Baylor trying to dismiss lawsuit alleging 52 rapes in 4 years by football players

Baylor has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit that alleges 52 rapes by 31 Baylor football players over a four-year span between 2011 and 2014. Baylor’s filing was first reported by Deadspin.

The motion, filed in U.S. District Court in Texas, claims that “as a general rule, universities do not have a legal duty to protect their students from harm caused by other students.”

According to the motion, the school’s attorneys filed based on the grounds of statute of limitations.

Baylor’s attorneys wrote in the motion to dismiss that the plaintiff’s case exceeds the two-year statute of limitations. Texas’s statute of limitations for sexual assault is five years; the statute for Title IX lawsuits is two years.

The lawsuit was filed by a woman in January, who claims she was raped by former Baylor football players Tre'Von Armstead and Shamycheal Chatman, adding to the allegations in the Baylor sexual assault scandal that ended up costing Art Briles his job as Baylor head coach.

According to The Dallas Morning News, the woman sued for Title IX and negligence. The paper also reports the suit states that two gang rapes involved 10 or more players. There is also a line in the suit referencing former Baylor assistant coach Kendall Briles, Art’s son.

The lawsuit describes a culture of sexual violence within Baylor's athletics, in which the school implemented a "show 'em a good time" policy that "used sex to sell" the football program to recruits. A Dallas-area high school athlete, according to the suit, said former assistant coach Kendall Briles once asked him, "Do you like white women? Because we have a lot of them at Baylor and they love football players."

Art was fired as head coach of the Bears during the offseason when the scandal broke. Kendall spent much of 2016 with public shows of support for his father, paying tribute to him during the season opener and joining with other coaches on the staff to challenge the Baylor administration’s handling of the situation.

Details from the scandal show how Art, among others, passed the buck specifically involving an allegation from one woman of sexual assault, and how per athletic department policy he was not allowed to do so.

Kendall has recently been hired as an offensive coordinator by Lane Kiffin at FAU. Kiffin said he felt comfortable with Briles’ situation in a press conference before the Playoff semifinal.

The lawsuit alleges that the Baylor coaching staff instituted a “show em a good time” culture in which illegal activities were encouraged and/or ignored in regards to what players did when hosting recruits on their visits.

a. Players arranging for women, alcohol and illegal drugs for parties when recruits were in town;

b. Paying for and escorting underage recruits to bars and strip clubs;

and c. Paying for off-campus football parties (which repeatedly resulted in gang rape of women by the athletes).

Part of the lawsuit centers on the hostess program, referred to as the Baylor Bruins. Many schools use young women to impress and shuttle recruits from place to place on their campus visits. The lawsuit alleges that the Bruins were used to have sex with recruits.

Though the Bruins had an official policy of no sexual contact with the recruits or football players, BAYLOR had an unofficial policy of looking the other way when there was sexual intercourse between the Bruins and the football players.

The woman levying this lawsuit, referred to as Elizabeth Doe, was a part of the Bruins program starting in the fall of 2012. In April of 2013, Ms. Doe says that she was taken home from a party by Chatman and Armstead after becoming intoxicated at a party.

Ms. Doe’s roommate’s boyfriend confronted the two players and called 911. Before the police arrived, fellow Bruins showed up at the house to try and get Ms. Doe to develop a cover story that said she had consensual sex with one white man. A subsequent Title IX investigation revealed that Chatman had dispatched the Bruins to the apartment.

Per the lawsuit, the Waco police never interviewed Chatman or Armstead and Baylor took no action either.

We will continue to update this story as it develops.