Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts tagged as “March 8-9 rape allegations”

University fires coach & brings in Brenda Tracy to talk to the jocks about rape

7/7/2016 update: At some point you know the Ducks are going to have to do the same. It’s inevitable. Meanwhile CNN has the story on Baylor here. Of course it’s not just the athletes – see Lindo et al.: 6/24/2016 update: Riley’s footballers hear from Brenda Tracy, OSU rape survivor,…

PAC-12 presidents approve spineless “Altman-Austin Rule”

Updated: On March 11 the PAC-12 university presidents met to approve the spineless “Altman-Austin Rule”, which would *not* have stopped Dana Altman from bringing Brandon Austin to UO. It does *not* ban efforts like those by UO lawyer Doug Park to settle with Austin on terms that would have allowed UO to quietly pass him off to…

2 more Dana Altman recruits sue Gottfredson & Holmes for due process violations

3/15/2016: Duck Athletics brings still more invaluable publicity and goodwill for UO. Who defines our “national brand”? Brandon Austin. From Google search trends:

Screen Shot 2016-03-15 at 10.28.49 PM

Camilla Mortensen has the latest lawsuit story in the Eugene Weekly. Also see Andrew Greif in the Oregonian and Jack Moran in the RG.

The $20M complaint from Dominic Artis and Damyean Dotson’s lawyers Alex Spiro of NYC and Brian Michaels of Eugene is here. Artis and Dotson’s state complaint is basically a cut-and-paste of Austin’s federal complaint here, which was filed by Marianne Duggan of Eugene and preeminent sperm lawyer Alan C. Milstein of Moorestown, New Jersey back in October.

I’m no law professor, but if attorney Alex Spiro (Harvard Law) had passed this in as his final paper, I’d report him to UO’s student conduct office for plagiarism and urge Sandy Weintraub and Robin Holmes to expel him – after a thorough hearing and appeal, of course.

John Canzano has an opinion piece in the Oregonian: Canzano: Lawsuit not fair to Oregon Ducks, but ends up a strong NCAA play:

Did Altman support the dismissals of the players? Did Gottfredson ask for Altman’s resignation somewhere in the process and get push back from key boosters? Were the players a sacrifice that was made to appease the protesters picketing the university president’s office? And why didn’t Oregon just do what every other reputable university might do — suspend the players pending the outcome of the investigation instead of initially standing with them, then after the NCAA Tournament, dismissing them?

Quite the difference from his Jan 8 2015 column: Canzano: Every day Oregon stands with Dana Altman is another step into the muck:

Best case scenario, he turned his back on three innocent players who were under investigation for sex assault. Worst case, he knowingly recruited a player who was under investigation for a sex assault, then lied for months about what he knew and undermined campus safety while trying to save himself.

This is your basketball coach, Oregon. One who should have been fired months ago.

… The lawsuit [he means the one from the survivor Jane Doe, with whom UO settled for $800K], zeroes in on the exact problem. It alleges that the university took steps to protect itself and to guard its coach, while accepting the survivor as collateral damage. Given that federal law mandates that Oregon should have handled this with urgency and alacrity the actions at UO are troubling.

Among the shocking allegations in the lawsuit? UO refused to provide the players with unredacted documents. Say it ain’t so!

Screen Shot 2014-06-05 at 11.23.48 AM

As with Austin’s, this complaint makes many other serious allegations of violations of due process rights by VPSA Robin Holmes and her assistants Sandy Weintraub and Chicora Martin and the feckless Mike Gottfredson.

Where were these people getting their legal advice? From Randy Geller, formerly UO General Counsel, now “of counsel at Harrang, Long, Gary and Rudnick, and/or his Assistant GC Doug Park, who is still employed by UO as associate GC for $200k+.

Here’s UO Strategic Communicator Tobin Klinger’s improbable explanation for why Geller “retired” – announced in the midst of the events described in the lawsuit, and the day before sports reporters unexpectedly broke the story of the basketball rape allegations:

Screen Shot 2016-03-15 at 6.27.32 PM

Dominic Artis and Damyean Dotson’s prayer:

Screen Shot 2016-03-15 at 6.06.40 PM

Screen Shot 2016-03-15 at 6.08.00 PM

1/26/2016: Duck lawyers respond to Brandon Austin’s due process lawsuit. Park gave Austin a clean transcript.

More students punished for sexual assault are winning in court

11/5/2015: Jake New has the analysis in InsideHigherEd. The start: Last week, Brandon Austin, a former college basketball player, filed a lawsuit against the University of Oregon for $7.5 million, arguing that administrators there violated his rights when they suspended him over his alleged involvement in a gang rape. Austin was…

Jennifer Morlok resigns over retaliation, calls out President Schill

Update: The Chronicle’s report is here: … In a written statement to The Chronicle, Oregon’s vice president for student life, Robin Holmes, said that the university “was committed to providing Ms. Morlok with a supportive work environment,” but that she had chosen not to accept offers of “alternative workplace scenarios.”…

Doug Park brings still more embarassment to UO

10/24/2015 update: From the Ornstein stories in the Chronicle and ProPublica:

“I don’t blame the University of Oregon for a rape,” she said. “It’s not their fault. I blame them for how they responded to it. I found out months later that every single meeting I had with a therapist, she took detailed notes on, and the University of Oregon had read these notes before I had even seen them.”

And now there’s a Slate op-ed about the reports, here

Viewing medical records for medical reasons could help a university protect a student at risk of harm. But the University of Oregon’s meddling into Hanson’s private account of her rape would have only helped the university protect itself. The value of therapy lies in the patient’s expectation of confidentiality; if a student thinks her private exchanges with a doctor could resurface in the office of a university administrator, helping her heal will be much harder. A therapist’s office can be one of the only safe spaces available to a rape survivor on a college campus. Exploiting that trust to try to avoid paying a legal settlement is a cynical maneuver that can only exacerbate an already-low rape reporting rate.

The Jane Doe records seizure happened on Doug Park and Sam Hill’s watch. The Hanson incident apparently took place while Randy Geller was GC. I think the correct phrase here is “institutional betrayal”.

10/23/2015: Chronicle and ProPublica report on UO counseling record confidentiality

Reporting by Charles Ornstein, here. He picks up on the report first made in the Eugene Weekly in May by Camilla Mortensen, below. (Without citing her – wow is that bad form.)

Ornstein gets Doug Park to offer a complete and utter apology for the UO General Counsel Office’s behavior in these two cases:

Can the UO Senate save the General Counsel’s office from itself?

10/1/2015 update: The Senate website includes a proposal for a new UO policy on keeping student counseling records private. This presumably comes from the committee that interim Provost Frances Bronet appointed last spring, after she’d ordered the GC to return Jane Doe’s files: http://senate.uoregon.edu/sites/senate.uoregon.edu/files/Appendix%20B%20-%20Recommendation%20for%20the%20University%20of%20Oregon%27s%20policy%20on%20the%20confidentiality%20of%20health%20care%20and%20survivors%20services%20information.pdf 9/30/2015:  Students who have been sexually assaulted often seek out mental health…

UO Counseling Director Shelly Kerr fined $5K for giving Jane Doe records to Doug Park’s GC office

That’s the report from a normally well informed source. (Now confirmed, see below for the report). Today the Oregon Board of Psychologist Examiners imposed a $5,000 fine on Dr. Shelly Kerr, Director of the University of Oregon Counseling and Testing Center, for actions relating to the transfer of counseling records to…

UO’s Tobin Klinger in denial about Jane Doe’s confidential counseling records

8/21/2015: Diane Dietz of the RG has more, here: UO psychology professor Jennifer Freyd, who pushed to make the UO counseling center records private, said she was “very, very pleased” with the Education Department’s guidance. “They’ve gone a long way to clarifying the situation,” Freyd said Thursday. “The only way people…

Jane Doe’s therapist and Shelly Kerr’s assistant will sue UO over retaliation

[See below for email update] Morlok and Stokes deserve enormous respect for telling the truth about the UO General Counsel’s efforts to seize Jane Doe’s confidential counseling records. That revelation let to changes in Oregon law and may lead to changes in federal law as well. And now it seems that…

President Schill’s Q&A with Emerald reporter Kenny Jacoby

8/5/2015: Full interview in the Daily Emerald, here. An excerpt:

Jacoby: You mentioned [in your statement] that you didn’t think any university personnel acted wrongfully. Was the decision to recruit Brandon Austin, who was suspended at a different university for sexual misconduct, a mistake?

Schill: The reason for the settlement was to close the chapter and to move forward. Nothing I say about that matter is going to change anything.

Jacoby: Was the University’s decision to countersue the victim wrong?

Schill: Ditto.

Jacoby: What about accessing Jane Doe’s therapy records?

Schill: Ditto.

Jacoby: Would you have handled the case differently if you were president at the time it happened?

Schill: It’s always easy to second-guess. Ditto.

It’s beginning to look like we’ll still be dealing with this athletic scandal when the next one hits.

But at least he’s talking. Frohnmayer was the last UO president who would regularly answer questions from student reporters. Gottfredson did it once, but got pissy and went back down the bunker when the reporter asked why Dave Hubin was charging student reporters to see public records about their university.

8/4/2014: RG editors call for President Schill to release the records, build some trust. Editorial here:

… If Schill truly wants the university to move past this incident, he should order the release of all records pertaining to the case. If he’s right, those records should support the school’s hard-to-believe claim, for example, that head coach Dana Altman did not know Austin was being investigated for an alleged sexual assault when the athlete transferred from Providence to play for the Ducks. If Schill is right, they should also support the university’s equally hard-to-believe contention that and Athletic Director Rob Mullens did not know the identities of the accused players before the Ducks played in the NCAA Tournament. There are numerous other questions, as well, that the settlement fails to answer for Oregonians who rightly hold the state’s flagship university accountable for its handling of this case.

A decision to make the requested records public could help Schill persuade the university community and others to “move forward” in the aftermath of the case. It would also set a heartening tone of transparency for a new UO president, one that would be a marked departure from the secrecy that has become the disturbing norm at the university for too many years. Schill’s decision to release the settlement document was a good start. Now, he should take the next step.

The university — and the community and state in which it is located — are ready, even eager, to “move forward.” But first they need and deserved the information that allows them to do so in confidence.

Yes. People want to move on because they understand how destructive this has been to UO and they want that over. But they also see this as a powerful event that focused attention and clarified the need for changes in policies and behaviors and beliefs.

I learned so much about what really happens on campus to young women, as a result of conversations sparked by the press coverage – coverage that the UO administration did its best to stop. 

There’s a reason truth comes before reconciliation. Efforts to understand how this event happened, and how UO botched its response, should not end. If nothing else we need to know what went wrong so we do better in the future. As a practical example, what will happen when the next similar incident happens? Will the campus be told, or will we have to learn about it from sports reporters again? 

I don’t think UO can put this behind us while our official response still looks like this:

Update: Ducks, Dana Altman settle basketball rape claim for $940K

Email from loyal UO Matters reader Tobin Klinger:

On TuesdayAug 4, 2015, at 1:19 PM, Tobin Klinger <[email protected]> wrote:

Bill,

I noticed that you posted President Schill’s letter to campus regarding the settlement agreement. Thank you for helping share the information. 

However, you should know that the settlement will, in fact, be completely covered by the university’s insurance coverage. No funds of the UO Foundation will be involved.

The Register Guard has published this story which may be a helpful reference.

http://registerguard.com/rg/news/local/33366922-75/the-university-of-oregon-settles-high-profile-rape-lawsuit.html.csp

Thanks

Tobin

That’s good news about the Foundation money. The Diane Dietz story that Klinger points out is indeed helpful and informative, complete with a timeline. The settlement is for $800K plus a four year full-ride scholarship. Let’s call it $940K, or 1 Gott. The settlement agreement with UO is here. In addition to the money, UO agrees to ask a few more questions about Dana Altman’s future transfer players:

Screen Shot 2015-08-04 at 1.39.38 PMScreen Shot 2015-08-04 at 1.39.47 PM

Klinger also reports there is no separate settlement with Altman:

From: Tobin Klinger <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Post
Date: August 4, 2015 at 2:53:46 PM PDT

Bill,

There is no settlement with Dana.

Thanks

Tobin

Update: Letter from President Schill: