Rape survivor brings message: ‘Use your platform for good’
For Brenda Tracy, the words “red zone” mean something a little different than they do for her typical audience.
In the eyes of most of the young men she speaks to across the country — including members of the Miami Hurricanes football team, with whom she met last week — the red zone is that 20-yard stretch on the field where most often touchdowns are scored or defended.
But for Tracy, the “red zone” is that critical stretch during the start of a new school year when most sexual assaults happen on college campuses, a time that, for better or worse, intersects with the excitement of football season.
“That’s when over 50% of sexual assaults happen on our college campuses,” said Tracy, a rape survivor, nurse and activist who has made it her mission to educate athletes across the country about physical and sexual violence.
“It’s happening during their season. Not only that, there’s research that shows there’s a 41% spike in rape reports on D1 home-game days.
“When we bring tens of thousands of people into these stadiums, we have this kind of hyper
masculine, crazy football stuff going on and people are being assaulted. For me, I feel like who better to raise awareness and take a stand during this period of time than football players?”
Having players take that stand is, for Tracy, an extremely personal matter.
More than 20 years ago, Tracy and a friend visited the apartment of a member of the Oregon State football team. There, Tracy was left alone with four men, including two OSU athletes, who she said raped her during an assault that lasted for more than six hours. Her attackers told police they had, at various points, heard her say “stop.”
According to a column in The Oregonian, with whom Tracy first publicly shared her story in 2014, the police report detailing what happened that June night spanned 28 pages. Tracy’s attackers were arrested and all four pointed fingers at each other while denying their involvement.
Eventually, though evidence had been collected, a rape kit had been performed and a doctor said he was willing to testify that Tracy had been assaulted, the charges were dropped.
Tracy says she considered suicide. The two Oregon State players involved that night received onegame suspensions, their coach describing their actions as “a bad choice.”
That three-word description of what happened that night enraged Tracy. Though she has since spoken to Mike Riley — the coach who made that remark — his words stayed with her, fueling her mission.
Her goal now is to use her “Set the Expectation” campaign to educate football players and other athletes across the country to help them see how they can use their platform to make sure fewer women endure what happened to her.
“If women alone could stop sexual violence, we would have already done it,” Tracy told the South Florida Sun Sentinel days after her visit with the Hurricanes. “Men are the missing component of this issue. Most sexual violence is perpetrated by men. That’s just a fact.
“It’s usually a man perpetrating this violence against another man, a woman or a child. … But only 10% of our male population is doing these things, which means 90% don’t. But we’ve all seen the stories where we have men who are complicit in their silence, in their actions or they’re good guys who don’t feel like it’s their problem.
“I explain to [athletes] that women alone can’t solve this epidemic. Do you think the 10% are going to do anything? That leaves us you. … If you’re the 90% sitting here, then you need to start getting involved. … They have a huge, huge platform and the ability to drive the narrative and drive the conversation.”
At Miami, Tracy’s message resonated not only with coach Manny Diaz and his staff, with whom she met privately before addressing the players, but the Hurricanes themselves.
Many of those players took to social media after meeting her to thank her for sharing her story and spending time with them. Others spoke to her privately after the mandatory team meeting, sharing their stories with her.
“I definitely think guys were blown away by what she was talking about and I feel like it took tremendous courage to be able to come in there,” said redshirt senior receiver K.J. Osborn, who represented Miami at last week’s ACC Kickoff event in Charlotte.
“People who do those talks, it takes a lot of courage to be able to come in there, to total strangers, and tell her story, I think that really meant a lot. … It’s something that really needs to be pressed.
“You see those issues in the NFL, college and high school. Those are very bad things that are happening. By her coming, it opened guys’ eyes that this is a problem and that we’re bigger than football. She was talking about using our platform to push the issue to respect women. That’s a very serious thing.”
That players at Miami seem to be listening, Tracy says is rewarding. It’s part of the reason she continues publicly reliving the worst day of her life.
But, she noted, there’s a special sense of pride when a coach speaks to his players on her behalf, the way she says Diaz did both before and after her meeting with the Hurricanes. She also knows her work has made a difference when she hears coaches tell their players there are consequences for their actions, something else Tracy said Diaz made clear.
“I did a presentation with the coaches and I have a thing called the ‘Set the Expectation’ pledge where we attach eligibility to behavior,” Tracy said. “It basically just says if you harm someone, you don’t get to play sports. It’s a privilege, not a right, and you have an obligation because of your platform to do good.
“When I met with the coaches, I talked about the pledge. I talked about attaching eligibility to behavior and my whole thought process around how that mechanism can change culture. We talked about one-game suspensions and how messaging matters and what you’re saying when you give a one-game suspension. …
“When I was done speaking later, Coach Diaz came back in the room and said, ‘Look, if you’re involved in this stuff, you’re out of here, period.’ He was very clear with them: What I was saying was correct and he was going to be supporting this message. … In my work, everything I try to do, at the most basic level, the ‘Set the Expectation’ campaign is about coaches telling their players that their behavior matters.”
Since launching her “Set the Expectation” campaign, Tracy has spoken at more than 80 schools and has addressed more than 30 Power Five programs.
The first team she met? Nebraska, where Riley coached from 2015-17 after he left Oregon State. Tracy now credits him with helping her heal after that awful night.
At Michigan, the Wolverines invited Tracy to come back to campus and serve as an honorary captain after her speech both moved and inspired both players and coaches.
How much involvement Tracy will continue to have with the Hurricanes in the future remains to be seen, but the hope is that she’s made an impact that will last in the weeks, months and years to come.
“Her point, which I completely agree with, is not to think of the studentathletes as a problem,” Diaz said. “It’s to think of them as a solution because if it’s true that we’re the most visible when there is a problem, it could also be true that we’re the most visible in terms of being a solution. The fact that our players can wear the wristbands and retweet the message and get that out there, No. 1 , shares the message, which was very strong and powerful.
“The No. 1 thing we want to do is prevent these things from happening. We don’t want to manage it. … When you think about how crucial a crime like that is and how many people it affects, it’s almost like a precrime mentality.
“For our players to understand to hopefully, not ever get themselves in similar type situations and then be able to have a positive impact and influence on others to do the same, I think is is a massive benefit to everybody.”