When she heard that University of Colorado football coach Gary Barnett was accused of intimidating a female athletic department trainer into not pressing sexual assault charges against a player, the charge didn’t seem right to Jennifer Bachew.
A graduate of Northwestern University who worked as an athletic department trainer while Barnett was the coach there, Bachew had the opposite experience after she had a problem with an athlete in 1998, she said.
The player, a Northwestern starter who now plays in the NFL, grabbed her buttocks, Bachew said. She said she went straight to Barnett to complain.
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The next day the player told her Barnett had threatened to throw him off the team, said Bachew, who now works as a missionary in the Caribbean island nation of Trinidad and Tobago.
“I talked to coach Barnett, and he took care of it,” Bachew said. “No one else ever bothered me again.”
Bachew’s story contrasts sharply with one told in a report filed with the Boulder Police Department. In that report, a female CU trainer says she was sexually assaulted by a player in September 2001. When she later met with Barnett, the coach told her he would support the player “100 percent if she took this forward in the criminal process,” according to the report.
Through her lawyer, the woman told the Denver Post she did not continue the case because of “intimidation” by Barnett.
“Of what I know of [Barnett] personally, he always was very professional, and he was always very ethically and morally upstanding,” said Bachew, who also contacted Colorado officials.
Bachew’s description of the incident at Northwestern “is very accurate,” Barnett said Thursday.
The coach said he dealt with that problem “the way I handled everything in my entire life.
“You respond the right way, which has been my history.”