How a Reality-TV Star Became the Voice of Sexual-Violence Prevention

Alexis Jones doesn’t fit the profile of many of the activists working to combat sexual assault on campuses. For one thing, the 34-year-old isn’t a sexual-assault victim. She was a contestant on the reality-TV show Survivor.

She worked in the entertainment industry. She founded a nonprofit, I Am That Girl, which focuses on empowering young women, and wrote a book by the same name.

But over the past three years, as allegations of sexual assault have roiled athletic teams at Baylor, Michigan State, and Vanderbilt Universities, among others, Ms. Jones has become the go-to prevention educator for male athletes in dozens of big-time college sports programs.

At first Ms. Jones was speaking in individual locker rooms about the importance of respecting women. After coaches told her they wanted a means of continuing the conversation, she teamed up with sexual-violence experts and filmmakers to create an educational program, ProtectHer, that she began selling this spring.

Ms. Jones spoke with The Chronicle about how she ended up doing sexual-violence-prevention work, what works with college athletes, and how to spur cultural change in an environment where the focus remains on winning games.

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You’ve done reality TV, entertainment, and nonprofit work. How did you end up educating athletes about sexual assault?

I was an athlete myself. I grew up with four older brothers in this very male-dominated environment in Texas, where, I remind people, football is a religion. Then I did my undergrad and master’s at the University of Southern California. My sophomore year, after doing The Vagina Monologues, I sat down with six girls in my sorority. And I said, “We have a lot of conversations about things that don’t matter. What if once a week we had conversations about things that did?” Six meetings later we had 347 girls show up. Out of that, I Am That Girl was born. I also worked in the entertainment industry in college. I worked at Fox Sports and ESPN.

Then Trent Dilfer, who was a commentator for ESPN, and Yogi Roth, who’s a commentator for the Pac-12, called and asked me to give a talk to the top 18 high-school quarterbacks in the country, for a TV show called Elite 11, on the importance of respecting girls. When it aired a week later, the Ray Rice domestic-violence video came out. Suddenly I became that girl in the locker room who’s having tough-love conversations with guys. I was not prepared for the fact that, overnight, I would be hired by Division I locker rooms all over the country.

There’s been a lot of public attention on college athletes and sexual assault. Your phone has been ringing off the hook. Has that scrutiny been a wake-up call?

Absolutely. There are more than 300 federal investigations into major universities for how poorly they handled sexual assault. In the era we live in, there is no hiding anymore. For a long time, from a cultural standpoint, winning was enough for coaches. What we’re really seeing is a shift in the expectations put on coaches. Not only is winning an expectation, but so is ushering boys into manhood.

Part of that is because we are seeing such transparency in terms of who these guys are on and off the field, which before social media wasn’t an option. We didn’t have access behind the velvet curtain to see what was really going on. Now because that’s front and center, there is a completely different expectation on coaches. And I’m wildly inspired by how many head coaches — and we’re talking the biggest and baddest, the Nick Sabans of the world — are taking it upon themselves to say: “This is a massive priority for me as an individual, as a coach, as a man.” I’m seeing tangible change on the ground.

What does “tangible change” mean?

After coming in and speaking for an hour, I end up sitting with these guys for two to three hours as they’re wrestling with these tough conversations. When I come in, it’s not just “don’t sexually assault women.” We have to take five steps back from that and say, “Let’s look at your programming, as a millennial man. The majority of you learn about sex through porn. Let’s talk about the 10 hours of media a day you consume.” To me, tangible change is sitting down after, when all of these guys have a thousand things they could be doing, and they’re exhausted and could go straight to bed. Instead they want to sit there and talk. They come up to me and say, “When you said X, Y, and Z, I think I fall into that category and I don’t feel good about that. So can you help me?”

What’s it like to walk into a roomful of college football players who don’t necessarily want to be there?

The boys initially don’t know I’m a girl, and that’s intentional. The head coach comes in and says: “We’re bringing in one of the foremost experts on manhood. This person has hiked Mount Everest. This person has survived 33 days on a deserted island.” Then he says, “Please welcome Miss Alexis Jones.” Every single time there’s a whiplash. Before I say a word, these guys are confronted with the fact that they absolutely assumed that I was a man.

I immediately dive into, “Why am I here?” I tell them, “The whole country is talking about you like you’re the problem. I just so happen to believe that you’re integral to being the cure.” That already reframes the issue. Then I say, “The reality is, one in five women will be sexually assaulted on this campus. I’m not talking about in theory, I’m talking about your campus right now. That being said, it’s really different when it’s her.”

I click to the next slide, and I’ve pulled pictures of their sisters and moms and girlfriends from their social media. I usually memorize 10 to 15 names. “It’s different when it’s Julie, or it’s Lauren, or it’s Jenny.” All of a sudden they’ve gone from slouching, sitting back, thinking, here we go, another speaker who’s here to tell us not to make mistakes. When they’re looking at a picture of their 16-year-old sister and I’m saying, “The reality is, I’m here on behalf of her,” it’s a completely different conversation. Their entire body language changes.

You’re using the vernacular of college athletes to talk about respecting women.

One time, one of the guys was like, “Well, why am I a bad guy if a girl’s texting me a naked selfie at 2 o’clock in the morning, who I’ve never met before — why am I a bad guy for showing up and bragging about it?” I said, “Well, it’s kind of like Ben Roethlisberger walking into a bar in ’08 and bragging about having beaten the 0-16 Lions.” After a long pause, he’s like, “OK, that makes a lot of sense.”

I’ve never heard a guy say, “Hey, buddy, did you get consent from that young lady?” None of these guys are using words like consent. None of these guys are like, “Hey, I noticed on Thursday that there was an awesome opportunity to be an upstander when that young lady had too much to drink.” Part of it is being deeply entrenched in pop culture. What are they consuming? And how do we deliver the education in that way?

That doesn’t mean to dumb it down. That doesn’t mean to not give this topic the gravitas it deserves. But last week, I was talking to Clay Helton, the head coach at USC. He said, “In 23 years of coaching, I’ve learned that the only thing that matters is, do these guys actually hear the message?” You can have the best delivery ever, but it doesn’t matter if it’s not relatable.

The focus in big-time college sports is still largely on winning games. How can cultural change occur when the success of the team is still the ultimate focus?

Activism is the ultimate endurance sport. The only way you survive endurance sports is really patting yourself on the back throughout the process and celebrating every little win. We have so, so far to go. But how are we celebrating coaches so we are shifting the narrative? They should be getting just as much attention and praise for ushering boys into manhood as they do for winning.

Among universities and coaches, who are the pathfinders? Who is really trying to get this right?

Nick Saban at Alabama is on the cutting edge. He has the No. 1-ranked football team in the country, and he made time to have me speak to his team. When you have that much pressure on you as a coach, and you are saying this matters, that is showing what it means to be a leader. Also, Charlie Strong at South Florida. Clay Helton at USC. Jim Mora at UCLA. Justin Wilcox at Cal Berkeley. Chris Peterson at the University of Washington. These guys are the real deal. For me as a woman coming into these locker rooms, it requires the alpha-male head coaches saying, “It’s not enough to check a box. If we’re going to see something really shift, it is going to be us who demand this change.”

Coach Jay Wright at Villanova is another one I’d add to the list. He had me come in and do an entire session for every single coach at Villanova to help them understand what is going on with millennials, and what do we have to do? It takes a lot of humility for these coaches to say, “The truth is, we didn’t get this education either, and none of us are above having something happen in our locker room.” They’re saying, “It is more important that I am building men of character than simply winning games.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.