Baylor Used A Racist Smear Of Black Football Players To Cancel Art Briles – OutKick
The big-time college coaching career of Art Briles effectively died on May 26, 2016. The coroner’s report listed sports media-induced “cancel culture” as
www.outkick.com
Yeah, yeah, Clay Travis, I know, but he makes a good point here in this article.
"Two weeks ago, OutKick obtained several hundred pages of court documents and sworn testimony regarding on-going litigation between Briles and Baylor officials that further call into question the legitimacy of the accepted Briles narrative. OutKick pored over the documents and re-interviewed Briles about the sex scandal that torpedoed his career and Baylor football.
What emerges is a picture of a university that went to great lengths to scapegoat Briles and a handful of black football players for a sexual-assault issue that engulfed the entire school."
“There was a campus-wide problem with sexual assault and reporting and dealing with it at Baylor,” Briles attorney Ernest Cannon told OutKick last week. “There was a conscientious effort made by the lawyers and PR people to diffuse that by blaming it all on Briles and his black football players.”
"Pepper Hamilton’s investigation in 2015-16 unearthed 100 allegations of sexual assault at Baylor. Eight of those allegations involved athletes. Five of them involved Baylor football players. According to the depositions reviewed by OutKick, Pepper Hamilton lawyers and the Baylor board of regents only discussed the allegations involving the black football players.
In order to avoid a written transcript and potential discovery, the board of regents took the unusual step of asking the law firm to report its findings orally. When pressure from key donors, justifiably perplexed and disappointed by Briles’ expensive firing, mounted against the board of regents, its leaders hired a San Francisco-based public relations firm, J.G. Bunting, that advertises its ability to “change the narrative.”
J.G. Bunting worked with a Wall Street Journal reporter with ties to Waco and the board of regents to get a story out detailing additional sexual-assault allegations involving Baylor football players. Five months after Pepper Hamilton filed its oral report and Baylor fired Briles, the Wall Street Journal reported that Pepper Hamilton uncovered 17 instances of sexual or domestic assault, including four gang rapes, by 19 Baylor football players."
But the WSJ report was flawed.
"During a six-hour deposition, Ronald Murff, the former chairman of Baylor’s board of regents, admitted that the school’s legal department, not Pepper Hamilton, discovered the additional allegations reported in the WSJ, and that those allegations surfaced after Briles was fired.
“I was as surprised and shocked by the (Wall Street Journal) story as anyone else,” Briles told OutKick. “I thought, ‘Where did this come from? What’s the basis? What’s the substance? Why am I just hearing about this now?’ ”
What’s more, the allegations often lacked substance. One allegation—Baylor said in its sworn interrogatory response—stemmed from an ESPN report. Another was based on a claim made by a woman during an interview with a Waco TV station. Baylor cited no facts or evidence concerning either alleged incident, only that Baylor saw reports on ESPN and local television."
"...WSJ reporter Brad Reagan was a relative of Baylor vice president Reagan Ramsower, the administrator who oversaw the school’s much-maligned campus police department. Murff claimed he did not know of the connection. Reagan was raised in Waco and once worked at the Waco-Tribune Herald. His late grandfather, Bud Trippet, served as Baylor’s team doctor. "
And the Pepper Hamilton lawyers were fixated on race
"...the lawyers investigating Baylor fixated on the racial makeup of Baylor’s football team.
“One of the investigators said her husband is a Philly cop and knows the area (of one of our recruits), and the woman says, ‘Y’all seem to have a lot of black players,’ ” Bennett told The Star-Telegram’s Mac Engel. “I looked at her and said, ‘Are you kidding me?’
“Later on it comes that ‘how do your black players fit in on campus life at Baylor?’ As it went on, I asked one of them, ‘Do you realize you have not asked me about a single white player?’ It was too many questions (about race).”
