The Ken Starr media tour is not going well.
The now former Baylor president and chancellor has been making the media rounds this week to defend the school (and himself, it seems) in light of the scandal that has exposed the school’s completely inadequate responses to allegations of sexual assault.
Starr already looked, as Dan Wetzel put it, “clumsy and clueless” in an interview with ESPN earlier this week. He took clumsy and clueless to new levels in an interview with KWTX in Waco.
Reporter Julie Hays presented Starr with a Nov. 2015 email from a woman who says she was raped by former Baylor football player Tevin Elliott, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for a separate sexual assault. The email, which was addressed to Starr, former head coach Art Briles and others, featured the subject line “I Was Raped at Baylor,” and was featured in a recent episode of ESPN’s Outside the Lines.
When Hays asks Starr about the email, Starr – at first – says he may have seen it.
“I honestly may have. I’m not denying that I saw it,” Starr said.
Soon after these words left Starr’s mouth, KWTX’s report says a public relations woman named Merrie Spaeth asked the station’s news director not to use Starr’s comment when the piece airs. The news director, of course, objected to that request. Spaeth then interrupts the interview to pull Starr out of the room, presumably to coach him up with a different, more image-friendly way of answering Hays’ question.
When Starr returns to the room, Spaeth instructs Hays to ask the question a second time. She does. This time, Starr’s answer is different: “All I’m going to say is I honestly have no recollection of that.”
At this point, Starr inexplicably turns to Spaeth to ask her if his answer was “OK.” The cameras are still rolling, and a clearly exasperated Spaeth instructs Starr to look at Hays, not at her.
Starr later answered a third time.
“I honestly have no recollection of seeing such an email and I believe that I would remember seeing such an email,” Starr said. “The president of a university gets lots of emails. I don’t even see a lot of the emails that come into the office of the president. I have no recollection. None.”
Starr was removed as school president last week when Baylor’s Board of Regents released the summary findings from Philadelphia-based law firm Pepper Hamilton’s investigation into the school’s handlings of sexual assault allegations. However, Starr, at first, was allowed to remain in the role of chancellor. That changed Wednesday when he announced in his ESPN interview that he would step down from that role as “a matter of conscience.”
Starr, who claimed he has not been privy to the full Pepper Hamilton report, did not present himself very well in that interview either. When asked if Baylor did enough to keep female students safe, Starr bizarrely made a distinction between safety on campus and off-campus.
"In terms of our campus, as far as I know, absolutely," Starr said. "The episodes of which I’m aware — and I’m behind a veil of ignorance in part, I’ve been partially briefed but not fully briefed — every episode of which I’m aware happened off campus, not on campus. But we accept responsibility for that. We don’t say well you’re not within the geographic confines. You’re not in one of our residence halls.
"I don’t believe — this is my belief — that there is any episode of on campus. And this is part of training. We need to train our young people. Be careful. And we are using a wonderful method called green dot of bystander intervention. We’ve been working on these for many many months but it’s been a work in progress just as it has been around the nation.
"You cannot turn as a fellow student at a party — and we’re an alcohol free campus — it’s not happening on campus to the best of my knowledge. They're off-campus parties, those are the venues where these bad things have happened."
In its summary of the findings from the Pepper Hamilton report, the Baylor Board said the school’s “student conduct processes were wholly inadequate to consistently provide a prompt and equitable response under Title IX.” It also said Baylor “failed to consistently support complainants” and “failed to take action to identify and eliminate a potential hostile environment, prevent its recurrence or address its effects.”
Pepper Hamilton also pointed to failings from the athletic department and football program specifically. As a result, Art Briles was removed from his position as head coach and athletic director Ian McCaw resigned.
Perhaps until the full Pepper Hamilton report is released – not just a 13-page summary from Baylor’s board – will we know the full scope of what school and athletics administrators did and did not know of the multiple accusations of assaults against football players.
If this interview gaffe from Starr is any indication, the details won't be pretty.
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