Report: 17 sexual assaults at Baylor over four years

Regents who oversaw the investigation of Baylor University's own investigation say they uncovered 17 separate acts of sexual assault and/or intimate partner violence perpetrated by 19 members of the football team over the last four years, with one regent telling the Wall Street Journal it was "horrifying and brutal."

Coach Art Briles, who was fired in May, has denied that he was informed of the alleged criminal acts of his players, offering a vague apology in September, without ever saying the words "rape" or "sexual assault. Instead, he admitted that "some mistakes" had been made, but couldn't put a finger on exactly what those mistakes were.

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"I made mistakes. I did wrong, but I'm not doing this trying to make myself feel better for apologizing," he said in an ESPN interview.

Now, the regents who spoke to the Wall Street Journal are saying that that's just not true.

In at least one case, Baylor regents said, Mr. Briles knew about an alleged incident and didn't alert police, the school's judicial-affairs staff or the Title IX office in charge of coordinating the school's response to sexual violence.

One board member reiterated the findings of Pepper Hamilton 13-page summary report, namely, that the football team was above the law.

"There was a cultural issue there that was putting winning football games above everything else, including our values," said J. Cary Gray, a lawyer and member of the Baylor board of regents. More broadly, he said, "we did not have a caring community when it came to these women who reported that they were assaulted. And that is not OK."

When the board of regents asked him what went wrong, even then he couldn't bring himself to blurt out much more than corporate platitudes.

Baylor regents said that when Mr. Briles was asked what he would have done differently, he broke down and wept. Many board members began to cry as well.

"He couldn't speak he was so upset, and all of us were," Mr. Gray said. "Art said, 'I delegated down, and I know I shouldn't have. And I had a system where I was the last to know, and I should have been the first to know.'"

Mr. Cannon said Mr. Briles quoted Scripture and expressed his regrets over the painful situation Baylor was in, but didn't admit to wrongdoing.

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