Baylor University’s former Title IX coordinator initially agreed to a settlement offer with Baylor, but then walked away when the school asked her to sign a confidentiality agreement and wouldn’t pay her a request $2 million to do so, according to a report by KWTX.
The report states the school offered Patty Crawford $1.5 million in settlement and an additional $50,000 if she would sign a confidentiality agreement. Crawford refused to sign the agreement unless she received $2 million; the school rejected it. Consequently, Crawford told Baylor she would speak to the national media about her time at the university, her dealings with the Baylor Board of Regents and their handling of sexual assault allegations.
Crawford told KWTX when reached by phone on Tuesday that she was on her way to New York to speak with a network news show.
In Crawford’s original complaint she states Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Reagan Ramsower reacted hostile to her for “doing her job too well,” and ultimately took away her ability to handle Title IX complaints, a source told KWTX.
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Last month KWTX obtained a secretly recorded audio tape of a meeting between Crawford and members of the athletic staff in late July in which Crawford expressed frustration with the administration.
She told the group she had begun to refuse to share names of those involved in Title IX investigations with Baylor administrators, fearful that the officials might take action before those involved in the investigations receive due process.
“That’s what we talked about this week, I said this has to be very clear that at this point, no one is going to know, other than our office, who these people are, what their names are, where this is going”, Crawford says.
“Because there have been occasions where I’ve been called on my cellphone on a Sunday morning by a board member wanting names.”
Crawford also told the group she felt like the football team had been unfairly targeted, noting just two football players have been convicted of sexual assault during Briles’ tenure at Baylor.
“A very small percentage of our cases have anything to do with athletics”, Crawford said in the meeting, of which KWTX obtained a recording.
“And I’ve made that very clear to our leadership. This is not an athletics issue in the sense of violence and all these things, this is a human issue.”
Crawford became Baylor’s Title IX coordinator in November 2014 after the program started to come under fire for its handling of sexual abuse complaints.
The football program came under intense scrutiny after Pepper Hamilton, a law firm the school hired to do an internal investigation into the handling of sexual assault complaints, found “a fundamental failure by Baylor to implement Title IX,” which included a “lack of strong institutional management” and “specific failings within both the football program and athletics department leadership, including a failure to identify and respond to a pattern of sexual violence by a football player, to take action in response to reports of a sexual assault by multiple football players, and to take action in response to a report of dating violence.”
Baylor coach Art Briles was fired, and athletic director Ian McCaw and university president Ken Starr both resigned in the wake of the report.
For more Baylor news, visit SicEmSports.com.
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Graham Watson is the editor of Dr. Saturday on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email her at dr.saturday@ymail.com or follow her on Twitter! Follow @YahooDrSaturday
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