case illustrates, school disciplinary panels are a world unto themselves, operating in secret with scant accountability and limited protections for the accuser or the accused.
At a time of great emotional turmoil, students who say they were assaulted must make a choice: Seek help from their school, turn to the criminal justice system or simply remain silent. The great majority — including the student in this case — choose their school, because of the expectation of anonymity and the belief that administrators will offer the sort of support that the police will not.
Yet many students come to regret that decision, wishing they had never reported the assault in the first place.
The woman at Hobart and William Smith is no exception. With no advocate to speak up for her at the disciplinary hearing, panelists interrupted her answers, at times misrepresented evidence and asked about a campus-police report she had not seen. The hearing proceeded before her rape-kit results were known, and the medical records indicating trauma were not shown to two of the three panel members.
One panelist did not appear to know what a rape exam entails or why it might be unpleasant. Another asked whether the football player’s penis had been “inside of you” or had he been “having sex with you.” And when the football player violated an order not to contact the accuser, administrators took five months to find him responsible, then declined to tell her if he had been punished.
Hobart and William Smith officials said they have “no tolerance for sexual assault” and treat all complaints seriously, offering emotional support, counseling and, when necessary, extra security and no-contact orders. They said the school’s procedures offer students a fair hearing and were followed in this case. But they cited privacy laws in declining to answer specific questions.
“Campuses are really frustrated by knowing so much about a given case and how reasonable they were and they can’t tell this story,” said Brett A. Sokolow, a legal adviser to the school. “It’s easy to paint them as the bad guy because they are in a position where they can’t defend themselves.”
Yet privacy laws did not stop Hobart and William Smith from disclosing the name of the woman — a possible rape victim — in letters to dozens of students. “I’m surprised they didn’t attach my picture,” she said.
After that disclosure, the woman spoke with her parents and agreed to have The Times use her first name, Anna, as well as her photograph.
The school said it was legally obligated to identify Anna to students who might have been called to testify in a possible criminal proceeding. The district attorney who was assessing the case disagreed, calling the identification “unnecessarily specific and, in my mind, a poor exercise of judgment.”
A second female student at Hobart and William Smith, who was sexually assaulted at a fraternity party in October 2012, told The Times that one of her two assailants had had his punishment reduced on appeal because of poor questioning by the school’s disciplinary panel. Like Anna, the student said friends of the accused had retaliated against her for reporting the assault.
Colleges nationwide are navigating the treacherous legal and emotional terrain of sexual assault. In May, the federal Department of Education disclosed for the first time the names of colleges — 55 in all, including Hobart and William Smith — under investigation for possibly violating federal rules aimed at stopping sexual harassment.
Afterward, Hobart and William Smith’s president, Mark D. Gearan, sent letters to the college community, saying the school was confident it had not violated federal law. The school’s policies and procedures “reflect our commitment to creating and maintaining an academic environment that is free from sexual harassment and misconduct,” wrote Mr. Gearan, a former Peace Corps director and White House aide to Bill Clinton. This summer, a committee of faculty, staff and students is studying whether the school can deal more effectively with sexual misconduct.
Turning to the police may not offer a more equitable alternative. For example, as The Times reported in April, the Tallahassee police conducted virtually no investigation of a Florida State University student’s rape complaint against the star quarterback Jameis Winston.
College administrators have their own incentive to deal with such cases on campus, since a public prosecution could frighten parents, prospective students and donors. Until last year, Hobart and William Smith’s chief fund-raiser also helped oversee the school’s handling of sexual assaults. The two functions are now separate.
While the school explained to Anna that talking to the police was an important option, she said, she decided against it after a school administrator said it would be a longer, drawn-out process. When she changed her mind six months later, the district attorney, R. Michael Tantillo, said he had “virtually nothing to work with” and quickly closed the case.
Although federal officials estimate that up to 20 percent of college students will be sexually assaulted in school, Mr. Tantillo said he rarely heard of such reports at Hobart and William Smith. “I guess that’s your job to find out why,” he told a reporter.
Hobart and William Smith, on a hill overlooking Seneca Lake, deep in Finger Lakes wine country, is technically two small liberal-arts colleges — Hobart for men, William Smith for women. Its 2,300 students share the same campus, classes, dorms and overall administration, but receive degrees from their respective schools.
It took one visit for Anna to know this was where she wanted to be. “You could see out on the lake — literally, felt like this is what heaven looks like,” she said.
Saying goodbye at the beginning of school, Anna’s mother was comforted by a professor who had been in touch with her daughter. " ‘She really sounds like something,’ ” she recalled him saying. “He said: ‘This is a very preppy place. I’m going to look out for her.’ ”
Anna, who considers herself anything but preppy, quickly grasped the challenge. “It was really a culture shock for me,” she said. “A lot of the girls, they look alike, and I’m not small and have blonde hair and $500 sunglasses.” So she searched for students “who didn’t fit into that stereotypical William Smith girl.”
There was something else: She had entered what is commonly known as the Red Zone, a period of vulnerability for sexual assaults, beginning when freshmen first walk onto campus until Thanksgiving break.
“Students arrive and you have a new environment, new social circle and the fear that goes with new expectations,” said Robert S. Flowers, vice president for student affairs. That can lead to experimentation, including excessive drinking and attendant problems.
For that reason, the school held what students call rape seminars, the first in a program that, Mr. Flowers said, has made Hobart and William Smith a leader in preventing sexual violence.
Anna and her girlfriends often joked about how the national rape estimates might affect them. “They kept repeating the statistics,” she said, and “every night we would go out we would be like, ‘Oh, who’s going to be the one?’ ”
It took just 14 days to find out, Anna said.
Whether one believes the accuser or the accused, it would be hard to dispute that what happened was a life-altering experience that ruptured Anna’s nascent friendships, damaged her health, traumatized her family and derailed her college plans.
Emotionally battered, Anna later took a leave and returned home. “I do not recognize myself — I have become someone that I hate,” she said. “It was such a toxic environment that I needed to be home and try and find myself again.”
The fraternity houses, where so many parties occur, sit high above the lake. And it was at one fraternity, Kappa Sigma, where sometime between 9:30 and 10 p.m. on Sept. 7, Anna attended one of the year’s first big social events — a “highlighter party,” where students write on one another’s clothes with a marker that glows under black light.
Later there was dancing. Anna and a senior football player she had just met were grinding to the music, rubbing their bodies together.
With so many students packed together in the basement, it became hot, and the football player escorted Anna upstairs, where smaller groups congregated in students’ bedrooms. A friend tried to stop her, but she went anyway.
Anna said she had begun the evening drinking shots of rum mixed into Gatorade. She drank one beer at the dance, she said, and then the rest of an opened beer her dance partner had given her.
Around midnight, a fraternity member tried to enter his room, but found it locked. He opened the door with his key and caught a glimpse of what would become a pivotal episode in Anna’s case: The senior football player was naked, and Anna was sitting on a bed with her top off, covering her breasts. The visitor quickly left.
About the same time, Anna texted the friend who had tried to intervene earlier; she had asked him to hold her keys because she had a hole in her pocket, and wanted them back. A subsequent message was darker, talking of hookups. “He got ten guys to try and hu with me,” Anna wrote and added, “I’m scared.” She would later tell the hearing panel that she had exaggerated the number to get her friend’s attention.
She texted again for her keys, and then wrote, “He won’t leave me.”
Her friend tried calling, but got no response. Around 1 a.m., he asked another student to check Anna’s room. She wasn’t there. “We need to find her ASAP,” he texted, adding, “She is so drunk.”
Eventually he tracked her to a building called the Barn, a dance hall favored by students who do not belong to fraternities. Inside the dimly lit room, a D.J. played music near a couple of pool tables.
Around 1:25 a.m., after 10 minutes of searching, the friend said, he found Anna “bent over the pool table face down with her back towards the wall.” She and the senior football player had their pants down, he said, “and it was clear they were having sex.”
Anna “had a scared look on her face,” he said, as six or seven people, perhaps five feet away, were “looking and laughing.”
Anna’s friend, a freshman who was also a football player, approached his teammate and told him that he was being disrespectful and had “crossed the line.”
“It wasn’t me, it was her,” the teammate replied.
The friend walked Anna back to her dorm. On the way, another student saw her crying.
To this day, Anna says she remembers nothing about the Barn, the pool table or what happened there.
It wasn’t long before students in Anna’s dorm realized something wasn’t right. She was pale and disoriented. After she tried to vomit, classmates changed her clothes and put her to bed. Yet they continued to worry, fearing she had been drugged and raped.
One friend remembered that she had asked a football player earlier if he knew where Anna was. He smirked and made a crude allusion to a sexual act with Anna. “I felt very uncomfortable and got up and left,” she said. Anna later identified him as one of her assailants.
Soon word spread that something untoward had happened at the Barn.
“The girls and I decided we should call campus security,” one friend said. “We knew something was really wrong.”
At 2:10 a.m., Sgt. Anthony Pluretti arrived to find 10 to 15 students outside Anna’s room. After talking to her and realizing that she “could not remember how many drinks she had consumed and that she had no idea that she was at the Barn,” Sergeant Pluretti called campus paramedics, he wrote in a report.
They recommended that a hospital evaluate her. The closest one with a trained sexual-assault nurse was 20 to 30 minutes away in Canandaigua.
The friend who had walked Anna home from the Barn accompanied her to the hospital. As the hours passed, he later told school officials, she began to talk about what had happened at Kappa Sigma: She was in a room with several boys and girls who left her alone with the football player; three times she refused his request for sex; two other football players entered the room, and she was sexually assaulted.
She did not go into great detail, the friend said, because she was “just beginning to remember what happened.”
Around 7:30 in the morning, the nurse told Sergeant Pluretti that she had found “internal abrasions and heavy inflammation” and believed that Anna had suffered a forceful sexual assault.
No date-rape drugs were found, but based on tests at the hospital, her blood-alcohol level at the time of the first sexual encounter would have been about twice what is considered legally drunk. While driving Anna back to her dorm, Sergeant Pluretti reported, he pulled over four times so she could vomit.
He tried to comfort her, explaining that the school “would respond in whatever manner that would support her,” and that she should not feel rushed or pressured into deciding what to do, including whether to file a police report. She did express a desire to see a counselor after she had slept.
Back at Anna’s home, around 2:30 on Sunday afternoon, her mother was entertaining guests when the phone rang. “The caller ID said Geneva, and I knew that was bad,” she recalled. The caller identified herself as Maria Finger, a psychologist at the school.
“Are you sitting down?” she asked.
After a few hours of sleep, Anna gave a statement to the Office of Campus Safety. Other students provided their own statements, including the three accused football players. (They are not being identified in this article because the school cleared them.)
The first football player — who had pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in 2012 after being arrested for fighting and resisting arrest — was given a no-contact order, with a warning: “You should not involve your friends in any manner to breach this order.” Yet he twice asked one of the other two players to talk to Anna and check on her. He also texted one of Anna’s friends, who then texted her: “He wants me to explain something to you. I don’t necessarily believe him, but I wanna tell you his side to see if anything clicks considering that you don’t remember some of it.”
Now it was the school’s responsibility under federal law to evaluate the allegations and, if necessary, hold a hearing.
At 3:14 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 17, a three-member panel convened behind closed doors to begin adjudicating Anna’s complaint.
Such hearings are usually confidential. But The Times obtained a transcript of the proceedings.
The hearing, not dissimilar to what happens at many colleges, bore little resemblance to a court proceeding. Neither the accuser nor the accused were allowed to have lawyers or family members present. They could bring “advisers,” but they would be voiceless advisers, prohibited from speaking.
The panelists could act pretty much as they wished, including questioning Anna about internal college reports and witness statements that she was not shown. Also absent were the usual courtroom checks and balances. The panel acted as prosecutor, judge and jury, questioning students and rendering judgment. All members were supposed to be trained for this delicate assignment.
The chairwoman, Sandra E. Bissell, vice president of human resources, was joined by Brien Ashdown, an assistant professor of psychology, and Lucille Smart, director of the campus bookstore, who the school said had expressed an interest in serving.
Boiled down, the complaint alleged that the senior football player had sexually assaulted Anna at the fraternity house while a second player inserted his penis into her mouth. At some point, a third player was alleged to have held her down. The senior was also accused of raping her later in the Barn.
The panel’s initial questioning was based mostly on the investigative work of campus officers who aggressively sought out witnesses, followed leads and conducted interviews. According to the federal Education Department, a sexual-assault investigation typically takes around 60 calendar days. Hobart and William Smith did it in a little more than a week.
The hearing followed almost immediately. While a speedy adjudication can help all parties move on with their lives, in this case it left little time for the panel to study witness statements and prepare a cogent line of questioning. It also left Anna with little time to process events of that night, much less familiarize herself with the statements of others, some of which she had received the day before the hearing.
Anna was questioned first. “It was one of the hardest things I have ever gone through,” she said later, adding, “I felt like I was talking to someone who knew nothing of any sort of social interaction; what happens at parties; what happens in sex.”
She had to relive that evening through questions that jumped around in time, interrupted her answers and misrepresented witness statements. One question incorrectly quoted one of her friends asserting that at the dance Anna had told her that she wanted to go upstairs and have sex; in fact, the friend had said, Anna told her that the football player wanted to have sex.
At a critical point, Anna was about to describe what happened when she was alone upstairs with the first two football players — only to have the panel abruptly change the subject.
Q. O.K., just the three of you?
A. Yeah.
Q. And then what happened?
Q: Can I just ask a question? O.K., in your statement you do say that you were trying to text.
This is followed by a lengthy exchange about texting.
Later she was asked how the senior football player had tried to undress her, but the panelists cut her off.
Q. It helps us to understand what took place. You know, I’m going to apologize now because we have to ask difficult questions and I really apologize for that.
Q. And for all of us, as hard as it is, if you could be specific, if you are going to talk about a hand holding you, was his left or his right? And if there’s a penis involved, is it flaccid, is it erect?
Q. Because the most detail you give us when you tell us the story, the less questions we have to ask for details. And if you want to break just let us know, we can give a couple of minutes.
Q. And as you start your story about this line of events, I just want to — you know what, can we just back up a little bit before that, because before this line of events starts to happen, there has or has not been any coke brought into the room?
This was followed by a discussion of Anna’s allegation that some students in the room were using cocaine.
Two of the three panel members did not examine the medical records showing blunt force trauma — it was the chairwoman’s prerogative not to share them. Instead, the panel asked what Anna had drunk, who she may have kissed and how she had danced. It was, Anna said, as if admitting you were grinding — a common way of dancing — “means you therefore consent to sex or should be raped.”
The panel asked about the Barn — even though Anna stated that she did not remember being there — and whether the friend who found her there might have misconstrued her dancing as sex. Anna responded that the pool-table witness had said she and the football player had their pants down. “I don’t know who dances like that in public,” she added.
It was during this discussion that one panelist asked if the witness had seen the player’s penis in Anna’s vagina or if he had just seen them having sex. “The questioning is absolutely stunning in its absurdity,” Anna’s lawyer, Inga L. Parsons, said later.
Anna’s panelists were supposed to have “adequate training or knowledge” of sexual violence, according to federal guidelines. Even so, they pressed Anna on why she initially had not wanted a rape exam at the hospital.
Does anyone really believe that it is pleasant to have rectal, vaginal, vulva and cervical swabs taken?” Ms. Parsons said. “Not to mention photographs of your private parts and dye injected into your vagina?”
The three football players then took their turns before the panel. Their accounts were quite different from their accuser’s.
The senior player said Anna had given him a lap dance behind the fraternity bar. Upstairs, he said, she kissed him and then performed oral sex on him for two to three minutes. However, he said, he could not get an erection because he was tired from playing football and “a super long bus ride.”
At the Barn, he said, she again pulled his pants down. “My flaccid penis was rubbing up against her vagina,” he had told the campus police, adding that he had then realized their conduct “was inappropriate” and pulled up his pants.
The second football player said that while his teammate was in the room, Anna pulled down his pants and gave him oral sex. “I didn’t consent,” he said. “She’s doing it all by herself. My hands are not touching her.” After a brief period, he said, he told her to stop. “I zippered my pants up, put my belt on, and I walked out the door.”
The third player, who faced the weakest case, acknowledged being in the fraternity room but said he left before the sexual encounter.
Anna’s friend who recounted the pool-table scene chose not to testify, but, according to Anna, stands by his account.
Records show that the first two players had lied to campus officers when initially asked about Anna’s allegations. The panel, though, chose not to ask about it.
The day after the episode, the senior football player told two campus officers that he could not recall Anna’s name, even though he had spent much of the evening with her. The player denied having sexual contact with her during or after the fraternity party.
Only after the officers confronted him with reports to the contrary did he acknowledge having “sexual contact” — but not sex — at the Barn, and engaging in oral sex with Anna at the fraternity house.
The second player, during three separate interviews with campus officers, denied even being in the fraternity room. It wasn’t until his fourth interview two days after the sexual encounter that he confessed to being in the room with his teammate and having oral sex with Anna.
That same day, the football coach, Mike Cragg, summoned the three accused players, two team captains and the pool table witness for a private locker-room meeting where he heard their recollections, then passed on details of Anna’s account, hearing transcripts show.
Two days after that meeting, the senior player changed his account a second time, telling the campus police that he “wanted us to know that he was ready to come clean about the truth,” records show. A second player had in fact been with him at the fraternity house, the player said, and Anna had given both oral sex. He said he had lied to protect himself and his teammate from Anna’s false allegations.
Mr. Cragg declined to answer questions from The Times. But in a written statement he said, “If I were to learn that a member of my team had behaved in a manner that violated our code of ethics or community standards, I would want him removed from the team immediately.” He added: “I have never and would never encourage any player or players to coordinate stories to avoid disciplinary actions.”
While the panel did not ask the players about their changed accounts, it did let the senior give an opening statement.
“I come from a wonderful family with strong Christian values,” he said. “I have been blessed with a beautiful mother, grandmothers, nieces and amazing aunts.” And he added: “I treat women with the respect and honor they deserve.”
The panel had to answer several basic questions: Did Anna give consent, was she capable of giving consent, and did the senior player violate the no-contact order either directly or through his friends? The standard of proof, mandated under federal guidelines, was preponderance of evidence — was it more likely than not that the students had sexually assaulted Anna?
Several hours after the last witness, the panel announced its decision clearing all three athletes on all counts.
The next day, the panel chairwoman sent Anna written confirmation of the decision, informing her that if she wished to appeal, she could find directions on Page 13 of the sexual-misconduct policy.
But Page 13 said nothing about appeals. Instead, it contained a section titled “False Allegations.” The college admitted its mistake, Anna’s mother said.
Anna’s lawyer appealed the decision to clear the senior player. Mr. Flowers, the student-affairs administrator, granted the family additional time to file its appeal and reviewed the rape-kit results and hospital records. He upheld the panel’s ruling, though he did find a violation of the no-contact order.
In an email response to The Times, the panel’s chairwoman, Ms. Bissell, said the members were proud of their service. “A great deal of care and focus goes into this work, including extensive training in advance of our service, as well as refresher training prior to serving on a particular panel,” she said.
As students returned after winter break, amid swirling rumors of a gang rape, they were greeted by a new mandate: Everyone had to watch an interactive video designed to educate them about sexual assault. The video contained hypotheticals and a series of questions. Answer them, students were told, or be denied campus housing.
The video generated instant controversy, beginning with its title — “ThinkLuv.”
“So right from the start, it’s the kind of program that’s fun and playful and not something that needs to be taken seriously,” said Kelsey Carroll, a recent graduate who founded a student group to combat sexism. “Rape is not about love. It is about violence and power.”
The campus paper said the video attempted to educate students “while slut-shaming, generalizing and even being sexist in the process.”
Mr. Flowers defended the video, saying 94 percent of students had called it a positive experience.
On May 2, the day after the federal government announced that Hobart and William Smith was among the schools under investigation, the school sponsored an event used on other campuses called “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes,” in which men walk around campus in high-heeled shoes to raise awareness of sexual assault. Campus meetings were also held to discuss the issue.
“I think the school has been receiving a lot of pressure from the press, alums and certainly from students to act,” Ms. Carroll said. “As a campus we know it’s not the case that rapes and sexual assaults are not happening on campus — it’s that they aren’t reported or the reporting system is failing.”
Mr. Tantillo, the district attorney, said that after prosecuting a campus rape case seven years ago, he had worked with the school to improve its handling of sexual-assault reports. He praised what he said was the thoroughness of its investigation of Anna’s case.
But he also understands the questions that might lead a woman to stay silent. “Is this going to be publicized? Is everybody going to know about this? Am I going to be ostracized? Is this going to affect me for the rest of my life? Am I going to lose friends? Are people going to believe me?”
If a woman does decide to come forward, he said, she should do so immediately. “If you wait hours, days or weeks, that gives people plenty of time to get their stories together, to engage other witnesses to support them, and it makes it much, much more challenging.”
Disappointment is a recurring theme among many students who ask their schools to adjudicate their sexual-assault complaints.
“Most of the students I work with say, ‘Had I known how bad the school process was, I would not have reported at all,’ ” said Annie E. Clark, who counsels assault victims on their rights.
One reason for this disappointment is that many college hearing panelists lack even the most basic training, said Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat who has investigated the quality of campus rape investigations. The senator recently surveyed 440 colleges and universities and found that one-third had failed to properly train officials adjudicating claims.
A lack of transparency in student hearings makes it difficult, if not impossible, for students to evaluate the way their schools adjudicate complaints. “They are a little like snowflakes — they are all different,” said Ms. McCaskill, a former sex-crimes prosecutor.
The police have their own shortcomings, she said, citing the flawed inquiry in the Jameis Winston case in Florida.
The Geneva police hardly distinguished themselves in Anna’s case. Detective Brian E. Choffin, relying primarily on his reading of school records, sent the prosecutor an error-filled report.
Detective Choffin mischaracterized witness statements, put the words of one student in the mouth of another, and stated that he “never saw any discrepancies or alterations” in what the two football players told the authorities, even though they had initially lied about having sexual contact with their accuser. And while Anna’s blood-alcohol tests had been done many hours after she last had a drink, he also stated unequivocally that her level “would not make a person impaired to the point of blacking out.”
The detective defended his report, which disputed much of Anna’s account, calling it “thorough and based on facts.”
Looking back, Anna said she knows only too well the price of pursuing her complaint — physical threats and obscenities on her dormitory door, being pushed in the dining hall and asked to leave a fraternity party. Her roommate moved out with no explanation.
Mr. Flowers said the school continued to strengthen programs to stop sexual violence. Over the last two years, he said, seven students have undergone disciplinary hearings for sexual assaults; four were expelled.
Against her parents’ wishes, Anna plans to return to Hobart and William Smith in the fall.
“Someone needs to help survivors there,” she said.
September 15, 2014
By Richard Perez-Pena and Walt Bogdanich
After downing a double dose of NyQuil to fight a cold, the young woman woke in a man’s dormitory room with a vague memory of someone being on top of her, but no recollection of sexual contact. Three days later she found a condom in her vagina. She repeatedly confronted the man, who insisted that nothing had happened, and his roommate, who had told her he saw them having sex, then said he was joking.
“I was worried, and I was crying,” the woman, a Florida State University student, told the police. She went to Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare for an examination, and to the university police, but they did not question the suspect or his roommate. Instead, they asked the woman if she wanted the suspect questioned; she never gave a “yes” or “no” answer, so they closed the case 18 days after her initial report.
Last year, the Tallahassee police’s handling of a rape accusation against Florida State’s famed quarterback, Jameis Winston, who denied the allegation, drew attention to the department’s failure to adequately investigate despite bruises on the accuser and semen on her underwear.
Now an examination of other cases from recent years shows a pattern to the handling of sexual assault complaints by Florida State students: After an accuser makes a police report and submits to a medical rape exam, the police ask if she wants them to investigate, and if she does not explicitly agree, they drop the case, often calling her uncooperative.
The pattern emerges from interviews with prosecutors and victims’ advocates, and a review of case files obtained by The New York Times from both the Tallahassee police and the university police, under the state’s Freedom of Information Law.
The records provide a look at police practices not just locally, but also nationally. Experts say that what happens in Tallahassee is common, although police forces are being encouraged to alter their habits.
“There are a lot of jurisdictions that are trying to do it better, but it’s still incredibly common that the police just do not do the investigation,” said Rebecca Campbell, a psychology professor at Michigan State University who researches law enforcement treatment of sexual assaults. “They do not treat other crimes this way. If you have a property crime, they don’t say: ‘Would you like me to dust for fingerprints? Would you like me to canvass the area for witnesses?’ ”
After getting the accuser’s statement, Dr. Campbell said, the police should “do what you would do with any other crime — you investigate, and you go try to catch the bad guy.”
That has been the practice in Philadelphia for a few years, said Kathleen M. Brown, an associate professor of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania, who worked with the city police on revising their approach. When a rape exam is done, she said, a victim decides whether to give the evidence to the police and talk with an officer; if she does, the police explain the next steps and assure her that she can stop cooperating at any time, but they do not ask her if they should continue to investigate.
“Agreeing to report is not the same thing as saying, ‘I’ll get up on the stand and testify,’ and that conversation shouldn’t happen until much later, if it happens at all,” Dr. Brown said. Historically, many officers disbelieved the accusers or wanted to avoid hard-to-prove cases, and discouraged women from reporting rapes, she said, “so we’ve worked hard to get to this point.”
It is unknown how many Florida State University students report sexual assaults to the police. Most occur off campus and are reported to the Tallahassee Police Department, which does not tally which accusers are students, nor does the state attorney’s office. Sixteen on-campus rapes were reported to the Florida State University police from 2011 through 2013, but those include nonstudent victims and exclude sex crimes other than rape.
But records from Refuge House, a Tallahassee nonprofit group, obtained as part of an examination of the Winston case, show that in those three years, its nurses were called to hospitals to examine and counsel 63 Florida State students seeking treatment for sexual assault. Of those, 55 reported the assault to the police.
Interviews with prosecutors and a review of local news reports turned up just two arrests in that span by the Tallahassee police for sexual assaults on Florida State students. University police records show no arrests for forcible sex offenses from 2007 through 2013. Unlike burglary, sex is often consensual, so proving rape is hard; in some cases, prosecutors agreed with the police that the evidence did not support charging the suspect.
It is widely accepted that if a victim is adamant that she does not want a case pursued, law enforcement should take that into account. But reports from both city and university police departments show that unless accusers say firmly that they want cases investigated and prosecuted, officers have called them uncooperative and called off investigations.
“I was raped and stressed and scared,” one student later wrote in a complaint to the Tallahassee police, “something completely different than not cooperating.”
The student who accused Mr. Winston of raping her in December 2012 complained that a police report falsely stated that she had not cooperated and did not want the case pursued. Prosecutors did not learn of the case until months later, and concluded they could not successfully prosecute, but leveled withering criticism at the Tallahassee police for doing little to investigate.
In talking with the police, “they indicate that this happens all the time, victims come in, they’re not sure what they want to do, and the case is not investigated until they make up their mind,” said Georgia Cappleman, the chief assistant state attorney for a six-county region of Florida that includes Tallahassee.
“If a victim comes in and reports a violent crime, I don’t think it’s appropriate to then say, ‘Well, what do you want to do about it? Are you sure you want to go forward with this?’ ” Ms. Cappleman said. “The appropriate thing to do is to assume by her being there, making the report, that she does want an investigation and to proceed with it accordingly.”
The Tallahassee police did not respond to requests for comment.
In a written statement, the university said its officers are trained to treat people compassionately, including “making sure the alleged victim is aware of, and can prepare for, the next steps.” It added that experts counsel that “it is important to allow a victim to have a voice in the investigative process as a way of re-establishing control over their lives.”
In the case of the woman who found a condom inside her, the university said, the investigator “respected the desires of the alleged victim,” and could reopen the case if she requested it.
Since the Winston case burst into view last year, the Tallahassee police have gotten a new chief, and both that department and the university police have stepped up efforts to train officers in dealing with sexual assault victims, though it is not clear how much day-to-day practice has changed.
In a case from April 2013, the day after a woman went to a hospital and told the Tallahassee police that she had been raped, she told them that she was unsure about prosecuting. When she remained uncertain 17 days later, an officer wrote that she was “unwilling to cooperate with the investigation or proceed with criminal charges” and closed the case. The suspect was not interviewed.
In another case, a student and her family complained repeatedly about the Tallahassee police’s treatment of her rape allegation last October. They said officers had treated her more skeptically than the suspect, and one asked if she was sure it was rape and advised her not to tell her father.
The woman had bruises on her neck and inner thigh, she said she had told police that she had fought, and an investigator’s report said, “When the victim tried to get up, he would push her down by the neck.” Yet the same report said she had not resisted. On the day of the episode, she gave separate interviews to two officers, went to a hospital for an examination and filled out a written statement, but the report referred to her as being “unwillingness to cooperate” when she did not give a follow-up interview later that day.
The department did not make an arrest in the case. It sent the woman a letter saying that it would not formally investigate her complaints, but that one officer “was counseled on how his actions or what he said could be perceived by other people.”
Sexual assault cases are notoriously hard to prove in court, and in Leon County, only about one in five police complaints — including those in which no “rape kit” is collected — leads to prosecution. The rate appears to be significantly lower for college students, but it is unclear whether the difference reflects the prevalence of alcohol in college cases, a different approach by the police or other factors.
“I think that’s an extremely important question, and we don’t have an answer,” said Meg Baldwin, executive director of Refuge House. But, she added, “a factor I would suggest is the social isolation of student victims.” Students are away from their homes and support networks, they often report that their college friends shun them for accusing fellow students, and many move back home after an attack, making investigation harder, she said.
When officers ask an accuser if she wants a case to go forward, putting the onus on her to decide, there is a risk “that in the guise of seeking the victim’s consent to the investigation, she’s actually being bullied out of it,” Ms. Baldwin said. “Particularly in the few days after an attack, a victim is very likely to place the interpretation on those kinds of questions as questioning the reliability of her report.”
In fact, victims often say they feel doubted by the police, who focus on their behavior and on holes and inconsistencies in their stories. Experts say investigators need to understand that fragmented, even contradictory memories, and unexpected emotional responses, are normal products of trauma.
Sexual assault is the hardest crime to measure because, according to many surveys, most victims never go to the police. An increase in cases can reflect better reporting, not a crime wave. Crime statistics reported by colleges and universities are doubly problematic, because they generally exclude off-campus attacks.
In April, a White House task force on college sexual assault listed as its first recommendation that every college conduct a campus climate survey, to try to gauge the extent of the problem.
October 12, 2014
By Mike McIntire and Walt Bogdanich
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The 911 call could not have sounded more urgent: A man was beating a woman holding a baby outside their apartment as she tried to leave.
You just need to get someone out here right away because it is really bad,” the caller said, adding that the man was “punching” the mother and “grabbing the little baby around the arm.”
By the time the police arrived shortly after 3 a.m. one day last January, the couple were back inside. The 19-year-old woman acknowledged that she and her boyfriend had argued, and that he had not wanted her to leave. But she insisted nothing physical had occurred.
Officers responding to a domestic violence call have a legal duty to investigate thoroughly, seek written statements from witnesses and from the victim, instruct the victim on how to seek help and, finally, forward their report to the local domestic abuse crisis center. But, according to their brief report on the episode, the officers did none of that.
They did, however, find the case significant enough to notify their sergeant — “due to the fact that it was an F.S.U. football player,” the report said. The sergeant, a Florida State University sports fan, signed off on it and the complaint was filed away as “unfounded.”
It was hardly the first time that the towering presence of Florida State football had cast a shadow over justice in Tallahassee.
Last year, the deeply flawed handling of a rape allegation against the quarterback Jameis Winston drew attention to institutional failures by law enforcement and Florida State officials. The accuser’s lawyer complained that detectives had seemed most interested in finding reasons not to pursue charges against Mr. Winston, a prized recruit who went on to win the Heisman Trophy and lead his team to a national championship.
Now, an examination by The New York Times of police and court records, along with interviews with crime witnesses, has found that, far from an aberration, the treatment of the Winston complaint was in keeping with the way the police on numerous occasions have soft-pedaled allegations of wrongdoing by Seminoles football players. From criminal mischief and motor-vehicle theft to domestic violence, arrests have been avoided, investigations have stalled and players have escaped serious consequences.
In a community whose self-image and economic well-being are so tightly bound to the fortunes of the nation’s top-ranked college football team, law enforcement officers are finely attuned to a suspect’s football connections. Those ties are cited repeatedly in police reports examined by The Times. What’s more, dozens of officers work second jobs directing traffic and providing security at home football games, and many express their devotion to the Seminoles on social media.
Certainly, Florida State football players have not always sidestepped prosecution. Over the last three years, at least nine players have been arrested on charges ranging from sexual assault to being an accessory to a fatal shooting.
But on other occasions, despite strong evidence, investigations have been delayed and sometimes derailed.
When Jesus (Bobo) Wilson, an up-and-coming wide receiver, was stopped by the Tallahassee police in June while riding a stolen Bintelli Sprint motor scooter, his story was dubious: He claimed he had borrowed it from a student whose last name he did not know. But for Officer Michael Petroczky, it was convincing enough to forestall an arrest.
The officer, noting in his report that Mr. Wilson was a Florida State football player, wrote: “Wilson was not arrested today because he cooperated, showed no signs of guilt and provided a plausible story that needs to be investigated.”
According to the scooter’s owner, Mr. Wilson’s football connections weighed heavily on the case. After letting Mr. Wilson go, the officer arranged to meet the owner, a Florida State student, in a campus parking lot at night and “questioned if I was mentally stable or if I had forgotten that I lent him the scooter,” the student said in an email interview. The officer seemed deeply reluctant to charge Mr. Wilson, saying he did not want his name on the arrest report, according to the student.
“He told me that he had not arrested Wilson because he was a football player, and he did not want to ‘ruin’ his record by arresting him” if there was a chance he might be innocent, the student wrote.
At least 13 football players have been implicated in a string of wild public shootouts with CO2-powered BB and pellet guns, causing thousands of dollars in property damage, endangering bystanders and eliciting a police response. Yet until the most recent case — a previously unreported shootout in June that caused such a commotion that a sheriff’s helicopter was called in to search for suspects — none of the episodes led to charges, even though elsewhere in Florida suspects as young as 12 have been arrested for doing the same things.
The investigation of the June shootout sat inactive for months but was restarted not long after The Times began asking about it; charges were filed against three Florida State players on Oct. 2.
In a statement, the Tallahassee police chief, Michael DeLeo, who took over late last year, said that with 66,000 college students in the city, “I take seriously the responsibility entrusted to us to keep them safe and also hold them accountable for their actions.” And while he is proud of his officers, he said, if they make mistakes, “we immediately investigate and hold them accountable.” In response to The Times’s reporting on the police handling of the scooter case, the department has begun an internal-affairs inquiry.
A police spokesman, Officer David Northway, added that because of likely attention from the community and news media, it was department policy for officers to notify supervisors if cases involved high-profile figures, from college football players to government officials and business leaders.
The Times’s reporting also yielded a fuller account of how Florida State handled the rape complaint against Mr. Winston. In January 2013, days after Mr. Winston was identified by his accuser, senior Florida State athletic officials met privately with Mr. Winston’s lawyer. Afterward, they decided, on behalf of the university, not to begin an internal disciplinary inquiry, as required by federal law.
Most recently, university officials suspended Mr. Winston for one game after he stood in a public place on campus and, playing off a running Internet gag, shouted a crude reference to a sex act. In a news conference afterward, his coach, Jimbo Fisher, said, “Our hope and belief is Jameis will learn from this and use better judgment and language and decision-making.”
A search of his public Instagram page would have turned up a similar display. Amid photos of himself with his coach, the comedian Will Ferrell and the former N.F.L. quarterback Archie Manning, Mr. Winston posted a video clip in February in which he and a teammate, mimicking a viral music video, jokingly sang a line from the song “On the Floor” by the rapper IceJJFish, which celebrates men not taking “no” for an answer from women:
“She said she wants to take it slow, I’m not that type of guy I’ll letcha know, when I see that red light all I know is go.”
On one level, the special treatment accorded Florida State football players who get into trouble is the age-old story of important people reaping benefits not available to everyone else. And to say the players are important to Tallahassee would be an understatement.
Drive around Florida’s capital city and evidence of Seminole fever is everywhere, from the Chief Osceola license plates and bumper stickers to the billboards and buildings sporting team colors of garnet and gold. The community has good reason, beyond pride, to get behind the team: County officials say each home game pumps $1.5 million to $10 million into the local economy, depending on the quality of the matchup.
The revenue also flows to important people at the university, mostly through the conduit of Seminole Boosters, a tax-exempt organization that collects millions from donors in the community, along with game concessions, sky-box rentals and merchandising. Money from the Boosters has helped pay the salaries of high-ranking athletic officials and the university president, whose performance goals included enhancing “the partnership” between the Boosters and the athletic department.
Days before the national championship game last season, Coach Fisher received a multimillion-dollar raise and contract extension. Most of his $3.5 million pay comes from the Boosters, and the more he wins, the more he earns — up to $1.45 million in bonuses, including $200,000 for an undefeated season, $200,000 for finishing with a top-five national ranking, $400,000 for winning the national championship and $125,000 for various coach-of-the-year honors. Mr. Fisher’s first 12 bonuses are linked to winning, the last two, for a maximum payout of $75,000, to academic achievement for student athletes.
A successful football program is also good for Tallahassee police officers. They earn an extra $40 to $45 an hour, at university expense, providing traffic control on game days, according to the department. Last season, officers were paid a total of $112,000, according to the university.
Some officers working game-day shifts are paid directly by Seminole Boosters. Three officers who played important roles in the Winston investigation were among those seeking private work with the group, records show, and the department’s top officials at the time — Chief Dennis Jones and his deputy, Cheryl Stewart — attended a 2012 fund-raiser benefiting the Boosters and Coach Fisher’s family charity. The close connection between the police and the Boosters is hardly hidden: The fund-raiser’s sponsor, a booster club called Old School, posted photos on its website showing Chief Jones kicking off the event by firing a shotgun.
The benefits that flow from a top-tier team, and the incentives it creates to protect the franchise, are not unique to Florida State; indeed, they can be found in college towns across the country. But the current national uproar over professional athletes receiving light punishment for serious misbehavior has refocused attention on what some say is a similar failure to hold student athletes accountable in powerhouse college sports programs. Some critics of the N.F.L.’s handling of recent domestic violence cases are asking if players learn the wrong lessons while still in school. Gerald Gurney, a former senior associate athletic director at the University of Oklahoma who teaches a course on “ethical issues in intercollegiate athletics,” said the outsize influence of big-time collegiate sports could create a climate where keeping student athletes on the field trumped all other considerations.
“Too often, that relationship between the athletic department and local law enforcement is too close, where we lose objectivity and lose the ability to have a fair investigation if these students are athletes,” Mr. Gurney said. “Why? No. 1 is the love of the sport, of college football and the public’s attention to it, and the celebrity of the head coach and celebrity of the athletes.”
On a Sunday evening in November 2012, as people milled about on West Tennessee Street near the Florida State campus, a red sport utility vehicle started cruising up and down, with someone inside firing a BB gun out a window. Bystanders were “stung by BBs,” and one nearly hit a security guard at an apartment complex, said Connie Ratliffe, the guard’s supervisor at the time.
“I heard this ‘ping, ping, ping’ and felt something whiz past my cheek,” as BBs struck a car she was standing next to, Ms. Ratliffe said in an interview. She added that she had pushed the guard back and ducked out of the way.
The episode marked the beginning of an intermittent, nearly two-year run of dangerous mischief — much of it, including the November episode, previously unreported — involving Florida State football players using BB and pellet guns powerful enough to shatter windows, damage cars and embed steel BBs in door frames.
According to a Tallahassee police account, the authorities put out an alert for the vehicle and soon pulled over a red Mercury with Marvin Bracy, Chris Casher and Kenneth Williams inside. The officer’s report says that the three young men “told me they were on the F.S.U. football team,” and that the police retrieved a black “semi-auto pistol BB gun” hidden under a rug in the back of the car.
Ms. Ratliffe identified the car but could not say which of the players had been firing the gun. The players denied shooting at anyone. The officer gave Mr. Bracy, the driver, a traffic ticket, and then “the BB gun was returned to Mr. Bracy,” according to the report. No charges were filed. The police spokesman, Officer Northway, said that without anyone to identify a suspect, “there was no ability to move ahead.”
“They were doing something that was really dangerous, that could have put somebody’s eye out or caused a car accident,” said Ms. Ratliffe, who did not know the players were never charged. “That’s ridiculous.”
A couple of weeks later, the university police responded to a complaint that two men were walking on a bike trail carrying a “long-barreled handgun.” The officers ordered the men — identified as Mr. Winston and Mr. Casher — onto the ground and handcuffed them, before determining that the gun was a pellet gun. The players said they had been shooting at squirrels, and were let go.
Later that night, according to the property manager at the nearby Legacy Suites apartments, Mr. Winston, Mr. Casher, Mr. Williams and another player, Mario Edwards Jr., took part in a shootout that caused $4,200 in damage to 13 windows. The manager, David Sudekum, told the Tallahassee police that he planned to evict all four players and had called the Florida State athletic department, but that “none of the suspects have come forward to pay for damages.” The police report said the case was being investigated as a potential felony, since it involved damage in excess of $1,000 resulting from criminal mischief.
Under university rules, a felony arrest results in automatic suspension from the team.
After officers made inquiries, Monk Bonasorte, an associate athletic director, said the cost of replacing the windows would be split among the four players and others involved in the shootout. In response to questions from The Times, the university said 13 of the team’s 100 or so players — far more than reported earlier — had paid $300 apiece. The police report added that Mr. Sudekum no longer wanted to pursue charges, and the case was dropped.
This past June, Florida State players were implicated in another previously unreported BB-gun shooting that caused damage and frightened tenants at the Cypress Gardens apartment complex. In what appeared to be retaliation for a BB-gun assault that shattered the apartment windows of a Florida State player that morning, three football players drove into the complex’s parking lot, jumped out and started exchanging fire with a fourth man.
In the ensuing mayhem, two cars belonging to tenants were damaged — the back window of one was shattered, and the other was hit five times, causing dents and smashing the side mirror — and frightened bystanders took cover.
“Whatever they were using, these weren’t toys you get at Walmart, they had some power behind them,” said Cameron Manning, whose apartment overlooks the scene. “It looked like a drug deal gone bad.”
Police officers responded and, based on witnesses and a security camera video, initially believed the shooting involved firearms. Officers fanned out to search the area and called in a helicopter from the Leon County Sheriff’s Office. A homicide investigator from the Tallahassee police violent crimes unit was assigned to the case.
The investigator, Scott Cherry, soon figured out that the shooting had involved BB guns and within a day had identified four suspects: a Cypress Gardens resident named Prince Adams and three Florida State football players, Dalvin Cook, Trey Marshall and Mr. Wilson, the wide receiver. The sensitivity of the football players’ involvement became clear in what happened next.
According to a report that he wrote later, the investigator described the facts of the case to the state attorney’s office on July 2, but at first did not reveal the “names or status of the subjects.” Then, after explaining that three of them were Florida State players, “I was instructed that the issue would have to be ‘round-tabled’ with the division chiefs” before deciding what to do, he wrote.
The chief assistant state attorney, Georgia Cappleman, said, “We round-tabled the matter to get a consensus because the prosecutors who were reviewing it did not agree on how the matter should be handled.” Ultimately, they concluded that the crime involved was disorderly conduct — a lesser offense than the criminal mischief designation the investigator was considering.
The inquiry went nowhere for more than two months until the police began interviewing the players on Sept. 8, not long after The Times began asking about it. In his report, the investigator wrote that he had been preoccupied with more serious cases over the summer. He said the state attorney’s office “looked at this incident again” and decided that a misdemeanor charge of criminal mischief was, in fact, warranted, and on Oct. 2, all four suspects were charged and ordered to appear in court later this month.
The criminal mischief count fell short of a felony because the police estimated the damage to the tenants’ cars at less than $1,000. In arriving at that figure, investigators did not take into account the cost of the apartment windows that had been shot out earlier the same day in an episode that witnesses said involved some of the same suspects.
The police spokesman said the chief had found the delay in the case to be unacceptable and had instituted a new policy to prevent such lapses.
Stolen Scooter
The BB-gun investigation came at an inopportune time for Mr. Wilson, who on June 17, just a week before the shootout, had been stopped by the Tallahassee police for riding around on the motor scooter that had been reported stolen. At first, it was unclear if he would face charges related to the theft, as he insisted to the officers that he had borrowed the scooter from a student he knew only as “Drew.”
Officer Petroczky’s initial report was not short on praise for Mr. Wilson. After the officer identified him as a football player, he wrote, Mr. Wilson did not attempt to flee and “was completely cooperative and calm during the entire encounter.” He added, “It is not typical for a suspect that is knowingly operating a stolen vehicle to be so compliant.”
Later that night, after meeting the scooter’s owner in the Florida State parking lot, Officer Petroczky wrote an addendum to his report, saying he had concluded that the owner was not, in fact, the mysterious “Drew” and had not lent the vehicle to anyone. Yet he still did not arrest Mr. Wilson, and instead turned the whole matter over to the university police, where the case languished for weeks.
The police spokesman, Officer Northway, said the chief had ordered his internal-affairs unit to look into the case because “the allegation that an officer might have tried to influence a citizen not to file charges in a possible felony theft is a serious allegation.” The scooter owner, who asked that he not be identified out of concern for retaliation on campus, said in the email interview that it was only after his father complained to the police that the case had picked up steam.
“It didn’t seem like they were pursuing the case much and were waiting to see if I would just forget about it or let it be,” the student said.
Mr. Wilson finally admitted that he had stolen the scooter after finding it with the keys in the ignition, and on July 9 he was charged with grand-theft auto, a felony. Mr. Wilson was suspended from play, although he took part in summer practice.
Mr. Wilson’s lawyer, Tim Jansen, who specializes in representing Florida State athletes in trouble, succeeded in getting the charge reduced to a misdemeanor. Mr. Wilson pleaded no contest, was sentenced to 30 days on a sheriff’s work detail — to begin after football season — and through his lawyer paid $1,000 restitution for damage to the scooter.
It is unclear where he came up with the money. According to a letter his mother wrote to the judge in an eviction proceeding that was happening at the same time, neither she nor her son could pay his back rent and utilities of $3,139. She said she was out of work and could come up with only $1,000 for her son’s landlord.
Florida State reinstated Mr. Wilson after the Seminoles’ first game; five weeks into the season, he was the team’s second-leading receiver.
On Jan. 10, 2013, a female student at Florida State spotted the man she believed had raped her the previous month. After learning his name, Jameis Winston, she reported him to the Tallahassee police.
In the 21 months since, Florida State officials have said little about how they handled the case, which is now one of dozens across the nation being investigated by the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
But new information has recently emerged, as part of The Times’s continuing examination of the case, indicating that it was Florida State’s athletic department that decided the allegation did not merit a university investigation. Normally, university officials outside the department handle such matters.
According to a statement released by the university on Tuesday, senior athletic department officials met with Mr. Winston’s lawyer, Mr. Jansen, within days of his identification as a suspect and quickly concluded that “there were no grounds for further action.” The accuser’s former lawyer, Patricia A. Carroll, said the department did not contact her at the time to get her client’s side of the story.
Although Florida State was legally obligated to conduct a “prompt, thorough and impartial” disciplinary inquiry, the university chose not to, as the team marched to the national championship. “This is exactly the cover-up we suspected,” Baine P. Kerr, a lawyer for Mr. Winston’s accuser, said in a statement responding to the new information. “Coach Fisher and his associates ‘concluded’ that they would keep it to themselves. But football coaches don’t get to decide whether schools investigate athletes for rape.”
According to the university’s statement, Mr. Winston’s lawyer “informed the athletics department that the police had dropped the investigation.” Based on that information, and accounts given “by the athlete and two others who had witnessed the encounter,” athletic officials made the decision that no inquiry was warranted.
At times, the university’s statement underscores inconsistencies in the case. The Tallahassee police have said publicly that they had not dropped the case — only temporarily suspended it — and according to police records, detectives at the time knew nothing about the two witnesses, both friends of Mr. Winston’s. One of them, Mr. Winston’s roommate, took a video of the encounter, only to discard it before the police could examine it.
On Friday, as The Times was preparing to publish this article, the university sent an open letter to the Florida State community, laying out the university’s timeline of events and defending its handling of the case.
In response to questions from The Times, university officials said they had fully informed federal investigators six months ago about the athletic department’s knowledge of the sexual-assault allegation in January 2013. The officials said they were limited in what they could say publicly about the case because of privacy laws, and declined to make athletic department officials or Mr. Winston and other team members available for interviews. Mr. Jansen also declined to discuss the case.
As The Times reported last April, the Tallahassee police also failed to aggressively investigate the rape accusation. It did not become public until November, when a Tampa reporter, Matt Baker, acting on a tip, sought records of the police investigation.
Upon learning of Mr. Baker’s inquiry, Florida State, having shown little curiosity about the rape accusation, suddenly took a keen interest in the journalist seeking to report it, according to emails obtained by The Times.
“Can you share any details on the requesting source?” David Perry, the university’s police chief, asked the Tallahassee police. Several hours later, Mr. Bonasorte, the senior athletic department official, asked Chief Perry if the requester was a sportswriter. The chief did not know. At 7:59 the next morning, a city official informed the chief that Mr. Baker was in fact a sports reporter. By 11 a.m., the athletic department had tracked down his résumé.
Might the Tallahassee police try to block the report’s release on legal grounds? Mr. Bonasorte wanted to know. “I will talk to Jimbo, if released or not,” he said, in an email to Chief Perry.
TMZ, the gossip website, also requested the police report and later asked the school’s deputy police chief, Jim L. Russell, if the campus police had interviewed Mr. Winston about the rape report. Mr. Russell responded by saying his officers were not investigating the case, omitting any reference to the city police, even though the campus police knew of their involvement. “Thank you for contacting me regarding this rumor — I am glad I can dispel that one!” Mr. Russell told TMZ in an email. The university said Mr. Russell was unaware of any other police investigation at the time of the inquiry. Soon after, the Tallahassee police belatedly sent their files to the news media and to the prosecutor, William N. Meggs. By then critical evidence had been lost and Mr. Meggs, who criticized the police’s handling of the case, declined to prosecute.
Only after the end of Florida State’s national championship season did the university, having begun a disciplinary inquiry, attempt without success to interview Mr. Winston. Seven more months would pass before the school interviewed his accuser, who had long since dropped out. Mr. Winston has acknowledged having sex with his accuser, but said it was consensual. He will cooperate with the university’s disciplinary inquiry, which the university said Friday would be conducted by an independent hearing officer.
The 911 call came at 3:10 a.m. A man and a woman were fighting outside an apartment complex three miles north of the Florida State campus. The caller, a neighbor, asked the police to hurry. He said the man was grabbing the baby, punching the mother and trying to block her from driving away. “He jumped behind the truck, and she tried to run him over,” he said.
It was not the first time the couple had fought, the caller said, adding, “You can constantly hear them screaming.”
In two minutes, the Tallahassee police were on the scene. Officer Paul Donaldson later summed up what they had learned in a three-paragraph report: The man and woman were inside talking, not yelling. He was holding their baby. During an earlier argument, she had tried to leave their apartment, taking the baby with her, but he objected. Both calmed down and went back inside. “There was no bruising or evidence of a battery,” the police report stated, calling the complaint “unfounded.”
Because police departments have historically treated complaints of domestic violence less seriously than other violent crimes, many departments have adopted clear investigative protocols, some of them codified in state laws. But since the officers decided that this was not a case of domestic violence, they avoided having to follow those protocols and their own department policies, according to police records and interviews with domestic violence experts.
Over all, the police appear to have done little investigating. Officer Donaldson’s report contains no indication that the police interviewed any witnesses or obtained written statements, nor did he give a reason for failing to do so. Because the 911 caller said the altercation occurred outside, the police could have attempted to examine video from security cameras fixed throughout the apartment complex, but the report includes no mention of it.
“The training that I have seen on domestic violence, not just in Florida but nationally, certainly you would want to see if there were any witnesses,” said Nina Zollo, legal counsel to the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence. “So based on the 911 call, there was a witness. That is pretty basic domestic violence training for officers.”
Florida law states that whether or not an arrest is made, officers must clearly indicate in their report that “the alleged offense was an incident of domestic violence.” They must then send the report to the designated domestic violence crisis center.
The department spokesman, Officer Northway, said the case was correctly reclassified as a “domestic disturbance” because officers had determined that it was only a “verbal argument.”
After viewing the police report, provided by The Times, the director of the designated crisis center in Tallahassee, Refuge House, said she believed that the episode should have been classified as domestic violence, with the report sent to her office.
“Refuge House has raised its concerns about this report to T.P.D. and is awaiting a full response,” the director, Meg Baldwin, said in a statement.
Ms. Baldwin said the episode pointed to broader concerns about domestic abuse involving Florida State football players.
“Victims of domestic violence at the hands of F.S.U. football players have come to us, believing that they can’t go to police, can’t get an injunction safely, can’t complain to F.S.U., can’t be seen anywhere near the F.S.U. victim advocate office, and face enormous risk to their safety, alone with an attacker who is physically massive and habituated to physical aggression,” she said. “None of these victims even filed a police report.”
In the January case, the officers may have been less than diligent in their investigation, but there was one item they did not neglect: notifying their supervisor, Sgt. David McCranie, “due to the fact that it was an F.S.U. football player.”
The sergeant was recently demoted after running two red lights and hollering at state troopers while off duty. He said he got carried away because he was excited about Florida State winning a big softball game against Michigan.
“Where I was, everybody was whooping and hollering,” he told internal affairs investigators. “The streets were busy. And I left, and as I passed the trooper, I whooped and hollered.”
Correction: October 10, 2014
An earlier version of this article misstated the street on which a driver fired a BB gun. It was West Tennessee Street, not West Tallahassee Street.
November 15, 2014
By Mike McIntire and Walt Bogdanich
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — In the early morning hours of Oct. 5, as this college town was celebrating another big football victory by Florida State University, a starting cornerback on the team drove his car into the path of an oncoming vehicle driven by a teenager returning home from a job at the Olive Garden.
Both cars were totaled. But rather than remain at the scene as the law requires, the football player, P. J. Williams, left his wrecked vehicle in the street and fled into the darkness along with his two passengers, including Ronald Darby, the team’s other starting cornerback.
The Tallahassee police responded to the off-campus accident, eventually reaching out to the Florida State University police and the university’s athletic department.
By the next day, it was as if the hit and run had never happened.
The New York Times looked into how the police handled the case, reviewing law enforcement records and interviewing witnesses, lawyers, the police and a university representative. The examination found that Mr. Williams, driving with a suspended license, had been given a break by the Tallahassee police, who initially labeled the accident a hit and run, a criminal act, but later decided to issue Mr. Williams only two traffic tickets. Afterward, the case did not show up in the city’s public online database of police calls — a technical error, the police said.
Mr. Williams eventually returned to the scene. But Tallahassee officers did not test him for alcohol. Nor did their report indicate whether they asked if he had been drinking or why he had fled — logical questions, since the accident occurred at 2:37 a.m. The report also minimized the impact of the crash on the driver of the other car, Ian Keith, by failing to indicate that his airbag had deployed — an important detail, because Mr. Keith said in an interview that the airbag had cut and bruised his hands.
The university police, who lacked jurisdiction, nevertheless sent two ranking officers — including the shift commander — to the scene. Yet they wrote no report about their actions that night. Florida State dismissed the role of its officers in the episode as too minor to require a report or to be entered into their own online police log, comparing it to an instance when campus officers responded to a baby opossum falling from a tree.
The car accident, previously unreported by the news media, comes amid heightened national scrutiny of preferential treatment given to athletes, including articles by The Times examining how the authorities have sometimes gone easy on Florida State football players accused of wrongdoing. The Tallahassee police conducted virtually no investigation of a 2012 rape accusation against quarterback Jameis Winston, the 2013 Heisman Trophy winner. Mr. Winston is scheduled for a student disciplinary hearing Dec. 1, nearly two years after the accusation was first made. He has denied sexually assaulting anyone.
Elijah Stiers, a lawyer from Miami who helped write a state law enacted this year that toughened penalties for hit-and-run drivers, said the basic facts of the Oct. 5 crash had warranted criminal charges and a sobriety test.
“Two-thirty in the morning, people fleeing on foot — at the very least you’ve got to charge them with hit and run,” he said, adding, “You don’t get out of it just because you come back to the scene.”
The Times also showed its findings to the Tallahassee police chief, Michael DeLeo, who said in an interview that the department would “conduct an investigation to determine what happened and whether the officers acted appropriately.” He added, “No one should be shown any favoritism.”
Florida State declined to make anyone available for an interview. In a series of written responses to questions, the university gave shifting answers, at one point saying, incorrectly, that Mr. Williams had driven his car home and that the Tallahassee police were required to call the campus police under a “mutual aid agreement.” A Tallahassee police spokesman said there was no policy requiring its officers to contact the university when its students committed traffic violations.
Neither Mr. Williams, named the most valuable defensive player in last season’s national championship game, nor Mr. Darby responded to a request for comment.
In their report on the crash, the Tallahassee officers justified not charging Mr. Williams because he returned “approximately” 20 minutes later without being contacted by the police. That stands in sharp contrast to how the police treated another driver who left the scene and drove home after a minor, low-speed accident in the same area late last month. That driver and his mother contacted the police about a half-hour later to report the accident.
At five miles per hour, the collision inflicted far less damage than that caused by Mr. Williams’s car — and caused no injuries. Even so, the police charged the driver, who was not a Florida State football player, with hit and run.
The Oct. 5 crash occurred shortly after 2:30 a.m., as Mr. Keith, 18, was driving home on West Tharpe Street from his job at the restaurant. A Buick Century heading the other way darted in front of him, attempting a left turn onto High Road. Mr. Keith hit the brakes, but it was too late: His Honda CR-V collided with the Buick, spinning it around. The Honda lurched to a halt a short distance down Tharpe, its front end crumpled, debris scattered around and fluid leaking onto the street.
Shaken, Mr. Keith got out and waited for the Tallahassee police, who arrived within minutes. An officer approached him with an unexpected question: Where were the occupants of the other car?
“That’s when I first realized they were gone,” Mr. Keith said.
More officers arrived, and tow trucks were called to remove the two disabled cars. An officer at the scene, Derek Hawthorne, filled out a form for the abandoned Buick, labeling the accident a “hit and run,” and asked that the car be held for processing as evidence. Officers ran a check on the license plate and found that it was registered to Mr. Williams’s grandmother in Ocala, Fla.
About a half-hour after the accident, the investigation took an odd turn. Another officer at the scene, Joseph Smith, discovered that the glass front door of a closed Exxon station at the corner of Tharpe and High was shattered, apparently from a break-in, according to his report. The gas station manager was called, and she replayed security camera video for the police showing a man breaking in and walking out with an armload of merchandise.
The video, obtained by The Times, also captured a poor-quality image of the accident. In it, the Buick containing the Florida State football players could be seen attempting the left turn onto High Road, in the direction of the Exxon station, just as the burglar was about to leave and walk toward High Road.
“They happened within seconds of each other,” said Karen Southern, the Exxon manager, adding that the police had mentioned the accident to her but had not said whether they believed there was any connection to the burglary. No evidence has surfaced to link the two, and the break-in remains unsolved.
Mr. Keith said one of the officers had asked him about the Exxon’s broken front door, and he replied that he had not noticed it. He said he believed that when the break-in was discovered — at 3:06 a.m., according to the police report — the football players had not yet returned, indicating that they could have been gone for at least half an hour.
At one point, Mr. Keith said, a football player — he did not know which one — apologized to him for fleeing and explained that they “had a lot on the line.” The player was “sort of rambling” until a female friend told him to stop talking, Mr. Keith said.
“She said to him, ‘Be quiet, you sound like you’ve been drinking,’ ” Mr. Keith said. “I remember that very clearly, because it surprised me that she would say it. But the way he was speaking, I definitely had suspicions about drinking.”
In the crash report, Officer Hawthorne indicated there was no suspected alcohol or drug use, and he issued Mr. Williams traffic tickets for an improper left turn and for “unknowingly” driving with a suspended license. On the form for the impounded Buick, the officer used a pen to cross out earlier notations indicating the car would be held as evidence, writing: “No hold no processing.”
Around 3:30 a.m., Mr. Williams, 21, called Mario Edwards Sr., director of player development for the football team, for a ride home, according to the university. The crash report said that both cars were disabled with damage that exceeded their estimated value. Mr. Keith got a lift home with a tow truck.
The Tallahassee police said officers had discretion in deciding when to press charges and issue citations. They provided The Times with seven other cases in which someone had hit a car and left the scene but had not been charged with hit and run.
A review of those cases, however, found that none were comparable in severity or circumstance to the Oct. 5 crash. Four of the accidents involved cars bumping into each other in parking lots, one other caused no damage, and the other two were very minor. In no case did a driver abandon a wrecked vehicle in the middle of the night and flee the scene after totaling someone else’s car. Notably, most of the seven crash reports contained far more narrative detail about what had happened than the report on the Oct. 5 accident did.
The role of the campus police in responding to the accident is especially unclear. That agency’s call logs indicated that the Tallahassee police had called at 3:38 a.m. seeking help in an “investigation.” Yet, a university spokesman said all the city police had wanted was an after-hours phone number for a football coach so they could tell him that two of his athletes had been in an accident; the campus police could not locate a phone number.
The two campus officers — Sgt. Roy Wiley, the shift commander, and Cpl. Greg Washington — decided on their own to drive to the crash scene to see whether they could help, but they were not needed, the university said.
University policy specifies that police reports “must be completed and submitted regarding actions taken by officers” in response to an “outside request for assistance.” Asked why the two officers had not filed a report, the university said they “were not involved in the investigation, didn’t make an arrest and their assist didn’t result in an arrest, citation or summons.”
The campus police chief, David L. Perry, said in a statement that he had reviewed the actions of his officers and had found that they behaved appropriately. “This was a routine matter of our agency responding to a simple request from T.P.D. and it was all together proper for our officers to go the scene,” he said in the statement.
As for Mr. Williams, court records showed that two days after the accident, he paid $296 in overdue fines, related to an earlier speeding ticket, in order to have his license reinstated. But the $392 in fines related to the Oct. 5 crash remained unpaid, and overdue, as of this week. As a result, his license was suspended again.
When Walt Bogdanich showed up in Tallahassee early last year, the Florida State University Seminoles and their fans were still celebrating their national championship, led by the arm and charisma of the quarterback Jameis Winston.
What drew Bogdanich to Florida was not Winston’s brilliance on the field, but an ugly episode off it: Winston had been accused of rape by a freshman. Just days before Winston won the Heisman Trophy, the local prosecutor announced he lacked enough evidence to charge him.
The Winston case was all but buried under the championship hoopla when Bogdanich began to dig. Although the prosecutor had hinted that the police could have done more to investigate, it wasn’t until Bogdanich had exhaustively re-examined the case that the full picture emerged: The police had conducted virtually no investigation at all.
Bogdanich’s April 16 article, “A Star Player Accused, and a Flawed Rape Investigation,” was the first in a yearlong investigation with Mike McIntire that exposed the corrosive damage from the staggering influence and wealth of powerhouse collegiate sports programs: Colleges and law enforcement agencies reflexively protect athletes accused of sexual assault and other crimes. The reporters revealed cases that were ignored, covered up or not properly investigated.
In the Winston case, detectives failed to follow obvious leads to witnesses. They failed to recover a cellphone recording of the sexual encounter or video from the bar where Winston met his accuser. They waited two weeks before even attempting to interview Winston — by telephone — after his accuser identified him. (He refused to talk, saying he was busy.) And they never obtained Winston’s DNA. Moreover, Bogdanich revealed, the lead detective, who had done private security work for the football team’s booster club, waited two months before writing his first report on the case. Then he prematurely suspended the investigation, claiming the accuser was refusing to cooperate, which her lawyer denied.
Bogdanich’s article was a bombshell. The Miami Herald called it “a damning investigation” showing how official “incompetence conveniently coincides with the interests of a college football program.” The Orlando Sentinel called on the governor to probe the “inept” police work. And the Tallahassee police department agreed to change how it handles sexual assault complaints. (The impact of this work is detailed in the Supplementary portion of this entry.)
Bogdanich and McIntire had broken ground on two alarming and related failures roiling higher education in America: sexual abuse and the refusal of officials to hold college football players to account.
A July 12 article by Bogdanich about accusations of rape against players on the undefeated football team at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York gave readers a detailed autopsy of one of the most opaque elements of the abuse epidemic: the way colleges adjudicate cases.
The article gave a disturbing account of scandalous bumbling. It included an on-the-record account from the accuser as well as unprecedented access to transcripts of a confidential disciplinary hearing. Players admitted lying and discussing their stories with the football coach before the hearing. Questioning by the hearing committee — which included the campus bookstore manager — was inept and at times ludicrous. The hearing took place before the rape exam results were known; two of the three panel members did not even see medical records that indicated the accuser had suffered recent trauma.
The unrivaled, on-the-record detail in Bogdanich’s article distinguished it from the anonymously sourced articles about campus assaults that have appeared across the country. For that reason, based on all the available measurements, that article drew more reaction than any other article in the series. Within hours, 23 Hobart students began an online petition drive that collected 120,000 signatures and called on Hobart to make major changes to its handling of such complaints (which it did). Within 48 hours, the article attracted nearly a million readers and 2,100 comments on The Times website.
It lit up Facebook and Twitter. And months later, after a Rolling Stone article on college rape was shown to be poorly sourced, Bogdanich’s account was cited by Poynter and The Times’s public editor as an example of how to report so serious an accusation.
Having laid bare the colleges’ amateurish handling, Bogdanich and McIntire revealed a new and profoundly troubling aspect of law enforcement. In two explosive articles, the reporters returned to Florida and uncovered case after case of the Tallahassee police displaying alarming leniency to Florida State football players accused of theft, domestic violence and other crimes. Police reports showed that officers scrupulously noted when the accused were football players, as if they were a protected class. Many officers, The Times found, supplemented their incomes by providing security at football games, tying the force and the team ever closer.
One egregious example of the skewed relationship between the police and the football team involved a serious hit-and-run accident last October. The star Florida State cornerback who caused the accident, which injured the other driver, fled the scene with a teammate. When they returned — joined by a Florida State athletic department official — the driver was not charged with hit and run, but was given two relatively minor traffic tickets. He was also not tested for alcohol even though the accident occurred at 2:30 on a Sunday morning after the team had celebrated yet another victory. The unpublicized accident did not show up on the department’s official logs.
When confronted with The Times’s reporting, the Tallahassee police chief ordered an internal investigation of the hit and run. It was the second internal investigation he had launched in response to the newspaper’s reporting.
The desire to cover up — rather than expose — problems on college campuses was never more evident than when the hit-and-run article was published online. Florida State fans went on the offensive and began a campaign to tag the article on Twitter as spam, temporarily blocking it from readers. But the story, like all the powerful reporting of Bogdanich and McIntire, could not be contained.
For their powerful work on the year’s most pressing issues, we are proud to nominate Walt Bogdanich and Mike McIntire for the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.
Winners
Prize Winner in National Reporting in 2015:
Carol D. Leonnig
For her smart, persistent coverage of the Secret Service, its security lapses and the ways in which the agency neglected its vital task: the protection of the president of the United States.
National Reporting
Finalists
Nominated as finalists in National Reporting in 2015:
Marisa Taylor, Jonathan Landay and Ali Watkins
For timely coverage of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on CIA torture, demonstrating initiative and perseverance in overcoming government efforts to hide the details.
The Jury
The Jury
David Shipley(Chair )
senior executive editor
Trif Alatzas
senior vice president and executive editor
Mary Elson
managing editor
Brian McGrory
editor
Terri Thompson
director, Knight-Bagehot Fellowships in Economics and Business Journalism
Winners in National Reporting
David Philipps
For expanding the examination of how wounded combat veterans are mistreated, focusing on loss of benefits for life after discharge by the Army for minor offenses, stories augmented with digital tools and stirring congressional action.
Lisa Song, Elizabeth McGowan and David Hasemyer
For their rigorous reports on flawed regulation of the nation's oil pipelines, focusing on potential ecological dangers posed by diluted bitumen (or "dilbit"), a controversial form of oil.
David Wood
For his riveting exploration of the physical and emotional challenges facing American soldiers severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan during a decade of war.
Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein
For their exposure of questionable practices on Wall Street that contributed to the nation's economic meltdown, using digital tools to help explain the complex subject to lay readers.
2015 Prize Winners
Anthony Doerr
An imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.
Julia Wolfe
A powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the 20th Century.
Stephen Adly Guirgis
A nuanced, beautifully written play about a retired police officer faced with eviction that uses dark comedy to confront questions of life and death.
David I. Kertzer
An engrossing dual biography that uses recently opened Vatican archives to shed light on two men who exercised nearly absolute power over their realms.