Here are some more tidbits from the article: (Crawford is Patty Crawford, Baylor's former Title IX coordinator)
"(Crawford) also found Baylor students naive when it came to sex and dating. Some who came from devoutly Christian backgrounds would come to college without ever having learned anything in the way of sex ed. Crawford was baffled. She remembers student groups coming to her in June 2016, after Pepper Hamilton’s report was released, and asking her to come talk to them about sex. She found herself addressing sororities with hundreds of members, going “very 101” on topics they seemed desperate to learn. Crawford would explain the concept of sexual relationships to them in basic terms, explaining to large groups of young women that they had the right to choose whether to have sex with their partners. It helped explain a pattern that she found: Female students trusted their environment so much that they started putting themselves in difficult situations.
“I would work with students who would say, ‘He was my best friend,’ and I would ask how long they’ve known each other. ‘Well, a week,’” Crawford recalls. “‘He was the first person I met at Baylor, and I trusted him to get me home after going to my first party. I only had one drink, but I can’t remember everything.’”
She found that students would stay overnight at off-campus parties because they were concerned about Baylor police going through residence halls on weekend nights looking for tipsy students and taking them back to the police station. “They were so scared to go back to their own homes that they were staying in these houses where they don’t know people, they’re intoxicated—possibly incapacitated—and they’re being assaulted,” Crawford says.
Crawford saw that Baylor norms put women there at unique risk. “It was a culture of targeting,” Crawford says. “Predators could target freshman women for all of these reasons. They could target them and say, ‘Hey, you can trust me.’ I had a pattern case where it was a practice of this predator to become friends with women, tell them he doesn’t drink, that he’s a good Christian guy. He’d go to church with them and say, ‘Here’s my number, call me if you need a ride home from a party,’ and he was taking women home from parties,” where, she says, multiple women told her that he sexually assaulted them.
But the whole time Baylor was winning games, building stadiums, and basking in on-field glory, its coaches were managing a series of incidents they were desperate to keep from dominating the news. Briles’ players were frequently in trouble, and internal communications from the coach to his staff show they worked hard to ensure that their players’ names didn’t end up in front of the university’s judicial affairs department or cross Patty Crawford’s desk.
When reports reached their own desks, meanwhile, the coaching staff sometimes appeared to lack urgency. According to a lawsuit against the university, after a female Baylor athlete reported that she’d been raped by “at least four, and, according to some reports, as many as eight” Baylor football players in 2012, she told her own coach the names of the players who sexually assaulted her. The coach took that list to Briles, whose responded by questioning why the woman was around those players, then advising the coach to tell the woman to call police.
Being at Baylor was an ideal set-up for what Briles was building: He was in a quiet town where stories like Ukwuachu could somehow end up buried; his university’s Christian reputation gave him the chance to present his decision to present his recruits as a righteous quest for redemption; the atmosphere at Baylor led the young, Christian women to stay quiet if they found themselves becoming victims. He was able, for years, to keep what was happening under the surface contained. His players could be accused of beating their girlfriends, and the girlfriends would leave town. His players could be accused of gang-rapes of female Baylor students, and he’d be permitted to question why they were around the players he brought to their campus.
And accounts of the women who came to Baylor because it felt safe say Briles’ staff used them to market the program to prospective players.
A lawsuit filed by a former Baylor student claimed that Kendal Briles—Art Briles’ son, and his offensive coordinator—asked a prospective recruit, “Do you like white women? Because we have a lot of them at Baylor, and they love football players.”
Crawford says she talked to dozens of women who reported being raped at Baylor. Women at Baylor reported being raped by athletes, by fraternity members, by journalism students and engineers. But one thing stood out to Crawford when she investigated the cases involving football players. “The athletic ones were violent,” she says. “Consistently violent. I had violent cases that were non-athletes, but there were some consistent things: specifically, gang rape. The majority of the gang rape allegations that were made to me were related to athletics—specifically, football. There was a consistent thing of being part of a team or a brotherhood.”