for having sex in their dormitory. The President of Notre
Dame, Theodore Hesburgh, a noted liberal and scholar, a
Catholic priest, insisted that no rape took place and said that
the university would produce, if necessary, “dozens of eyewitnesses. ” I quote Anson:
Hesburgh’s conclusions are based on an hour-long personal
interview with the six football players, along with an investigation conducted by his Dean of Students, John Macheca, a. . .
former university public relations man. . . Macheca himself will
say nothing about his investigation. . . Various campus sources
close to the case say that, throughout his investigation, no university official spoke either to the girl [j/c] or her parents. Hesburgh himself professes neither to know or to care. He says testily, “It’s irrelevant.. . . I didn’t need to talk to the girl. I talked to the boys. ”36
According to Anson, had Dr. Hesburgh talked to “the girl” he
would have heard this story: after work late on July 3, she
went to Notre Dame to see the football player she had been
dating; they made love twice on his dormitory bunk; he left
the room; she was alone and undressed, wrapped in a sheet;
another football player entered the room; she had a history of
hostility and confrontation with this second football player
(he had made a friend of hers pregnant, he had refused to pay
for an abortion, she had confronted him on this, finally he did
pay part of the money); this second football player and the
woman began to quarrel and he threatened that, unless she
submit to him sexually, he would throw her out the third-story
window; then he raped her; four other football players also
raped her; during the gang rape, several other football players
were in and out of the room; when the woman finally was able
to leave the dormitory she drove immediately to a hospital.
Both the police investigator on the case and a source in the
prosecutor’s office believe the victim’s story— that there was a
gang rape perpetrated on her by the six Notre Dame football
players.
All of the male university authorities who investigated the
alleged gang rape determined that the victim was a slut. This
they did, all of them, by interviewing the accused rapists. In
fact, the prosecutor’s character investigation indicated that the
woman was a fine person. The coach of the Notre Dame football team placed responsibility for the alleged gang rape on the worsening morals of women who watch soap operas.
Hesburgh, moral exemplar that he is, concluded: “I didn’t
need to talk to the girl. I talked to the boys. ” The Dean of
Students, John Macheca, expelled the students as a result of
his secret investigation. Hesburgh overruled the expulsion out
of what he called “compassion”— he reduced the expulsion to
one year’s suspension. The rape victim now attends a university in the Midwest. Her life, according to Anson, has been threatened.
The fact is, as these two stories demonstrate conclusively,
that any woman can be raped by any group of men. Her word
will not be credible against their collective testimony. A
