Twelve years old and in the first flush of incipient manhood so mother bought me an original green flavor Speed Stick. It was my introduction to deodorant. The house we had rented was full of sand fleas and on top of that this seriously disabled girl that I felt bad for but was uncomfortable being around. We’d take her out to local places and the disability by itself or the relatives’ foreign accents by themselves woulda been one thing but the both a them factors together… well, I just wanted to fit in as a ~70% regular person but all the goddamned time with this poor girl who was about to die. I wish I been nicer to her. I wasn’t mean or nothing but I coulda been nicer. I was just embarrassed around the hillbillys. I was embarrassed my whole family had weird European accents. Every time we went into a store I was like “I’m not really with them.” (Stores were just stores then, not like Targets or Walmarts or whatever.)
Anyway. So we was in a house on the Outer Banks. Not a fancy house, it was really just a shack. It’s gone now, climate change. Sand fleas everywhere. I got the best tan of my life that summer. Like a junior deity. All smelling of green Speed Stick… and rotting bycatch. I happened to be reading On The Beach at the time, the novel where all the survivors of the nuclear war are freaking out in Australia waiting for the death cloud to come. Fishermen would throw back the sharks and rays and other commercially unviable fish, which would wash up on the beach and rot for six hours. Nobody ever tells you about the first time you flip over a decomposing horseshoe crab. They’re disturbing to flip over in the best of health. Imagine that times suppurating decomposition.
So. The omnipresent spectre of nuclear war (which honestly I was as jaded to as possible. You can’t keep freaking out over that shit indefinitely,) the mysteries of the sea thrown up at my doorstep only to rot away in some chthonic miasma, the body horrors of a mortally disabled relative, with a soupçon of rotting fish. All in one summer vacation!
I have no reason to suspect that they were(and, as noted, I hope that his behavior toward the swim team members didn’t rise to the level where it would have generated FERPA-covered medical records in the course of their treatment).
My point was simply that, in the already ugly topic of sexual assault on campus and admin-complicity-with-athletics, the FERPA/HIPAA issue can add an unexpected layer of additional suck to an already lousy situation; since it gives the school the ability to pull medical records if people who used campus medical services attempt to take legal action.
Should they have kept watch on him?
Kicked him from the team for being creepy and making the women feel uncomfortable?
Maybe just went ahead and arrested him for future crimes, because warning signs.
We can’t have it both ways. Being an asshole with no social skills and saying completely inappropriate things that border (and probably are) on harassment doesn’t mean we get to condemn him because of future acts that have now come to pass. If that was the case every high school kid that was a “loner” or didn’t have a lot of friends would get scrutinized for being “different”. Fuck all that. I agree that he didn’t get the punishment he deserved, but the idea we could have forcibly stopped him based on these claims is not a world I want to live in.
Yes, you can certainly police the character of anyone on your sports team, so long as they’re sexually harassing others. Your false dichotomy doesn’t protect privacy, it protects literal rapists over women.
Yes. An athletic program should warn him and then kick him off. To not do so creates a hostile environment for female athletes and put the school in the position of violating Title IX. And Stanford has some deep pockets.
As a former female swimmer who grew up swimming and wearing Speedos (among the other brands), I can’t believe that his infantile antics got this far. I’ve never heard my male or female counterparts ever make comments about other swimmers’ bodies (either male or female). It just wasn’t done.
His parents failed and Stanford failed, and I see several lawsuits on the horizon.
I’m just tired of ‘higher learning’ institutions focus on athletics over all else. Can we just eliminate athletics from academia all together? I think our campuses would become much safer and produce better students if all of this hoo ha fandom and fealty to the ‘game’ weren’t part of the equation. Also, there’s a good chance that fewer executives would be complete jackass psychopaths if we didn’t keep passing off athletes as academics.
It’s not just the money, the pride and religious zeal backs the righteousness to put the “greater good” of the alumni over lives made ashamble by rape.
I don’t mind athleticism but the faith of the lay is distressing as fuck well beyond the corrupt administrations trying to cash a paycheck.
As do I and I think we should encourage children to seek whatever healthy physical activities to which they are drawn. What does that have to do with school?
Making things a true nonprofit with ethics boards not tied to the schools, we can deincentivize the rape and party culture of college much more with the athletics detached from the school administration and school law enforcement and school’s legal might to protect themselves and their athletes against the residents and other students.
What struck me about this case was just how bad the crime was. I mean, dragging an unconscious woman behind a dumpster to rape her is rape-at-knife-point-in-the-park bad, it’s break-into-house-while-someone-is-sleeping bad. We’re talking Law & Order SVU stuff. I just can’t get my head around how it can be passed off as minor.
