Feuding Over Sex-Assault Scandal Intensifies Spotlight on Baylor

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Baylor University has been criticized for months for being slow to divulge details about a spate of sexual assaults that rocked the campus and toppled its leadership. Now, the university is seeking to regain control of its message with a series of moves that are raising eyebrows among alumni and activists.

This week, it set up a website, The Truth, in which it has been taking on its critics as part of an effort to increase transparency. The aggressive tone of some of its posts contrasts sharply with what many have described as the university’s previous silence on the scandal. For activists on the campus, the public feuding has reopened old wounds.

Baylor has used the site to challenge assertions by its former Title IX coordinator, Patty Crawford, that the university thwarted her efforts to deal with a sexual-assault problem that went well beyond the football program. Her complaint to the U.S. Department of Education prompted a Title IX investigation of Baylor. The scandal also led to the firing of Baylor’s head football coach, Art Briles; the demotion and eventual resignation of the university’s president, Kenneth W. Starr; and the resignation of its athletics director, Ian McCaw.

Baylor’s new website also “fact-checked” reporting about the scandal on an episode of Showtime’s 60 Minutes Sports. The episode, shown Tuesday evening, described how some assault complaints at Baylor were never forwarded to the proper authorities and how, according to Ms. Crawford, hundreds of students came to her with complaints about sexual assault during her stint of less than two years as the university’s Title IX coordinator.

On its new website, Baylor officials raised doubts about that number and said that while they did everything they could to help her succeed, “Crawford lacked the administrative skills to manage the Title IX office.”

The Fallout at Baylor

A sexual-assault controversy led the university to demote its president and take action against members of its athletics staff. Read more about how the scandal unfolded and its lingering effects.

• How Baylor’s First Female President Plans to Move Past the Sex-Assault Scandals
• At Baylor, a Scandal’s Constant Drip Means a Relentless Spotlight
• Title IX Officers Pay a Price for Navigating a Volatile Issue
• Baylor’s New Provost Seeks to Foster a ‘Morally Significant’ Culture

The university also defied warnings from CBS News, which produces the Showtime series, that it risked violating the network’s intellectual-property rights by posting interview clips that Baylor contends “CBS didn’t want you to see.” (Showtime is a division of the CBS Corporation.) These were clips the university filmed using its own equipment while the CBS interviews were under way on the Baylor campus.

Members of Baylor’s Board of Regents, who have been under pressure to publicly address the controversy, chose to make their first public statements to The Wall Street Journal last week — a move that riled some alumni. Three regents, who the university said were speaking on behalf of the entire board, described what one regent called a “horrifying and painful” series of assaults perpetrated by Baylor football players.

In all, 17 women reported sexual violence by 19 football players between 2011 and 2015, which includes four gang rapes, the regents said.

Some people have questioned why the regents focused their comments on the football program, when Baylor officials have said that football players were involved in just 10 percent of the complaints filed with the university’s Title IX office in a four-year period ending in 2014-15.

A university spokeswoman said Wednesday that Baylor officials had made clear that “Baylor’s was an institutionwide failure.”

Change in Approach

The university’s change in approach followed its decision last month to hire a San Francisco-based public relations firm, G.F. Bunting & Company. The firm’s president, Glenn F. Bunting, said Wednesday that he wasn’t authorized to speak about clients and that he couldn’t respond to criticism from the Baylor Line Foundation, formerly the Baylor Alumni Association.

A statement by the independent alumni group, which has had a contentious relationship with the university for years, said in part:

“Some members of the Board of Regents have given media interviews that seem to be a part of a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign to validate their staffing decisions rather than explaining what happened directly to the Baylor family.”

Ernest Cannon, a lawyer for the fired coach, Mr. Briles, has accused the regents of making the coach a scapegoat for wider failings to enforce the university’s Title IX policy. Mr. Cannon did not return calls for comment on Wednesday, but he told a Waco television station that the public-relations firm had “invented” a number of the alleged assaults and gang rapes in an effort to smear the coach’s name.

Laura E. Seay, a 2000 graduate of Baylor who is an assistant professor of government at Colby College, said she has been disturbed by “poorly informed and insensitive comments” made by alumni who have questioned women’s stories in their fight to get Mr. Briles reinstated.

“It may be true that 90 percent of the assaults did not involve football players,” she said, but many of them did. Mr. Briles “was fired for a reason,” she said.

Having the scandal constantly in the news is difficult for survivors, Ms. Seay said. “Many of them had kind of moved on, and when the story keeps blowing up and Baylor keeps bumbling its response, it feels like slowly pulling off a Band-Aid.”

Jim Dunnam, a lawyer who represents 10 women who are suing Baylor over its handling of sexual assault, said eight of those cases had nothing to do with football players.

“They seem to be doing everything they can to only talk about football,” he said. “The idea is, We’ve gotten rid of the coach and therefore dealt with the problem.”

Baylor’s spokeswoman, Lori Fogleman, pointed out that the university was working on carrying out 105 recommendations made by Pepper Hamilton, the law firm it hired to conduct an investigation. Those recommendations involve the entire university, she said, not just athletics.

Byron Newberry, a professor of mechanical engineering who chairs the Faculty Senate, said that while he wishes Baylor officials had been more forthcoming earlier, he welcomes the new focus on transparency. “The more information that is available about what went wrong,” he said, “the better the chance of correcting the problems.”

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.