SAN DIEGO — For months, most people did not know that a 17-year-old girl reported she had been raped at an off-campus house party near San Diego State University last fall.
She cooperated with the police investigation. She underwent the intensity of a rape exam. She saw a therapist, she journaled, she switched her senior year of high school from on-campus to virtual. She said she developed an eating disorder.
And she waited.
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The allegations that took shape: Gang rape by SDSU football players. Police reassured her they were investigating. But months passed without updates, she said.
Then out of nowhere, in June, media reports revealed the reported rape and that San Diego State had deferred investigating the allegations of misconduct by student athletes.
And a teenage girl was suddenly overwhelmed. Part of her was grateful to know that there was still movement in the case.
“But the other part of me was very uncomfortable with the world being able to read about something so personal, especially since it wasn’t coming from me.”
In late July, the now 18-year-old went public with her story, speaking to media outlets, sharing details of what she said happened that night and the months that followed with no word from investigators or school officials.
On Thursday, San Diego police submitted their nine-month investigation to the district attorney’s office to review. No one has been arrested, and it’s unclear if criminal charges will be filed.
The university said it would open an internal investigation.
Two federal laws — Title IX and the Clery Act — are designed to ensure that young people are protected against crimes such as sexual violence. Experts say that while the university may not have been required to launch an investigation because of the specific nature of the described rape — the young woman was not a student at the college and the reported incident didn’t happen at a campus location — the university’s obligation to do what it can to keep students safe remained.
Experts say it is not uncommon for police departments to ask universities to stand down while they look into serious incidents. But waiting could put the safety of students at risk.
“What if this were to happen again and the school is on notice ... and they didn’t do anything about it the first time they found out about the assault?” said attorney Shiwali Patel from the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, D.C.
Agonizing aftermath
According to the young woman, an acquaintance posted something on social media about a Saturday night house party, so she and her friends, who were already out, decided to swing by. The Union-Tribune generally does not name alleged victims of sexual assault.
Halloween was approaching, and she was in a fairy costume. She was already intoxicated when a man approached. He made small talk, he offered her a drink, she said, and he led her to a room.
Several men were there, she said. She said she was thrown face down on the bed.
She said she was in and out of consciousness as men assaulted her. Her belly and nose piercings were ripped out.
Her friends had been looking for her. She said she stumbled out of the room, bloodied and bruised.
“I was super out of it. I was crying. I had blood all over my face and body and costume,” she said. Her friends bombarded her with questions. She told them she had been raped.
She asked them to take her home. A friend went with her to a police station a day later, on Monday, where she called the non-emergency dispatch line and was placed on hold. It took four hours before an officer responded.
“The officer I talked to was actually amazing, so kind and so very supportive,” she said.
She turned over her costume and underwent a “really traumatizing” rape exam — swabs and flash pictures and videos, tests for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
She used the officer’s phone to call her father and ask him to come to Rady Children’s Hospital. When he got there, she told him why. “To see my dad freaked out in tears after giving him that news was really, really rough,” she said.
She cooperated with police as they investigated. But after about two months, she said, the communication withered. When she asked for updates, “they would tell me they were trying to be as thorough as possible and that there was nothing, no information they could give me.”
She waited. On campus, rumors were flying.
Within three days of the alleged rape, the girl’s father spoke with a University Police Department official about it. He thought that conversation meant he was reporting it. The school did not see it that way, saying that while a family member had contacted police, that relative had not filed an official police report.
On Oct. 19, San Diego police told university officials they were investigating the off-campus incident and asked the school to hold off on any internal inquiries for fear of compromising the criminal investigation. The school agreed to stand down.
“Ignoring SDPD’s request could have caused irreversible harm: Potential suspects might have destroyed evidence, there could have been collusion among suspects or witnesses, and survivors could have been harassed or harmed further,” the university said recently.
San Diego police officials said Thursday that, by waiting, the college safeguarded the department’s investigation.
Plus, the school said, it did not have the victim’s name until late last month, and no witnesses had stepped forward.
Several people reached out to the school about the incident through an anonymous system called RealResponse. San Diego State officials said the students were not witnesses to the alleged rape, but the school forwarded their statements to San Diego police.
RealResponse is a tool that allows student athletes to communicate with the school anonymously on a host of issues, including incidents of sexual misconduct. The university was not immediately able to say how many messages it receives through RealResponse every year or how many result in school investigations.
As the school year rolled on, San Diego police said they were investigating.
More than 20 investigative personnel worked on the case, resulting in nearly 200 hours of overtime. Detectives obtained and executed 10 search warrants, interviewed multiple witnesses, examined physical evidence and reviewed more than three terabytes of digital evidence.
According to San Diego police statistics, 571 rapes were reported across the city last year. The rape clearance rate, which measures how often cases are solved by arrest or closed because of circumstances outside the control of investigators, was 10.5%.
The national rape clearance average in 2019, the year data were most recently available, was about 33%. San Diego’s rape clearance rate that year was 20.5%.
Beyond Title IX
On Monday, the school said it would open its own administrative inquiry into the allegations because police told them it would not interfere with the criminal investigation.
On a webpage SDSU set up to answer questions about this particular case, the university said it has begun exploring whether any of its policies were violated and will review “all known and confirmed information and evidence through the lens of SDSU and CSU [California State University] policies.”
That process will go beyond the “confines of Title IX” and will look at policies related to discrimination, harassment, sexual misconduct and violence, the school said.
Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any educational institution that receives federal funding. Title IX investigations look at policy violations — not criminal acts — and could result in disciplinary action including expulsion.
Title IX doesn’t seem to apply here. The alleged victim is not a student, and the incident happened at an off-campus party. Two attorneys who are Title IX specialists said that means the school would have been required to dismiss a Title IX complaint.
Still, the spirit of the statute should be in play, said Patel from the National Women’s Law Center.
“That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be taking steps,” Patel said of the university.
The allegation “very much has a real impact on students and they should be taking steps to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.”
Attorney Brett Sokolow said while the school would be required to dismiss the claim, the school could open an investigation “if they think there is a clear danger.”
And sometimes a school will take action “not because it has an obligation, but there will be a hue and cry if they don’t react because of the public expectation.”
Plus, he said, if an incident is deemed to be outside of Title IX jurisdiction, the school has more latitude to act than it would for an investigation specific to Title IX.
Relatedly, the Clery Act requires that universities send timely warnings to its students when certain crimes are committed that pose a serious or ongoing threat to the campus community.
However, the law is only invoked when crimes such as murder and sexual assault happen on campus properties, adjacent to campus properties or at certain non-campus locations, including those owned or controlled by recognized student organizations.
The alleged rape did not occur at one of these locations, officials have said.
A pivotal time
The allegations and the subsequent investigations come at a pivotal time for the college and its athletics department. The university is about a month away from opening Snapdragon Stadium, which is being built at the site of the old San Diego Stadium in Mission Valley. Advertising for the new stadium includes trolley wraps featuring Aztec football players.
And this summer USC and UCLA announced they will be leaving the Pac-12 Conference for the Big Ten — moves that could open up new opportunities for the Aztecs, who are part of the Mountain West conference.
On Tuesday, a few days before fall camp was to kick off, head football coach Brady Hoke said that the team and its staff will assist the rape investigation in any way they can, and that their “hearts go out truly to the victim.”
“Being a father myself, joined by others on the staff, we will not tolerate this type of alleged behavior within our football program,” he added.
Officials have not released any suspect names or information about whether any are current or former football players.
Staff writer Kirk Kenney contributed to this story.
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