Suit alleges coach helped suspect flee

Prairie View A&M botched assault case, former student says

A Prairie View A&M University coach — asked to help a female athlete who said she’d been sexually assaulted on campus — instead bought the accused male athlete a plane ticket to leave the state before he could be arrested, according to a federal lawsuit.

The suit, filed by a student identified only as “Mary Doe,” accuses Prairie View A&M of creating a hostile educational environment and violating the federal Title IX law that prohibits gender discrimination in schools and universities.

The accusation is the latest federal lawsuit accusing a Texas college campus of mishandling sexual misconduct allegations, a problem universities across the nation have grappled with for years.

“If you can’t trust your coach, if you can’t trust your school, if you can’t trust the police, who do you turn to?” said Brenda Tracy, an Oregon-based rape survivor and victim advocate who has worked with Texas college sports teams. “You have a responsibility for the well-being of this human in front of you. This is a serious trauma with serious consequences.”

Prairie View A&M spokeswoman Yolanda Bevill said in an email that the university does not comment on pending litigation but that officials take seriously sexual assault allegations. The woman’s lawyer, Muhammad Aziz, likewise declined to comment.

The woman filed a report with the university’s police department the day after the alleged Feb. 18, 2015, assault in her oncampus apartment. She was taken for a sexual assault examination at a local hospital, where she confided to her coach and identified her assailant, according to the lawsuit filed Friday in U.S. district court in Houston.

The coach, who is not identified, responded by telling her multiple times that she did not need to alert her parents and then surreptitiously helping the accused athlete leave town, according to the suit. She and her parents met with the coach within two days after the assault, and he told them repeatedly he did not know where the male athlete was, the suit said.

The coach left his position several months later, telling her teammates that she was the reason for his departure, the suit said.

Teammates then retaliated against her, the suit said, creating a hostile environment. The suit did not say which sport the woman participated in.

‘What do you do?’

The unidentified male student was located in Florida and charged with sexual assault in May 2015, according to the suit, which gave no details as to the outcome of the criminal case. While attending a bail hearing on the case, the woman learned that the coach had paid for a plane ticket to help her alleged assailant avoid both arrest and disciplinary action by the university, the suit said.

She is seeking damages and attorney’s fees. She plans to ask the court to allow her to proceed with the case under a pseudonym.

“You follow the processes, you go through the system, to be betrayed,” Tracy said. “What do you do?”

The suit says the university misinformed her of her rights and discouraged her from taking further action, even though she followed procedures for reporting a crime recommended on many university campuses. Six on-campus rapes were reported by Prairie View A&M in 2015 under the federal Clery Act.

Prairie View A&M, a historically black university northwest of Houston in Waller County, enrolled more than 9,000 students in the fall. Most are full-time, undergraduate students, though more than 1,000 are working on post-graduate studies.

The university enrolled its first students in 1878 after being established by the Texas Legislature and placed under the oversight of what was then the Agricultural and Mechanical College at Bryan.

Students on campus Monday were surprised by the allegations outlined in the lawsuit, which came amid planned events about emotional and verbal abuse, said student government President Kendric Jones.

These issues, he said, are especially resonant given discussions of workplace harassment in the viral #MeToo movement.

“It’s a big deal in the world,” said Jones, a senior.

Policy and culture

Federal officials, meanwhile, are reconsidering guidance issued under the Obama administration outlining how universities should respond to reports under Title IX, which requires campuses to give men and women equal access to education and orders them to take action when they learn of gender-based discrimination, including sexual misconduct. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos pared back some of that guidance in the fall amid complaints from both victims and the accused.

Victims have said their schools don’t take their accusations seriously; students accused of crimes have said college officials discipline them too harshly without due process.

Christopher Kaiser, the director of public policy for the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault, said the Prairie View A&M woman’s allegations show that good policy may not be enough to encourage institutions to handle sexual misconduct properly.

“If the people responding to survivors are acting more like gatekeepers keeping the case from going forward, that’s not justice — that’s abetting a rapist,” he said.

Prairie View A&M prohibits domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment and stalking, and sexual harassment may lead to reprimand, suspension or termination of employment, university policy says.