Colorado regents to examine allegations

DENVER -- University of Colorado regents will meet within 10 days to discuss claims that football recruits were offered sexual favors to enroll, regent Chairman Peter Steinhauer said Friday.

Steinhauer, in a telephone interview, said he hadn't set a date yet but the meeting would focus on allegations that female students were raped at off-campus sex parties held for the recruits.

Gov. Bill Owens demanded on Thursday that the University of Colorado address the allegations.

"Women are not recruiting tools," Owens said after the disclosure of the charges, made by Boulder District Attorney Mary Keenan in testimony for a civil rights lawsuit.

"We've started addressing those issues and we appreciate his thoughts on this," Steinhauer said.

University officials angrily denied the charges.

"I've been an educator for 33 years and much of my teaching and emphasis is about character," coach Gary Barnett said. "Neither myself nor any of my coaches have ever encouraged or condoned sex as part of the recruiting process, period."

Barnett and athletics director Dick Tharp both said they felt offended. Tharp called the claims "fantasy assumptions."

"I categorically deny any suggestion or intimation that we engage in or condone such reprehensible conduct as the use of sex to entice young recruits," he said, leaving a news conference without taking questions.

Owens said he was shocked by the allegations and demanded a public accounting. He called on the university to take steps to reassure female students it will not tolerate a climate of sexual misconduct.

The scandal centers on a 2001 off-campus party at which two women say they were raped by recruits.

A third woman says she was raped by two football players after the party and then threatened not to come forward.

Keenan investigated, but ended up charging four players with providing marijuana and alcohol to minors. She has said she decided against assault charges because the men believed they had been promised sex at the party, making it difficult to prove rape beyond a reasonable doubt.

The lawsuit by one of the alleged victims, former student Lisa Simpson, accuses the football program of fostering an environment in which women routinely suffer sexual harassment. That would violate federal Title IX bans on gender discrimination in educational programs.

Simpson and the other two women have agreed to have their names used publicly.

Keenan, during a deposition in October, said she met with athletic department officials after a Niwot woman reported being raped during a recruiting function in 1997.

She said she met with officials more than four years later, after Simpson's allegation surfaced, and did not believe the university was taking her complaints seriously.

Reached by telephone after the university news conference, Keenan defended her testimony.

"I told the truth to the best of my knowledge," she said. "I stand by what I said at the time. I'm just a witness. A lot of people have been deposed. ... I didn't want to give a deposition. I was under subpoena to talk."

Former CU athlete Monique Gillaspie, who said she was raped by two football players after the 2001 party, praised Owens' stance and urged other women who "have fallen prey to CU football program misconduct" to step forward. She and her parents issued the statement through her lawyer.

In a Sept. 23, 2003, deposition with Simpson's attorney, Barnett said five or six of the men who were at the December 2001 party told him that Simpson handed them condoms before they went into a bedroom with four women.

"From that point on, it became group sex," Barnett said in the deposition.

He also said the players told him they put recruits and themselves in "a very inappropriate situation" involving alcohol and consensual sexual conduct.

Barnett also said he did not know of any recruiting changes that Keenan and other prosecutors had mentioned to university officials following the 1997 allegations.

In another deposition, campus police Officer Timothy Delaria described a separate 2001 party as "some kind of sex party for the recruits." He said recruits were shown a pornographic video and told that easy sex was a fringe benefit of playing at Colorado.

Delaria, discussing a police interview with a football recruit, said the recruit told officers, "They told us, you know, 'This is what you get when you come to Colorado."'

Keenan also said Officer Dan Spicely, who acted as a liaison between the football program and Boulder police, might have told coaches and players to meet before the investigation began.

"It gave (coaches and players) a chance to cover it up," Keenan said.

Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner said there was no known evidence Spicely interfered with the investigation.

If the allegations of sex parties are true, it would not be the first time a big university has engaged in such practices to entice recruits, said Richard Lapchick, director of Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society.

"It's happened over the years in other places, and that does not make it right in any of the places," he said.

The NCAA sets restrictions on entertaining recruits, though there is no definition of "excessive entertainment," spokeswoman Kay Hawes said.

Hawes declined to say whether the NCAA was investigating allegations against the Colorado football program. Should the university be found in violation of recruiting rules, it could face punishment including fines, probation and recruiting restrictions.

An NCAA subcommittee on recruiting plans to review reports of problems in recent years to see if rules should be changed, Hawes said. Those meetings are expected to begin this spring.

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