‘I hated this man more than my rapists’
TELLING HER STORY IN FRONT OF DISMISSIVE COACH BROUGHT CLOSURE
Inspirational speakers are frequent visitors to college football teams. Alumni now in the NFL return to dole out advice. Superstars from other sports stop by to talk competitive spirit. Sports psychologists discuss how to handle stress. Brenda Tracy is none of these. But there she was Wednesday, standing in front of the University of Nebraska football team, delivering a powerful speech unlike any other the players are likely to ever hear.
Back in 1998, when Tracy was 24, she was gang- raped by four football players, she told the team.
Two of her attackers played for Oregon State University, she continued. When the charges were dropped, and the players received nothing more than a onegame suspension, their coach called the two men “really good guys who made a bad choice.”
That coach, the one whose words had enraged her 18 years earlier, was now standing in front of her. Mike Riley — who once coached Oregon State and the CFL’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers — was now in charge of Nebraska football. Tracy wasn’t holding back. “At one point, I hated this man more than my rapists,” Tracy said, referring to Riley. She described in graphic detail her gang rape, her thoughts of suicide, her long struggle to feel normal.
“You could literally see the whole room turn and look at Coach Riley,” she said afterward. “It was intense. I saw them all look. I could feel it.”
Almost as remarkable as Tracy’s speech, however, was the reason why she was there in the first place. Riley had invited her.
Their meeting was nearly two decades in the making. In that time, sexual assault on college campuses has gone from a silent epidemic to the subject of intense national discussion.
Could telling her story now, in front of the man who, she felt, had trivialized her suffering so many years ago, provide some semblance of closure?
In 1998, Brenda Tracy was a waitress at a restaurant in Salem, Ore., the single mother of two young boys.
One night in June, she joined a female friend at a small gathering at the apartment of an Oregon State University defensive back. After an evening of gin, orange juice and video games, Tracy ended up unconscious. When she woke up, a player was having sex with her. She was raped by four men, she told police.
Four football players were arrested. When questioned, the men pointed fingers at each other, according to The Oregonian.
Riley, who was part of the coaching staff that saw the Winnipeg Blue Bombers win the Grey Cup in 1984 and would go on to win two more as head coach in 1987-90, was then the head coach at OSU. He suspended his two players for one game.
As prosecutors were preparing to try their case, however, Tracy suddenly refused to co-operate.
“Two weeks after reporting the attack and enduring a severe backlash and death threats from a community that should have helped me and protected me — I dropped the charges,” she later wrote.
Riley, whose father, Bud, also coached the Blue Bombers, decided his players would still serve a one- game suspension, but he also defended them.
“These are really good guys who made a bad choice,” he said.
Those three words — “a bad choice” — would come back to haunt Riley. But not as much as they would haunt Tracy.
In an op- ed published in The Oregonian, she said his words had “scarred” her.
“How could coach Riley say that? Good guys? A bad choice? I couldn’t understand. What was a bad choice? Was it a bad choice when his player was raping me or when that player was watching three other men rape me?” she wrote.
“A bad choice … a bad choice is staying up late when you have to be up early. A bad choice is drinking underage. A bad choice is speeding on the freeway and getting a ticket.”
“I despised that man,” she said this year. “I hated him with every cell in my body.”
When the newspaper contacted the coach in 2014, he did two things.
First, he admitted he could have been harsher on his players, given Tracy’s accusations — never retracted — against them.
“I felt I needed to do some- thing there to send a message,” Riley told Oregonian reporter John Canzano. “Maybe I should have done more.”
Second, the coach asked Canzano if he thought Tracy, who had gone on to become a nurse and an advocate for survivors of sexual assault, might come and talk to his team.
This week, at the Nebraska University campus, Tracy finally faced the man she had hated for 18 years.
“Hi, Brenda,” Riley said with a smile.
“Then he hugged me,” she said. “He allowed me to cry on his shoulder for a few minutes.”
The two talked for more than an hour.
“I said everything I needed to say. I asked everything I needed to ask,” Tracy said. “We talked about 1,000 different topics . … I feel like I put everything on the table and left it all there.”
“He answered everything,” she said.
And he apologized, for not digging more into what really happened during those six hours back in 1998.
After their meeting, it was time for Tracy to talk to the team.
She told the players about her six hellish hours in the apartment, about the pain, the humiliation, the death threats.
And when she told the players that she used to hate Riley “more than my rapists,” she could feel 150 faces turn from her to the coach and back again.
But she also told them that Riley didn’t have to bring her to Nebraska.
“This is what accountability looks like,” she told the players. “This is what transparency looks like. This is how we get things done.”
She even said the players should appreciate having a coach like Riley, and learn from him.
“It’s OK to be accountable,” she told the team. “It’s OK to say you’re sorry.”
IT’S OK TO BE ACCOUNTABLE. IT’S OK TO SAY YOU’RE SORRY.