A story that Baylor, both the university and football program, would love to just go away is instead seemingly growing in scope.
Late last month, BU regents told the Wall Street Journal that 17 women reported sexual or domestic assaults in alleged incidents involving 19 football players since 2011. “There was a cultural issue there that was putting winning football games above everything else, including our values,” one of the regents, J. Cary Gray, was quoted in the story as describing the program under then-head coach Art Briles.
Thursday, during a meeting with the Dallas Morning News, another regent, David Harper, made the explosive allegation that Briles was made aware of a gang rape and didn’t report it to the proper authorities either at the university or in law enforcement. In response to those allegations, current Bears assistant coaches and football staffers, who have yet to speak publicly on the controversy since the scandal broke six months ago, released a tweeted statement Friday night that both attempts to debunk Harper’s claims and supports the actions of their former head coach.pic.twitter.com/9ogtsPhb6L
— Coach KB (@kendalbriles) November 5, 2016
One of the assistants that signed the statement is Kendal Briles, Art Briles’ son. Another is Jeff Lebby, Art Briles’ son-in-law.
Art Briles was dismissed as the head coach at Baylor in the midst of the sexual assault scandal that rocked both the football program and the Baptist university. At least two of Briles’ players were convicted of sexual assault committed while they were Bears football players. Several other players were accused of committing either sexual assault or violence — or both — while playing for Briles.
None of Briles’ assistants were dismissed as a result of the scandal even as an independent review into the football program’s handling of sexual assault accusations showed that “members of the Baylor coaching staff chose not to report incidents of sexual violence involving football players, [instead] meeting directly with those filing complaints of sexual abuse and handling their own investigations outside of university policy to discredit the complainants, thus denying them the right to a fair investigation by the university.”