On questions that
are never entirely answerable—and why they’re still worth asking.
In early November,
the story
broke that nearly a year earlier—in December 2012—a young woman had come to
the Tallahassee police alleging that she had been raped by Jameis Winston, at
the time red-shirting on the Florida State football team; this season, as the
team’s red-shirt freshman quarterback, Winston was the leading contender for
college football’s most prestigious award, the Heisman Trophy. There
were and remain all sorts of questions about why neither the Tallahassee
police nor FSU seemed to have investigated the allegations until nearly a year
later; in any case, when they did, they
decided that there was not sufficient evidence to charge Winston, a decision
that was revealed at an early December, controversially
upbeat press conference. Less than two weeks later, Winston
won the Heisman Trophy by a significant margin (although he was also left
off of a number of ballots).
Allegations of
rape will always (in the absence of some sort of incontrovertible evidence or
eye-witness testimony or the like) be very difficult to
substantiate and prove, especially when the accused is alleging (as Winston
did) that he had consensual sex with the accuser; the Winston case is partly an
illustration of that difficult fact of our legal and justice system. But of
course, the questions surrounding the authorities’ year of inaction in the
Winston case, as well as the parallel questions about the timing of the press
conference (at which the state’s attorney obliquely referenced the
upcoming Heisman vote, while simultaneously claiming he
was unaffected by that factor), raise another uncertain issue: whether
Winston’s status on campus and in his city, as perhaps the most sought-after
recruit (and then the most acclaimed football player) in the country, impacted
either the investigation or its results. It’s entirely possible that those
elements had no impact; but we’d be naïve not to consider the possibility that
they played a role.
Legal questions
are not the same as football or perception ones, of course. But if we treat
those two kinds of uncertain issues as overtly parallel, it would have at least
one distinct benefit: just as the uncertainities surrounding rape charges do
not mean that police and authorities shouldn’t investigate such charges to the
full extent of their abilities, so too do the enduring uncertainties about the
role of status and recognition in a case like Winston’s not in any way mean
that we shouldn’t ask and consider those questions as we analyze and respond to
such a case. I don’t have any idea what happened with Winston and his accuser,
but I know this: from Kobe Bryant
to Ben
Roethlisberger, to cite only two other high-profile cases, rape and sexual
assault are a part of the culture of sports in America, and the least we can do
is to treat the issue with the seriousness and analytical rigor it demands.
Next issue
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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