Investigators looking into official misconduct at Penn State University are examining the school’s handling of allegations against the actor and film-maker Nate Parker, the New York Times has reported.
Parker was a member of the wrestling team at Penn State when, in 1999, he was accused of rape. He was acquitted and the conviction of his college roommate, Jean Celestin, was later overturned. In 2012, the woman who made the allegations killed herself.
Details of the accusation and subsequent events resurfaced during the promotion of The Birth of a Nation, Parker’s recently released film about the 1831 slave revolt led by Nat Turner, on which Celestin has a writing credit.
Three former Penn State officials are being prosecuted on charges that they failed to report allegations of child molestation by former football coach Jerry Sandusky. Parker has “no direct connection to the criminal case against the university officials and he faces no legal problems”, the Times wrote.
The office of the Pennsylvania attorney general, the newspaper said, is considering whether the way in which the university handled accusations against Parker “suggests a broader pattern of inaction by the athletic department when it came to complaints of sexual misconduct”.
Parker was suspended from the wrestling team as a result of the rape charge, then reinstated in 2000 while facing trial, the Times wrote.
“Within weeks, a female student trainer complained that he had exposed himself to her,” the report said. “But after she decided not to go to the police, despite the urging of the university, Penn State appears to have dropped the matter.”
Parker later transferred to the University of Oklahoma.
The student trainer said that while she gave him a back treatment, Parker turned to her and exposed part of his genitals. The woman said she then met Tim Curley, a former Penn State athletic director and one of the administrators now being prosecuted, and other officials. She was encouraged to report the incident to the police, she said, though she chose not to.
“That meeting appears to have been the end of the issue for Penn State,” the Times wrote, adding that a lawyer for Curley declined to comment.
Parker’s lawyer told the Times this was the first he had heard of the accusation by the student trainer, which he said was “completely untrue”.
Parker has spoken about the rape accusation, which he has said was false and arising from a consensual encounter. In August, he told Ebony Magazine his definition of consent had changed since the incident. In September, he told 60 Minutes he did not feel guilty about what happened. Earlier this month, he criticized the way the media has covered the story.
His initial comments on the situation, in which he said the accusation and trial were “the most painful … moments in my life” and said he could “imagine it was painful for everyone”, met with criticism, defaced posters and a postponed screening.
Those comments came from a “standpoint of ignorance”, he later said.
