Ex-Kansas rower says she was raped by KU football player
A former University of Kansas rower claims she was raped by a Jayhawks football player.
According to the Dallas Morning News, a class action lawsuit filed by the alleged victim’s parents says the alleged incident took place in November 2014. The lawsuit also says the school “failed to protect her from harassment by her attacker.” The football player is not named in the lawsuit.
From the Morning News:
The suit was filed in Kansas by the parents of Daisy Tackett, who enrolled at KU as a freshman in the fall of 2014. In November of that year, the suit says, she was raped in a university dorm that housed many members of the football team and other athletes.
Generally, The Dallas Morning News does not identify rape victims by name, but in an extensive interview last month, Tackett asked that her name be used. Her parents’ suit, filed as a class action, said the university, “in its attempts to solicit students to enroll,” has repeatedly lied by claiming that its residence halls are safe. As a result, it suggested, countless students have fallen victim to sexual predators.
“What happened to our daughter need not have happened to any other student,” Amanda Tackett, Daisy’s mother, said in an interview.
The alleged incident took place after a party at Jayhawker Towers Apartments, an on-campus apartment complex owned by the university. The lawsuit says Jayhawker Towers has “a specific history of publicly reported sexual assaults of women” and also lists eight other instances of sexual crimes from the past three years.
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Tackett, who withdrew from KU in January, did not initially report the incident, but eventually told the school’s Office of Institutional Opportunity & Access and her parents. She said she saw her attacker on campus and said another rower claimed the same football player tried to assault her.
From the Morning News:
“I told two people that day and then kind of dropped it,” Tackett said. “I knew that no one was going to believe it.”
She continued to see her assailant on campus, she said. He would sometimes yell at her, once publicly calling her “that bitch.” She said she started experiencing panic attacks. Daisy finally came forward to KU’s Office of Institutional Opportunity & Access, which is charged with overseeing compliance with state and federal laws and university policies on discrimination, sexual violence and other subjects.
She made that decision, she said, after learning that the same football player tried to assault a rowing teammate this past fall. That was the first time she told her parents about the rape.
“At first I was reluctant,” she said. “Then I realized if he’s assaulted two people, he has assaulted more or will assault more if we don’t do anything about it.”
Tackett also said she was disappointed in the ability to access resources promised to her by KU.
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After coming forward, she said, she felt ostracized. She was left behind when the rowing team made a training trip to Florida. The IOA seemed slow to provide promised escorts to class or campus parking passes, she said.
“They made it so difficult to access the resources they had,” she said. “For the last three weeks of semester, I locked myself in my room. I would leave just to practice and go to class.”
In response to the lawsuit, Kansas issued a statement Friday.
In a written statement issued Friday, the university denied that it lied to anyone about the security of its campus and dorms. It boasted of KU’s “ongoing efforts to ensure students are safe and aware of their surroundings” and of the school’s “robust support services” for victims of sexual violence.
“The suggestion that our residence halls are unsafe or that we misrepresent campus safety in our student recruitment is baseless,” the statement said.
For more Kansas news, visit JayhawkSlant.com.
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Sam Cooper is a contributor for the Yahoo Sports blogs. Have a tip? Email him or follow him on Twitter!
