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Several former Northwestern University athletes held a press conference on Wednesday in which they alleged a culture of hazing at the school fostered systemic discrimination, harassment and sexual abuse.
“No teammate I knew liked hazing,” Lloyd Yates, a former Northwestern football player said at Wednesday’s conference. “We were all victims no matter what our role was at the time. But the culture was so strong that we felt we had to go with it to survive, to be respected, and to earn the trust within the football program.”
Flanked by three other former Northwestern football players, Yates, one of four members of his family to have attended the Chicago school, alleged some coaches participated in the abusive hazing practices and said there was a “code of silence that felt insurmountable to break.”
The hazing was particularly hard for some nonwhite players, for whom a “football scholarship was their only ticket to a better life” and who “had so much at stake and had no voice or power to stop the abuse.”
According to Yates, “the graphic, sexually intense behavior was well known throughout the program. We were physically and emotionally beaten down and some players have contemplated suicide as a result.”
Yates, other former Northwestern athletes, and their attorneys announced during Wednesday’s press conference their intention to sue the university over the allegations. The news came one day after an anonymous former Northwestern football player filed a separate civil lawsuit alleging hazing at the school.
A Northwestern representative declined to comment to NBC News on Wednesday beyond a previous statement that insisted that the school is taking new action against hazing.
“These steps, while necessary and appropriate, are just the start, and we will be augmenting them in the coming weeks,” the school said.
On July 7, Northwestern released findings from its investigation into a whistleblower’s November 2022 complaint alleging hazing within the school’s football program. The university said the whistleblower’s claims were largely substantiated, but “did not discover sufficient evidence to believe that coaching staff knew about the ongoing hazing conduct.” However, staff had “significant opportunities to discover and report the hazing conduct,” according to the report’s executive summary.
Northwestern initially suspended its head football coach, Pat Fitzgerald, for two weeks as a result of the investigation. He was fired on July 10 after the university’s student-led newspaper, The Daily Northwestern, published a report detailing an anonymous former football player’s allegations of abuse. The player had called the university-imposed sanctions against the football program “a slap on the wrist.”
Fitzgerald has denied any knowledge of hazing during his coaching tenure at the school.
The player detailed several alleged hazing incidents, confirmed by a second anonymous athlete, in The Daily Northwestern report that included:
- Football players were subjected to a hazing practice known as “running,” in which the students-athletes “would be restrained by a group of 8-10 upperclassmen dressed in various ‘Purge-like; masks, who would then begin ‘dry-humping’ the victim in a dark locker room.”
- Team members were “forced to strip naked and perform various acts,” including bear crawling, slingshotting themselves across the floor with exercise bands, and performing center-quarterback exchanges.
- Team members were threatened with more harassment or abuse if they “snitched.”
“It’s hard to explain to you guys what we went through,” Tom Carnifax, another former Northwestern football player, told reporters on Wednesday. “We know because we saw it for four years straight. The words we have to tell you and best describe it is not even touching a fraction of it.”
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who’s representing the former Northwestern athletes, said at Wednesday’s press conference he’s spoken with at least 50 former students — men and women — who’ve detailed allegations of sexual harassment and abuse they experienced during hazing within Northwestern’s football, baseball and softball programs.
Crump’s clients have yet to file a lawsuit. He and fellow attorney Steve Levin, who’s also representing the former athletes, said they’re taking into account all the statutes that may have been violated through the alleged abuse (for example, they said Wednesday that some of the accusers were minors when the alleged abuse occurred).
Crump said he hopes the allegations are a “landmark” moment “that will set a precedent” and deter similar behavior across college athletics.
The issue of hazing has persisted in college sports programs for years. The Northwestern scandal seems likely to spur serious scrutiny of the rotten power imbalance between college athletes and the institutions they play for. That conversation has also been ongoing for years, particularly as players — who cannot earn salaries — have sought pay structures and workplace protections similar to traditional employees, rather than so-called student–athletes.
One hotly-contested remedy — unionization — came up during Wednesday’s press conference.
“I think if they had a union this would never have happened,” Levin said, “because someone would have gone to the union and it would have ended that day.”
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