WACO, Texas (CN) — A federal judge in Texas dismissed gross negligence claims against Baylor University and fired head football coach Art Briles on Friday, one day after Briles testified he was unaware of a female student’s assault claims against a player for two years.
U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman tossed the claims against Baylor, Briles and former athletic director Ian McCaw, partially granting a motion to dismiss. Pitman said “no reasonable jury” could conclude the trio had been grossly negligent based on the evidence presented this week at trial.
Briles' attorney, J. Reid Simpson of Yetter Coleman in Houston, told reporters outside of the courthouse that he's happy for his client, who “did nothing wrong.” The attorney could be heard telling Briles about the dismissal over the phone.
Plaintiff Dolores Lozano of Houston will pursue her remaining claims of negligence and sex discrimination under Title IX against Baylor as the trial continues into a second week.
Lozano claims she was beaten three times by running back Devin Chafin in March and April 2014 during her senior year and that the school’s deliberate indifference to her reports allowed the abuse to continue. Chafin has steadfastly denied the assaults and is not a party to the lawsuit.
Along with several other female students' stories of rape and abuse, Lazano's story surfaced in 2016, resulting in Baylor regents ordering an independent investigation by the law firm Pepper Hamilton. The firm concluded administrators discouraged students from reporting abuse and, in one case, even retaliated against one student.
Sporting shaggy hair and a goatee, Briles testified Thursday that three regents called him after Pepper Hamilton presented them with the investigation’s findings. Briles did not attend the presentation.
“He told me, ‘I let you down, coach. They are going to fire you,’” Briles said. “They are just going to fire me and not tell me why?”
Briles described a subsequent meeting where Baylor administrators and regents told him he'd be suspended with the intent to terminate him. Former regent J. Cary Gray testified Monday that the regents couldn't fire the coach outright due to the parameters of his employment contract.
Briles said he felt the board was being disloyal to him, even though he had given all his loyalty to them.
“It was not pleasant from my point of view,” he said. “I became emotional and about four board members came over and put hands on me to start praying.”
Briles inherited a football team that went 3-9 when he was hired after the 2007 season — the Bears failed to win any Big 12 Conference games that season. He ultimately led Baylor to back-to-back conference championships in 2013 and 2014. He has claimed he didn't find out about Lozano’s assault claims until 2016.
McCaw testified on Thursday that the coach was being unfairly scapegoated by Baylor regents after years of failed responses to assault and sexual violence complaints. He said he resigned out of disappointment over Briles, who was singled out for the scandal.
McCaw quit after he was sanctioned and put on probation, while Ken Starr was demoted from his role as school president. Starr later resigned as Baylor chancellor and as a law school professor.
On the stand McCaw recalled former regent Richard Willis telling him that Briles “would take the fall” after Pepper Hamilton’s presentation. He said Baylor’s Title IX coordinator identified more than 400 possible complaints to the office in the years immediately before the investigation, which involved both students and non-students, on campus and off.
“Baylor had a wide-ranging problem with interpersonal violence and sex assault,” McCaw said. “The Board of Regents wanted to blame it all on one program and on one man: Art Briles.”
McCaw’s testimony echoed accusations he made in a 2018 deposition in a separate lawsuit that ten women filed against Baylor, saying at the time he was “disgusted” with the regents’ alleged racism. He accused the school of hatching “an elaborate plan to essentially scapegoat black football players and the football program for being responsible for what was a decades-long, university-wide sexual assault scandal.”
McCaw told jurors he first heard about an alleged assault involving Chafin and Lozano in April 2014 from associate athletic director Nancy Post. He said Post reported that Lozano had sought counseling and medical attention and would file a report with Waco police. Baylor’s attorneys have argued this shows the procedures in place were correctly followed by administrators and there was not deliberate indifference or negligence.
Lozano claims Baylor acrobatics and tumbling team head coach LaPrise Harris-Williams asked her about her bruises after one of the alleged assaults. She says Harris-Williams reported the assault to Post, who replied in turn that “being involved with incidents like Lozano’s were not [Harris-Williams’] responsibility.”
Chafin, whose deposition testimony was played in court on Wednesday and Thursday, did not appear in court in person as a witness.
Lozano claims that at the first confrontation in March 2014 at Chafin’s apartment, he kicked her on the floor of a closet and strangled her into unconsciousness after she aborted a pregnancy.
Chafin says he grabbed Lozano's arms as she was hitting him.
“We both cried and got very emotion, then she blamed me,” Chafin said in the deposition. “I went to leave my room and she wouldn’t let me. We argued, she hit me and scratched me several times. I did not hit her, I only acted in self-defense.”
Chafin was then shown images Lozano took of her bruises, and he denied that he caused then.
In 2016, Lozano filed an assault case against Chafin’s now-wife in McLellan County District Court in Waco, which was later dropped.
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