Michigan State Student Says She Was Raped by 3 Basketball Players and Told Not to Report It

The lawsuit is one case in an alarming pattern of sexual misconduct at the school.

Michigan State mascot
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Image via Getty/Scott W. Grau/Icon Sportswire

Michigan State mascot

There’s more controversy coming out of Michigan State this week. The university was previously implicated in disgraced sports doctor Larry Nassar’s sexual assault scandal, for which Nassar received up to 175 years in prison. But now, according to a federal lawsuit filed on Monday, a female student has alleged that three former Michigan State basketball players sexually assaulted her in 2015 in an apartment off-campus. Even worse, she claims that she was discouraged by the school from reporting the incident.

According to the lawsuit, the unnamed female student met the athletes at a bar in East Lansing. The men took her to an apartment where they told her there was a party. The woman alleges that there was no party and that she started to feel unwell and “discombobulated.” She says she tried to “send a phone text, but she could not control her thumbs to formulate a text.”

She claims the players raped her in a bedroom, but didn’t remember anything else before waking up on the couch hours later. The student says she contacted the school’s Counseling Center staff about a week after the incident, and they dissuaded her from going to the authorities. She alleges that the staff warned her she’d be dealing with “an uphill battle that would create anxiety and unwanted media attention” when she told them who raped her. The lawsuit reads, “Plaintiff was so discouraged by the representations made by the MSUCC Counseling staff she became frightened to the point that she decided she could not report the rape(s) to law enforcement.”

Any alleged incident of sexual misconduct is alarming, but the trend of both confirmed cases and allegations flowing out of Michigan State gives one reason to take serious pause. As we previously reported, Larry Nassar's ex-boss, a former dean at the school, is facing his own sexual misconduct allegations, and last week, three of the school's players pled guilty to reduced charges pertaining to the sexual assault of a woman in 2017.

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