What It Looks Like When A University Truly Fixes How It Handles Sexual Assault

Brenda Tracy never dreamed she’d wear an Oregon State University T-shirt — not after what happened in 1998.

In June of that year, Tracy, then 24 and living with her parents, reported to police that four men had gang-raped her at a party. Two of the accused assailants, she said, were OSU football players.

What happened next was disappointing, to say the least. The accused men implicated each other in interviews, but prosecutors did not share that information with Tracy — essentially leading her to believe her case was weaker than it really was. Based on that bad information, Tracy ultimately decided to stop cooperating with prosecutors, and the case petered out. The state destroyed her rape kit without telling her, and before the statute of limitations expired. OSU, it would later be revealed, only punished the two accused players with a one-game suspension and community service.

So by the time Tracy told her story to a reporter, in 2014, she didn’t have particularly warm feelings for Oregon State. But then she received something she never expected: an apology.

It’s hardly uncommon these days to hear about colleges and universities failing to handle sexual assault cases with the appropriate gravity. Even when schools vow to do better, even when they say they’re taking the issue “very seriously,” many of them still face complaints from students about yet more failures. 

But Tracy said OSU’s president, Ed Ray, was different. 

“Ed Ray really stepped up to the plate — not just said something, but actually did take it seriously,” Tracy told The Huffington Post. “I’m very confident in this point that he really does care and gets it.”

After Tracy came forward, Oregon State issued a public apology for how it had responded to her report more than a decade earlier. And then the school hired her to be a consultant on how it should handle sexual assault. Rather than freezing out the whistleblower, OSU regularly brings Tracy in to speak to classes, sports teams and members of Greek life about sexual violence. In February, she spoke at an OSU conference on healthy masculinity.

Beyond that, Ray successfully lobbied the Pac-12 Conference to bar athletes from transferring to schools after they’ve been suspended or expelled for sexual assault. And OSU set up an on-campus advocacy center for victims, even as other universities closed their own. 

When it comes to recognizing its mistakes in student sexual assault cases, and taking steps to put them right, Oregon State might be one of the most progressive schools in the country. 

“You can sort of push issues under the rug or be in denial about them,” Ray told HuffPost. “But they’re real, and they touch peoples’ lives.”

“I get the sense there are places where perfectly decent people find such matters so awful and so hard to deal with, personally, that they almost have blinders on,” he went on. “Who gets hurt by that? The victim. So somehow we all need to suck it up.” 

Brenda Tracy’s Story

In June 1998, Tracy told police that four football players had gang-raped her in Corvallis, Oregon, at an off-campus apartment. Two of the men Tracy accused attended Oregon State. Tracy herself was not and had never been an OSU student, but she told the school about the alleged incident, feeling that officials there should know.

Prosecutors misled Tracy about the viability of her case. Meanwhile, she was receiving death threats for having come forward at all. Ultimately, she decided not to move forward with charges against the men.

No one at Oregon State spoke with Tracy again until she called them in 2014, when she was 40 years old and in therapy — and curious about what, exactly, had happened. 

That year, the University of Oregon was under intense scrutiny for waiting until after March Madness to start investigating a report that three basketball players gang-raped a female student. UO was also facing backlash for recruiting one of those players, Brandon Austin, after he was punished by Providence College for a claim that he and another student sexually assaulted a woman. 

OSU was evasive when she called in 2014, Tracy said, and declined to disclose information about her 1998 report. Tracy was frustrated, and decided to contact the writer of an article about OSU’s football team, Oregonian sports columnist <a class=”ProfileHeaderCard-nameLink u-textInheritColor js-nav
ProfileHeaderCard-nameWithBadges–1
” href=”https://twitter.com/johncanzanobft”>John Canzano.

After Tracy told her story to Canzano in November 2014, Ray, who has been president of Oregon State since 2003, ordered an internal investigation. Three weeks later, he and a top Title IX official met with Tracy in Portland to deliver the results in person. 

The two OSU players in the 1998 case, Tracy learned, had been given probation and 25 hours of community service, and were suspended for one football game. The university imposed such light sanctions because it saw the alleged incident as something that wasn’t its responsibility, since it had happened off campus.

Tracy was devastated to learn the men she accused had merely received slaps on the wrist. But then something remarkable happened: Ray apologized, on behalf of himself and the university. 

The Apology Was Just The Beginning

“He was tearful at points,” Tracy said, remembering the hour-long conversation with Ray where he apologized. “Sitting there, looking in his eyes, I really did feel compassion coming from him. I really did feel he was being sincere.” Still, she said, she took Ray to task during that conversation, letting him know how upset she was that the men she’d accused of raping her had walked away with barely any punishment.

Tracy also mentioned that she’d like to find a school to partner with to improve how sexual assaults are handled. Ray said he wanted Oregon State to be that school. 

Ray said he asked himself, “What does it make sense to do as a human being?”

“One reason why a lot of institutions get it wrong with very real, very personal human tragedies like this,” Ray told HuffPost, “is they forget it’s not about the institution. It’s not about damage control. It’s about trying to understand what the situation is, regardless of whose watch it was on.”

Oregon State didn’t try to sugarcoat the way it handled Tracy’s accusations, even though Tracy might have sued the school. In fact, another woman later did.

Kristen Samuelson sued Oregon State in September 2015, saying she was drugged and raped in 1999 in the same Corvallis apartment where Tracy’s alleged rape took place. According to Samuelson’s suit, OSU student health officials responded to her claims at the time by suggesting that maybe she’d actually consented to sex. The school also referred Samuelson to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, the suit said. 

The lawsuit was dismissed, largely due to the fact the alleged assailant was not an OSU student. Yet in the dismissal, Judge Michael McShane wrote that OSU’s “response to the rapes of Ms. Samuelson and Ms. Tracy was shameful, woefully inadequate, and will remain a dark stain on the history of the institution.” He accused the school of looking the other way so as not to alienate “donors and talented athletes.” 

The school never challenged Samuelson’s recollection of events. It did, however, dispute the idea that Oregon State could be held legally responsible for her alleged assault. In a public statement, OSU offered to provide non-monetary help for Samuelson, like counseling.

OSU’s response to the rapes … was shameful, woefully inadequate, and will remain a dark stain on the history of the institution.”
U.S. District Court Judge Michael McShane

It may seem like a small thing for Oregon State to offer an apology to Tracy, or to refrain from challenging Samuelson’s credibility as a rape victim. But such things are “absolutely important,” said Laura Hanson, a University of Oregon graduate and sexual assault survivor.

Hanson reached a settlement with UO in 2014 over errors in how it handled her sexual assault report. After that, when Hanson had no ability ever to sue UO again, she said she asked if she could work with UO’s student affairs office to make reforms. But the administrators pretended they didn’t know who she was.

“Any efforts that I’ve made to connect with U of O have been completely ignored or shut down,” Hanson told HuffPost. “It looks small to an outsider, probably, but that kind of connection is important. It shows other survivors that they still have a place at the school.”

The Domino Effect Of Getting A College President On Board

As Tracy started lobbying the state legislature for reforms on how survivors are treated, Ray wrote letters of support for bills that would enhance privacy rights for campus rape victims. He also advocated for requirements that college sexual assault survivors be informed of their rights. These measures passed, and were signed into law. 

“He’s just been one of my biggest champions and supporters,” Tracy said. 

Ray also decided that Oregon State should no longer accept students transferring in, or starting as grad students, who would not able to re-enroll immediately at their original institution. In other words, students suspended or expelled from somewhere else cannot find safe haven at OSU.

The issue of students punished for assault simply transferring to other schools, without having to disclose their records, has attracted national scrutiny amid concerns that serial attackers could slip away to offend again. Brandon Austin’s case brought it home to Oregon.