USA TODAY investigation: LSU mishandled complaints
Officials ignored complaints vs. abusers, denied victims’ requests for protection
Failure to adequately address sexual misconduct allegations goes beyond a star player.
For more than a year, people at the highest levels of the Louisiana State University athletic department fielded complaints about their prized running back, Derrius Guice.
Early in the spring 2016 semester, a member of the LSU diving team told her coach and an athletic department administrator that Guice raped her friend after she’d passed out drunk at a party.
That summer, a female student told two senior athletics administrators Guice took a partially nude photograph of her without her permission and shared it with a team equipment manager and possibly others.
Then, in April 2017, the athletic department received reports of a second rape allegation against Guice, this time by a tennis player.
Federal laws and LSU’s own policies require university officials to take such allegations seriously and report them to the Title IX office for investigation, as well as to campus police if the incidents occurred on school property.
Yet at each step, LSU officials either
doubted the women’s stories, didn’t investigate, or didn’t call the police, allowing Guice to continue his football career.
LSU’s failure to adequately address sexual misconduct goes beyond one star running back, a USA TODAY investigation found. Officials in the university’s athletic department and broader administration repeatedly have ignored complaints against abusers, denied victims’ requests for protections and subjected them to further harm by known perpetrators.
At least seven LSU officials had direct knowledge that wide receiver Drake Davis was physically abusing his girlfriend, a different LSU women’s tennis player, but they sat on the information for months, while Davis continued to assault and strangle her. In another case, the school determined that a fraternity member had sexually assaulted two women, but it refused to move him out of classes he shared with one of them and altogether ignored an allegation against him by a third student.
USA TODAY also found three cases in which, rather than expelling or suspending male students found responsible for sexual assault, LSU allowed them to stay on campus. The men, non-athletes, received “deferred suspensions,” a probationary period during which they must stay out of trouble.
In a fourth case, LSU deferred the suspension of a man who stalked and sexually harassed a fellow student, even after he’d pleaded no contest in court to telephonic harassment.
“I just think that honestly they don’t care,” one of the women told USA TODAY. “The whole system is on the side of the accused.”
Some of the women in this story are not being named because it is USA TODAY’s policy not to identify individuals who allege sexual crimes and domestic violence without their permission. Two chose to use their full names.
As part of a broader crackdown on universities for mishandling sexual violence, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights launched a sex-discrimination investigation into LSU in August 2015, after a woman filed a complaint saying that no one informed her of her Title IX options when she reported her sexual assault to campus police. Title IX is the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education.
Three years later, in July 2018, investigators dropped the case, saying the victim had stopped communicating with them, records show. Yet when it came to Guice and Davis, LSU officials made similar errors, failing to get the Title IX office or police involved when federal laws and school policies required it, USA TODAY’s investigation found.
LSU declined to make 10 coaches and administrators available for interviews. Citing the privacy interests of those involved, school officials did not answer nearly four dozen questions that USA TODAY submitted Nov. 4 about their handling of specific allegations and Title IX cases more generally.
In a statement, LSU said it does not tolerate sexual violence of any form.
“We are unwavering in our commitment to respond promptly to any reports of misconduct, to investigate these reports in a manner that is fair and equitable, to support victims of sexual assault, and to protect the privacy of our students according to the law,” it said. “Putting an end to sexual assault is an institutional priority, and we are constantly working to achieve that goal.”
Guice and Davis included, at least nine LSU football players have been reported to police for sexual misconduct and dating violence since coach Ed Orgeron took over the team four years ago, records show. But the details of how LSU handled complaints against the other seven, including two who played key roles on its 2020 national championship team, remain largely secret.
For three months, LSU refused to release full campus police reports involving four players to reporters. Although such reports often are public, university officials said the cases could still be prosecuted and releasing documents could harm the cases – even though, years later, it has only shared one of them with the East Baton Rouge District Attorney’s Office, the office said.
LSU continues to withhold police and Title IX records from at least two women who’ve requested copies of their own files. Samantha Brennan, who said Guice photographed her without consent, said she never wanted to press charges against him. But LSU told her she’d have to wait to access her police report until the statute of limitations ends – six years after the incident.
USA TODAY and Brennan sued LSU for access to her full police report. The lawsuit is ongoing.
LSU has acknowledged formally disciplining two of the nine athletes: Davis and Peter Parrish, a quarterback accused of raping a woman in a car outside a bar earlier this year. LSU suspended Parrish for one year. The university expelled Davis, but not until July 2019 – four months after his criminal conviction, and 10 months after he’d already left the school.
Guice’s attorney has said he was never disciplined, and LSU attorney Johanna Posada confirmed in response to a public records request that four other athletes were not disciplined, either. They include running back Tae Provens, linebacker Jacob Phillips, tight end Zach Sheffer, all accused of rape; and safety Grant Delpit, who was accused of recording a woman during sex without her knowledge and sharing the video with others. Provens was arrested; his case remains open, the district attorney’s office said. The others have not been criminally charged.
LSU would not confirm or deny if it disciplined two other players accused of dating violence – defensive linemen Davon Godchaux and Ray Parker – citing privacy interests. Both were arrested. Godchaux was not charged; Parker’s case is pending, the DA’s office said.
USA TODAY reached out to all of the players directly or through attorneys or team spokesmen. Provens, Phillips and Davis declined to comment. Sheffer hung up when contacted by a reporter and did not return messages. Delpit denied allegations through his attorney.
“Until being recently advised in connection with this USA TODAY investigation, Mr. Delpit was unaware of any police report or Title IX complaint having been lodged against him in 2017,” his attorney, Shawn Holley, said in a statement. “To date, he has not seen any report identifying him in connection with this alleged incident.”
Parrish sued the school alleging unfair treatment but withdrew the lawsuit in September, after a judge declined to temporarily lift his suspension. Parrish, who transferred to the University of Memphis in August, denied the allegation through his attorney.
The other athletes did not respond. In a separate statement, Orgeron said his football program “takes any allegation very seriously” and that he has followed Title IX reporting protocols.
“We are committed to a culture of safety, equity and accountability for all students and staff. We provide education, training and resources to combat violence, sexual misconduct, and inequality,” Orgeron said in his statement.
Elizabeth Taylor, a Temple University professor who studies sexual assault and harassment within athletics organizations, said LSU exhibits the same “pattern of continually mishandling these types of incidents” that was seen at Baylor, Penn State and Michigan State.
‘All the higher-ups’ knew
Two weeks after meeting Guice at an off-campus bar in July 2016, Brennan, a student who worked part-time in LSU’s football recruiting office, was told a nude photo of her was circulating around the football team. Luke Dudley, a friend who was the student equipment manager on the football team, later told Brennan that Guice had sent it to him, according to text messages she shared with USA TODAY.
Sharon Lewis, LSU’s head of football recruiting and Brennan’s boss, heard about the photo and called Brennan into her office on July 22, 2016. Lewis also brought in senior associate athletic director Miriam Segar, who was introduced to Brennan as a “victim’s advocate,” Brennan recalled.
The same day, Segar accompanied Brennan to the police department to file a report, which Brennan did. Brennan declined to press charges against Guice, saying she didn’t want to ruin his life.
Lewis and Segar weren’t the only ones aware of the photo. “All the higherups at LSU” knew about it, Dudley told Brennan in a text message, adding that he was called into a meeting about it.
LSU policies required campus officials to report the allegation to the Title IX office to conduct an initial investigation. But the Title IX office never reached out to Brennan, she said.
Early warnings about Drake Davis
In January 2017, Davis began dating an LSU women’s tennis player – not the same one who said Guice raped her. The relationship soon turned violent, the woman told police and USA TODAY, with Davis leaving the woman bruised or bleeding on at least six occasions over the course of just over one year.
Interviews with the woman, her father and several teammates, as well as a detailed LSU Police Department arrest report released after the case closed, demonstrate how LSU officials who were told of the abuse – including by the woman and Davis directly – repeatedly failed to act on the information, each time leaving her vulnerable to Davis’ increasingly violent attacks.
In fact, a top LSU athletics administrator had been sitting on a confession from Davis for four months.
On April 14, 2018, Davis admitted to punching the woman in a text message conversation with deputy athletic director Verge Ausberry, police records show. The conversation was not revealed until late August, when police found it after obtaining a search warrant for Davis’ phones.
Davis in March 2019 pleaded guilty to two batteries and violating a protective order.
LSU in July 2019 expelled Davis for violating its student conduct code and Title IX policy “on multiple occasions during the summer and fall of 2018,” disciplinary records obtained by USA TODAY show.
His expulsion came as news to the woman, who said LSU never told her.
Flawed Title IX process
It’s not only athlete cases that have stalled in LSU’s Title IX process. Delays, missteps and inaction have also plagued cases involving ordinary students, according to interviews with five women who’ve gone through the process, as well as corroborating documents they provided USA TODAY.
In spring 2019, Elisabeth Andries, an LSU industrial engineering major, encountered a familiar face in one of her classes: the fraternity member who she said sexually assaulted her two years earlier, when she was a freshman.
As it turned out, another student had reported the man for sexually assaulting her in almost the exact same way, the same night, on the same bus trip.
Both women decided to move forward with a Title IX case. They did not file police reports.
The case dragged on for more than six months, during which LSU rarely gave the women updates, twice extended the man’s deadlines to appeal without notifying them, and denied their requests for protection from him during the case, according to the women and their emails with school officials.
LSU in June 2019 found the frat member responsible for sexually assaulting both women, case records the women shared with USA TODAY show. He received deferred suspension, meaning he could remain on campus.
This time, the other woman in the case appealed, feeling the sanctions were inadequate.
Before the appeal hearing, Jonathan Sanders, who runs LSU’s student judicial affairs, asked the women if they had additional evidence to present. They said they did – a new sexual assault allegation against the fraternity member by a third female student, who had confided in Andries and offered to speak to investigators. They gave Sanders her name and also suggested he speak to the fraternity president from the time.
No one from LSU ever contacted the third woman about the allegation, the woman told USA TODAY – a violation of federal and university Title IX policies. And Sanders called the wrong fraternity president, the women said.
The panel in late September 2019 voted to increase the sanctions against the fraternity member, suspending him for two semesters and banning him from campus.
But at a football game two weeks after the ruling, Andries saw the man in the student section, she said. When the women told LSU, they said, the school informed them that it had granted the fraternity member another extension, and that he was allowed to remain on campus.
LSU denied the frat member’s final appeal that October.
LSU’s lengthy and cumbersome Title IX process is intentional, the other woman in the case believes. The school, she said, fears lawsuits and knows perpetrators are more likely than survivors to sue.
“If we get worn down enough, we’re just going to give up at some point,” she said. “I think it’s all designed so that everybody just gives up and goes home.”