Baylor loses negligence case over football player assault, must pay $270,000

WACO, Texas (CN) — A Texas federal jury on Tuesday sided with a former Baylor University student who says the school was indifferent after she reported being beaten up by her football player ex-boyfriend, awarding her $270,000 in damages for her negligent response claim.

The jury of three men and five women deliberated for more than nine hours after listening to five days of testimony.

Dolores Lozano of Houston sued Baylor in 2016 on claims of negligence and violations of Title IX. In 2018 she added former athletic director Ian McCaw and former football head coach Art Briles as defendants, accusing them of gross negligence.

Lozano claims she was beaten three times by running back Devin Chafin in March and April 2014, during her senior year, and says the school’s deliberate indifference to her reports led to additional beatings. She also claims Chafin kicked her on the floor of a closet and strangled her into unconsciousness after she aborted a pregnancy.

Jurors also found in Lozano’s favor on her Title IX claim, but awarded no damages, and concluded Baylor was deliberately indifferent to her reports.

Lozano thanked her supporters immediately after the verdict was announced, tweeting “justice prevailed.”

Her story, along with several other female students’ stories of rape and abuse, surfaced in 2016, prompting Baylor regents to order an independent investigation by the law firm Pepper Hamilton. The firm concluded that administrators discouraged students from reporting abuse, and in one case even retaliated against a student.

Lozano’s attorney, Zeke Fortenberry of Dallas, accused coaches of knowing “not only of rapes, but of gang rapes” involving players who “were not reprimanded” at all, during his opening statement.

U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman tossed a gross negligence claims against Baylor, Briles and McCaw on the fifth day of trial, holding that, after hearing Briles and McCaw testify, “no reasonable jury” could conclude the defendants had been grossly negligent.

Briles told jurors he felt Baylor regents were being disloyal by firing him after the investigation. He testified that he was never given any Title IX training by Baylor and didn’t learn of Lozano’s claims until 2016, two years after the incidents she described having occurred.

McCaw testified that he quit after being sanctioned and placed on probation because he opposed the scapegoating of Briles. Regents used him to “take the fall” in the scandal and to mask years of issues with campus-wide assaults beyond the football team, he said..

“Baylor had a wide-ranging problem with interpersonal violence and sex assault,” McCaw told jurors. “The Board of Regents wanted to blame it all on one program and on one man: Art Briles.”

Lozano says her acrobatics and tumbling team coach LaPrise Harris-Williams asked her about her bruises after one of the alleged assaults and reported it to associate athletic director Nancy Post, who replied that “being involved with incidents like Lozano’s were not [Harris-Williams’] responsibility.”

McCaw refuted her claim: Post informed him of the assault in April 2014 and reported Lozano had sought counseling, medical attention and would file a report with Waco police, he testified. Baylor argued this shows the procedures in place were correctly followed by administrators and there was not deliberate indifference or negligence.

Chafin is not a party to the lawsuit and did not testify. Judge Pitman earlier denied Baylor’s motion to bring Chafin in as a third-party defendant. Chafin has steadfastly denied he ever assaulted Lozano and testified during a deposition that he acted in self-defense by grabbing her arms to stop being hit by Lozano.

Lozano testified on the second day of trial that she told then-running backs coach Jeff Lebby about the assaults and Chafin’s alleged drug abuse, claiming she saw him use marijuana, Oxycontin and mushrooms.

Baylor attorney Julie Springer, with Weisbart Springer in Austin, confronted Lozano on cross-examination on why she testified in a deposition in 2021 that she had only talked to Lebby about Chafin’s grades, yet was now claiming she told him about the assaults and drugs.

“That was what I could recall at that time,” Lozano replied.

“You only had one conversation with him and it was about academics,” Springer said.

Lebby is Briles’ son-in-law and the current offensive coordinator at the University of Oklahoma. He was forced to issue a public apology last month when Briles appeared on a sideline next to Lebby in University of Oklahoma clothing.

Springer told jurors that Baylor does apologize and accepts responsibility for the “bad things” that happened at the school, but as far as its liability, “this is not one of those cases.” She argued that Lozano was repeatedly urged to go to the police and to take advantage of school resources.

“Nobody from Baylor discouraged you from going to the police, right?” Springer asked.

“Yes,” Lozano replied.

Lozano has held public office since she was elected last year to be a justice of the peace in Harris County. Her term runs until 2027.

from Courthouse News

There isn’t much Cher hasn’t done in her career. A Christmas album is new territory, though

LOS ANGELES (AP) — There isn’t much Cher hasn’t done in her career. She’s achieved EGOT status, she’s the only artist to have a No. 1 song in each of the past six decades — heck, she’s got her own gelato business, Cherlato. But a Christmas album? That’s new territory.

So, why now?

“I just didn’t want to do one,” she told The Associated Press. “I didn’t know how I was going to make it a ‘Cher Christmas album.’”

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The secret, of course, was to lean into the incredible eclecticism of her career, all while avoiding the sleepy, saccharine pitfalls of a “Silent Night” -heavy holiday release.

Her first new album in five years, the appropriately titled “Christmas,” releases Friday. In some ways, it required Cher to find her voice again. She hadn’t sang since a March 12, 2020, performance in Oklahoma City was canceled when a Utah Jazz basketball player tested positive for the coronavirus.

So, she called up her vocal teacher, “Adrienne Angel, who’s 96, who came out and hung with me and we worked every day.”

“And then I went to the mic and I was able to sing,” she says. “I have very young vocal cords.”

On “Christmas,” Cher enlists an all-star list of collaborators. There’s Cyndi Lauper on “Put A Little Holiday In Your Heart,” Stevie Wonder on “What Christmas Means to Me,” Darlene Love on “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home),” Michael Bublé on “Home,” and even the rapper Tyga on “Drop Top Sleigh Ride” — you read that last one correctly.

But working with others in this way is something she says she’s never done before. When you’re Cher, do you really need a featured voice?

“Well, with Darlene, I wasn’t going to sing her song without her,” she says of the song they first sang together 60 years ago on “A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector.”

“With Stevie, I did the song, I loved the song, but there were just things I couldn’t do, that were just Stevie,” she says. “So, I called him and just said, ‘Stevie, I’ve done it. I’m pretty proud of it. But there are things I can’t do, and I need you.’”

“I was still trying to sell him when he’d already said yes,” she says. “At some point he asked me, ‘Is this my song?’ And I went, ‘You think I could call you to ask you to sing on someone else’s song?’”

Alexander Edwards, Cher’s romantic partner and a credited producer on the project, is best friends with Tyga, who helped make the most unexpected and delightful collaboration happen.

“Christmas” is dedicated to Cher’s late mother, Georgia Holt, who died just before the holidays last year. But don’t mistake this album as therapy — the act of reclaiming Christmas in the face of loss, or a way to memorialize Holt.

“I think about my mom all the time,” she says. She doesn’t need an album to remind her of her mom; her mom is everywhere.

“I don’t have a bit of regret that my mom is gone because my mom was such a vibrant woman and she didn’t like what was going on in her life,” she adds.

Cher says her mom sends her messages all the time — like recently when she rediscovered a huge plate she made her mom, flipped it over, and read what it said: “Dear mom, I love you, Merry Christmas.”

“And it was like, ‘Mom, you’re just not going to leave me alone, are you?’” she says.

In addition to the album, Cher is preparing to release a 25th anniversary edition of her Grammy-winning album “Believe” on Nov. 3. Its title track is credited as the first use of autotune — though, as she recalls, it was termed a “pitch machine” at the time.

She was arguing with her longtime producer Mark Taylor about the track, and he brought up the new technology.

“It started and it was like, ‘Oh my God, this is the best thing ever.’ And I thought, ‘You don’t even know it’s me. This is the best thing ever.’ And then we high fived,” she recounts.

But don’t mistake an openness to technology and musical innovation as an openness to artificial intelligence.

Of the technology, Cher is quick to say: “Not AI. Someone did me doing a Madonna song and it was kind of shocking. They didn’t have it down perfectly. But also, I’ve spent my entire life trying to be myself, and now these a——- are going to go take it? And they’ll do my acting and they’ll do my singing?”

“I’m telling you, if you work forever to become somebody — and I’m not talking about somebody in the famous, money part — but an artist, and then someone just takes it from you, it seems like it should be illegal,” she adds.

For those keeping count: It is also the 35th anniversary of Cher winning the best actress Oscar for her role in “Moonstruck.” When asked if she will act again, she’s quick to point out the necessity of a resolution to the ongoing Hollywood actors strike.

She was asked to do a special, she says.

“They said, ‘Well, we can do it in England.’ I said, ‘We can do it on the moon, but I’m not doing it,'” she says, not until an agreement is reached.

Spoken like, well, Cher.

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By MARIA SHERMAN AP Music Writer

from Courthouse News

Rockets are trading Kevin Porter to Thunder, and Oklahoma City will waive him

(AP) — Kevin Porter Jr.’s time with the Houston Rockets is over, after the team agreed Tuesday to trade him and a pair of second-round draft picks to the Oklahoma City Thunder, a person with knowledge of the agreement told The Associated Press.

Porter Jr. — whose future in the NBA is uncertain because of serious legal issues — will be waived immediately by the Thunder once the trade gets league approval, according to the person who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because neither team had announced the deal.

ESPN first reported the trade terms, which were later confirmed by The Houston Chronicle and other outlets. The Rockets also will receive Victor Oladipo and Jeremiah Robinson-Earl as part of the trade, the person said.

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Porter is owed nearly $15.9 million for this season and an additional $1 million that was guaranteed for next season. The Rockets already had told Porter that he was essentially barred from the team after it learned of his arrest on domestic violence charges last month.

Porter was arrested after an alleged attack on his girlfriend, former WNBA player Kysre Gondrezick, in a New York City hotel room Sept. 11. One assault charge against Porter was dropped this week for insufficient evidence, the New York Post reported; he still faces a strangulation charge and another assault charge in relation to that alleged incident and has pleaded not guilty to both.

“The allegations against him are deeply troubling,” Rockets general manager Rafael Stone said earlier this month. “Going back a few weeks, as soon as I heard the allegations, I informed his representatives that he could not be part of the Houston Rockets.”

There is no known timetable on Oladipo’s return from a patella tendon tear suffered in last season’s playoffs with Miami.

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By TIM REYNOLDS AP Basketball Writer

from Courthouse News

Baylor, alum spar over what coaches knew about assaults, drug use

WACO, Texas (CN) – Baylor University’s attorneys cast doubt Tuesday on whether an alumnus actually told coaches about the beatings she says she received from running back Devin Chafin and about what she says was his abuse of prescription opioids, mushrooms and marijuana.

Dolores Lozano sued Baylor, former football coach Art Briles and former athletic director Ian McCaw in federal court. She claims negligence and sex discrimination under Title IX, that she was beaten three times by Chafin in 2014 during her senior year and that the school’s deliberate indifference to her reports caused additional beatings. Lozano’s story along with several other female student stories of rape and abuse surfaced in 2016, resulting in the Baylor board of regents ordering an independent investigation by the law firm of Pepper Hamilton that concluded administrators discouraged students from reporting abuse and retaliated against one student.

The fallout resulted in the demotion of Ken Starr as president — he later resigned as chancellor and as a law school professor. Briles was suspended with intent for termination in spite of winning two Big 12 Conference championships. McCaw was suspended and he later became athletic director at Liberty University after resigning.

Testifying Tuesday, Lozano told jurors that she had informed then-running backs coach Jeff Lebby of Chafin’s assaults and drug use, saying she saw him use marijuana, Oxycontin and mushrooms. She said the prescription opioid abuse was so bad it once required her to throw him into a bathtub to wake up.

Lebby is Briles’ son-in-law and is currently the offensive coordinator at the University of Oklahoma. He was forced to issue a public apology last month when Briles appeared on a sideline next to Lebby in OU clothing. Briles has remained a pariah in college football since his firing — coaching in high school and in Italy since leaving Baylor.

Baylor attorney Julie Springer, with Weisbart Springer in Austin, confronted Lozano on cross-examination on why she testified in a deposition in 2021 that she had only talked to Lebby about Chafin’s grades, yet was now claiming she told him about the assaults and drugs.

“That was what I could recall at that time,” Lozano replied.

“You only had one conversation with him and it was about academics,” Springer said.

Springer also pointed out that Lozano knew she could have contacted Baylor campus police and Judicial Affairs but did not, citing records of earlier disputes Lozano had as a student with a former roommate and an unidentified basketball player.

The attorney also asked Lozano why she did not go to Waco police after the first assault, if she didn’t want to get Chafin in trouble.

“Nobody from Baylor discouraged you from going to the police, right?” Springer asked.

“Yes,” Lozano replied.

With approximately 10 of Lozano’s friends and family members in the courtroom Tuesday, Lozano silently wept while telling jurors she has struggled with anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder after the assaults and that she regularly speaks with a counselor.

Lozano testified she learned of her unplanned pregnancy with Chafin in February 2014 after they had broken up and that he was initially supportive of her decision to have an abortion. She said Chafin later argued with her before he first assaulted her at his apartment on March 6, pushing her over a toilet and then kicking her in the stomach as she laid inside a closet. Lozano said Chafin then began to strangle her and she briefly lost consciousness before she awoke to him crying and asking for forgiveness.

Her attorney, Zeke Fortenberry of Dallas, showed jurors several images Lozano took on her mobile phone of her bruises on her arms, neck and back in the days after the assault.

Lozano criticized Baylor’s response when she went to the Health Services clinic for help after she says Chavin assaulted her a second time in April 2014. She told jurors she was seated in a car at a Waco bar when he approached and slammed her arm against the car window.

Lozano said she told clinic staff about both assaults by Chafin and that she was referred to counselors who seemed to focus more on the abortion than the abuse.

“It was very uncomfortable,” Lozano said. “It was more focus on the abortion than on being beaten … I just left there feeling like I was going to go to hell.”

Lozano said she was staying away from Chafin but that he was expressing suicidal thoughts so she agreed to meet with him a third time in April, where he pushed her down in his apartment kitchen before getting up and leaving.

“I seriously hate you,” Lozano’s Facebook message to Chafin afterwards stated. “I hate you for making me feel like I am not good enough.”

She testified Chafin replied with “I have done nothing but apologize.”

Defense attorney Springer cast doubt on whether Lozano’s self-admitted heavy drinking after she turned 21 years old was really due to Chafin, entering into evidence a statement Lozano wrote when she was sentenced to community service for an open container violation.

Lozano was issued the ticket after being stopped by Waco police driving the wrong way down a one-way street. Lozano reportedly told officers her mother was a cop and her passenger, Chafin, was issued a citation for minor in possession of alcohol.

“I thought I was capable of driving home but I was not,” Lozano wrote at the time. “In all honesty, I started drinking a lot after 21 to deal with school and family stress.”

Springer told jurors during opening arguments Monday that Baylor does apologize and accepts responsibility for the “bad things” that happened at the school, but that “this is not one of those cases.” Baylor claims Lozano was repeatedly urged to go to the police and to take advantage of school resources.

Chafin has already testified during a deposition in this case and will not testify in person. The case is being presided over by U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman, who earlier denied a motion by Baylor to bring Chafin into the case as a third-party defendant. Chafin has steadfastly denied ever throwing Lozano to the ground, kicking or choking her.

Lozano ran for public office last year in Harris County and was elected as Justice of the Peace for Precinct 2, Place 2. A Democrat, Lozano’s first term runs to 2027.

from Courthouse News

Martin Scorsese is still curious — and still awed by the possibilities of cinema

NEW YORK (AP) — A moment from years ago keeps replaying in Martin Scorsese’s mind.

When Akira Kurosawa was given an honorary Academy Award in 1990, the then 80-year-old Japanese filmmaker of “Seven Samurai” and “Ikiru,” in his brief, humble speech, said he hadn’t yet grasped the full essence of cinema.

It struck Scorsese, then in post-production on “Goodfellas,” as a curious thing for such a master filmmaker to say. It wasn’t until Scorsese also turned 80 that he began to comprehend Kurosawa’s words. Even now, Scorsese says he’s just realizing the possibilities of cinema.

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“I’ve lived long enough to be his age and I think I understand now,” Scorsese said in a recent interview. “Because there is no limit. The limit is in yourself. These are just tools, the lights and the camera and that stuff. How much further can you explore who you are?”

Scorsese’s lifelong exploration has seemingly only grown deeper and more self-examining with time. In recent years, his films have swelled in scale and ambition as he’s plumbed the nature of faith ( “Silence” ) and loss ( “The Irishman”).

His latest, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” about the systematic killing of Osage Nation members for their oil-rich land in the 1920s, is in many ways far outside Scorsese’s own experience. But as a story of trust and betrayal — the film is centered on the loving yet treacherous relationship between Mollie Brown (Lily Gladstone), a member of a larger Osage family, and Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a WWI veteran who comes to work for his corrupt uncle (Robert De Niro) — it’s a profoundly personal film that maps some of the themes of Scorsese’s gangster films onto American history.

More than the back-room dealings of “Casino,” the bloody rampages of “Gangs of New York” or the financial swindling of “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “Killers of the Flower Moon” is the story of a crime wave. It’s a disturbingly insidious one, where greed and violence infiltrate the most intimate relationships — a genocide in the home. All of which, to Scorsese, harkens back to the tough guys and the weak-willed go-alongs he witnessed in his childhood growing up on Elizabeth Street in New York.

“That’s been my whole life, dealing with who we are,” says Scorsese. “I found that this story lent itself to that exploration further.”

“Killers of the Flower Moon,” a $200-million, 206-minute epic produced by Apple that’s in theaters Friday, is an audacious big swing by Scorsese to continue his kind of ambitious, personal filmmaking on the largest scale at a time when such grand, big-screen statements are a rarity.

Scorsese considers “Killers of the Flower Moon” “an internal spectacle.” The Oklahoma-set film, adapted from David Grann’s 2017 bestseller, might be called his first Western. But while developing Grann’s book, which chronicles the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI, Scorsese came to the realization that centering the film on federal investigator Tom White was a familiar a type of Western.

“I realized: ‘You don’t do that. Your Westerns are the Westerns you saw in the late ’40s and early ’50s, that’s it. Peckinpah finished that. ‘Wild Bunch,’ that’s the end. Now they’re different,” he says. “It represented a certain time in who we were as a nation and a certain time in the world – and the end of the studio system. It was a genre. That folklore is gone.”

Scorsese, after conversations with Leonardo DiCaprio, pivoted to the story of Ernest and Mollie and a perspective closer to Osage Nation. Consultations with the tribe continued and expanded to include accurately capturing language, traditional clothing and customs.

“It’s historical that Indigenous Peoples can tell their story at this level. That’s never happened before as far as I know,” says Geoffrey Standing Bear, Principal Chief of Osage Nation. “It took somebody who could know that we’ve been betrayed for hundreds of years. He wrote a story about betrayal of trust.”

“Killers of the Flower Moon” for Scorsese grew out of a period of reflection and reevaluation during the pandemic. Covid-19, he says, was “a gamechanger.” For a filmmaker whose time is so intensely scheduled, the break was in some ways a relief, and it allowed him a chance to reconsider what he wants to dedicate himself to. For him, preparing a film is a meditative process.

“I don’t use a computer because I tried a couple times and I got very distracted. I get distracted as it is,” Scorsese says. “I’ve got films, I’ve got books, I’ve got people. I’ve only begun this year to read emails. Emails, they scare me. It says ‘CC’ and there are a thousand names. Who are these people?”

Scorsese is laughing when he says this, surely aware that he’s playing up his image as a member of the old guard. (A moment later he adds that voicemail “is interesting to do at times.”) Yet he’s also keen enough with technology to digitally de-age De Niro and make cameos in his daughter Francesca’s TikTok videos.

Scorsese has for years been the preeminent conscience of cinema, passionately arguing for the place of personal filmmaking in an era of moviegoing where films can be devalued as “content,” theater screens are monopolized by Marvel and big-screen vision can be shrunk down on streaming platforms.

“I’m trying to keep alive the sense that cinema is an artform,” Scorsese says. “The next generation may not see it that way because as children and younger people, they’re exposed to films that are wonderful entertainment, beautifully made, but are purely diversionary. I think cinema can enrich your life.”

“As I’m leaving, I’m trying to say: Remember, this can really be something beautiful in your life.”

That mission includes spearheading extensive restoration work with the Film Foundation along with a regular output of documentaries in between features. Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker are currently producing a documentary on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

Cinema, he says, may be the preeminent 20th century artform, but something else will belong to the 21st century. Now, Scorsese says, “the visual image could be done by anything by anybody anytime anywhere.”

“The possibilities are infinite on all levels. And that’s exciting,” Scorsese says. “But at the same time, the more choices, the more difficult it is.”

The pressure of time is weighing more heavily on Scorsese, too. He has, he’s said, maybe two more feature films left in him. Currently in the mix are an adaptation of Grann’s latest book, the 18th century shipwreck tale “The Wager, ” and an adaptation of Marilynne Robinson’s “Home.”

“He’s uncompromising. He just does what he feels he really wants to look into,” says Rodrigo Prieto, Scorsese’s cinematographer on “Flower Moon,” as well as his last three feature films.

“You can feel that it’s a personal exploration of his own psyche,” adds Prieto. “In doing that, he allows growth for everybody, in a way, to really look into these characters who might be doing things we might find very objectionable. I can’t think of many other filmmakers who attempt at such a level of empathy and understanding.”

Yet Scorsese says he often feels like he’s in a race to accomplish what he can with the time he has left. Increasingly, he’s prioritizing what’s worth it. Some things are easier for him to give up.

“Would I like to do more? Yeah. Would I like to go to everybody’s parties and dinner parties and things? Yeah, but you know what? I think I know enough people,” Scorsese says with a laugh. “Would I like to go see the ancient Greek ruins? Yes. Go back to Sicily? Yes. Go back to Naples again? Yes. North Africa? Yes. But I don’t have to.”

Time for Scorsese may be waning but curiosity is as abundant as ever. Recent reading for him includes a new translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s “The Betrothed.” Some old favorites he can’t help but keep revisiting. “Out of the Past” — a movie he first saw as 6-year-old — he watched again a few weeks ago. (“Whenever it’s on, I have to stop and watch it.”) Vittorio De Sica’s “Golden Naples” was another recent rewatch.

“If I’m curious about something, I think I’ll find a way – if I hold out, if I hold up – to try to make something about it on film,” he says. “My curiosity is still there.”

So too is his continued astonishment at cinema and its capacity to transfix. Sometimes, Scorsese can hardly believe it. The other day he watched the Val Lewton-produced 1945 horror film “The Isle of the Dead,” with Boris Karloff.

“Really? How many more times am I going to see that?” Scorsese says, laughing at himself. “It’s their looks and their faces and the way (Karloff) moves. When I first saw it as a child, a young teenager, I was terrified by the film and the silences of it. The sense of contamination. I still get stuck on it.”

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By JAKE COYLE AP Film Writer

from Courthouse News

Title IX trial over Baylor handling of student assaults kicks off

WACO, Texas (CN) — Attorneys for Baylor University alumnus Dolores Lozano told jurors Monday that school officials — including disgraced former football coach Art Briles — acted with deliberate indifference when she reported being assaulted by her former boyfriend and running back Devin Chafin, resulting in more assaults.

Lozano’s attorney, Zeke Fortenberry of Dallas, said during opening statements that the “Baylor way is to look away” at reports of domestic abuse and sexual assault by football players. He said the program was generating millions of dollars in additional revenue as the team won two Big 12 Conference titles under Briles.

“The coaches knew not only of rapes, but of gang rapes,” Fortenberry said. “They [the football players] were not reprimanded.”
Lozano, of Houston, sued Baylor in 2016 on claims of negligence and sex discrimination under Title IX, later adding former athletic director Ian McCaw and Briles as defendants in 2018. She claims the first assault by Chafin took place during her senior year in 2014 at his apartment.

Julie Springer, with Weisbart Springer in Austin, represents Baylor. She firmly denied claims that Baylor looked the other way after Lozano’s reports.

“She was not retaliated against, she was encouraged to go to police and go to counseling,” Springer told the jury. “There is no question bad things happened. Baylor accepts responsibility and publicly apologizes. This is not one of those cases.”

Briles’ downfall began after questions were asked in 2016 about the school’s bungled handling of several assault and sexual violence allegations. The school’s board of regents ordered an independent investigation by the Pepper Hamilton law firm that resulted in the publication of a finding of fact, a public apology by the board and the removal of Ken Starr as Baylor president.

Briles was suspended with intent for termination and McCaw was reprimanded and suspended. Starr later resigned as chancellor and as a law school professor. Briles was ultimately fired and McCaw resigned, later resurfacing as athletic director at Liberty University in 2016.

Now known as Troutman Pepper, the law firm concluded administrators “directly discouraged” some complainants from reporting sexual assault and retaliated against one complainant.

“Assailant began to raise his voice and threaten plaintiff. He then slapped, kicked, and slammed plaintiff against the wall until she fell to the ground,” Lozano says in her complaint. “Assailant strangled plaintiff until she began to lose consciousness.”

Lozano claims she told then-running backs coach Jeff Lebby about the assault while her bruises were still visible, but that no action was taken. Lebby is Briles’ son-in-law and is currently the offensive coordinator at the University of Oklahoma. Lebby was forced to issue a public apology last month when Briles appeared on a sideline next to Lebby in OU clothing.

Lozano managed the Baylor acrobatics and tumbling team at the time and claims her head coach, LaPrise Harris-Williams, asked her about her bruises. Lozano says Williams reported the assault to associate athletics director Nancy Post, who Lozano claims said “being involved with incidents like Lozano’s were not [Williams’] responsibility.”

Lozano says she then went to football chaplain Wes Yeary while her bruises were still visible, who “supplied her with literature to assist her in her spiritual self-worth and preservation.”

The repeated lack of action by Baylor led to a second and third assault by Chafin, who remained on the team until he was kicked off in 2016 after a marijuana possession arrest, Lozano says. She claims Chafin slammed her arm against a car in front of other people and that the on-campus clinic turned a blind eye when she told staff how she was injured and by whom.

“The clinic staff referred plaintiff to the on-campus counseling center, again to ‘assist her in her spiritual self-worth and preservation,’ as if she was the cause of her own abuse,” Lozano says in her complaint. “No further action was taken by anyone at the on-campus clinic, no report was filed with the University, and the incident was disregarded as just another complaint.”

Fortenberry told jurors that after the third attack, Lozano was so embarrassed to face the people in the same apartment that she escaped through a window.

“He kicked her in the stomach, as if the abortion was not enough,” Fortenberry said.

Defense attorney Springer disputed that story, stating Chafin testified at a deposition that Lozano would not stop slapping him at the meeting, so he pushed her away and tried to escape through the window first before she went through instead. Springer said Baylor Student Life staff offered to pursue a no-contact order against Chafin and that Lozano could have pursued a protective order with police.

But Lozano says she filed an incident report with Waco police naming Chafin as her attacker, but her subsequent calls to police were not returned. Lozano amended her complaint in 2018 to add the city of Waco as a defendant, claiming police violated her equal protection and due process rights under the 14th Amendment. She reached an undisclosed settlement with the city in 2021.

Briles’ attorney J. Reid Simpson, with Yetter Coleman in Houston, told jurors Lozano never reached out to Briles, that she never called or sent a text message. He said Briles denies finding out about the assault accusations until 2016.

“Coach Briles does not have the power to expel anyone from Baylor or from Waco, Texas,” Simpson said.

McCaw’s attorney Thomas Brandt, with Fanning Harper in Dallas, expressed confusion at Lozano’s Title IX claim that McCaw is responsible for the second and third assaults against her.

“Lozano is alleging her boyfriend hit her and that because of Ian McCaw, he hit her,” Brandt said incredulously.

U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman, a Barack Obama appointee, is overseeing the trial. He previously denied a motion by Baylor to bring Chafin into the suit as a third-party defendant.

Chavin finished his collegiate football career in 2016 at Missouri Southern State University. He has denied ever throwing Lozano to the ground, kicking or choking her, telling former ESPN reporter Joe Schad in 2016 he “grabbed” Lozano “because she was fighting” him.

The first witness called Monday was former Baylor regent J. Cary Gray, an attorney with Gray Reed in Houston. He testified that regents did personally apologize to several female Baylor students in the wake of the Pepper Hamilton investigation, but did not know if anyone had personally apologized to Lozano.

Gray said he learned about Lozano after she sued. He said he voted to suspend Briles with intent to terminate after the investigation because there was a need for culture change, and that Briles was not fired outright due to the constraints of his employment contract.

“He was a good football coach, but we needed someone else for this culture change,” Gray testified. “It needed discipline, in a larger sense.”

Briles’ attorney objected when Gray was asked to disclose how much the school paid Briles in the settlement of his contract, arguing the number is confidential and not relevant.

Lozano ran for public office last year in Harris County and was elected as Justice of the Peace for Precinct 2, Place 2. A Democrat, Lozano’s first term runs to 2027.

The trial is expected to last up to two weeks. The jury consists of three men and five women.

from Courthouse News

An Oklahoma man used pandemic relief funds to have his name cleared of murder

GREENWOOD, Ark. (AP) — Ricky Dority spends most of his days playing with his grandchildren, feeding chickens and working in the yard where he lives with his son’s family.

It’s a jarring change from where he was just several months ago, locked in a cell serving a life prison sentence at Oklahoma’s Joseph Harp Correctional Center in a killing he said he didn’t commit. After more than two decades behind bars, Dority had no chance at being released — until he used his pandemic relief funds to hire a dogged private investigator.

The investigator and students at the Oklahoma Innocence Project at Oklahoma City University, which is dedicated to exonerating wrongful convictions in the state, found inconsistencies in the state’s account of a 1997 cold-case killing, and Dority’s conviction was vacated in June by a Sequoyah County judge.

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Now, the 65-year-old says he’s enjoying the 5-acre property in a quiet neighborhood of well-to-do homes in the rolling, forested hills of the Arkansas River Valley outside of Fort Smith. “If you’re gone for a lot of years, you don’t take it for granted anymore.”

Dority is one of nearly 3,400 people who have been exonerated across the country since 1989, mostly over murder convictions, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. In Oklahoma, there have been more than 43 exonerations in that time, not including three new exonerations this year.

The cases underscore a serious problem facing a judicial system in which many old convictions resulted from overworked defense attorneys, shoddy forensic work, overzealous prosecutors and outdated investigative techniques.

The problem is particularly acute given Oklahoma’s history of sending people to death row, where 11 inmates have been exonerated since 1981. The issue has pushed a Republican-led legislative panel to consider whether a death penalty moratorium should be imposed.

In Oklahoma County, Glynn Ray Simmons was freed after spending nearly 50 years in prison, including time on death row, in a 1974 killing after a judge determined prosecutors failed to turn over evidence in the case, including a police report that showed an eyewitness might have identified other suspects.

And just this week, Perry Lott, who served more than 30 years in prison, had his rape and burglary conviction vacated in Pontotoc County after new DNA testing excluded him as the perpetrator. Pontotoc County, in particular, has come under intense scrutiny for a series of wrongful convictions in the 1980s that have been the subject of numerous books, including John Grisham’s “The Innocent Man,” which he produced into a six-part documentary on Netflix.

The most common causes of wrongful convictions are eyewitness misidentification, misapplication of forensic science, false confessions, coerced pleas and official misconduct, generally by police or prosecutors, according to the Innocence Project, a national organization based in New York.

In Dority’s case, he said he was railroaded by an overzealous sheriff and a state prosecutor eager to solve the killing of 28-year-old Mitchell Nixon, who was found beaten to death in 1997.

Investigators who reopened the case in 2014 coerced a confession from another man, Rex Robbins, according to Andrea Miller, the legal director of the Oklahoma Innocence Project. Robbins, who would plead guilty to manslaughter in Nixon’s killing, implicated Dority, who at the time was in a federal prison on a firearms conviction. Dority said he knew he didn’t have anything to do with the crime and found paperwork that proved he had been arrested on the day of the killing.

“I thought I was clear because I knew I didn’t have anything do with that murder,” Dority said. “But they tried me for it and found me guilty of it.”

Jurors heard about Robbins’ confession and testimony from a police informant who said Dority had changed bloody clothes at his house the night of the killing. They convicted him of first-degree murder and recommended a sentence of life without parole.

After years in prison, while most inmates spent their federal COVID-19 relief check in the commissary, Dority used his to hire a private investigator, he said. Bobby Staton had mostly investigated insurance fraud, but he took on the case and realized quickly that it was riddled with holes, Staton said.

He eventually turned to the university’s Oklahoma Innocence Project, which assigned a law student, Abby Brawner, to help investigate.

Their investigation turned when Staton and Brawner visited Robbins in the maximum-security Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite, and he recanted his statement implicating Dority.

“It was pretty intimidating,” Brawner said. “Especially when you’re going in to meet someone who doesn’t know you’re coming and doesn’t want to talk to you.”

Brawner and Staton also learned the informant didn’t live at the home where he told investigators Staton showed up in bloody clothes. When the actual homeowner testified at a hearing this summer, the judge dismissed the case.

Dority’s original attorneys were ineffective for not discovering the informant didn’t live at the home, the judge said, giving prosecutors 90 days to decide whether they will retry him. That three months has been extended, and prosecutors have said they intend to ask the judge for more time for DNA testing. Dority, confident in his innocence, said he’s not concerned about additional forensic testing.

Sequoyah County District Attorney Jack Thorp and former Sheriff Ron Lockhart did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press. But Assistant District Attorney James Dunn, who is overseeing the case and was not in the office when it was originally prosecuted, said he agreed with the judge’s dismissal after hearing the homeowner’s testimony and learning a witness “was not credible.”

“The last thing I want to see is an innocent person in prison for a crime they didn’t commit,” Dunn said. “Because that means the person who actually did commit the crime, or those persons, are still out there.”

Meanwhile, Dority is learning to use a smartphone and the television remote control, he said. He’s thankful to Staton and the Innocence Project and says his case proves others are wrongfully imprisoned in Oklahoma.

“After they’ve done what they’ve done to me, I know there are people in that prison who are innocent that need to be out and need help getting out,” he said. “If they hadn’t gotten me out, I’d have been in there for the rest of my life.”

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By SEAN MURPHY Associated Press

from Courthouse News

Oklahoma judge dismisses case of man who spent 30 years in prison for Ada rape

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — An Oklahoma judge on Tuesday exonerated a man who spent 30 years in prison for a 1987 rape and burglary, after post-conviction DNA testing from a rape kit showed he did not commit the crime.

Pontotoc County District Judge Steven Kessinger issued a final order that vacates Perry Lott’s conviction and permanently dismisses the case.

“I have never lost hope that this day would come,” Lott, 61, said in a statement. “I had faith that the truth would prevail, even after 35 long years.

“I can finally shut this door and move on with my life.”

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Lott was released from prison in 2018 after the DNA results first came to light, but only after agreeing to a deal with former District Attorney Paul Smith to modify his sentence. The agreement allowed Lott to leave prison and remain free while his motion to vacate was litigated. At the time, Smith said the DNA evidence did not exclude Lott as a suspect.

But earlier this year, the Innocence Project, which helped to free Lott, approached newly elected District Attorney Erik Johnson, who reviewed the case and agreed the conviction should be vacated.

“Five years ago, all evidence pointed to his innocence, but he was denied justice,” Innocence Project Senior Staff Attorney Adnan Sultan said in a statement. “We are grateful to District Attorney Erik Johnson for his commitment to righting this wrong.”

Oklahoma state law requires a conviction to be vacated in order for a wrongfully convicted person to be able to seek up to $175,000 in compensation from the state.

Lott’s case occurred around the same time and in the same county as the convictions of Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot, whose cases have come under intense scrutiny and have been the subject of numerous books, including John Grisham’s “The Innocent Man,” which he produced into a six-part documentary on Netflix. A federal judge ordered Fontenot released, but Ward remains in prison.

The books and documentary also feature the high-profile exoneration of Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, who both were convicted in the same county for the 1982 killing of Ada waitress Debra Sue Carter. That case featured the same cast of investigators and prosecutors, along with the same jailhouse informant who testified against Ward and Fontenot. Williamson at one point came within days of being executed. Both were later freed.

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By SEAN MURPHY Associated Press

from Courthouse News

Charged & disbarred

Read the ruling here.

from Courthouse News

In historic vote, House ousts Speaker Kevin McCarthy

WASHINGTON (CN) — Just nine months after he was elected to lead the Republican party’s House majority, Kevin McCarthy’s tenure as House speaker is at an end Tuesday afternoon, as Democrats joined right wing Republicans in a vote to kick him off the dais.

It’s the first time in history the House has successfully voted to remove its top lawmaker.

In a tightly contested, 216-210 vote the lower chamber approved Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz’s motion to vacate the office of the speakership. The move strips McCarthy of his title and leaves a yawning power vacuum at the top of the Republican party.

McCarthy’s ouster also puts the House’s legislative business in suspended animation until Congress can elect a new speaker.

Eight GOP lawmakers joined the House Democrat caucus in passing the motion to remove McCarthy. It was a minority of the chamber’s Republican votes, but more than enough to secure victory for Gaetz and his allies.

Ironically, the groundwork for Tuesday’s motion was first laid in January as part of a deal then-Congressman McCarthy made with right wing lawmakers as he ascended to the speakership.

Under the agreement, reached as House Republicans undertook marathon deliberations to select their new congressional leader, the California lawmaker agreed to pursue a laundry list of conservative policy objectives if elected speaker. McCarthy also reportedly agreed to right wing demands that any member of Congress be allowed to file a motion to vacate the speakership should they become dissatisfied with his work.

Nine months later, that deal has come back to haunt the former speaker.

The man at the helm of McCarthy’s political demise, Florida Congressman Gaetz has in recent months fashioned himself as one of the former speaker’s staunchest critics. The lawmaker has said McCarthy reneged on his promises to right wing Republicans, such as pursuing term limits for members of Congress and reforming federal budget negotiations.

The last straw for Gaetz, however, came over the weekend as McCarthy reached across party lines and worked with Democrats to pass a short-term stopgap budget bill — a move that averted a costly government shutdown after weeks of Republican infighting over federal spending.

Gaetz’s complaints are shared by only a small minority of the Republican caucus. Most GOP lawmakers have stood by former Speaker McCarthy, blasting the Florida Republican for what they see as a shortsighted move that puts in jeopardy Republican efforts to check President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda.

“This is a sad day, and not a day I expected to live through,” said Oklahoma Congressman Tom Cole during floor remarks Monday. “The overwhelming majority of my party supports the speaker that we elected. We’re proud of the leadership he’s shown.”

Without naming Gaetz directly, Cole accused the lawmaker and his allies of working to “plunge this body into chaos, and the country into uncertainty, for reasons that only they really understand.”

“Chaos is Speaker McCarthy,” Gaetz fired back. “Chaos is somebody who we cannot trust with their word.”

Virginia Republican Bob Good, who supported McCarthy’s ouster, said he was sad Congress had arrived at what he framed as “a totally avoidable situation,” but raked the former speaker over the coals for his handling of budget negotiations and his decision to work with the White House during May’s debt ceiling crisis.

“We need a speaker who will fight for something, anything, besides just staying or becoming speaker,” Good said, accusing McCarthy of “surrendering to the Democrats” in spending talks.

Meanwhile, the mood was solemn in the House chamber following the vote to oust McCarthy.

Announcing that “the office of speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant,” North Carolina Congressman Patrick McHenry ended the lower chamber’s session with a forceful, angry crack of the speaker’s gavel.

McHenry will be the House’s interim leader until a new speaker is elected.

McCarthy had yet to make a public statement about his removal as of Tuesday afternoon.

Some Republican lawmakers backed the former speaker, arguing that GOP policy priorities should come first.

“Now is not the time to remove the Speaker,” said Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert in a post on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. While she said she was “frustrated by the broken promises, secret deals, and failed leadership,” forcing Republicans to elect another speaker “undermines [GOP] priorities at the worst possible time.”

“Electing a new Speaker in this environment risks getting a Speaker that makes deals with the Democrats,” said Texas Congressman Ronny Jackson.

Democrats, for their part, pointed out that McCarthy’s ouster was largely of his own design.

“Kevin McCarthy’s sycophantic appeasement of Trump’s MAGA enablers brought to our body chaos, extremism and his own toppling,” said Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin. “Today, unified behind our exceptional leadership, Democrats are clearly the only party capable of ending the dysfunction and governing for the common good.”

Until the House elects a new speaker, lawmakers cannot move forward with legislative business. Such a freeze comes as Congress has a little over a month to approve a federal budget for 2024 — the stopgap measure negotiated by former Speaker McCarthy and House Democrats over the weekend only funds the government through mid-November.

from Courthouse News