TITLE IX Investigation Clears MSU Basketball Players of Rape Accusation
A trio of basketball players from Michigan State University were cleared of rape charges by Title IX investigators this past Wednesday. Bailey Kowalski, who graduated from MSU this spring, came forward shortly before the end of the 2018 school year to claim she had been raped by three MSU basketball players at an off-campus party in 2015. The attorney for one of the accused players says the fact that the investigation found his client not culpable demonstrates how unbelievable Kowalski’s story was: “The burden of proof is so low in these kind of cases for a complainant to prevail,” he said. “They just have to believe one side a little more than the other side. They couldn’t even meet that low threshold.”
The 39-page report concluded that a “preponderance of the evidence” did not support that the three players Kowalski originally named had violated university sexual misconduct policy. It did not list a finding for the other player. The two players who acknowledged they were at the apartment told investigators that Kowalski willingly had oral and vaginal sex with them and verbally agreed to have a threesome, according to the report. The report states that one of the players said he and his teammate had “threesomes this way with women before and would never want anyone to do anything they did not want to do,” and that being an athlete at MSU is a “slippery slope” so he is cautious and “always asks for consent.”
thecollegefix-Staff
