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SEC Sports
LSU mishandled sexual misconduct complaints against students, including top athletes
A USA TODAY investigation found LSU mishandled abuse allegations against top athletes and other students and subjected victims to further harm.
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For more than a year, people at the highest levels of the Louisiana State University athletic department fielded complaints about their prized running back, Derrius Guice.
Early in the spring 2016 semester, a member of the LSU diving team told her coach and an athletic department administrator that Guice raped her friend after she’d passed out drunk at a party.
That summer, a female student told two senior athletics administrators that Guice took a partially nude photograph of her without her permission, and then shared it with a team equipment manager and possibly others.
Then, in April 2017, the athletic department received reports of a second rape allegation against Guice, this time by a women’s tennis player.
Federal laws and LSU’s own policies require university officials to take such allegations seriously and report them to the Title IX office for investigation, as well as to campus police if the incidents occurred on school property.
Yet at each step of the way, LSU officials either doubted the women’s stories, didn’t investigate, or didn’t call the police, allowing Guice to continue his football career.
LSU’s failure to adequately address sexual misconduct goes beyond one star running back, a USA TODAY investigation found. Officials in the university’s athletic department and broader administration repeatedly have ignored complaints against abusers, denied victims’ requests for protections and subjected them to further harm by known perpetrators.
At least seven LSU officials had direct knowledge that wide receiver Drake Davis was physically abusing his girlfriend, a different LSU women’s tennis player, but they sat on the information for months, while Davis continued to assault and strangle her. In another case, the school determined that a fraternity member had sexually assaulted two women, but it refused to move him out of classes he shared with one of them and altogether ignored an allegation against him by a third female student.
USA TODAY also found three cases in which, rather than expelling or suspending male students found responsible for sexual assault, LSU allowed them to stay on campus. The men, non-athletes, received "deferred suspensions," a probationary period during which they must stay out of trouble.
In a fourth case, LSU deferred the suspension of a man who stalked and sexually harassed a fellow student, even after he’d pleaded no contest in court to telephonic harassment.
“I just think that honestly they don’t care,” one of the women told USA TODAY. “The whole system is on the side of the accused.”
Some of the women in this story are not being named because it is USA TODAY’s policy not to identify individuals who allege sexual crimes and domestic violence without their permission. Two chose to use their full names.
As part of a broader crackdown on universities for mishandling sexual violence, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights launched a sex-discrimination investigation into LSU in August 2015, after a woman filed a complaint saying that no one informed her of her Title IX options when she reported her sexual assault to campus police. Title IX is the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education.
Three years later, in July 2018, investigators dropped the case, saying the victim had stopped communicating with them, records show. Yet when it came to Guice and Davis, LSU officials made similar errors, failing to get the Title IX office or police involved when federal laws and school policies required it, USA TODAY’s investigation found.
LSU declined to make 10 coaches and administrators available for interviews. Citing the privacy interests of those involved, school officials did not answer nearly four dozen questions that USA TODAY submitted Nov. 4 about their handling of specific allegations and Title IX cases more generally.
In a statement, LSU said it does not tolerate sexual violence of any form.
“We are unwavering in our commitment to respond promptly to any reports of misconduct, to investigate these reports in a manner that is fair and equitable, to support victims of sexual assault, and to protect the privacy of our students according to the law,” the statement said. “Putting an end to sexual assault is an institutional priority, and we are constantly working to achieve that goal.”
Guice and Davis included, at least nine LSU football players have been reported to police for sexual misconduct and dating violence since coach Ed Orgeron took over the team four years ago, records show. But the details of how LSU handled complaints against the other seven, including two who played key roles on its 2020 national championship team, remain largely secret.
For three months, LSU refused to release full campus police reports involving four players to reporters. Although such reports often are public, university officials said the cases could still be prosecuted and releasing documents could harm the cases – even though, years later, it has only shared one of them with the East Baton Rouge District Attorney’s Office, the office said.
USA TODAY sued LSU in mid-October for access to four of the reports, arguing that its failure to produce them violated state public records laws. On Nov. 13, the university provided three of them. But it redacted the names of the suspects, victims and witnesses, citing not a public records exemption but rather Louisiana's constitutional right to privacy.
LSU continues to withhold police and Title IX records from at least two women who've requested copies of their own files. Samantha Brennan, the woman who said Guice photographed her without her consent, said she never wanted to press charges against him. But LSU told her she’d have to wait to access her police report until the statute of limitations ends – six years from the time of the incident.
USA TODAY and Brennan sued LSU for access to her full police report. The lawsuit is ongoing.
“LSU didn’t do the right thing back in 2016, but I was hoping they would do the right thing now,” Brennan said. “Unfortunately that was not the case, and the harder they fought to keep me from my police report, the harder I fought to obtain it.”
