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In this 1999 file photo, Paul Risser watches an Oregon State football game from the sideline in Corvallis. Risser served as the school's 13th president, from 1996 to 2002. Risser was OSU's president when Brenda Tracy was allegedly gang raped by four men, including Beavers' football players Calvin Carlyle and Jason Dandridge.
(Oregonian file photo)
A former student at Oregon State University has filed a federal Title IX lawsuit that accuses the school's former head football coach Mike Riley of failing to correct a hostile and sexually violent culture among football players that contributed to her being raped.
The woman alleges that she was raped on Oct. 9, 1999, while a freshman at OSU. The Oregonian/OregonLive is not naming her because she claims to be the victim of sexual assault.
Steve Clark, OSU's vice president of university relations, said Tuesday that the school generally refuted claims made by the woman in her lawsuit.
"We're not responsible for her very unfortunate sexual assault," he said.
The woman had attended a party at an off-campus apartment when a young man approached her with an open can of beer saying he was visiting the Corvallis campus and was down from Portland.
"She took two drinks of the beer and then became woozy and fuzzy-headed," according to her complaint filed Monday in Eugene's U.S. District Court. She vomited and the man escorted her to an apartment in the 1400 block of Northwest 20th Street, where some OSU football players allegedly lived.
She passed out and regained consciousness in a bedroom with OSU football jerseys and team photos on the walls.
"She was being sexually assaulted by the young man who had offered her the beer," the suit says. "She was unable to move her arms or legs to fight back. She faded back out of consciousness."
She woke the next morning naked and alone in the same bed where the assault occurred, she alleges. She dressed and fled the apartment.
A day or two later, she reported being raped to a sexual assault counselor at OSU's Student Health Services, the lawsuit says. She accuses the counselor of suggesting that she had perhaps said "yes" to the man and that she shouldn't have been drinking.
The encounter with the counselor dissuaded the student "from seeking any further help from OSU, and consequently did nothing more to hold her perpetrator accountable for his crime," the lawsuit alleges.
"After the rape and OSU's hostile response," the complaint says, the woman wasn't able to continue her studies.
The lawsuit does not make clear what has happened to the woman in recent years. But on Nov. 14, 2014, she saw the Brenda Tracy story in The Oregonian and that Tracy reported being sexually assaulted on June 24, 1998, by four men, two of whom - Calvin Carlyle and Jason Dandridge - played football at OSU.
Tracy, the woman learned, had been raped in the same apartment complex where she would wake up 15 months later, according to the lawsuit.
The woman alleges that OSU officials in the late 1990s, including Riley, failed to remedy a sexually violent culture toward women permitted by OSU's football program and implement a more effective assault prevention policy. (Riley is now the head football coach at the University of Nebraska.)
She alleges that her attacker was one of Carlyle's cousins.
The lawsuit accuses Oregon State of deliberate indifference to prior sexual violence and Riley of deprivation of due process and violation of equal protection.
"We disagree and refute her claim that the university's actions in the Brenda Tracy matter led to her assault a year later by a non-student relative of one of Ms. Tracy's assailants," said Clark, the university spokesman.
The lawsuit seeks $7.5 million in damages.
-- Bryan Denson
503-294-7614; @Bryan_Denson