When Peyton Manning was in college, he allegedly sexually harassed a trainer at the University of Tennessee. He was having some kind of issue with his foot. She was doing her job and trying to fix it and that's when she claims he stuck his bare butt, perineum, and testicles on her face. The trainer agreed to a settlement with UT and under the terms of a separate settlement between Manning and her, he's not supposed to attempt to rewrite history to cast himself as a better guy than he was, but he's had to go back to court. Robert Silverman over at The Daily Beast has a good and engaging read that rehashes all that old stuff.
It's not a widely known thing, but it's not a secret. Certainly a lot of legislators were in office when UT had to make their big settlement with Manning's alleged victim. They know what happened.
Yesterday, legislators as varied as Speaker Harwell and House Minority Leader, Craig Fitzhugh, tweeted out congratulations to Manning on his Super Bowl win.
I don't think that Manning should be pilloried, but there's something disconcerting about a bunch of people who spent the previous week trying to assure everyone how they're going to better handle sexual harassment spending Sunday night congratulating Peyton Manning.
A lot of sexual harassers are nice and charming and do good work. We're not always going to be so lucky as to have it allegedly be someone like Jeremy Durham who's personal behavior has burned a lot of bridges. If a sexual harassment policy is going to be any good, the people writing it and enforcing it can't overlook problem behavior from awesome people they like. That's lesson one.
Lesson two lies in the bullshit Manning spewed in his book, Manning: A Father, His Sons, and a Football Legacy (which was the basis for his victim's defamation suit which Manning settled out of court), in which he puts forth his version of what happened:
I admit that even in the context of "modern" life, what I did to offend this trainer was inappropriate. Not exactly a criminal offense, but out of line. I certainly didn't dislike her. I thought she had a vulgar mouth, but I always tried to be nice. …ÂThen one day I was in the training room and a track athlete I know made some off-color remark that I felt deserved a colorful ... response. I turned my back in the athlete's direction and dropped the seat of my pants. …
But I did it thinking the trainer wasn't where she would see. … Even when she did, it seemed like something she'd have laughed at, considering the environment, or shrugged off as harmless. Crude, maybe, but harmless.Â
What's interesting here is that Manning's explanation for what happened relies on the belief that sexualized hazing of athletes is normal. If the trainer had been one of the guys, his actions would have been "crude, maybe, but harmless."
I keep hearing people asking how the Ooltewah basketball incident could have happened. Not just the sexual assault that happened during a hazing incident, but how the coaches didn't notice something terrible was happening.
But here's what we learn from Manning. Sexualized hazing is normal. Some men his age—roughly the age of the coaches involved—don't see anything wrong with it. That makes it pretty easy for sexualized hazing to escalate into sexual harassment or sexual assault. Many men in positions of authority don't recognize the first step as being the first step to something worse.
That's a huge shame, because harassment and assault aren't harmless and men are left with lasting scars when they're the brunt of this kind of behavior.
A lot of bad, damaging behavior gets overlooked in our society because we otherwise like the people doing it. I remain sympathetic to Speaker Harwell's plight because it's really hard to craft rules people you like aren't going to like. It's far easier to overlook good people's transgressions.
But we shouldn't.
