Authors: Jeff Benedict,Don Yaeger
“There are patterns of exclusion in ownership, capital, and licenses for NFL properties. Here we are 400 years later still proving the obvious, that we can coach a football team, that we can play quarterback. Still having to prove the self-evident—now that’s racist.”
Immunity
On February 27, 1998, television soap operas were interrupted in the New England area by breaking news of a real-life soap opera unfolding north of the border. New England Patriots star running back Dave Meggett had been arrested earlier that morning in a posh Toronto hotel and charged, along with former Patriots practice squad player Steve Brannon, with sexually assaulting a prostitute. Meggett, the NFL’s all-time leading punt returner, was also charged with robbing the woman of $400 after allegedly slapping her about the face. Strapped to a stretcher, the victim was wheeled out of the hotel and transported by ambulance to an area hospital. Meggett and Brannon left the hotel handcuffed in the back of a police car.
Meggett’s was but one among a two-week flurry of off-season arrests involving NFL players:
• On February 16, Jets kicker John Hall was arrested in Florida for possession of marijuana (charge is pending).
• On February 17, Packers running back Travis Jervey was arrested for possession of marijuana (charges were dropped).
• On February 25, Redskins wide receiver Leslie Shepherd was arrested for assaulting a man at a bar (acquitted at trial on June 2, 1998).
• On March 1, Jets lineman Matt Finkes was arrested in Arizona and charged with drunk driving after crashing his car (charge is pending).
• On March 3, Bengals running back Corey Dillon was arrested for drunk driving in Seattle (pleaded guilty to a reduced charge and served one day in jail).
The charges against Meggett were the most serious of the lot, and the most difficult to come to grips with by fans. An NFL player caught with weed? Sure. Players drinking and smashing up their cars? It happens. Guys mixing it up in a bar after a few too many brews? No surprise there. But a prostitute who says she was raped in an NFL star’s hotel room? The public is far less willing to believe such charges. And why would a millionaire rob anyone, much less a prostitute, of $400?
Welcome to the erotic nightlife of celebrity athletes, where the narrow gap between sexual indulgence and sex crimes offers a murky view of who’s telling the truth—the woman who says she was violated, or the player who says she wanted it.
Shortly after Meggett’s arrest, his accuser, a thirty-three-year-old Toronto woman who made no effort to conceal her occupation as both a dancer at a Toronto gentleman’s club and as a high-priced call girl, offered her side of the incident. In a published report, she revealed that she had known Brannon for two years, meeting him for the first time in a Toronto strip club. On March 26, 1998, hours before the alleged rape, the woman said she received a phone call from Meggett, whom she claimed to have never met previously, asking her to meet him and Brannon in Meggett’s $460-per-night suite at the Royal York Hotel.
When she arrived at the hotel, she said that Brannon met her in the lobby and escorted her up to Meggett’s room. Alone in the room, the woman and Brannon had protected sex. Meggett then entered the bedroom unannounced, sat down on the bed beside them and reportedly said, “ ‘It’s party time.’ He was counting [a big wad of money] out loud,” the woman said.
According to the woman, Meggett put on a condom and joined his friend and former teammate in having intercourse with her. She suddenly demanded that both of them stop, however, when their condoms unexpectedly broke.
“I told him [Meggett] to put on [another] condom, and he didn’t,” she said. “Anybody that knows me, knows I’m really into safe sex. Steve got in front of me and held up my arms. Meggett was in back of me. Meggett said the Patriots test him for AIDS all the time and I wouldn’t catch anything.”
She eventually untangled herself from the men, went into the bathroom, and rinsed herself off. “I got dressed and when I came out, Meggett was going through my fur coat and demanding I give him back the money,” she said. “I started yelling at him that I wasn’t giving the money back, and he started hitting me. I told Meggett, ‘If you are willing to beat me for it, you must need it more than me.’”
Meggett and Brandon, through their attorneys, insisted that any sex that took place that night was consensual. Meanwhile, Meggett’s lawyer, Alan Gold, according to press reports, hired a private investigator “to scour Toronto’s night life … in an effort to discredit the woman’s sexual assault claims.”
A
s bad as the allegations against Meggett sounded, athletes have little to worry about when they are arrested for sex crimes. Of the 217 felony sexual assault complaints against college and professional athletes that were reported to police between 1986 and 1995, only sixty-six ever reached the trial stage. And of the sixty-six players who stood trial, 85 percent were acquitted. Conversely, Bureau of Justice statistics confirm that based on a 1990 study, 54 percent of the arrests for rape in the United States resulted in a conviction. The sordid circumstances surrounding the Meggett case illustrate an increasingly familiar scenario that makes convictions hard to come by when professional athletes are charged with rape: an alleged victim tells authorities she was raped by a professional ballplayer; the accused player admits to having sexual relations with the accuser, but denies the criminal charges; and well-paid defense attorneys remind the public that while it may be nontraditional for revered athletes to engage in group sex or in trysts with strippers and groupies, it is, however, not criminal.
The seamy nature of these cases initially tarnishes the player’s image in the popular press. In court, however, lurid tales of sexual impropriety often hurt the accuser far more than the accused athlete, particularly if the accuser is a known call girl, nude dancer, or sports groupie. Under these circumstances, jurors don’t necessarily believe the athlete to be more credible, but simply conclude the woman’s occupation and her conduct leading up to the alleged incident raise too much doubt to find the player guilty. Consider the following:
• On October 3, 1990, a Seattle woman who was a known sports groupie had sex with Cincinnati Bengals player Lynn James in his hotel room. She later sued nineteen of James’s teammates in federal court, claiming she was gang-raped by as many as a dozen players while teammates rooted each other on. No criminal charges were ever brought against the players, yet ten of them contributed to a $30,000 payoff to keep the woman from going forward with her claims. “It wasn’t brutality or something that could be classified as criminal,” said one of the accused players after the jury in the civil trial found the players not liable. “It was in fun, a human act. When are we allowed to drop the role model? What I mean by that is that a single guy doesn’t have the pleasure or same ability a married guy has. A married guy can go in the privacy of his home and whatever happens happens. But a single guy’s gotta get it from somewhere.”
• In April of 1991, a twenty-three-year-old Austin, Texas, woman accused three Houston Oilers (Mike Rozier, Cris Dishman, and Richard Johnson) of sexually assaulting her in a hotel after the players reportedly met her in a club earlier that evening. According to the accuser’s own admission, she was intoxicated at the time she left the club. Johnson, while admitting that he had consensual sex with the accuser, conceded to authorities that “she was asleep during intercourse.” A Travis County grand jury listened to the evidence, including testimony from the players, and declined to indict.
• In August of 1995, La Crosse, Wisconsin, authorities received a complaint from a woman who said she had been sexually assaulted by members of the New Orleans Saints during training camp. The alleged victim had accompanied one of the players to his dorm room and had sex with him. She told authorities that other players then entered the room unannounced and forced themselves on her. The players’ version, in part, is described in the following excerpt from an Investigation Summary written by the prosecuting attorney’s office: “Player 1 … and Player 2 did lie down and took their clothes off…. He [Player 1 ] stated that he and Player 2 did perform sexual intercourse with her and that she also had oral sex with him. He stated that at one point when she was having oral sex with Player 2 that he had sexual intercourse with her from behind.. . . When Player 9 entered the room … he took his clothes off and then attempted to put a condom on. … Player 1 stated that he specifically remembers seeing Player 5 standing in the doorway because he made the comment that he couldn’t even get into the room with all the guys in there.”
Despite the alleged victim’s wishes to go through with criminal charges, prosecutors declined to indict the players. “I believe the credibility of the woman who reported the assaults would be insufficient to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that the sexual contact she had with numerous players was not consensual,” said prosecutor Ron Kind. The woman, it turned out, was an exotic dancer.
In cases of acquaintance rape, which so often boil down to a “he said–she said” swearing contest, credibility is paramount. And in jurors’ eyes, groupies, strippers, and prostitutes who willingly go to celebrated athletes’ bedrooms get little sympathy. Criminally accused athletes, as a result, actually benefit from describing the affair as a random sexual liaison. Seemingly, the more indiscriminate the sexual behavior that players are willing to admit to, the less likely it is that they will be convicted, much less indicted for a sex crime.
In short, convictions are generally tough to come by in any date rape case. But they are particularly rare when the accused is a celebrated athlete. Juries have their doubts about consent and force, even in cases of alleged gang rape where the accuser may have been drunk, asleep, or mentally impaired at the time of the incident. In the Bengals case mentioned above, the accuser claimed
and players admitted
that more than a dozen teammates rooted on players as they took turns having sexual contact with her. “I was trying to hide my eyes, ears, and nose to it because it’s not very pleasant,” said Judge Walter McGovern, who presided over the Bengals’ civil trial. Prior to trial, McGovern and his law clerk were presented with over twenty hours of videotaped depositions detailing the alleged rapes. Without expressing an opinion as to whether or not the players’ conduct was criminal, McGovern said in an exclusive interview, “I’m sure that it [the players’ conduct] would really turn off 99 percent of the people in this country.”
With so much riding on how jurors perceive the accuser, the public’s familiarity with groupies and women who willingly have sex with athletes provides a potent weapon for defense attorneys. The more notorious rape cases involving professional athletes in the past decade have involved groupies or prostitutes. As a result, some jurors (and it only takes one for a not guilty verdict) warm up quickly to defense attorneys’ portrayal of any accuser of an athlete as a groupie-type. This has a chilling effect on the willingness of other women who are sexually assaulted by players to come forward and press charges. “Women who indulge athletes in sex have got to start participating in some of the responsibility for athletes getting away with sexual assault,” said Lori Peterson, a Minneapolis attorney who has represented five women in separate civil cases involving NFL players. “By acting like it is an honor to be bedded by a football player, these women are perpetuating the stereotype and endangering other women.”
So what happens in cases where the alleged rape victim is neither a groupie, exotic dancer, or prostitute? Do accusers who are mere social acquaintances, live-in girlfriends, teenagers, or even minors fair any better in court? To explore these questions, the authors examined numerous rape cases, some of which never made it to the indictment stage and have been previously unreported by the press. Relying heavily on police reports and court documents, the authors also went back and interviewed key figures in each case chronicled below. The circumstances surrounding these cases illustrate why professional athletes often seem immune to prosecution for rape.
T
ogether, Indianapolis Colts defensive tackle Tony McCoy, six feet and 282 pounds, and New Orleans Saints defensive tackle Darren Mickell, six foot four and 291 pounds, anchored the University of Florida’s defensive line from 1989 through 1992. In the spring of 1992, both players were drafted into the NFL, McCoy by the Colts and Mickell by the Chiefs. Both quickly earned starting positions and developed into premier pass rushers. In 1996, Mickell was traded from Kansas City to New Orleans.
According to police reports on file at the University of Florida’s campus police department, McCoy’s and Mickell’s odyssey to NFL stardom was checkered with complaints of sexual assault. Despite pages of police documents detailing alleged assaults involving both players, none of this ever came to light. Here’s why.
On October 5, 1995, three years after both players had left Florida, the university’s police department received a telephone call from Carmen Nichols.* A former student, Nichols reported that she had been gang-raped in the football players’ dormitory back in 1991. According to Nichols’s extremely detailed and lengthy police complaint, back on June 28, 1991, she was in her apartment when her phone rang at approximately 2:00
A.M.
Nichols told police that she hung up the receiver when the male voice on the other end refused to identify himself. Minutes later, a former boyfriend whom Nichols had been intimately involved with telephoned. The boyfriend, a Florida football player, asked Nichols to meet him in the lobby of Yon Hall.
When Nichols arrived at the entrance to the boyfriend’s dorm minutes later, she encountered Darren Mickell, who told her that he was the one who had called just prior to her boyfriend and refused to identify himself. Unnerved, Nichols backed away from Mickell and started back toward her apartment. She noted in her police statement that she was aware of Mickell’s “reputation,” but did not elaborate. A criminal background check on Mickell revealed that while on a football scholarship he was charged with resisting police officers three times. In 1992 he pleaded no contest to a felony charge of grand larceny and served two days in jail.