DENVER-
The attorney for a woman who said she was gang raped at a football recruiting party for the University of Colorado told a panel of federal judges Monday that a judge should have considered a pattern of other alleged sexual assaults involving players and recruits.
U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn dismissed a lawsuit filed by Lisa Simpson and another woman, twice ruling the women failed to prove the university was deliberately indifferent to any harassment.
During a hearing at the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeal, the judges asked lawyers for both sides to detail what they knew about other allegations of assault and harassment and who had been notified.
The judges took the case under consideration but didn’t say when they would rule.
Simpson watched the hearing from the front row with her mother, Karen Burd, and declined to comment.
Burd said her daughter only wants to get her “day in court”.
“That’s what we’re hoping and praying for,” Burd said.
Three months before Simpson said she was assaulted in her apartment by players and recruits, Simpson attorney Baine Kerr told the judges that a student trainer was raped by a player and that a coach pressured her to drop criminal charges. Police also investigated the alleged rape of a recruiting ambassador two months before Simpson’s alleged rape.
“It shows the consequences of rape in this environment—nothing,” Kerr said.
Kerr also listed the 1997 alleged sexual assault of a 17-year-old high school student by two recruits, which he said was discussed by high level school officials, the alleged, repeated sexual harassment of former kicker Katie Hnida and of student trainers.
But CU’s lawyer, Patrick O’Rourke, said those alleged cases involved a variety of people—players, recruits and trainers on and off the field—and different authorities were notified. He said the university couldn’t expected to believe that previous, unrelated incidents posed a risk of future problems.
“These are acts engaged in by individuals,” O’Rourke said.
Judge Harris L. Hartz wondered if a culture of women being treated as “available for sexual desires” wouldn’t be enough for the university to take action.
“The risk doesn’t have to be that great when the danger is that great it would seem,” Hartz said.
In March 2006, Blackburn ruled that despite new evidence showing CU coaches and trainers might have known about sexual assault and harassment problems before the alleged assaults, the women still had not shown they could prove violations of a federal gender equity law.
“A cry for justice, however, does not mean that Title IX should be expanded to provide justice simply because the cry for justice has not been answered otherwise,” Blackburn wrote.
The case by Simpson and another woman was dismissed in March 2005, and Blackburn ruled on their request to revive their lawsuit a year later. They say they were sexually assaulted at an off-campus party in 2001 and that CU violated federal Title IX by fostering an atmosphere that led to the alleged attacks.
In their appeal, lawyers for the women argued that officials knew of sexual assaults and harassment up to four years before the 2001 party and that the school concealed several prior assaults from them.
The recruiting scandal dominated headlines in Colorado in 2004 and beyond for months. Former Gov. Bill Owens at one point appointed the attorney general to lead a grand jury investigation, which resulted in an indictment against a former football recruiting aide for soliciting a prostitute and misusing a school cell phone.
A separate probe, backed by the CU Board of Regents, concluded that drugs, alcohol and sex were used to entice blue chip recruits to the Boulder campus but said none of the activity was knowingly sanctioned by university officials.
The school responded by overhauling oversight of the athletics department and putting some of the most stringent policies in place for any football recruiting program. The fallout included the resignation of university President Elizabeth Hoffman and the departure of athletics director Dick Tharp. Football coach Gary Barnett stepped down in 2005.
No criminal sexual assault charges were filed as a result of the scandal .
Sixteen civil rights and women’s groups filed friend-of-the-court briefs supporting the appeal.
