Lawsuit alleges Art Briles backed out of promise to apologize to Baylor rape victim
A new lawsuit against Baylor University sheds further light on the ignorance that ran through the football program and casts Art Briles in a particularly unfavorable light.
Jasmin Hernandez, a former Baylor student, was raped by a Baylor football player in 2012. The player, Tevin Elliott, was later sentenced to 20 years in prison, and Hernandez filed a lawsuit against the school, as well as former athletic director Ian McCaw and Briles, for failing to comply with Title IX law.
Hernandez’s lawyers recently held settlement talks, and in a statement released Monday, Briles’s attorney filed a motion to make the suit against Briles separate from the suit against the school, thus allowing him to fight it himself. Alex Zalkin, one of Hernandez’s attorneys, told ESPN’s Outside the Lines that last week, Briles pledged to come to a Friday mediation hearing “to support Jasmin…and help her, and to apologize to her and her family.”
On that Friday, Briles and Baylor reached a settlement to buy out the coach’s contract, and he did not show up at the hearing. Zalkin claims that the promised apology was simply a ploy for Briles to use as leverage against the school.
“[Briles] used the threat of helping Jasmin in her lawsuit against Baylor as leverage to negotiate his wrongful termination claim against Baylor,” Zalkin said. “He doesn’t care about victims. He never cared about victims. He’s using victims. He used them to help build up his football program, and now he’s using Jasmin to leverage more money out of Baylor.”
Zalkin said that the only explanation received from the Briles camp was that he “decided not to come.”
An investigation into the football program found that Briles was complicit in covering up sexual assault allegations against football players. Briles, for his part, seems to believe he has been treated unfairly throughout the process. The more we hear, the harder and harder that is to believe.
