of prison rape (probably because we believe it is a justified punishment or because we simply do not care about what happens to the population of people behind bars), we continue to perpetuate the very rape culture we say we want to end.
In college football, many (though not all) of the sexual assault cases involving college players fall outside of the “stranger danger” rape scenario that leads to misidentification of the perpetrator and so to false convictions. Most of the time, the woman knows the man she is reporting. Additionally, many of these cases involve gang rapes by multiple players (roughly 40 percent), a scenario that does not lend itself to overarching problems with eyewitnesses misidentifying perpetrators. This does not mean that race and racist beliefs about black men’s criminality have no place in these cases, only that most of these cases are more complicated than our nuance-averse narratives allow.
There is no way to determine with 100 percent certainty that the person reporting the crime is telling the truth. Yet the statistical odds are very high that the person reporting in these cases is not lying. Still, we have to also hold in our minds that race does play a role, clearly, in false rape convictions.
One other area where race most definitely has an impact is our appetite for consuming crime reportage when the person accused, charged, or convicted is a black athlete. We find it easy to talk about crime, especially crime as a problem within our larger society, when we have a black person in the role of perpetrator.
IV.
Willie Meggs, the prosecutor who took Travis Johnson to court, was the same state attorney in charge of Jameis Winston’s case in 2013. In the end, Meggs chose not to press charges against Winston. What he did, though, was take the opportunity to make the announcement of not charging Winston into a spectacle. He laughed multiple times during the press conference. At one point, Meggs was on screen standing behind a podium, and a female reporter off camera asked him, “Because there was more than one DNA evidence in the rape kit, can you conclude that there was perhaps sex with more than one male?” Meggs paused and then replied, “That would be a logical conclusion.” The man standing just behind him on camera, former Florida state senator Alfred Lawson, laughed in response, as did other people in the room. That was toward the beginning of the strangely lighthearted press conference about a high-profile sexual assault case. Meggs repeatedly cracked jokes with the media. When asked if the deadline for Heisman voting influenced how quickly or when Meggs determined that he would not press charges, he jokingly asked when the voting ended and then smirked while saying it did not affect his timeline. Then Meggs and Lawson kidded about whether Lawson had called him a “politician,” leading Meggs to grin widely for the camera, seemingly pleased with his own humor.
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