ESPN Report: Mizzou fails to report sexual assault, victim commits suicide
According to an ESPN “Outside the Lines” report, The University of Missouri-Columbia did not investigate or inform law enforcement about an alleged rape, that at least one member of the school’s football team participated in.
Administrators found out about the alleged 2010 incident more than a year ago. The victim, Sasha Menu Courey, committed suicide in 2011.
For most of 2010, Missouri swimmer Sasha Menu Courey harbored a secret: She believed she’d been raped by a football player. Late that year, her life spiraling downward, Menu Courey began to share her secret with others, including a rape crisis counselor and a campus therapist, records show. In the ensuing months, a campus nurse, two doctors and, according to her journal, an athletic department administrator also learned of her claim that she had been assaulted.
Among the thousands of pages of documents gathered by Missouri administrators in late 2012 in response to a records request was a December 2010 online chat transcript between Menu Courey and a rape crisis counselor that had been saved in Menu Courey’s university email folder.
Healthcare providers are bound by medical privacy laws, preventing them from report such crimes. Those same protections do not extend to campus administrators, who at Mizzou were made aware of claims that Menu Courey had been raped through several sources.
Under Title IX, once a school is made aware of possible sexual violence, it must take immediate and appropriate action to investigate.
Menu Courey committed suicide in June 2011, roughly 16 months after the alleged assault. Missouri administrators told “Outside the Lines” that the evidence wasn’t sufficient enough to get police involved.
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