MSU pays 1.2 million for agreed silence about football player sexual misconduct case
Michigan State University paid a combined $1.2 million to a woman and a former football player who were embroiled in a Title IX investigation and subsequent lawsuits if they both agreed to "set aside" the findings of an investigation that found the football player responsible for violating the school's sexual misconduct policy.
The former female student, listed as "Jane Doe" in settlement documents obtained Tuesday by Outside the Lines as part of a public records request, received $475,000 from the university. The football player, Keith Mumphery, received $725,000.
https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/27163447/michigan-state-pays-12m-settle-complaint
Double post.
Speaking of our friends in East Lansing....
Anybody else wonder what ever became of the MSU bombshell revelation that UMBig11 said would go off sometime last year? Not saying that they didnt spend the year bathing in poop but unless my memories have failed me (and that's entirely possible considering I celebrated my 60th birthday a week or so ago) every time some new PR disaster was revealed he said "nope, not it."
He said we'd definitely know it when it went public but I dont think it ever has. I wonder what it was.
At this point, the constant PR shitshow kinda neutralizes any bombshells. People are numb.
It really is crazy that it isn't the first thing people talk about when they discuss Michigan State athletics. What really drove home how much MSU has normalized their own reprehensible conduct was their Final Four run last year. The Izzo as a "class act" was back in full force and effect. Forget the multiple documented times he almost directly covered up crimes of players and former players. He was back to being the great "molder of men" again last March.
Michigan State has succeeded in getting people to engage in actual Orwellian double-think. Pretty impressive actually.
Meh. This is a problem with media as opposed to MSU. Notice the lack of articles about Urban Meyer’s ethics while he was a coach - If you’re winning no one is going to question anything.
And reprehensibly this is an actual strategy-certainly an MSU one.
IIRC, it had to do with several members of the women's basketball team in some capacity, and it turned out with further digging that there wasn't enough evidence (or new contradictory evidence) to actually go with the story. So that "bombshell" isn't going to come out.
So what you're saying is he needs to create burner account, while using a proxy server, to post the story on the blog?
Then we should call out Umbig11 here and have him give an update. UMBIG11... what is the status on your referenced new PR disaster ?
You do that at your own peril.
I think Space Coyote already answered your question.
Essentially the university buried it.
"The settlement documents note that the amount of money MSU paid to each party was not disclosed to the opposing party. MSU initially tried to redact the settlement amounts from the records released to Outside the Lines, but it provided a new set of documents with the amounts disclosed after Outside the Lines argued that state public records laws do not allow for the withholding of such information, as the settlement payouts are expenditures of a public institution."
JFC—MSU just can't ever do the smart thing, can it?
"Mumphery has repeatedly denied the rape allegation, telling investigators that the woman willingly engaged in sexual contact and that she was the one trying to initiate vaginal sex, but she got angry when he insisted on wearing a condom."
Color me skeptical of Mumphrey's claim here.
Even if from a liability standpoint, Mumphrey should receive more (for whatever reason, not saying it's appropriate or not), it shows how tone deaf MSU's admin is to how society is going to see this at large. To think it's going to look at all acceptable to have Mumphrey get a higher amount is ignorance, and from a PR perspective incredibly stupid.
They continue to do things that they feel will make things go away, but instead, just make things look worse
"and from a PR perspective incredibly stupid."
From the very beginning of the Nassar scandal to Engler's foot-in-mouth antics to today, MSU's strategy in PR has appeared to consist of dumping a can of gasoline on the affected area, lighting a match, and then expecting that nobody is going to notice the conflagration.
They were two separate negotiations with two separate lawyers negotiating two separate claims. There's no reason why they would end naturally up at the same or similar number. The disparity is mostly a reflection of the larger fact that the civil judicial process is primarily set up to adjudicate monetary damages moreso than emotional damages. Its much easier to estimate appropriate damages for loss of a salary than to determine an "appropriate" number for someone who may have been the victim of a sexual assault.
What that says about our society, I don't know, but it is what it is.
This may explain the seemingly odd result. The accuser’s lawyer didn’t know the value of the case to MSU and settled too low. On its face good negotiating strategy by MSU to keep the parties in the dark. Looks like they played the accuser and Mumphery’s lawyer went along. Doubtful that this result happens if there was full disclosure to the parties. Slimy way to save a few bucks.
MSU leadership is the epitome of "slimy way".
Perhaps I need to learn more about the legal system... but how in the world, is paying off a witness like Mumphrey to keep quiet, legal ? Seems wrong.
Title IX isn't the legal system (Which brings up a whole slew of other problems which regularly causes problems for schools to punish someone for a 'crime' that the legal system says can't be proven or litigated)
They didn't punish him for a "crime," they punished him for violations of the school's code of conduct. Who's going to do that, if not the school? They can't try you for a crime, they can't imprison you or force you to disclose as a sex offender for the rest of your life, but they can penalize you up to suspension or expulsion if you don't abide by the agreed code. At some schools like BYU or Baylor the code's so strict that any extramarital sex whatsoever is an expellable violation. Most schools are a lot looser than that, but I doubt there's a school in the country that says anything goes as long as it isn't criminal sexual assault.
I understand that, but if the accusation is he sexually assaulted me and the legal system says "nothing we can do because of lack of evidence or whatever" then what conduct policy did he violate? Don't be accused of sexual assault? It's an asinine way to run the school to let a jury of students determine someone's fate in a situation that shouldn't be discussed if the courts can't do anything about it.
The school's definition of "sexual misconduct" is, I would guess, very different from the state's definition of "sexual assault." For one thing, Michigan law is silent on the subject of consent. (Famously so, it's referred to as the "Michigan model.") I don't know anything about MSU's code but UM's specifically requires that sexual relations be consensual and MSU's almost certainly does as well--it seems to be pretty much universal among schools that allow sex at all. It's a different standard from the state's, and it's not hard to imagine situations that would violate one but not the other.
That seems reasonable to me. In one case the penalty is suspension or expulsion from a particular school. In the other the penalty is many years in prison (and sometimes a lifetime in a high-security hospital after your sentence is over, if a psychiatrist isn't satisfied with your progress in treatment) and a lifetime of reporting your whereabouts to law enforcement so your neighbors can know a convicted sex offender is living nearby. If the bar weren't higher for the latter, I'd think something was seriously wrong.
If you really want to attend a school where law enforcement is the sole arbiter of what's appropriate conduct and anything goes as long as it's not criminal, you'll need to find a school that agrees with you. Good luck; I probably won't be joining you there if you find one.
Here's an example of what I mean, in an area where there's maybe a little less emotional baggage attached than there is to sex:
The only non-academic expulsion I know of from my time as an undergraduate was a student who started leaving threatening notes on his resident head's door telling him that his infant daughter was going to die.
The police didn't think it was a credible threat, just a troll as we'd probably call it today, and he was never prosecuted.
The residence counsel didn't think it was a credible threat either. But they did take it seriously as a code violation; he was kicked out of the dorm, and eventually the school. (Technically I don't think it was an expulsion; I think he was suspended and never came back.)
The courts couldn't do anything about it; law enforcement didn't do anything about it, or did it so slowly it didn't matter what they did. We let a jury of students, and then the faculty council, decide his fate. Is this problematic?
I had no problem with any of it. I don't think professors should have to put up with death threats to their children, believable or not. If the school was more strict than society at large on how much terroristic trolling they were willing to put up with, good for the school; if that's a code of conduct you aren't willing to be held to, find somewhere else to get your degree.
Not only did he get twice as much as the victim, but MSU paid him almost a million dollars while he was still their playing football, correct?
This is almost as much as Auburn gives their players!!!!
No. The act occurred in March, 2015. He had concluded his MSU playing career and was drafted in May, 2015.
Non disclosure agreements are fairly routine in settlement agreements.
Just more evidence that the gender pay gap is real. Are you seeing this, Team USA women's soccer? Are you seeing this?
/s
If Mumphery really thinks this is why his NFL career tanked I am surprised he didn’t hold out for more money.
So this is the MSU method of paying players.
Wage gap is real
Interesting payouts. Lots of holes in this story.
Yikes
Talk about message board whiplash. Going from having the best in college sports to seeing this... Yikes.
Man, does that school suck.
I wonder, do female MSU students feel safe? Even if you avoid the athletic department, the "school" has shown it institutionally condones sexual assault.
When I visited MSU as a high school student, I was told that the female students all knew to avoid certain trails while jogging, especially at night. That was more than 15 years ago.
Commit sexual assault and get paid nearly a million dollars for doing it. Hell of a job by the MSU athletic dept.
Actually, the alleged committer of said sexual assault received almost 3/4 of a million dollars.
The alleged victim got less than a half million. That is such an MSU thing to do. I'm surprised they didn't have someone from the athletic department drive the check out to Mumphery's house, and then drive him to practice.
This seems inappropriate for a public school, but is entirely consistent with how MSU tries to avoid public scrutiny and oversight. They should just go private.
As a result of the settlement, Mumphery would likely not be a part of a separate lawsuit Miltenberg and Bernstein are pursuing against MSU, in which a male student says he was wrongly accused of sexual assault and suspended from the school. On July 5, the lawyers filed to attain class-action status to represent more than 50 male students who state they were wrongly found in violation of sexual misconduct policies and disciplined, with the goal of overturning those findings as well.
MSU is going to be paying a lot of people a lot of money for a long time due to their own incompetence and flat refusal to be decent human beings.
It requires a remarkable level of institutional incompetence to handle a claim so baldly that you have to pay both sides and buy their silence on the entire episode.
Kind of ironic that they are getting sued by the rapists....er, alleged rapists.
Bush league.
The A.D. department, the administration, board of regents, Dantonio. All bush league.
These Kangaroo Courts for Title 9 violations in colleges have to be one of the most absurd edicts ever passed down by a US Presidential administration. Basically just trying to remove any Due Process from these cases.
Are you talking about the original passage of Title IX (1972) or the more recent changes this decade. They'll never get it right. Schools have gone from doing too little to too much and due process has always been an issue.
Yeah, though this may veer into politics, I agree with you. From too little to (much) too much.
The University of Cincinnati case a few years ago (where BOTH parties made a report) was things at its absurd but inevitable extreme.
In a larger sense, I suppose what has happened with Title IX in the last 45 years is emblematic of "legislating" as a whole --- a pendulum swinging wildly from side-to-side.
on the legal side of the money, in all curiosity...how much do these knuckleheads actually make?
Burn it down. Given it's East Lansing, this would not be that difficult.
money (unfortunately) always talks
They gave the rapist almost double the payout? Only at MSU.