Former AD: Black players are scapecoats
McCaw says regents employed ‘cover-up’ to blame football for campus-wide scandal
Former Baylor University athletic director Ian McCaw says university regents concocted what he termed an “Enron cover-up scheme” to scapegoat Baylor’s football program, and African-American players in particular, to deflect attention from a campus-wide sexual assault scandal, according to a deposition filed Wednesday in federal court in Waco.
McCaw’s comments from a June 19 deposition were included in a motion filed by Houston attorney Chad Dunn, who represents 10 female former students who allege that Baylor violated federal law by denying them educational opportunities after they were assaulted.
Dunn said McCaw’s comments represent a damning indictment of Baylor regents, who in 2016 ousted president Kenneth Starr and football coach Art Briles as part of what they said was a reform plan to end a campus climate that contributed to sexual abuse of female students. “If what (McCaw) says is true, it means that there has been no reform at the school, just a laser light show to deflect attention,” Dunn said.
Dunn quotes several passages from McCaw’s deposition in a motion filed in Waco with U.S. District Judge Robert Pittman, who is presiding over the case
filed by 10 Baylor students identified as Jane Does. The motion seeks access to several categories of documents previously withheld by Baylor’s attorneys.
“Baylor has spent tens of millions of dollars trying to blame the sexual assault problem completely on football while at the same time secretly paying and recommending (former coaches),” Dunn said in his motion. “The court should take this opportunity to strike down the machinations of Baylor … and to make clear to all that the truth will not be concealed.”
Baylor said in a statement Wednesday it will continue to oppose providing certain materials to the women’s attorneys. It also said McCaw’s comments critical of Baylor regents as quoted in the motion were “based on speculation, hearsay and even media reports.”
Dunn responded that Baylor can clear up concerns about misleading comments by agreeing to make public McCaw’s deposition, which has been filed with the court but is under seal from public view for 15 days.
Dunn’s motion quotes McCaw, who was Baylor’s athletic director from 2001 through May 2016, as saying that Baylor regents staged an “elaborate plan that essentially scapegoated the black football players and the football program for being responsible for what was a decades-long, university-wide sexual assault scandal.”
Ex-AD cites ‘racism’
McCaw also said, according to the motion, that regents attempted to deflect attention away from their own failures and adopted a strategy of inserting false and misleading information into a report on the sexual abuse scandal prepared for the school by the Philadelphia law firm Pepper Hamilton.
Baylor, however, said Wednesday that no regents were present when findings of fact compiled by Pepper Hamilton attorneys were drafted.
McCaw, who was sanctioned by regents and placed on probation in 2016 as Briles was fired and Starr was removed as president, said he was offered a chance to remain as athletic director.
He elected to resign because he was “disgusted at that point with the regents, the racism, the phony finding of fact” in the Pepper Hamilton report and because he “did not want to be part of some Enron cover-up scheme” by the Baylor administration.
The cover-up effort, McCaw said, involves Pepper Hamilton, six Baylor regents, at least two senior Baylor administrators and the school’s general counsel.
McCaw, who is now athletic director at Liberty University in Virginia, includes additional “damaging recollections” regarding Baylor in the sealed deposition, Dunn said in the motion. In seeking access to documents withheld by the school, he said it is up to the court to “determine whether the light of truth will be allowed to shine.”
Houston attorney and Baylor alumnus John Eddie Williams, a member of the Bears for Leadership Reform group that has been critical of regents, said the statements attributed to McCaw reflect the group’s belief that Baylor’s principal problem has been “at the top level, that being the board of regents.”
“While there has been turnover, half of the board was in place when these events transpired, and we have not seen any true transparency and accountability,” Williams said. “I look forward with great anticipation to when someone finally deposes the regents who were involved and puts them under oath.
“There needs to be transparency, and all Baylor has tried to do is sweep this under the rug, and that is the wrong attitude. We have a new president (Linda Livingstone, who took the job in June 2017) who is trying to correct things, but the real problem is at the board level. The board is responsible for this cover-up.”
A victim weighs in
Dallas attorney Rogge Dunn, who represents former Baylor Title IX coordinator Patty Crawford and former Title IX office staff member Gabrielle Lyons, said McCaw’s comments as quoted in the motion vindicates Crawford’s complaints about the attitude of Baylor regents toward the plague of sexual assaults on the Baylor campus.
“Patty has said that the board stonewalled her, and this certainly indicates that the board was not an innocent bystander but an active participant in efforts to suppress what was going on and to protect the Baylor brand at all costs,” Rogge Dunn said.
One of the sexual assault victims who is suing the university said the recent developments don’t surprise her.
“I think more will keep coming out because so many have come forward and want answers and want justice,” she said. “Until there is transparency across the board, the problems can’t really be solved. It’s been going on a lot time and I can only speak for myself, but every time there is something new with any of these cases, it never shocks me.”
Attorney Ernest Cannon, who represents Briles, said McCaw’s deposition “validates what Art has been trying to say from the first day.
“Baylor had a campus-wide problem,” Cannon said. “It was not unique to the athletic department.
“Baylor needed two things: A bus and someone to throw under it.”