Assignment 16 - Grace Payne

I’ve always loved sports. You can ask Wes or my family and they will tell you just how avid of a sports fan I am. Because of that, I know how awful it is to have the star player on my team taken out of the game, whether for injury or suspension. It feels like all hopes of a championship are just gone. However, many suspensions in the various college and professional leagues are warranted, and that’s something fans like me should always keep in mind.

But on the flip side, certain offenses seem to warrant more lengthy suspensions than others. For example, the NFL jumps on suspending their athletes for breaking the substance abuse policy, yet we don’t see the same lengths for crimes such as sexual assault and domestic violence.

This speech is going to focus on college athletes, however, because many of the professional athletes that commit serious crimes started their crimes in college. More importantly, this speech focuses on how the glorification of college athletes has put them on a high pedestal, so that they are no longer held to the standards of normal college students or normal people in the realm of sexual assault and rape.

Recognizing sexual assault has consistently been a problem in our society, but it’s especially been a problem in universities, shown by a National Institute of Justice study that found that for every 1,000 females attending university, 35 will have incidents of rape each academic year. However, as a result of the Me Too movement, we have seen universities make a jump towards genuinely investigating accusations of sexual assaults on their campus, when it’s accused of normal college students.

However, college athletes aren’t really normal students. With their national exposure and busy schedules we see these athletes rising above the common college student. If they play on nationally prominent teams, for example Alabama in football or Kentucky in basketball, college athletes are glorified. They are no longer students, and instead go into the role of a celebrity, where if we see them we want to take pictures or sign autographs.

Because of this national prominence, we see college athletes being treated differently.

A great example of this is Jameis Winston, the current quarterback of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the former quarterback at Florida State University.

While Winston was in college, a student named Erica Kinsman claimed that she had gone out on a date with him. At some point, Kinsman and Winston left the nightclub, but Kinsman has no memory of that. She claims that the only thing she remembers is waking up in a room and being raped.

Now is an important time to mention that I am not here to decide whether Winston is guilty or not. I instead want to debate how Florida State University and the Tallahassee Police reacted to this accusation.

Florida State butchered this investigation in many ways, but most importantly, the University’s police chief held the official police reports for four days before handing it over to the local prosecutor. That police report also managed to make its way into the hands of Winston’s defense lawyer before it got to the local prosecutor.

The Tallahassee Police Department screwed up the investigation as well. The police detective in charge of the case was able to determine where the rape most likely occurred, at a Legacy Suites. That detective could have confirmed the location by asking a manager if he recognized Winston or Kinsman, but he never asked. That detective also never got the security footage from the place Winston and Kinsman were at earlier, saying that someone told him that the place didn’t have security footage, and he believed them.

We can debate why both the University and the Police had such shoddy investigations, but the most clear answer is the fact that it was Jameis Winston: starting quarterback for the Seminoles. Winston was a talented quarterback who would go on to bring Florida State great success in football, and that is a large part of why both investigations were not good. If Winston was investigated and proven guilty, Florida State loses out on tons of revenue and any championship hopes. Tallahassee is a college football town, so if the police proves him guilty, they make tons of enemies, and they are most likely Florida State fans themselves.

A few years later, Winston was accused of sexually harassing an Uber driver in Arizona. The NFL responded by suspending Winston for three games. To put that into perspective, the NFL suspended New Orleans running back Mark Ingram four games for violating their substance abuse policy. After that, what Winston did was forgotten again.

This second suspension shows the importance of tackling sexual assault while college athletes are in college. If they are not reprimanded and punished in college, they will move on with their life thinking that they won’t get punished for committing sexual assault. They will believe that because they are this rich football player that they are untouchable, and that at most they’ll get a small suspension and then the world will forget.

The second prime example I have is Brock Turner, a former swimmer at the University of Stanford.

Turner and Winston differ in a few ways. They are still question marks whether Winston actually raped Kinsman, but there is no question whether Turner raped his victim. Winston also went on to have success in his sport, while Turner will not. However, many would argue that Turner’s success comes from not spending years in jail, and getting to live his life like a normal person.

Brock Turner was accused of raping a woman while she was unconscious and unable to say no. There was clear evidence that he had done it, but he was sentenced to only 6 months in jail, and he went on to only serve 3 of those months before being released.

Many factors went into Turner’s small sentence, including what he did to the victim not being classified as rape under California law and possibly even race, but we have to consider the face that he was a talented athlete. He believed that because he was this big, strong, talented swimmer, he would be able to commit this act and get away with it. Unfortunately, because of California law, he pretty much did get away with it.

The United States glorifies college athletes in all sports. When you see a famous athlete, you want an autograph, or maybe a picture to show your friends. This glorification has led us to viewing college athletes as celebrities instead of just normal college students, so we treat them as such. Universities, police departments, and courts of law use this celebrity status to give out little to no punishment (if the crime has even been investigated at all) to those athletes, instilling in them a sense that this is how it always will be.

This is not a hard fix. If a college athlete is accused of sexual assault, or any crime, all universities and police departments have to do is properly investigate these crimes. It will require a sacrifice from everyone involved, but it’s worth it to protect the virtue and health of every female that goes to university.