We know Katie Hnida’s former coach at the University of Colorado didn’t think she was much of a football player.
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“She was terrible, OK? . . . She couldn’t kick the ball through the uprights,” is what Gary Barnett infamously said about the onetime kicker shortly before the university’s president placed him on administrative leave–code, one hopes, for “You’re fired as soon as I clear it with the lawyers.”
But I’d say Hnida has better aim than Barnett gave her credit for. She’s the one who finally kicked the lid off the long-simmering sex scandal involving the school’s football team.
For months, ugly stories seeped out of the Boulder campus, linking players and recruits to escort services, strip clubs, drinking, drugs, sex parties and rape. Three women filed civil lawsuits claiming they were sexually assaulted during or after an alcohol-fueled party for recruits in 2001. There had been another incident involving a high school student who said two recruits raped her at a party in a hotel room in 1997.
But it wasn’t until last week, when Hnida told Sports Illustrated that she had been repeatedly harassed by other players and ultimately raped almost four years ago by a teammate that the squalid mess bubbled over onto “Larry King Live” and the front page of sports sections across the country. Since she stepped forward, more sexual assault allegations involving the football team have come to light, bringing the total, as of Monday, to seven.
Maybe the story finally stuck because Barnett’s comments jolted the Richter scale of sexism. Maybe people just got tired of talking about Janet Jackson. But I think it’s largely because of Katie Hnida.
Hnida was a football player, not a football groupie. She was the first woman on the team at Colorado and she endured what she described as a harrowing series of abuse that included players exposing themselves to her and groping her in the huddle.
The sexual assault occurred, she said, as she watched television with a teammate, not after she’d been pounding shots at a party or passed out on a bed. She was, she said, a virgin.
Basically, she made for a sympathetic victim. And this, sadly, is still the lens through which many rape cases are viewed. The focus isn’t on what happened but whether the woman deserved anything and everything that could have happened.
You don’t even have to leave the state of Colorado, which has seen a recent spate of high-profile rape cases, to see evidence of this.
Last year, when reports surfaced that female cadets had been sexually assaulted at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, the brigadier general in charge of cadets compared one alleged victim’s behavior to that of a man who gets robbed after walking down an alley with $100 bills hanging out of his pockets.
The desk clerk who claims NBA basketball star Kobe Bryant sexually assaulted her in a hotel room near Vail last June has seen everything from her underwear to her medical records dragged through America’s living rooms while much of the scrutiny of Bryant has centered on the honking diamond he bought his wife afterward.
The “independent, impartial” panel charged with investigating the University of Colorado scandal is co-chaired by a former state legislator–and yes, a woman–who told a television reporter this after her appointment: “The question I have for the ladies in this is, why are they going to parties like this and drinking or taking drugs or putting themselves in a very threatening or serious position?”
That’s exactly the kind of question that distracts us from other, more important questions these cases raise.
Such as, for instance, what elements in the particular culture of athletics or the military contribute to these incidents? Or how do we address the role alcohol plays in sexual assaults at college campuses? What does it say about our view of men that we think a woman can’t go to a party without putting herself at risk of rape? Why are sex and sports so intertwined in our culture and in ways far more insidious than the flash of someone’s nipple shield at the Super Bowl?
Until we start paying more attention to the nature of the crime than the virtue of the victims, we’re the ones with the bad aim.
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Columns by Tribune staff reporters Steve Johnson and Louise Kiernan ([email protected]), who are husband and wife, appear in this space on alternating weeks.