Virginia Murder Stirs Memories for Anti-Violence Advocate

As Kathy Redmond heard more details about the Virginia lacrosse player who was killed earlier this week -- allegedly at the hands of a men's lacrosse player with whom she had been in a relationship -- one element struck a familiar chord.

Redmond has fought to bring visibility to victims of sexual assault by athletes since 1991, when she herself was a victim, of Nebraska football player Christian Peter. She had spoken at Yeardley Love's high school, Notre Dame Preparatory School in Baltimore, several times over the years, "to talk to the girls about violence and male-involved violence,'' she said. "So this is very ironic to me.''

One of the talks, Redmond recalled from her Colorado home Wednesday, took place in conjunction with a party in the spring of 2001 that involved students from Notre Dame's nearby "brother'' institution, St. Paul's School for Boys -- in which a video made by a St. Paul's student of him having sex with a girl from the all-girls school, without her knowledge, was shown to a group of his classmates.

The classmates, like the boy who made the tape, were members of St. Paul's varsity and junior varsity lacrosse teams. Eventually, the team's remaining varsity games were canceled, the player expelled and eight JV players were thrown off the team.

To Redmond -- who wound up filing a federal lawsuit against the University of Nebraska in 1995 after it ignored her case, and now operates the National Coalition Against Violent Athletes -- the entire experience with the Notre Dame students illustrated several things that relate to the situation at Virginia.

"What people need to realize is that this is going on at every school -- at Catholic schools, at prep schools, at public schools," she told FanHouse. "It doesn't matter. It's everywhere.''

And: "What really startled me is the amount of violent incidents the girls are subjected to by boys, and that they had no idea that it wasn't normal. I had several girls pull me aside asking me if (what amounts to) attempted sexual assault and rape were normal.

"It's kind of surreal,'' Redmond continued. "What's considered acceptable is being pushed further and further out.''

Yet, even after pointing out that no environment is insulated from the possibility of something like what happened at Virginia and at the Baltimore prep schools -- "This cuts across all races, all social classes, religions, across all barriers'' -- the fact that the products of exclusive, privileged backgrounds and of a sport still overwhelmingly the province of the wealthy elite cannot be pushed aside.

Love's accused murderer, Virginia senior lacrosse player George Huguely, attended the 81-year-old, 75-acre Landon School in suburban Washington. The high school is comprised of 348 boys (27 percent "of color") who pay $28,826 a year in tuition, according to the school's website.

All of those characteristics are par for the course for private prep schools in the D.C.-Baltimore region, whether coed or single-sex, nondenominational or church-affiliated. (An important distinction: most of the Catholic high schools in the Baltimore area belong to the Archdiocese of Baltimore, which has been closing and consolidating schools for the past three years because of severe financial problems.)

What they also share is lacrosse. The hotbeds of the sport elsewhere, such as New York and Connecticut, include heavy participation by suburban public schools -- but in the D.C. area, it is exclusively private school-centric, and in Baltimore, the prep schools are light years ahead of the city public school programs.

Collectively, they fuel every major college program in the country and many of the smaller ones -- certainly Virginia and, invoking the last infamous case involving college lacrosse players, Duke. Choosing her words carefully, knowing that the woman who accused its players of rape in 2006 was discredited, the charges dropped and the prosecutor punished and disbarred, Redmond said that it still would be foolish to ignore that incident while discussing the one at Virginia.

"To claim that those guys are 'innocent' is impractical, and it's harmful,'' she said. "You can't have 20 male lacrosse players, or football players or basketball players or soccer players, together, drinking and inviting strippers over, and thinking everything is going to turn out all right in the end ... A real chilling effect was sent through that case.''

There is more than conflicting perceptions, isolated incidents or stereotyping at play, she said, and the sooner everybody acknowledges that, the better.

"Parents of prep-school kids might want to believe something differently,'' Redmond said, "just like all parents want to believe this and that don't happen, can't happen, to them, but it does.

"I'm going to make a generalization here,'' she continued, "but when you have the non-revenue sports, where it takes money for them to play, a lacrosse, or golf or tennis -- it's not like they're using that sport to get out of the projects. So you have two sides of the coin. When it happens in football or basketball, for instance, people are going to believe, 'This is what they grew up in, this is their environment.' Then you see these other sports where with money, there's power.

"Now, you ask, are they growing up with a completely different set of expectations and standards? Are they growing up with a lack of accountability? That's the difference. You get the sense that they've never had to be held accountable for any of their actions, that there are no consequences.''

Generalization or not, Redmond said, she has noticed that when she speaks to teams of both genders in high school, college and the pros, the message sinks in with football and basketball teams very well. "It's the smaller sports that get cocky about it,'' she said. "I'd put lacrosse in that category, and baseball, too.''

Her understanding of the social and class elements of these situations comes from more than her direct dealings as an advocate. She played lacrosse while growing up, and still plays recreationally. She is a graduate of none other than Columbine High School, in the affluent Denver suburbs, eight years before the 1999 student shootings.


Reports that surfaced Wednesday evening buttress Redmond's observations: Eight of the 41 players on the Virginia men's team, including Huguely, have been charged with alcohol-related offenses, according to court records obtained by the Washington Post. Despite what has been described as a stern alcohol policy instituted by head coach Dom Starsia (with input from his players), which include suspensions and dismissals, Huguely was never disciplined for his 2008 off-campus arrest for public intoxication and resisting arrest.

(In comparison, the Post found that two D.C.-area Division I programs, Georgetown and Maryland, had three players combined who had faced alcohol-related criminal charges.)

Starsia, a former player at Brown, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 2006: "The party-hard, play-hard mentality has been at times a little bit of a badge of honor. There's a certain recklessness about a lacrosse player that as many people find endearing as find it unattractive."

The result of the blend of all those elements, Redmond said, from the sport to the backgrounds to the widespread lack of accountability to the growing permissiveness and lack of education by many women and girls, is far worse than unattractive. It's dangerous, and potentially lethal.

The fact that Huguely has a criminal record dealing with alcohol and violence is worrisome, she said: "If it turns out that he had issues with this in high school, then Virginia is in trouble. You don't have that kind of a rage issue and have that be the first time, so it will be interesting to see if he's had any priors. It won't matter if a report had been made; that's inconsequential.''

Redmond said that well-publicized incidents involving women and college athletes -- such as the one at Virginia -- trigger an increase in calls and emails to her and her website, women telling stories of what they had experienced. They come from all over, she said, so even though the focus naturally falls on the elite class from which the alleged killer and his victim emerged, that should make no one feel safer than anyone else.

"Just because it's an exclusive prep school, that doesn't make it any different,'' Redmond said, "and it doesn't make it any different than, say, a farm in Kansas. This is what's going on with our youth, period.

"If parents don't want to believe that, then they're putting their kids in danger. My hope is that schools start realizing that they'd better get a handle on this. Assaults and rapes are one thing, but murder -- that's something else.''