Four more former Northwestern football players came forward on Wednesday to claim they were also subjected to “extreme ritualized sexual” hazing while at the prestigious Big Ten school.
The new allegations came one day after the first lawsuit was filed by an anonymous former Wildcats player, whose civil complaint went into excruciating detail about hazing carried out within Northwestern’s football program.
“The university and the football program has let us down. That’s why we’re here today,” former player Lloyd Yates told reporters in Chicago, standing alongside other Wildcats football alum, Warren Miles-Long, Simba Short and Tom Carnifax.
“We were thrown into a culture where physical, emotional and sexual abuse was normalized.”
The players have not filed a lawsuit against the school, but their attorneys said they’re conducting more interviews with former athletes and civil action is pending.
The players and attorneys described many of the same acts outlined in the John Doe lawsuit filed in Chicago on Tuesday by attorneys Patrick Salvi and Parker Stinar, including alleged rituals involving a naked human “carwash” and a punishment called “Shrek claps” where upperclassmen on the team would run around a player who made a mistake in practice while clapping their hands above the head of the teammate.
“The stories are eerily similar to one another, whether they were there in 2013 or they were there in 2019,” said Ben Crump, representing the four named players.
Crump and his partner, Steve Levin, said they hope this scandal, which has rocked Northwestern, will have a greater impact throughout college sports.
“No student-athlete should be enrolled in an athletic department (and be) conditioned (to accept) forced participation in extreme ritualized sexual behavior,” Levin said. “That’s what happened here.”
Crump and Levin said they’re representing 15 former Northwestern student-athletes, including one-time football, baseball and softball players.
“It was a toxic culture that was rampant in the Athletic Department at Northwestern University,” Crump said.
A Northwestern rep on Wednesday declined to comment beyond a previous statement which 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,” according to the school.
Long-time Northwestern football coach Pat Fitzgerald was fired last week amid allegations that he didn’t prevent the hazing.
Fitzgerald was head coach for 17 seasons, turning the Wildcats into a consistently competitive program — a major accomplishment at the academically prestigious school, playing in the hyper-competitive Big Ten.
Fitzgerald, a 48-year-old Northwestern alum, was 110-101 in his time leading the team and a program best known for a 34-game losing streak that stretched from 1979 into 1982.
Northwestern had initially suspended Fitzgerald for two weeks before the school’s student newspaper detailed the hazing allegations. The Daily Northwestern’s report prompted administrators to consider a harsher penalty for Fitzgerald, leading to the coach’s removal.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
