Editorial, Opinion

EDITORIAL: FSU settlement doesn’t erase sexual assault

How much is settling a campus sexual assault case worth? Well, about $1 million. Florida State University paid $950,000 to settle a 2012 lawsuit filed by former student Erica Kinsman, alleging the then-Seminoles’ football player Jameis Winston sexually assaulted her, The New York Times reported Monday.

The settlement also required FSU to implement and report sexual assault awareness programs for the next five years. It’s also important to note that the university is not admitting liability in this settlement, and Kinsman still has a separate sexual battery suit against Winston.

Following the initial rape accusation, Kinsman transferred schools, while Winston won the 2013 Heisman Trophy and was selected as the No. 1 NFL draft pick in 2015 by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Winston now makes $6.3 million playing in the NFL — another organization that doesn’t seem to take sexual assault too seriously.

In 2014, two years after Kinsman’s allegations, Winston filed a countersuit against Kinsman, accusing her of defamation.

Regarding Kinsman’s initial 2012 case, The Times reported that Kinsman’s lawyers learned that the police didn’t gather DNA or attempt to interview Winston until two weeks after her allegations. That’s an entire two weeks for evidence to disappear. And that’s exactly what happened.

An in-depth investigation done by The Times said “there was virtually no investigation at all” into Kinsman’s case by investigators or police. “By the time the prosecutor got the case, important evidence had disappeared, including the video of the sexual act,” the article read.

But there was no way any fan of the university was going to jeopardize Winston’s chances of leading the FSU Seminoles to a national title, which he did in 2014. Florida police probably weren’t so eager to potentially incriminate FSU’s most famous athlete.

And this obviously wasn’t a big priority for FSU. It took almost four years to reach a settlement. If the same incident happened outside of the FSU campus, the entire investigation probably would have been over in a matter of days. FSU just couldn’t let its star athlete fall.

It’s only logical that universities would give preferential treatment to athletes. Not only do they generate the bulk of the schools’ publicity, but the bulk of the schools’ money as well.

FSU had a golden opportunity to show the nation how it puts its students’ well-being before profits and fame. By banning its star player from playing in any future games, FSU could very well have sparked an outrage warranted by the sexual assault allegations.

But it didn’t.

FSU isn’t taking any sort of radical measure to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The university’s new implementation of sexual assault classes is mediocre and the programs have little chance of solving anything. The effort is too little, too late. Campus sexual assault isn’t going away until colleges tackle the issue of sexual assault instead of putting a bandage on it.

We can throw blame around all we want, but it’s really the athletes who have to change their behavior. College athletes are far too glorified. Being a student athlete isn’t a right. It’s a privilege. And that privilege comes with a greater responsibility not only behave well, but to set examples for others in their wake. It’s tough to see this toxic cycle perpetuated time and time again. Athletes will keep abusing their power until they see that they can’t get away with it.

What would really be revolutionary would be to see an athlete (or professional athletic league, for that matter) using the publicity as a platform to speak out against sexual assault. If those in power speak up, others will follow. Deep-rooted traditions are difficult to eradicate, but with enough effort, it can be done.

It’s time to stop the desensitization to sexual assault. People should react with shock and disgust when they hear news of rape — not sigh or brush it off as merely a statistic.

FSU fans see Kinsman as “the woman who almost lost FSU a national title,” but they won’t see Winston as “the athlete who allegedly raped a woman.” It may be too late for justice at FSU, but it’s not too late to prevent something like this from happening again.

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2 Comments

  1. So you were able to quote the Times, but did you bother to do any investigating of your own.
    Lazy.

  2. this editorial is so wrong and full of half truths I lost count. Anyone, and I mean ANYone who has read the evidence, studied the timelines about what happened and when, and listened to the audio depositions of Erica Kinsman’s OWN FRIENDS, knows that this is, was, and always has been about $$….extorting a settlement. It’s an industry and it’s what Kinsman’s attorney’s Klune & Co do… this $950K of which Kinsman’s family only getst $250K of is a pittance but it dwarfed what the litigation costs would have been for FSU. But then again, that was the plan from the get go. And it’s the same game plan with Winston…. litigate to death until Winston’s attorney’s advise him that litigating this even to a positive conclusion on his end (which is exactly why this country needs “loser pays” legal reform in this country ) will cost more than settling. I’m hoping he doesn’t because then Kinsman would have to get on the stand and have her explain her seven different versions of her lies.