Former NFL Player, After Settling Title IX Lawsuit, Plots a Comeback

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/sports/mumphery-lawsuit-michigan-settlement.html

by jseliger • 7 years ago

53 28 7 years ago

rmason• 7 years ago

I live near East Lansing and have friends who know Keith Mumphery. In the swirl of the Dr. Nassar scandal some well meaning Michigan State administrator falsely ruled against him in this lady's appeal. I was impressed by this balanced article and I hope it finally means justice for him.

But as I said on Twitter, will the NFL listen? Sadly the scandals locally are far from over with at least two court cases against former MSU administrators ongoing.

mgamache2• 7 years ago

Mumphery is a good, but not great NFL talent. I bet he gets sidelined. Two Years is a long time to be away from the game.

voidwtf• 7 years ago

I hope the settlement was commensurate to that likely possibility. Who knows where he could have been now, not even he knows. That opportunity was stolen from him.

This is just as bad as someone being falsely imprisoned IMO. There are so many opportunities that may have been availed him. Maybe he’s not the greatest NFL talent, but there is no way to know what might have grown out of that experience. Maybe he would have ended up applying his skills and knowledge in some other way within the industry just having been exposed to it directly.

bsder• 7 years ago

But as I said on Twitter, will the NFL listen?

I suspect an incoming lawsuit against the NFL will get their attention.

If they really cut him without any investigation, that's going to be a violation of his contract. Obviously, you won't win this if you actually get convicted for a crime, but the fact that he has been exonerated means the NFL is guilty of a contract violation and is going to have to cough up for it.

I suspect that will finally get the attention of some important people in the NFL.

ohithereyou2• 7 years ago

The NFL sees head injuries in the athletes that play for it as "the cost of doing business", so I have a feeling that they'd just cough up and move on, especially given the reputation they've had recently about minimizing punishments for domestic violence against women.

jetti• 7 years ago

That may get him some money but I doubt it would get him back on the field or even on a practice squad.

jseliger• 7 years ago

It seems that most people don't understand how insane and discriminatory Title IX is: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/laura-kipniss-endle...

cperciva• 7 years ago

I don't think Title IX is discriminatory. Rather, it has been applied in discriminatory ways.

SpicyLemonZest• 7 years ago

I'm not sure that's a meaningful distinction. The literal text of Title IX is so short it can't possibly be discriminatory:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

Everything that people normally refer to by the phrase "Title IX", from Title IX offices to Title IX cases to Title IX procedure, is an application.

ohithereyou2• 7 years ago

That's like saying New York City's prior "stop and frisk" policy wasn't discriminatory, just that it was applied in discriminatory ways.

If you have a policy that can be applied in discriminatory ways then I would argue that it is discriminatory unless the text of the policy limits its application in some way to reduce or prevent its discriminatory application.

colechristensen2• 7 years ago

It is disturbing to more and more find myself on the other side of the culture war.

There is nothing "liberal" about what is going on here and the people who are doing it are by numbers moderate not extremist.

Where do you go when you support free expression and freedom to pursue the good life however you see fit?

thrower123• 7 years ago

Quillette? Then people say you are "alt-right", although they are considerably more nuanced than most outlets.

colechristensen2• 7 years ago

Not for me. I don't want to engage heavily on the other side of these topics, I think the topics are a poison. There is real discrimination in the world and this isn't it.

throwaway-3891• 7 years ago

I write this as someone who considers himself a liberal in the American political sense. As I see it, there is a serious tension in the way we think about sexual assault. We assert two things: 1. women very rarely make false claims of sexual assault, so we should believe their claims, and 2. higher rates of criminal convictions and incarceration among black people are largely explained by institutional racism, rather than truly higher criminality among black people. These things conflict in the apparent over-representation of black (and minority in general) students in campus sexual assault accusations [1].

Hard numbers don't seem very common here, but that article contains qualitative testimony: "In 2015, in The New Yorker, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor, wrote that in general, the administrators and faculty members she’d spoken with who 'routinely work on sexual-misconduct cases' said that 'most of the complaints they see are against minorities.'"

That article offers also one pretty shocking statistic: "In the 2013–14 academic year, 4.2 percent of Colgate’s students were black. According to the university’s records, in that year black male students were accused of 50 percent of the sexual violations reported to the university, and they made up 40 percent of the students formally adjudicated. During the three academic years from 2012–13 to 2014–15, black students were accused of 25 percent of the sexual misconduct reported to the university, and made up 21 percent of the students referred for formal hearings."

As a result, I struggle to reconcile points 1 and 2 above. My best guess -- and it's similar to what that article hypothesizes -- is that encounters that already exist in some grey area of drunkenness and consent are more likely to be viewed as assault when the man is "other", i.e. black or minority. But this seems awful.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/09/the-qu...

dsfyu404ed• 7 years ago

encounters that already exist in some grey area of drunkenness and consent are more likely to be viewed as assault when the man is "other", i.e. black or minority. But this seems awful.

I agree with you but I'd like like to point out that this is just saying "it's not creepy when attractive people do it" but adding another couple dimensions (race and similiar) to "attractive" which is, as you said, awful. I can't think of any circumstances in which a double standard like that, especially one predicated on circumstances that are in large part outside one's control (hitting the gym won't make you 6'4", clearly being a star athlete didn't help this guy) is acceptable.

Rebelgecko• 7 years ago

FWIW, my alma mater actually had a Title IX trial where one of the university employees who voted to expel a student said (paraphrasing slightly) "she's too pretty and smart for him, how could it have been consensual?".

BurningFrog3• 7 years ago

1. women very rarely make false claims of sexual assault, so we should believe their claims

This is a big fundamental mistake. Women are just as capable as men of lying.

The principle of "innocent until proven guilty" was established over centuries of very hard won experience of why this imperfect principle works better than all the others that have been tried.

How sad that the left of 2019 has forgotten this history and now needs to relearn it.

SmokeGS• 7 years ago

Politicizing domestic/civil legal issues is historically a failure and has huge blowback.

bryanrasmussen• 7 years ago

Obviously the reason that #1 exists is because the systems meant to help victims of crime treated sexual assault victims as liars and people somehow deserving of their victimization, hence an overreaction.

However regarding statement Women are just as capable of lying as men, I suppose this is true but I also wonder if there aren't particular crimes that have different levels of lying about than others, and different types of lies. For example a companies office gets burglarized, an expensive ring was in the office but was not stolen. I would expect this to be a temptation to lie and say it was stolen, because it gives a benefit and who does it hurt, the insurance company whom everyone hates or the burglars who you would like to hurt at the moment.

The question to me is what is the rate of lying that people would want to do about about sexual assault. My gut feeling is not that much, but of course it's a charged subject so I bet nobody is really researching it and able to tell us what the rate actually is.

on edit: clarifying that the word overreaction is used under the supposition that the application of #1 if it results in a false statement being believed then that is an 'overreaction'

austhrow743• 7 years ago

One aspect of that grey area is when persistence becomes sexual assault /rape.

Potentially there's a cultural aspect at play where more aggressively pursuing women is more common /expected in other ethnic groups.

whack• 7 years ago

You raise an interesting point, but I don't think making any sort of generalization is the answer here. There are good and bad people of every gender/race. Hence why every incident needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

With regard to the original article, it appears to be a singularly bad ruling on MSU's part. The official guideline given was to "adopt a looser standard of guilt known as more likely than not." Reading through the case details, all the evidence points towards Mumphery being innocent - I certainly don't think it meets the "more likely than not" standard. If anything deserves critique here, it is MSU's handling of this case, not the broader guideline recommended by the Education Department.

JohnBooty2• 7 years ago

Feels like we're on a pendulum. For most of human history most rapes went utterly unpunished unless there were signs of a physical struggle, since it's usually utterly impossible to prove what happened in a bedroom between two people.

Now we're swinging the other way in some cases and ruining peoples' lives based on a mere statement from another person. In some cases this delivers justice where there wouldn't have been any in previous times. In other cases an innocent person gets their life ruined.

solidsnack90002• 7 years ago

For most of human history most rapes went utterly unpunished unless there were signs of a physical struggle, since it's usually utterly impossible to prove what happened in a bedroom between two people.

Human history is very long and we know very little about most of it.

Consider that the bedroom as a place for two people is a fairly recent development: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/communal-sleeping-hist...

Claims like the above suggest that fifty thousand years of sexual assault is finally being brought to an end by 1900s social movements. It's the narrative that emboldened people to interpret Title IX so broadly in the first place, but it's not possible to support it.

Former NFL Player, After Settling Title IX Lawsuit, Plots a Comeback

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