That one hurt. I LOVED that car.
“I’ll need a copy of all of David’s contracts and financials. We’ll have to account for all his income and see what his contracts did and didn’t include,” Mr. Morris told Caryn, and then he turned to me.
“Something else I’ll be doing is going through your website and the one the school maintains for your football and baseball activities. I have to make sure there’s a clear separation between the two, that is between your own and the school’s. The same goes for all your social media accounts.
“There is something we need to address, or you’ll get into trouble for sure. When you do an interview, you should make clear what it’s about. It can be either about football or baseball, or anything else, but it can’t be about both. When I say ‘anything else,’ that means any activity that you get paid for. I need to pull the tape from your WORD interview and see if you crossed the line. You also dodged a for-sure violation when you didn’t get the role as a baseball player in The Secret Circle. If you had actually played that part, you would never have been able to play baseball in college. It’s possible you wouldn’t have been able to play football, either.
“When you’re in a football or baseball uniform, you absolutely cannot talk about anything else but those sports. That goes for the times you’re with your team or in a team activity; you cannot talk about anything else but those sports.
“What I want you to do in the future when interviewed is to pull the conversation back if it begins to blur the lines. Simply say that per NCAA rules, you can’t talk about that, or some such,” Mr. Morris said.
I would get Frank to write up some good responses for me.
You can sometimes tell when someone is genuine, and Mr. Morris was one of those people. He warned me I would be dealing with the NCAA for quite some time but to step back and let him work on it. I gave him the same direction I gave Caryn earlier in the week: I didn’t really want to know unless there was a problem. I didn’t want to live my life worrying about one crisis after another. Between my team, my dad, Ms. Dixon, and Mr. Morris, I trusted they could handle it.
He agreed that was a sound approach.
“That’s probably the best way I can think of for you to stay sane through the process,” Mr. Morris said with a chuckle.
◊◊◊
We drove to Lincoln Park to Jack and Bev Mass’s home. I sent Jack a text to let him know when we were close, and he had the gate and garage open when we got there. I directed Dad to park in the garage. We took the stairs to the roof and the bridge to the house. The back door was open, so I made myself at home. Mom and Caryn came to a sudden stop when they saw the kitchen. I had my head in the refrigerator and smiled when I saw they’d gotten me my Mountain Dew. I got everyone one. Bev and Jack appeared.
“Good. I’m glad you feel at home,” Bev said.
“Don’t tell him that,” Mom warned.
“I only have a little time. You wanted to talk to me?” Bev asked.
“Yeah, if we could,” I said.
“Why don’t I talk to your dad and Caryn about investment options?” Jack proposed.
Mom started to follow me up to Bev’s office, but I told her I would talk to her later, as promised.
I gave Bev a general idea of what had happened. When she heard the victims were my best friends, especially Tami, she made a call to cancel her meeting she had to get to. I was glad to see this was a priority for her.
“So, explain to me how you found out.”
“I have a new employee who used to work for Rigby, Thompson and Associates. She’d overheard some conversations and had done some research on Brandon Rigby.”
I pulled out a folder of information and handed it to her. I sat quietly as she read. Bev looked up at me with a serious expression.
“Is this mine?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Bev began to write notes and highlight different items. Something Fritz had found out since we met was that the rape kits had never been processed. Bev looked concerned and then became pissed when she uncovered that piece of information.
“I thought we’d figured that out,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“A few years ago, they discovered that rape kits weren’t being processed. A TV show, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit did an episode to highlight this issue. They depicted a woman who had been raped numerous times by the same man over fifteen years. They discovered that the perpetrator had raped women all over the United States. The detectives attempt to contact the Special Victims Units in other cities, only to find out that most of them had never tested the majority of their collected rape kits. It was based on a real-life case.
“A woman has to go through an invasive four- to six-hour procedure just to collect the evidence. It’s a shame that so many weren’t processed. There were several reasons cited. The one that makes my blood boil was money. It isn’t exactly cheap to have a rape kit analyzed; it ranges from a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars. Interestingly enough, since that show, all over the country, they found the money for processing them.
“A good example is New York City. After they processed New York’s 17,000-kit backlog in 2001, the arrest rate for rape cases jumped from 40 percent to 70 percent. The kit is a critical tool in prosecuting these types of crimes,” she said.
Bev returned to reading. When she finished, she took a moment to collect herself.
“Let me give you some disturbing stats, and after you hear them, you decide if we should move forward.”
“Okay,” I said, nodding.
“A little over fifty percent of actual rape victims never come forward. So, if we use those numbers, it looks like at least twenty women have been assaulted by this fraternity. Hang on, that’s unfair. It’s most likely that that only a couple of men are involved, so it isn’t right to tar them all with the same brush,” she said.
“I don’t have a problem with it because they interviewed the whole fraternity. Someone, if not all of them, knew what was going on,” I said.
“I agree,” Bev said with a sigh. “I just hate to think that many men would allow something like this to happen repeatedly.”
We both took a moment to think about it.
“Here are the facts. Of every 100 rape allegations, 46 get reported to the police. Of those, 12 lead to an arrest. Nine will get prosecuted, and five will be convicted. The sad truth is only three will serve any time,” Bev said and let that sink in.
When Mike had raped Mona, that had fallen into the 54 that didn’t get reported.
“The real question is: why the foot-dragging? How did we get to a place where hundreds of thousands of sex-crime puzzle pieces are put into storage lockers and forgotten?
“There’s the easy answer, and the hard one. Easy is that rape kits cost a lot to analyze, which we already talked about. Despite this, I know that murders and other instances of nonsexual violence don’t get pushed aside the way rapes do.
“For a long time, our culture has refused to call rapes what they are: crimes. When there’s a sense of blame or responsibility associated with a victim, it’s easier for the police to ignore her case. The blurred ‘he said/she said’ that surrounds a lot of rape allegations doesn’t inspire much optimism among prosecutors. Let’s be honest: prosecutors need to get convictions to justify taking a case to court. If an office is overworked and underfunded, they don’t even try.
“And it’s not just the prosecutors. Police departments everywhere manipulate crime statistics. They do it by urging street cops to downgrade reports of sexual assault. It makes them look better. And it makes the citizens happier to think their city is safer.