Episode 181: LSU’s Mishandling of Sexual and Dating Violence
Last Monday USA Today released an investigative report by Kenny Jacoby, Nancy Armour, and BIAD’s own Jessica Luther on LSU’s mishandling of sexual and dating violence, inside the athletic department and beyond. On this week’s episode, Brenda, Lindsay, and Jessica discuss the report -- and what it should prompt in terms of university responses. [4:05] And, as always, you’ll hear the Burn Pile [37:36], Torchbearers, [46:29], and what is good in our worlds [47:51].
This episode was produced by Martin Kessler. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is a member of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Links
LSU mishandled sexual misconduct complaints against students, including top athletes: https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/sports/ncaaf/2020/11/16/lsu-ignored-campus-sexual-assault-allegations-against-derrius-guice-drake-davis-other-students/6056388002
LSU promises review of Title IX policies, faces calls for resignations, after USA TODAY investigation: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/11/17/lsu-promises-review-title-ix-policies-faces-calls-resignations-sexual-misconduct-guice-investigation/6327647002
LSU censored Derrius Guice’s name in recently released police report; USA TODAY sues for full record: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/11/18/lsu-continues-stonewall-woman-sexual-misconduct-case/3766529001
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards 'deeply troubled' after LSU investigation, urges a thorough review: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/11/19/louisiana-gov-deeply-troubled-lsu-scandal-after-usa-today-report/6347922002
Hundreds of LSU students protest the university's mishandling of sexual misconduct complaints: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/11/20/hundreds-protest-lsus-mishandling-sexual-misconduct-reports/6364537002
Transcript
Brenda: It’s Brenda here, and I’m joined by Jessica and Lindsay. Welcome to Burn It All Down. It’s the feminist sports podcast you need. On this week’s show we’re gonna be talking about an important story that came out of Louisiana State University, where the administrators in the sports program and beyond thwarted Title IX.
Jessica: It is definitely true that there’s a different way we talk about this. I’m not sure that that’s necessarily changing the way people are acting around this…
Brenda: But before that, I just wanna ask really quickly – it’s Thanksgiving week, happy Thanksgiving. What non-obvious petty shit are you thankful for? Meaning, don’t give me friends and family! Don’t give me co-hosts! [Lindsay laughing] Give me something that makes you happy that is not so actually important. Jess?
Jessica: Yeah, so, #1 is Oreos. I’ve been eating my fair share of Oreos during quarantine. Then #2, this week I put on a pair of jeans for the first time in I don’t even know how long, and it just made me so thankful for all of my elastic waistband pants that I have and normally wear. [laughter]
Brenda: I thought you were going in another direction!
Jessica: Nope!
Brenda: Like you were gonna be, “Oh, it was so good to put on pants!”
Jessica: It was not. [laughter]
Lindsay: It’s never good to button pants. Buttoning pants is never good.
Brenda: You heard it here –stay in your elastic waistband clothing. What about you, Linz?
Lindsay: So, I think I’ve told listeners that I’ve been mainly vegetarian since May, and so that makes things like drive-throughs a little difficult because there’s not that much. So what I’m thankful for while I’m going back and forth between DC and North Carolina and running all around Greensboro are Bojangles’ egg biscuits, because you can get them any time of the day because they do biscuits any time of the day. If you don’t know what Bojangles is, I’m sorry that you’ve lived such a horrible life. [laughter] But I just love that it’s this deliciousness that doesn’t stop at 10:30 that I can get on my way, and also online shopping and also makeup. I love all of these things.
Brenda: Nice, nice. Mine is Toaster Strudel. I had no idea that they continued to make Toaster Strudels, but I remember I was a kid, and you know when you’re like, well, if anybody kind of grew up kind of working class and were told that even working class stuff was too expensive…I remember my grandparents being like, that is the Cadillac of Pop-Tarts. [Jessica laughing] You cannot just go out there and get yourself a Toaster Strudel, right? So I coveted these things. I don’t know why I thought of it the other day, I was like, I should go out and buy all the things that my middle class ascension can provide, like Clearly Canadian seltzer water. So I bought Toaster Strudels and I think they’re amazing and I’m so grateful that that trash gets made still.
Jessica: Is that the one where you put your own icing on?
Brenda: YES! Yes! You can try to make you name, or you can spread it with a knife…There’s so much artistic creativity. I mean, you’re a baker.
Jessica: Yeah.
Brenda: You must really feel the Toaster Strudels. [laughs]
Jessica: I love Toaster Strudel. I feel you, for sure.
Brenda: Especially strawberry. Especially strawberry. Alright, well happy Thanksgiving to everybody out there. Okay, so I would like to issue a trigger warning for sexual and dating violence for this next topic. A reminder that there are timestamps, so you can always fast forward and skip what you need.
Last week USA Today ran a series of stories sort of spearheaded by a main one, which is titled LSU mishandled sexual misconduct complaints against students, including top athletes, and that was by Kenny Jacoby, Nancy Armour, and our own Jessica Luther. So I’m really excited and I feel really privileged that we have her on the show already. The articles begin by looking into two separate rape allegations against running back Derrius Guice who played at LSU from 2015-2017. These allegations came from other student athletes, and as the report says, “At each step of the way, LSU officials either doubted the women’s stories, didn’t investigate, or didn’t call the police, allowing Guice to continue his football career.” The story has prompted the governor’s ire and student and faculty protests, and I wanted to talk with Jessica both about the process of the piece, the piece itself, and about what we can think that some investigative report like this should prompt in terms of university responses. So, Jessica, I wanted to ask what your takeaway is from the piece was, in terms of…Was the idea that you were gonna put forth something that was particularly new, you were gonna reiterate what’s going on in terms of campus rape culture all the time, and try to shed some extra light on it? I mean, how different is LSU from any other program out there – or are they?
Jessica: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’ll say it feels really familiar. I mean, I’ve been doing this work for the last 7 years and there’s a lot of echoing that’s happening here. One thing that has been different…The analogy that I keep using is when you use a pressure cooker and then you have to release the steam afterwards, and it’s super intense and almost scary. That’s what it’s been like since we reported, the response has been incredible in a way that I haven’t really experienced before. We were definitely hitting on something that lots of people feel like they understood, but didn’t have an outlet for, like no one had told the story before and it needed to be told. So I think one of the big takeaways for us, and this was really important to us, was to make sure that we said that this was a university-wide problem. It’s definitely about football and athletics in particular; we found that there were at least 9 football players who were reported for sexual misconduct and dating violence since Coach Orgeron took over the team just four years ago, and one particularly terrible case around wide receiver Drake Davis who continually beat his girlfriend, who was also a tennis player.
Let’s really note over and over again how many athletes were harmed here when we think about how the school responded. but in the Drake Davis case seven – SEVEN, SEVEN – LSU officials knew about this, and some really sat on it before anything actually happened. So that included both of the tennis coaches, Mike and Julia Sell, they’re a married couple; assistant football coach Mickey Joseph, and deputy athletic director Verge Ausberry, right? So, very top people. They’ve all denied all of this. So it’s interesting in that one thing LSU has said is they’ve hired this outside law firm, Husch Blackwell, to come in and look at their policies and their procedures around Title IX and how they handle reports of sexual and dating violence. But one of the things that these women have said to us is that the policies were there, just no one was doing anything with them. That’s not uncommon necessarily, but that was an interesting part of this. It’s often like, let’s just fix the procedure and then everything will be better. This really does feel like a cultural issue and indifference to these reports, and again, university-wide. So the article’s definitely about football but we made sure there’s a whole story about a fraternity member who’s been reported, and we’ve heard stories from across campus since we’ve published this. So, a huge problem there.
Brenda: Does it feel any different than the culture at Baylor, for example?
Jessica: Baylor’s such a specific case because it’s Baptist, and so there’s a whole different flavor there, so in this sense…How to put it? One thing with this is I actually personally wondered if people would care, because it was LSU and we have this idea that D1 footballs schools like LSU – they won the national championship last year – that they're just like this, and this is kind of normal. Baylor was different, I mean, I didn’t expect that story to blow up in the way that it did, but there’s this idea of this Baptist culture built around the church, there’s an idea that they care about their community. So, I don’t know…Yeah, is it different? I don’t know. It’s so similar, right? It’s hard to know. I think that the way the campuses operate are very different and the communities that they bring in, but I’ll say I was genuinely surprised that people cared this much about this story.
Brenda: Another question I wanted to ask you is sort of connected to that, is at the same time there was this story about Colorado State…
Jessica: Yeah, and I think that’s interesting. So, this week The Coloradoan…I’m sorry, I think that’s how you say it. It’s the newspaper I guess out of Fort Collins, which is where Colorado State is – and also a USA Today paper, so I saw it on the USA Today site. But yeah, they had athletes come forward really recently, so this week there was a huge report about it, and it’s very similar stuff, I’ll say. It’s administrators repeatedly failing to notify the university’s Title IX compliance office within 24 hours after a reported incident, that they delayed the investigation by doing multiple interviews over and over again, and attempting to persuade people not to file stuff in order to make it go away. There’s just a mistrust with it around that entire process at this point. It’s not unlike LSU but it’s not on fire in the same way that the LSU story was. I think that part of this work will never stop being strange to me, like, when this stuff hits and when it doesn’t, what we care about and what we don’t.
Lindsay: One thing that really got me about this incredible work that you all did, Jess, is we’ve heard so much in the past 3 years about this Me Too era, right? It reminds me about how in the sports world it was like, well, Ray Rice is gonna change everything, right? It certainly made the conversation louder, certainly.
Jessica: Yeah.
Lindsay: Then we had the Me Too movement a few years ago, and when that happened I was in the middle of reporting on Derrick Rose and the Nassar case and all of these big cases for ThinkProgress. I think maybe a part of me thought, well, maybe this stuff was happening before Me Too and maybe there will be some change. All you heard was we were having a societal reckoning, and that that was gonna fix some things, right? Awareness is bigger than it was when Ray Rice first happened, when you were first reporting on Baylor. But then we get these pieces – what’s happening in Colorado State, what’s happening at LSU – and it feels like we’re back at square one sometimes, it just feels like we’re having the same battles over and over again, and if the Overton window is moving it’s in centimeters, you know? We’re just not pressing forward. So I guess from your perspective…I haven’t done any of this reporting in a couple of years. Did you notice any change in sources and how they were able to come forward in any of your conversations since the greater Me Too movement at large?
Jessica: That’s such a great question because one thing that I definitely noticed this week was that a lot of people were saying, “I thought stuff was better since Baylor,” which, of course, I paid a lot of attention to how people talked about Baylor and I was like, oh my gosh, this is wild that everyone just assumed that everything was better now, right? [Lindsay laughs] Yeah, this is interesting. So, Nancy and Kenny published a piece about Derrius Guice back in August, which they published a few weeks after Guice was kicked off the Washington NFL team for domestic violence. Then they had this report about the two reported rapes against Guice, and then that caused some disclosure, right? So, people contacting them with more stories, and I had also contacted them to just say they had done a really good job on that piece and I’ve known Kenny and Nancy for a long time.
So they brought me on to this with them, and so there was a lot of work of just…We contacted a lot of student athletes at LSU, and there was actually just a lot of silence. It was kind of fascinating how silent it was. I can’t say why that is, because you can’t ever explain the thing you don’t talk to people about, but you do wonder if there’s kind of a clampdown on how these things are talked about, if there was any kind of pressure involved there, which…Maybe that’s a result of Baylor as well, right? It’s the other side of it. There’s an idea that things are getting better, but maybe departments are getting less likely to talk. One thing that was super interesting about LSU, and we definitely wrote about this multiple times, is how hard it was to access anything. USA Today, alongside one of the victims, is suing LSU right now for documents that they’ve asked for. It took months to get stuff, things were weirdly redacted, like, they redacted the names of public employees, not just students. It was just a really difficult process. They wouldn’t let us interview anyone. We gave them I think we said four dozen questions, and they never answered any of those.
So, things aren’t getting better, right? It is definitely true that there's a different way we talk about this, but I’m not sure that that is necessarily changing the way people are acting around this. That’s something that I say a lot, that I think the system is set up to encourage people to make bad choices. When you’re talking about big money, big stages, all of that sort of stuff, that until the system itself is somehow changed – which, I don’t know how that will happen – people are gonna continue to make bad choices that often look like and are indifferent to these kinds of reports.
Lindsay: And I think it goes to just societal changes vs individual personal changes, right? When does one bleed into the next? You know, when you’ve been assaulted or harassed or made to feel threatened, when you’re within this world that idolized your abuser, that doesn’t necessarily make it easier for you to come forward, right? You still have to go through all the steps to come forward, right, and maybe I think it’s like that in all cases no matter kind of what type of trauma you’re going through. Sometimes that gets lost when we say things like “the post-Me Too era” – I think what that does is first of all it acts like a hashtag is this magical thing, but also I think it takes away all of the different individuals who make all of these different decisions that contribute to this environment, and how hard that is to change and how the impetus for that to change, the responsibility for that to change is still on survivors. I think something that I hoped was that the Me Too era…I kind of hate saying that, but you all know what I mean. Like, that that would make people in charge feel more like they needed to step up more, right?
Jessica: Yeah, like they’re scrutinized.
Lindsay: Right. That they’re being scrutinized, that they needed to be more transparent, you know what I mean? That they needed to act more, that the responsibility for this would stop falling squarely on the victims’ shoulders, and I don’t feel like that shift has happened yet.
Jessica: Yeah. Again, I’ll reiterate that a lot of people who came forward or were harmed, that we know were harmed, were other athletes. We’ve talked about this a lot on this show, but athletics and college departments, especially when you’re a D1 major football program, they’re so siloed, right? So these people are coming forward…I feel like it was LSU where they got a brand-new locker room on the same week that their library flooded, and everyone’s like, oh, it’s clear what counts here. The students are hyper-aware of that too, right? So I do wanna just reiterate that this is a LSU-wide problem, that they in general don’t handle Title IX…Well, there’s issues with Title IX itself, is kind of part of what we found. But I definitely…Yeah, the idea that people can just come forward and that something has changed dramatically in a way that makes it easier to come forward is not true. It’s still incredibly difficult, it’s still very scary for a lot of these people. People we talked to, they don’t want their names in there. We had multiple women that we talked to, and they’re anonymous in the piece, disclose publicly within days because they were so shocked that the support was so positive, which should tell you a lot about…And they’re right to be shocked, honestly.
Brenda: I mean, we have to think that this starts at the high school level as well, like, you see the kind of cultural capital that football has in the south. They’ve already seen it play out in their high schools, so why would they think that the colleges are any different? And siloing has the effect of, you know, these athletes could’ve gone to professors. You could, you could go to feminist campus resources which exist, but because they’re also siloed as student athletes academically their go-to person in their mind is probably gonna be someone from the athletic department.
Jessica: Right, and they’ve been taught that these people will help them, right? Jennifer Freyd and other professors out of Oregon talked – and I probably mentioned this on the show that there’s a phenomenon called institutional betrayal, where when an institution that you expect to protect you does not you feel a certain kind of pain. That’s different, but also important. So yeah, I can see telling your coach, the person that you trust probably more than most, and then watch them not care enough about you…I can’t say enough about how shocking the violence of the Drake Davis case is, and he pleaded to this, so we can talk about it that way, like, it happened and he said it did. It’s just mind-boggling that they sat around and watched this happen without intervening in a way to protect her. I mean, it hurts me and it makes me emotional now and I’ve known this story for a long time.
Lindsay: One of the things I always think about, and this came out in 2018, was there was an incident with the University of Maryland and the headline here that I wrote for ThinkProgress – I didn’t do the initial reporting on this, this was the Washington Post – but it was a student accused two football players of sexual assault and Maryland paid the legal fees of the accused. This is all within the athletic department because the student was…I don’t know if she was an athlete but she was working for the athletic department or associated with the athletic department in some way, and so this department that was supposed to be hers too, part of her home base, was paying the legal fees for the football players she was accusing of sexual assaulting her. I think this happens more than we know. That only came out because of an investigation into Jordan McNair’s death.
Jessica: Right!
Lindsay: This came out as part of the investigation into Jordan McNair’s death, which was totally unrelated to this but it was looking at institutional failures. I’ve always thought things like this happen so much more, and reading in your story, Jess, and from conversations I’ve had with other female athletes – things like weight rooms, right, that all of the athletes are supposed to have access to these facilities like weight rooms and training staff, things like this. When your abuser is in there and has priority in these spaces, the lack of safety that you feel, and when that is just reinforced by those in charge it’s devastating.
Brenda: I wanna shift gears a little bit to talk about ways in which we might rectify this or ways to think about going forward. You know, as a person who’s a university professor, who’s a lifer in a university, I think it is a special place. If there's not gonna be a reckoning with this at universities there’s not gonna be a reckoning anywhere. These are public institutions. We pay into them, we think they’re civically important, we think they’re bedrocks of democracy. It’s not enough to just say “fuck this shit” – that’s not helpful, in terms of thinking through…Universities are a good thing in general. But here we see they’re doing very very bad things. Whether you’re hiring a lawyer, whatever. These are the highest public paid employees in these states. The average public employee in the state of Louisiana makes around $50,000 – that is nothing compared to the power of these athletic departments, and those football coaches will make more than the governor, will make more than the president of the university.
Jessica: Can I just add, Brenda, that a lot of the time when you talk to these people who’ve been harmed, yeah, they agree with you that the university is a really important space and their education is really important and that's so much of what they want, is just to go to school without being scared.
Brenda: As someone that has handled as a professor quite a lot of Title IX cases, I’ll tell you, the majority of what the survivors want is to be able to go to school without running into the people involved in their assault. That is almost always what they want.
Jessica: Yes, the asks are often pretty small, and that’s part of it too, is it’s like, just do the small thing! They’re…Yeah. [Brenda groans] Sometimes I’m shocked by how little they’re asking for and how that can’t even be met.
Brenda: I have to say that this is coming at the same time that there’s a denigration of faculty over the last years, there’s a denigration of investigative journalism, and what we saw in the Nassar case, what we see in this case and what you all did at USA Today, what we’ve seen is how important it is to pressure from without. It scares me to see both those things happening over the last 10 years. Since 2009 Louisiana State has cut 500 faculty positions – 500! So if we think that the argument that I’m about to make, which I’ve made a thousand times before, which is: you need faculty governance if you’re gonna overhaul athletic departments. We saw this at Rutgers, we’ve seen it at other places. It’s the only thing that really…Those tenured professors who have the protection can go after these administrators, but when you have fired 500 positions at a place like Louisiana State that is an active way that you are sabotaging that kind of accountability. That is just obvious right there. So I guess I wanna ask for other ideas or other solutions that you think…I mean, Title IX isn't perfect but it’s certainly really really important, and it seems like from these stories that’s not what’s wrong.
Jessica: Right, no. I mean, they had policies that, had they followed, it would’ve been better. I’m not gonna say it would’ve been good, because we’ve seen all kinds of ways that the implementation of Title IX has been difficult and harmful to people at all kinds of universities all over the place, but certainly the policies were there. So I mean, I think this is the hardest part, right? The how to fix part is the hardest, because it really does feel like in the LSU case – and this is true in lots of cases – that there is some kind of cultural issue and how you shift culture is so different. So you can put the policies in front of people all you want, but if they’re not going to follow them…And part of why they don't follow them is because they don't have to, like, accountability is lost here, no one’s paying attention. I mean, the media…We had to do the work that we did in order for this to happen, and I will say just credit to USA Today on this. I’ve never worked on a team like this before. There were the three reporters – there's actually a fourth reporter, a local, who did additional reporting for us. Then throughout the process there were always at least two if not three editors on every editorial meeting, and at one point there were four. It was just a huge team of people working very hard to get this story out, and I never experienced that before. Like, I never worked on a team where an option was to sue for documents! And they just did it. It was really something to see what can be done when you do have the kind of resources here. You mentioned Nassar, which was also a USA Today paper that broke all of that wide open. So, yeah, more money for more outside scrutiny, maybe? I don’t know. But yeah, the how-to, I don’t know. Lindsay, do you have any ideas on this?
Lindsay: People have to be held accountable, and I do not mean the abusers here. I mean there has to be a system where the people in positions of power are held accountable for the actions of the people they’re supposed to be in charge of. I know it gets messy and I know that everyone wants to say that there’s nothing you can do, and everyone wants to say I don’t know and everyone wants to say this is just stuff that will happen, and how can we be in charge of it? But we have to hold people accountable. I just keep thinking back to Nassar and to what we saw in the roundabout of trying to find accountability for the abuse he inflicted.
In case you all don’t know, just very briefly – Larry Nassar was the former Michigan State doctor and USA Gymnastics doctor who sexually abused hundreds, probably thousands of people under the guise of medical treatment during his time at Michigan State and with USA Gymnastics. He had an office at Michigan State and he treated a lot of athletes, not just gymnasts, but a lot of people throughout the athletic department. There was the NCAA…First of all, I’ll never forget when all the testimonies were coming out, the victim impact statements of the Nassar survivors were being read in a courtroom in Michigan, and during that time Mark Emmert, the president of the NCAA, was asked about this, right? He said, “I don’t have enough information on the details of what transpired at the school right now.” That was his statement, while…Watch the victim impact statements!
Jessica: Yeah.
Lindsay: Literally the whole world is seeing information come out.
Jessica: We all had a lot of information at that point, yeah.
Lindsay: There was too much information, honestly! I was on information overload. So then the NCAA does open up an investigation. Lansing State Journal reported that Michigan State itself sent a letter to the NCAA notifying them that Nassar, under the guise of medical treatment, sexually assaulted at least 25 Michigan State student athletes – that’s their phrasing, we know we hate that phrasing – between 1997 and 2016, including six since 2014 when Michigan State botched its initial Title IX investigation into Nassar’s abuse. This is Michigan State saying this to the NCAA! However, Michigan State said in the letter that despite all of this no violations of NCAA rules occurred with regard to the criminal conduct of Dr. Larry Nassar, and the NCAA ultimately agreed!
Brenda: Yeah, well they’re right! They’re right!
Jessica: Yup.
Lindsay: This is the thing! It’s just infuriating. We have to find a way for the people in charge to be held accountable for this rampant abuse or else they’re never gonna care. I think that’s what I realized. They’re literally never ever going to care because being able to say “I don’t know about this” – why are they afraid of giving the tiniest punishments to these athletes, right? Because then they have to admit that they know about it, right?
Jessica: Yes.
Lindsay: And they’re afraid that if they admit that they know about it then they’re gonna be held responsible for it on a bigger level. Everything they do is to be able to say, “I didn’t know about this, I don’t wanna know about this. I am not responsible for this in any way.” That’s what has to stop.
Jessica: I’ll just say, can I just add very quickly that one of the other things around Baylor that’s happened this week in the conversation is people keep bringing up Art Briles being fired, right? And I really just feel like he’s the exception that proves the rule, that you don’t get fired.
Brenda: Yeah.
Jessica: So we are always mentioning him because he’s the one that exists out there. One of the things about Baylor is that he to this day, Art Briles says he doesn’t know about any of this stuff and he set up a system so that he would not know. Maybe that’s true, but I honestly don’t know. Either way, I know what people think. But even that, he’s saying I didn’t know because I didn’t want to know and I made sure that I would be safe from that. What even to say about the NCAA?
Brenda: Well, I’m absolutely good with just getting rid of the NCAA.
Jessica: Yeah, yeah.
Brenda: So I think we can say that’s a dead end, that we’re real clear on the purpose of the NCAA, which was created by President Teddy Roosevelt, which is enough said, okay? It was never intended to–
Jessica: I love that Brenda just brought some Teddy Roosevelt slander! [laughs]
Brenda: Yeah. Yeah. Fuck Teddy Roosevelt! He’s one of my least favorite Roosevelts. I mean, you’ve gotta be kidding me! [Lindsay laughing] This was an organization designed to keep college football going even when people were just dying on the field.
Jessica: Yes, yup.
Brenda: So this is an organization that’s just inherently problematic. I just would like to say that if we have to give up on hearts and minds if what Linz just said is true, right, that you keep wanting people to care and they just aren’t, then I feel like you have to go after wallets and reputation, and the way that you do it – hello faculty out there, I’m sorry if you were picked last in gym class and you hate sports, you have to get involved because it’s a student issue. What you do is you press to get on these committees – and there are these committees! – and if you get on them and if a full faculty meeting pressures the president to make these people accountable, they will have to be. They will. I know it’s a lot to ask of faculty because we’re already being asked so much, but I just think that’s one way to go and I think all this investigative helps give them the case in their laps to make. They don’t even need to do that research because people like Jessica Luther have done it. So I just wanna say congratulations and thank you to you and your collaborators for an amazing piece of work. I know it’s hard but I hope you get some satisfaction and that people are responding.
Jessica: Absolutely. We’ve heard from a lot of people who are very thankful that this story now exists and speaks to the experiences that they’ve had and makes them feel seen, and that’s always the thing that makes you do it again.
Brenda: Now it’s time for everybody’s favorite part of the show, where we take all the garbage in sports for the week and put it on the burn pile. Linz, whatcha got?
Lindsay: So, last week Jess burned the story of tennis player Alex Zverev, his ex-girlfriend Olya Sharapova has come forward about horrific domestic violence. Ben Rothenberg at Racquet magazine has reported extensively on this. Part of that burn was just also the tennis community’s silence. Well, one tennis player decided to say something this week. It was the ATP finals, the last event of the year, and Novak Djokovic, #1 player in the world, after he had been in a press conference after playing Zverev in the round robin portion, he was asked in a press conference about this abuse. He knew about this abuse – any hint that he didn’t know about this abuse was taken away, because he was asked about it in the press conference. Then Djokovic takes to Twitter to post a photo of himself hugging Zverev and the caption here is, “Always a pleasure sharing the court with you Sasha @AlexZverev. Great ending of the season for you. Best wishes in what awaits you on and off the court. Stay strong.” You are not gonna tell me that that is not as close as you can get to saying “ignore all the bullshit allegations, you are fine, fuck the haters.”
Jessica: Yes. Yes.
Lindsay: That’s what that basically said! “#DontBelieveWomen #NotAllMen” – basically that’s what that says. I’m sorry if anyone is pretending. You did not have to send this message, you did not have to mention best wishes “off the court.” [laughs] You did not have to mention “stay strong” if you felt like just saying this. So this is just infuriating that this is what the leader of the sport has done. It’s infuriating that the sport itself has been so silent and once again I’m just disgusted by the enabling and the way that people will rally around people when they have been accused of horrific abuse as if they themselves are the victims and as if women coming forward are the problem. Burn.
All: Burn.
Brenda: Jessica.
Jessica: Six weeks ago back during episode 175 when we talked about coaching I said the following: “The Athletic published a piece about Wichita State men’s basketball head coach Gregg Marshall. The school has launched a formal investigation because there are multiple cases with witnesses of Marshall physically assaulting people, including one case where he punched a player between the shoulders, near his neck, during practice. Like, what? And he’s not fired, he’s just ‘under investigation’.” In all, Marshall was reported three separate times for physically assaulting people. This week it was announced that instead of being held accountable Marshall is resigning his position at Wichita State. Apparently this was the course of action everyone decided on after a three month investigation into Marshall’s actions. Wichita State said it will not release the findings of that investigation, claiming they’re confidential. The athletic director had the gall to claim in the press release announcing Marshall’s resignation, “Our student-athletes are our primary concern.” Neither he nor Marshall even hinted at the reports of physical and emotional abuse.
Because he resigned, Marshall still gets money. As part of his contract settlement he will get paid nearly $8 million over the next 6 years. According to the Wichita Eagle, Marshall “will receive a $48,076.92 payment from WSU every two weeks, starting on Dec. 11, for the next six years, for a total of 156 payments and $7.5 million. The remaining $250,000 is being paid to Marshall in a lump sum.” Back in June the Kansas Board of Regents approved a plan to increase tuition by 2% at Wichita State because of financial difficulties during COVID. This came after leadership salary reductions including voluntary temporary furloughs of deans and a temporary reduction in salaries for university athletic coaching staff and a freeze of hiring and discretionary spending including travel and non-essential purchases. In doing all of this the school hopes to increase tuition revenue by $1.7 million and save $2.6 million. I’m not great at math, I’m decent at it, I use a calculator most of the time. But just doing this math in my head I know that all of these measures don’t come close to adding up to what the school will be paying an abusive former coach to go away. The system is bad, the accountability is bad, and I just want to burn all of it. Burn.
All: Burn.
Lindsay: Burn.
Brenda: [laughs] A very slow, frustrated burn from my co-host Lindsay.
Lindsay: Burn! [laughs] I also know what Brenda’s one is and I’m so excited. [laughing]
Brenda: I’m gonna burn Ohio representative Jim Jordan’s stupid fucking Twitter account. If I could I would delete that account even before I deleted President Donald Trump’s account. It is so bad. I’m not encouraging you to go to it, in fact let me do it for you. I am subject to this because my lovely friends on Twitter comment on him all the time, and an evergreen reminder that Jordon who sits on the judiciary committee has never been held accountable for the routine and persistent and devastating sexual assaults within the men’s wrestling program at Ohio State, which we’ve covered time and time again. Here’s some of the goodies from representative Jordan: “Even Dr. Fauci knows you can’t cancel Christmas.” Even Dr. Fauci? Like, “even” as if he’s the last person that has any sense? Number two: “Don’t lock down the country, don’t impose curfews, don’t close schools. Let Americans decide for themselves and celebrate Thanksgiving.” I think it’s perfectly in order that representative Jordan does wanna celebrate and I also think it’s perfectly normal that he is a COVID denier and that seems in keeping with his politics.
Here’s another great one: “At least you can still tweet after 10pm in Ohio” – which is part of his rebellion against what he considers the “repressive” curfew in Ohio. That does make me sad that you can tweet, Representative Jordan, after 10pm. That makes me really sad. Then I’ll just give you one more, I don’t wanna belabor it, but: “In Ohio you can play music at a wedding but you can’t dance to it. You can play games at an arcade but you better not socialize in a common area. You can order beer at 9:59pm but not 10:01pm. Makes total sense.” WOW. That’s a poet, and a sarcastic one at that. That’s great that you think it’s time for your super insightful sort of ideas about that. You also can’t trade stocks at 4pm eastern time but you can at 3:59pm, and you know what, Representative Jordan? It really makes total fucking sense. And so do the curfews, and so do the school closures, and so I wanna burn your Twitter account where you go on and on about how great Lou Dobbs is and just subject us to your petty petty petty bullshit poetry. So I wanna burn it. Burn.
All: Burn.
Jessica: Aren’t there always points in time, like, bars close at 2?
Brenda: Yeah! Yeah. Of course there’s time…We are a society that runs on time!
Lindsay: In DC the metro closes at midnight.
Jessica: Yeah. I mean, there’s always a time when you can’t order a beer. Like… [laughs] Okay, whatever.
Brenda: But you know what? If you look at Representative Jordan’s Twitter timeline you will see that he put on there “freedom” – so you know what? It comes back to freedom.
Jessica: Can’t argue with that. Can’t argue with that.
Lindsay: I bet he has no problem with places not selling beer on Sundays though.
Brenda: Or like, at a wrestling match when time’s up it’s time’s up. So I feel like Representative Jordan does understand the utility of using deadlines and time, probably. But I don’t know, maybe not.
Jessica: I love you, Bren.
Brenda: I love you, too. After all of that burning now we’re gonna celebrate some really wonderful people in our torchbearers of the week segment. I’m gonna start off with my hell yes ally of the week, which goes to former Chilean national football/soccer star, Jean Beausejour Coliqueo. He has been named a constituent assembly for gender equity driven constitution-making in Chile. Beausejour is Haitian, Mapuche, and a feminist advocate within football and he is now going to be a part in creating this new and exciting chapter in Chilean democracy. So, congratulations Beausejour! The Firestone of the week, Lindsay?
Lindsay: Yes, the Seattle Storm’s Jewel Lloyd – love her! – for her campaign to provide 10,000 meals to the hungry this holiday season. 10,000! Amazing.
Brenda: And the torchbearer of the week goes to…Can I get a drumroll please?
[drumroll]
Jessica: The women and allies who agitated for reform in women’s football labor standards, especially in the federations and in FIFPro, who managed to get FIFA – I repeat, FIFA! – to create minimum standards. Cheers all around.
Brenda: Yay. In these dark times, what is giving you happiness? What is good in your week? Lindsay.
Lindsay: [laughs] Uh… [laughter] This is a really really tough one. I will say though, and I slightly mentioned this up top, but I really love makeup and I’m not great at doing it or anything but I enjoy it. I’ve gotten back into like buying really cheap makeup and having fun with it just for myself, like, I don’t really do it for anyone else. It’s fun, and I watch lots of TikTok makeup videos, oh my gosh! I just scroll, scroll, scroll. They make things like winged eyeliner look so easy and it is not! But anyways, I will just say in a very just-for-me way I’ve been enjoying makeup and that’s been part of my self-care.
Brenda: Cool, cool. In addition to the Toaster Strudel I am also reading two books – one is Graciela Montaldo’s Museo del Consumo, and I understand that not everyone reads Spanish but if you do it’s fantastic. Also, Bill Acree’s new book Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina and Uruguay. So, when I’m avoiding grading that’s what I’m doing right now and it feels like maybe still working. Jess?
Jessica: Yeah, so it was a long week. It was not an easy week. But my birthday fell on Wednesday and so I didn’t work that day, I got to eat cake, I saw friends and family, I got a bunch of puzzles for my birthday, had some good hamburgers. So that was a nice day. Then on Friday Amira and Mike and the family stopped by on their way to Houston and we did a masked distanced outside chat for about 30 minutes, and that was lovely. We had Scooby and Ralph together, and they wouldn’t really play! They were kind of just in the same space, both of them boy dogs peeing on everything. But it was really fun to see them. Then I just wanted to mention, there is a Netflix show called Dash & Lily, it’s kind of like a YA romance, and we found it incredibly charming so it just made me very happy. It’s very lovely and fun and easy to take in, so I recommend that.
Brenda: Linz?
Lindsay: Yeah, one quick thing that is good is that both sides of my family, mom’s side and dad’s side, both cancelled the big Thanksgiving get-togethers. My families can be very stubborn about holiday gatherings, they mean a lot to us – as they do to everyone. But I was very relieved that those were canceled this year and I just kind of want to encourage everyone to put safety first this holiday season. This virus is getting really really bad. I know in Greensboro the COVID hospital is now full and patients are going elsewhere. My mom actually got a positive test this week in the nursing home, week think it’s a false positive. She’s asymptomatic so far, fingers crossed, but the fact that she’s in a nursing home makes that really scary. But I know it’s so hard to not carry through with holiday traditions after such a rough year but I just kind of wanted to say to everyone I hope that we can all find ways to enjoy from a distance, from outside, and through Zoom, and be safe. Because I think we’re getting closer to the end of this and I just want everyone to be safe. I love you all so much.
Brenda: On Burn It All Down we feel a lot of conflict about what to watch in sports this week, so it’s a great segment. But when I asked people, college football really wasn’t top of their list. You know, there’s some, I would say, high level of discomfort right now with encouraging some of the sports events, so I will say that I am still watching the UEFA men’s champ’s league this week – it’s today, Tuesday, and also tomorrow, Wednesday. Yeah, I don’t know. Guilty pleasures, what can I tell you. That’s it for this episode of Burn It All Down. On behalf of all of us here, especially more than ever: burn on, and not out. This episode was produced by the wizard, Martin Kessler, and Shelby Weldon extraordinaire does our website and social media. You can listen and subscribe to Burn It All Down basically anywhere where you get your podcasts. We’re also on Facebook and Instagram @burnitalldownpod; we’re on Twitter @burnitdownpod. Check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com, for previous episodes, transcripts, and show notes. From there you can email us directly or go to the Teespring store, and there are links to our Patreon. Once again, the biggest biggest thank you of all to our patrons for your support. It means the world.