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Mary Jo White Helps Powerful Football Coach Avoid 'Responsibility' Or 'Real Consequences'

I mean... how is this guy still employed.?

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Mary Jo White

Back in the aughts, with absolutely no fanfare, Urban Meyer was reigning over a criminal operation that would make the Corleone family blush. Aaron Hernandez literally killed people. But Urban recruited Jesus’s hero Tim Tebow so no one seemed to care.

Some of Florida’s arrests were trumped up, but taken as a whole, the entire Florida affair highlighted Meyer’s superhuman ability to look away as people who helped him win games got pinched again and again and faced absolutely no consequences over it. That streak of skating by as everyone around him fell on the wrong side of the law appeared to have finally reached its end recently. After Meyer lied about his knowledge of a longtime assistant’s domestic abuse and everyone saw the messages to prove he’d been covering for his assistant for years, the school hired former SEC chief Mary Jo White to investigate Meyer’s organization and ultimately led to a three-game suspension when almost everyone expected him to be fired outright.

The number three is significant. The team’s first two games are against cupcakes that the Buckeyes will destroy handily, but the third game is a Top 25 matchup with TCU. So it’s not nothing.

But Debevoise’s report is a disgrace. It actually takes the stance that Meyer was informed about the abuse at almost every step of the way and that he not only didn’t do anything, he asked people for help covering it up:

Investigators also found that upon learning about accusations made by Courtney Smith in an Aug. 1 report from college football reporter Brett McMurphy, Meyer and a fellow football staffer discussed how to adjust the settings on Meyer’s phone so that text messages more than a year old would be deleted. When investigators examined Meyer’s phone, they did not find any message more than a year old but said they were unable to tell when Meyer adjusted the settings on his phone to get rid of older messages.

How is that not terminally damning? Over and over again the report says that investigators concluded that Meyer had knowledge and yet just as frequently the report puts forward ridiculous excuses for Meyer. None quite so astounding as White’s response to Meyer’s steadfast public denial that he had any knowledge of his assistant’s behavior when, as White’s report notes, he did.

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“While those denials were plainly not accurate, Coach Meyer did not, in our view, deliberately lie,” lead investigator Mary Jo White said. “… Coach Meyer impressed us with his sincere commitment to the ‘respect for women’ core value that he espouses and tries to instill in his players.”

Truth is not truth, people! He was “confused” the report says. Oh.

And White was apparently impressed by his commitment to the “respect for women”? When her report is also concluding he knew about abuse for years and continued to employ the guy and went so far as to ask about how he could doctor his phones to cover up what he knew? What, exactly, is the impressive part?

Football coaches shouldn’t necessarily be in the serious business of adjudicating wrongdoing but they also can’t be allowed to sit on their hands in the face of overwhelming troubles. White had an opportunity to send a message that these allegations are serious and that no one is above the law. Instead we got… not really much.

A former Ohio State president once quipped, “I’m just hoping that the coach doesn’t dismiss me.” The coach at that point was ultimately fired for multiple violations over tattoos. Apparently even with Debevoise & Plimpton on the case “beating your wife” is still not as important as “free tattoos” in this country.

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(The full publicly released summary is available on the next page…)

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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