I am not even going to pretend that I knew who Ben Roethlisberger was when I was asked to write an article about celebrity apologists. Apparently, he is the quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and pretty darn good at it.
He has also been accused of sexual assault twice since 2009, but you would never know it by looking at his stats.
In all seriousness, the fact that Ben Roethlisberger has remained such a star on the Steelers roster since the accusations, neither of which were brought to trial, speaks to the celebrity exceptionalism inherent in American culture.
After the second accuser came forward in 2010, NPR’s Frank DeFord presented a story asking why star athletes are “expected to be sweeter than the average angel.”
This makes me wonder whether the average angel would approve of sexual assault, in DeFord’s universe.
It may not be the majority, but the fact that there is anyone defending a person accused of rape shows just how far our justice system still needs to go. I don’t doubt that you’ve heard someone, somewhere, say that the women accusing Ben Roethlisberger or Kobe Bryant or other sports stars of sexual assault are “gold-diggers” or “crazy groupies.”
There is innocent until proven guilty, and there is victim-blaming. You decide what the phrases above constitute.
In 2009, an executive casino manager named Andrea McNulty filed charges against Roethlisberger. According to an article published on the ESPN website, McNulty’s charges claimed that he had cornered her in a Lake Tahoe hotel room in 2008, then raped her. Roethlisberger had been in town for a celebrity golf tournament, and had reportedly asked McNulty, who worked at the hotel in which he was staying, to fix the television in his room when the rape occurred.
The National Football League’s website says that the suit sought $440,000 in damages from Roethlisberger, and also claimed that the owners of the casino where McNulty worked tried to cover up the assault. Her managers reportedly told her that “most girls would feel lucky to get to have sex with someone like Ben Roethlisberger.”
The Associated Press writes that after the alleged assault, McNulty sought counseling for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder,and ended up hospitalized multiple times. Most of the money she sued for was to cover her medical expenses. If she was lying about the assault, that seems like quite a lot of trouble to go through in order to break even.
Late last month, the two sides reached a settlement for an undisclosed amount, ending the lawsuit.
Another woman accused Roethlisberger of sexual assault in March 2010. Nate Davis of USA Today writes that the 20-year-old college student alleged that Roethlisberger invited her group of friends to the V.I.P. area of a nightclub in Milledgeville, Ga., where he encouraged them to take shots. The accuser said that Roethlisberger cornered her in a bathroom, where he raped her.
The District Attorney handling the case held a press conference in April 2010 with further details. The DA said that the accuser’s friends brought her to a hospital, where a rape kit was collected. Doctors found some minor physical trauma, but no semen was recovered. Roethlisberger claimed that the accuser had slipped and hit her head after they had contact that was “not consummated.”
A Milledgeville police sergeant who had been the first officer to respond to the scene, and who earlier in the night had been photographed with Roethlisberger, later resigned after a comment he made at the scene came to light. The sergeant admitted to saying “this b**** is drunk” in reference to the accuser on the night of the alleged rape.
The woman, who has remained unidentified, decided not to pursue criminal charges. In a letter to the district attorney, she claimed that the media attention from a criminal trial would be too “intrusive.” She emphasized that she was not recanting her claims.
At the press conference, the DA announced that he did not believe that he could prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, so criminal charges would not be pursued against Roethlisberger.
In response to the most recent accusations, the NFL suspended Roethlisberger without pay for the first six games of the 2010 season. The suspension was soon reduced to four games.
One might say that Roethlisberger, regardless of his innocence or guilt, has suffered and paid his dues to his accusers. The amount for which his alleged victim settled remains unreleased, but it’s certain that Roethlisberger was not bankrupted by these accusations. In 2010, the year Roethlisberger missed four games due to the suspension, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette named his salary as $8.05 million. So yes, the four-game suspension caused him to lose just over $3 million, or about $500,000 per game.
I think he survived with the other $5 million just fine. (And as a side note, let’s emphasize that the $440,000 that Andrea McNulty sought in damages in her suit is less than Roethlisberger makes for one football game.)
Can we imagine what it would cost for the average person to settle cases such as these? Would the average person even be allowed to settle, or have enough money to reach an acceptable settlement?
Let’s remember that according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), 60 percent of rapes/sexual assaults are not reported to police. Martha Bellisle of the Rena Gazette-Journal stated that Andrea McNulty waited months to report what had occurred with Roethlisberger, meanwhile spending time and hundreds of thousands of dollars in hospitals, for fear of losing her job.
Bellisle also claimed that McNulty feared that her reputation would be dragged through the mud, every decision she had ever made scrutinized for a way to place the blame on her. Sexual assault prosecution is not pretty for the accusers, either.
Perhaps settlements should not be allowed without a conviction, but our legal system is designed so that lawyers on both sides of a case heavily pressure the defendant to accept plea deals.
Assault or not, Roethlisberger was still drinking with an underage college student. And no, the fact that she was drunk and underage does not put her at fault.
Some news sources that reported on the accusations also mentioned Roethlisberger’s charities in the same article, as if they diminish or even negate the fact that he may have sexually assaulted two women. We can see this twisted logic in the case of the late Penn State coach Joe Paterno.
When allegations of sexual abuse of young boys by assistant coach Jerry Sandusky recently came to light, Paterno was accused of failing to report Sandusky’s acts to police. Paterno was fired by the university’s board of trustees on Nov. 9, 2011.
That night, the Pittsburg Post-Gazette reported 10,000 Penn State students rioting in front of the administration building.
Many students talked to the Post-Gazette about the good things that Paterno had done during his years at Penn State, including raising the academic performance of his athletes and donating millions of dollars toward various departments and colleges.
Even though Paterno never participated in the abuse, he implicitly allowed it to go on, reporting it only to the Penn State administration and never following up when nothing was done. He told Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post that he had never heard of “rape and a man,” presumably meaning that he did not at the time believe that a male could be raped. This is quite sad.
Paterno may have been old-fashioned, but there is no excuse for there not being general public knowledge that men can be raped. According to RAINN, one in 33 American men have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. An even larger percentage of boys between grades 5-9 said they had been sexually abused, and that does not even include unreported assaults.
Paterno admitted to being unsure how to handle the situation. He told Jenkins that he was “afraid to do something that might jeopardize what the university procedure was.” He backed away, hoping that others with “more expertise” would take over the investigation.
Unfortunately, this was not the case.
Like Andrea McNulty, who claimed to be afraid of being fired if she came forward with allegations against Ben Roethlisberger, Paterno should not have had to fear for his job or the university’s reputation simply for reporting alleged sexual abuse. But if the Penn State administration was determined to sweep it under the rug, Paterno should have gone to the police.
Rape and other crimes are never excusable. They are never ameliorated by kind acts or charity, and covering them up, through ignorance or otherwise, is still a crime.
Roethlisberger is still playing football. Joe Paterno still had many fans, as evidenced by the thousands of mourners that attended his funeral. And Kobe Bryant, after also settling a rape case out of court, won the All-Star MVP Award three times.
Would a doctor be so easily let back into his practice had he been accused of rape? Would a professor be allowed to teach again?
The Penn State scandal does not negate the charitable acts of Joe Paterno; but neither do his charitable acts negate looking the other way when an assistant coach touched young boys inappropriately.
The era of the sports idol is over. Americans want to hold on to this ancient feeling of hero-worship that has practically become moot in today’s information-saturated world.
We can’t hide the misdeeds of celebrities any more than we can tear our eyes away from Real Housewives or The Jersey Shore. And celebrities—despite how skilled they are at what they do or how much money they have given to charities—should not feel exempt from the laws of morality that the rest of the world holds to.
If, in this country’s justice system, people are innocent until proven guilty (as Ben Roethlisberger is), the same policy should be applied to accusers. These women should not immediately be dismissed as gold-digging crazies, just as Roethlisberger should not be immediately called a rapist.
Roethlisberger and Paterno never faced juries over their alleged crimes, though Sandusky has been arrested and charged with 40 counts of sexual abuse. He posted bail and awaits trial under house arrest.
As I previously mentioned, settlements and plea bargains have become commonplace in our courts today. Over-reliance on plea deals has skewed the justice of our justice system, and allows people like Ben Roethlisberger to essentially reach a “no contest” without ever being tried.
Roethlisberger may have lost a few fans due to the accusations, but not enough to demand his retirement from professional football. He got married in 2011, so the charges obviously have not disrupted his personal life too greatly.
In short, despite perhaps a slightly tarnished reputation, Roethlisberger will be remembered as leading the Steelers to three Super Bowls, not for being accused but never convicted of sexual assault.
The people affected by such cases, however, are not so lucky.
Kelsey Allagood can be reached at kallagood@spartans.ut.edu.