Ex-Baylor football coach Art Briles and other former athletic officials tried to keep misconduct by football players under the radar, a new court filing alleged Thursday, a day after the disgraced coach abruptly dropped his libel suit against school officials.
The filing, which came in response to a lawsuit by a former assistant athletic director, includes damning texts between Briles and other athletics officials as they dealt with multiple allegations against football players between 2011 and 2015.
When a female student-athlete reported that a football player had brandished a gun at her, the court paperwork said, Briles texted an assistant coach: "what a fool _ she reporting to authorities."
In another case, where a masseuse asked the team to discipline a player who reportedly exposed himself and asked for favors during a massage, the document said Briles' first response was, "What kind of discipline ... She a stripper?"
The filing also laid out the athletic department's response to allegations of gang rape by football players, including when a student-athlete told her coach that five football players had raped her at an off-campus party. Then-Athletics Director Ian McCaw took a list of names to Briles, who said, "Those are some bad dudes. Why was she around those guys?" He also suggested the woman tell the police, according to the filing.
Defense lawyers accuse Briles of creating an atmosphere that allowed wrongdoing by players _ from underage drinking to sexual assault _ to go unnoticed. "The football program was a black hole into which reports of misconduct such as drug use, physical assault, domestic violence, brandishing of guns, indecent exposure and academic fraud disappeared," the court filing said.
The paperwork was filed on behalf of several Baylor officials, including school regents and the interim university president, who were sued for libel by former assistant athletic director for football operations Colin Shillinglaw this week.
The narrative offered the most detailed account yet of how Baylor officials responded to the sexual assault scandal that has rocked the school.
Baylor officials were reluctant to catalog their response to the scandal for fear of violating the law or the privacy of survivors, their attorney said. But he said an onslaught of lawsuits and public pressure from major university donors compelled them to release more information.
"They were shocked and hurt and stunned as regents of the university," attorney Rusty Hardin of Houston said of the regents' response to the scandal. "But they were also fathers whose daughters may be Baylor students ... They have been driven by point one, by the first moment, to make sure they did what was right."
Briles' attorney did not immediately return a request for comment.
Shillinglaw's lawyer called the filing "very unorthodox" in an email late Thursday. "We look forward to the complete truth being revealed, instead of a bunch of disconnected accusations," Gaines West said.
Briles' dropped lawsuit and the new information from regents came just days after a Baylor sexual assault survivor sued the school, alleging that 31 football players committed at least 52 acts of rape between 2011 and 2014, an estimate that far exceeded what regents told The Wall Street Journal in October.
Regents said then that 19 football players had been accused of sexual or physical assault, including four alleged gang rapes, since 2011.
Hardin said regents came up with that number based on Pepper Hamilton's findings, newspaper stories and lawsuits. But Pepper Hamilton's probe was not meant to be exhaustive and did not tally every sexual assault reported.
Instead, the court filing said, the law firm did a "stress test" of Baylor's response to sexual assault complaints, which included analyzing particular cases and interviewing some victims.
Pepper Hamilton first presented their findings to regents, who govern the school, during an all-day meeting on May 2. What they had found "stunned" and "deeply saddened" the regents, to the point that several "openly wept as they tried to absorb what they were hearing," the court document said.
The law firm described a widespread mishandling of sexual assault cases, which included a university-wide failure to implement Title IX, the federal law that requires universities to proactively prevent sexual violence on campus, and a culture that blamed victims. In essence: "Institutional failures at every level."
Pepper Hamilton had planned to take six months to create a lengthy written report, but after that meeting, regents decided they needed to respond much more quickly. The law firm's investigative team then went to Waco to deliver a 10-hour oral presentation to the full board of regents on May 11 and 12, according to the filing.
By late May, the university had taken sweeping action. Briles was fired. McCaw, the athletic director, was asked to resign. Other athletic staffers, including Shillinglaw, were pushed out. The sanctions flowed all the way to the top: Then-university president Ken Starr was demoted and eventually ousted altogether.
Still, critics complained about a lack of transparency from the board of regents and suggested that higher ups with culpability still remained at the university.
Hardin defended his clients Thursday: "The regents did the only thing they could have done."
