6-Feb-2012 - The Public Editor: The Quarterback’s Tangled Saga

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Last fall, Patrick J. Witt, Yale’s star quarterback, was featured extensively in news reports about a scheduling conflict that was forcing him to choose between playing his final college game, at home against Harvard, and attending his interview as a Rhodes finalist on the same day in Georgia. Ultimately, he played. Now, two months after all the drama, The Times’s article set out to draw back the curtain and show that Mr. Witt’s “apparent choice of team fealty over individual honor” was not his choice to make and that he was “no longer a contender for the Rhodes” when his announcement was made on Nov. NFL jerseys china 13. Why not? Because several days before the announcement, The Times reported, the Rhodes Trust learned that a fellow student had accused Mr. Witt of sexual assault. The Times said the Rhodes Trust informed Yale and Mr. Witt that his candidacy was suspended unless the university re-endorsed it. The Times’s article, which appeared in a full-page spread inside the Sports section on Jan. 27, had no named sources. The Times did not speak with Mr. Witt — who did not return its phone calls, Facebook messages and e-mails — or the female student who was involved. Neither Yale nor the Rhodes Trust was willing to address the matter for the record. Readers noticed. For some, The Times’s decision to use the sexual assault charge was way out of bounds, especially given the nature of the sourcing and the documentation. Dean Baquet, a managing editor, said the allegation had to be reported because it was the reason that Mr. Witt’s opportunity to compete for a Rhodes scholarship had been compromised. But The Times viewed the sexual assault aspect to be secondary. “The story was not about the sexual misconduct charge,” he said. “The story really was about this big feel-good sports story that upon closer examination wasn’t quite that way.” He added: “We made a tremendous effort to try to get him to talk, to try to get the NFL jerseys supply woman to talk. But we weren’t investigating the truth or not-truth of the sexual misconduct allegation. We were investigating the feel-good story.” Suzanne F. Williams, a reader from Arlington, Va., didn’t see it that way. She e-mailed to say she thought the article, by Richard Pérez-Peña, was “incomplete and shabby” because it lacked Mr. Witt’s side and relied only on unnamed sources. She said The Times’s primary story line, about the Rhodes choice, was eclipsed by the sexual assault charge. “No matter what Mr. Pérez-Peña and the editor purport to be the actual subject of this story, what readers take away is that Mr. Witt is guilty of sexual assault,” she wrote. “Nothing else matters.” Under Yale’s procedures for handling accusations of sexual harassment and assault, students may choose to file either a formal or an informal complaint, regardless of the severity of the allegation. In this case, the informal route was chosen. According to Yale’s Web site, the informal procedure involves “limited or no investigation” and seeks outcomes including “a warning conversation with the respondent, a no-contact agreement, a recommendation for counseling, a change in housing, etc.” Mr. Witt’s agent, Mark Magazu of Atlas Strategies, told me the case involved a woman with whom Mr. Witt had an on-again, off-again relationship that ended two months before the complaint was filed, and that the university had mediated a confidential resolution. He gave me an Oct. 31 e-mail that a Yale official sent to Mr. Witt noting that a “non-disciplinary resolution is being sought.” Mr. Magazu called the Times article “character assassination” and sharply criticized the paper NFL jerseys cheap for publishing anonymous accusations without having direct contact with Mr. Witt or the woman. There is also a second major point of contention concerning the article, relating to what The Times considered the primary element: whether Mr. Witt was still a viable candidate for a Rhodes scholarship when he decided to play against Harvard.

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