Jurors in Dolores Lozano’s federal Title IX case against Baylor University heard Thursday from the ex-football player she said assaulted her, as well as ex-Baylor athletic officials she said stood in the way of justice: Art Briles and Ian McCaw.
Former Baylor running back Devin Chafin testified in a video deposition that he did not assault Lozano in spring 2014, an accusation at the center of the trial.
McCaw and Briles, whom Lozano accuses of failing to intervene in the case, told their stories and defended their actions and their athletic program.
Briles recalled how the Baylor Board of Regents fired him as head football coach after the briefing to regents from Pepper Hamilton LLP on the university’s failure to respond to female Baylor students’ reports of abuse. McCaw recounted how he resigned from his role as athletic director after his disappointment with the board in scapegoating Briles.
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Lozano earlier this week told jurors that Chafin assaulted her three times in March and April 2014.
Lozano is suing Baylor under Title IX seeking unspecified damages for a leadership climate of deliberate indifference, which she claims made assaults against women students more likely.
U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman dismissed most of her original claims in a 2016 suit, but she refiled an amended complaint in 2018 under Title IX and added negligence complaints against Briles and McCaw, saying they should have prevented the second and third assaults.
On the witness stand Thursday, McCaw said the first time he heard about an altercation between Lozano and Chafin was in April 2014. He said Nancy Post, an assistant athletic director, told him that Lozano had reported an incident, sought medical treatment and counseling and would file a police report with Waco police. Post had previously testified that meeting was April 14, 2014.
Under questioning from the plantiff’s attorneys, McCaw said university had hired Philadelphia law firm Pepper Hamilton LLP to investigate mistreatment of female Baylor students through the lens of five cases and make recommendations on how Baylor could improve Title IX compliance, particularly regarding dating violence and sexual assault.
He said that in the second to the last week of May 2016, Pepper Hamilton staffers spent a day and a half in Waco presenting their findings and recommendations to the regents. McCaw recalled a conversation with Richard Willis, who was regent chair from 2012 to 2016.
“After that, Richard Willis told me Art Briles would take the fall,” McCaw said. He elaborated that “Baylor University had a wide-ranging problem with interpersonal violence and sexual assault, and the regents wanted to blame it all on one program, on one man, Art Briles.”
McCaw said the university’s Title IX coordinator had found more than 400 possible Title IX complaints in the few years prior to the Pepper Hamilton briefing. Those included cases of interpersonal violence, sexual discrimination and sexual assault, in a variety of contexts – some at home, some on campus, some with unknown perpetrators.
McCaw said he couldn’t stand by the regents’ choice to blame it all on Briles. In late May 2016, McCaw resigned his executive role with Baylor and became athletic director at Liberty University in Virginia that fall.
Briles told the jury he hadn’t been privy to the details of the Pepper Hamilton presentation to the regents but he was aware of it.
“I didn’t know anything about the first presentation,” Briles told the jury. “After that meeting I had a couple of the board members call me and say, ‘Coach, they’ve decided to terminate you.’”
Regents Mark Hurd, Neal Jeffrey and Jay Allison had called him after the meeting, Briles said.
Briles didn’t remember Hurd’s phone call “very vividly,” he said.
“Jay Allison told me, ‘I let you down coach, they’re going to fire you.’ He had (another) meeting and wasn’t at the vote in Houston, when they took the vote,” Briles said. “They’re just going to fire me and not tell me why?”
Briles said Allison told him he would call Willis and set up a meeting for him and McCaw. The night before the meeting that Briles went to with McCaw, Briles said Jeffrey called him.
“Jeffrey played football for Baylor in the ‘80s,” Briles said. “He’s at Prestonwood Church up in Dallas now. He told me, ‘I love you, coach,’ and said he would be there for me to support me.
“We met on a Tuesday. It wasn’t all of the board. It was like 7 or 8 and there were Baylor administrators in the room, too. It was strange,” Briles said.
There was a table in the center with a speaker phone on it with the other board members on a conference call, the former coach said.]
“There really wasn’t a lot of dialogue,” Briles said. “It wasn’t pleasant from my point of view. I got emotional and about four of the board members came over and put hands on me and started praying. I looked over at Neal Jeffrey. He said not a word, not a word the whole time.”
Briles said he had given his loyalty to the regents and they had not returned it.
Thursday’s testimony also delved into the details of the original conflict between Chafin and Lozano.
In a video deposition shown Wednesday and Thursday, Chafin gave his account of the March 6, 2014 incident in his apartment, in which she claimed he choked her into unconsciousness. He said Lozano came over to talk about the abortion she had recently gotten.
“What actually happened the day she told me about the abortion, we cried and got very emotional and then she blamed me,” he said. “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. I took hold of her arms to stop her from hitting me. That’s it.”
Plaintiff attorney Sheila Haddock appears in the video, showing Chafin a series of photographs depicting the injuries he allegedly caused Lozano.
Chafin said he didn’t cause any injuries to Lozano.
Haddock asked which photo Lozano had showed him of her injuries. Chafin picked out a photo that Lozano had showed him.
“I don’t know how she got those injuries. I didn’t cause those injuries,” Chafin said.
Chafin was asked about the second incident on April 7, 2014, Scruffy Murphy’s, a campus-area bar, where she claimed he shoved her arm into a car door. Chafin denied that allegation.
He also denied Lozano’s allegation of a third altercation in late April in the kitchen of his apartment. Lozano had said he shoved her and she ended up on the kitchen floor.