Title IX investigators at Michigan State University have cleared three former basketball players who were accused of sexually assaulting a female student, ESPN reported Friday.
The woman, Bailey Kowalski, came forward publicly this spring about the incident she said happened in April 2015 at a player's apartment. The Title IX investigation was launched after she filed a Title IX lawsuit against the university in 2018.
ESPN said investigators questioned Kowalski's credibility because she possibly misidentified one of the players. They concluded in a 39-page report that a "preponderance of the evidence" did not support that the three players she originally named had violated the university sexual misconduct policy, according to ESPN.
Kowalski's attorney, Karen Truszkowski, did not immediately return a message left Friday by the Free Press.
According to ESPN, two of the accused players claimed the sex they had with Kowalski was consensual. They said the third person who Kowalski identified as being with them was actually a different person, ESPN reported. The third player she named denied being at the apartment that night, according to the report.
In an interview this week with ESPN's Outside the Lines, Kowalski said while it is possible she misidentified the third man, that should not invalidate her account of what the other two did. She said she plans to appeal the decision.
"I'm enraged because of the fact that they said they were there," Kowalski told Outside the Lines. "It's not like my credibility is, like, 'Oh, she doesn't even know who did it.' Because two of them did say it was them."
Kowalski never reported the alleged assault to police or campus officials. She said in her lawsuit that university counselors discouraged her from doing so once she told them that basketball players were involved.
Kowalski was known only as "Jane Doe" _ the name used in her lawsuit _ until this past April, when she held a press conference in East Lansing. Then a senior, Kowalski said she didn't want to walk across the stage at graduation without speaking up about what happened to her.
"If I didn't (speak out), I would be neglecting other victims and leaving them behind," Kowalski said. "Knowing I can be there for somebody right now, knowing there are women and men who exist as survivors, I look forward to being their support system if they do not have one.
"They do not have to be silenced, this isn't a burden they have to carry on their own."
