Mel Tucker, Michigan State University coach, is accused of sexual harassment by Brenda Tracy. Tracy works with sports programs talking to athletes about sexual violence and is a rape survivor. These details come from a Sports Illustrated report that quoted a USAToday story
Tracy said Tucker talked dirty and masturbated during a telephone call in April, 2022, leaving her in trauma. I don’t know when she reported the call.
Tucker said Tracy herself “set the tone” for the call with a provocative picture and suggesting what she might look like naked. He said she did not complain during the 36-minute call, nor did she hang up.
Tucker is out of his job, and $95 million contract, and faces a hearing in October.
Clearly I cannot fathom Tracy’s trauma and attempt to recover from rape, and don’t want to minimize her suffering.
At the bottom of all this in my mind, though, is she did not hang up.
Can anybody explain how her participation in a 36-minute call, even if she only listened, proceeds to Tucker’s culpability in traumatizing her for a half hour.
You didn’t include a link to any of the stories. Here’s one:
According to that, the phone call had been going on for some time before it became clearly sexual; so we’re not talking about 36 minutes, but only about “several” minutes at the end of the call. Also according to that story, Tracy says that when she realized he was masturbating she froze, and didn’t think to hang up.
That’s quite a possible reaction. Many people are too freaked out at the moment to react logically.
(Another possible reason somebody might not hang up could be that they were recording or trying to record the call, in order to be able to provide evidence.)
Women are conditioned to not make a fuss or create an uncomfortable situation. Look at Jenni Hermoso’s reaction to Rubiales’ unwanted assault, where in the moment she just froze. Brenda Tracy has the additional factor of a prior rape, so freezing isn’t a bizarre reaction.
Tracy was being paid to speak to MSU athletes, including the football team, which in effect makes Tucker her employer and creates a power imbalance. Maybe she was intimidated by him, maybe she worried about future speaking engagements if she pissed off a powerful coach.
Some states have laws against teachers having sex with students, even 18yo ones & against correction officers having sex with adult inmates; due to the power imbalance, the state assumes they are never consensual acts.
Whether she reported to him directly or he was just a powerful person in the organization, even if she didn’t freeze, saying no could potentially have ramifications on her continued employment / job responsibilities & could have been the poor (as in lesser-of-two-evils) choice she had to make.
In this case Tracy was more of a consultant and Michigan State was not her only client it would seem. I don’t know if that makes things different.
A lawyer could also claim that Tracy is a professional victim and bringing forward this sort of case actually helps her career.
The case is interesting, I guess. Very 2023 I suppose. In other times it would be easy to question why Tracy, an unmarried woman, is having so many non-work related conversations with Tucker, a married man. Clearly they were friends at least. Plus apparently both of them deleted their entire texting history.
Tucker will lose his job and there will be an undisclosed settlement all around. That much I can be sure of.
Yes, in other times that sort of crap was one reason why this sort of crap so often went unreported. Any woman who dared talk to a man about anything could be, and often was, accused of inviting sex.
As a divorced person whose spouse left me for “a friend”, in the terms of a marriage I am not okay with such friendships. Others disagree. My experience is that hetero male friends of hetero women want to sleep with them. Nearly always. That is what I have seen out of life. I doubt Tucker’s wife knew about this friendship and she shouldn’t have approved of it, or I wouldn’t have in her place anyway.
The question on the other side is are women oblivious to most hetero male friends wanting to sleep with them. Some claim to be. I’m not a woman so I don’t know.
My experience has been entirely different. And I would most certainly not take up any relationship with anyone who felt themself entitled to tell me who I was allowed to talk to, or to be friends with.
You certainly don’t. I’ve been turned down, by single male friends. (No, not by everybody, so it’s not that there’s something specifically repulsive about me.) Many women have had that experience.
Speaking as a guy, that hasn’t been my experience. I’ve had a number of female friends (attached and unattached) that I had no interest in sleeping with. And no I don’t think my libido is unusually low. Just that there’s a time and a place.
Hot take, if the only reason that you or the person you’re married to aren’t cheating on each other is because you don’t have the opportunity to because neither of you allows the other to be friends with people of the opposite gender - you probably don’t belong together anyways.
Hot take, it’s unlikely that one romantic interest will meet every single one of our needs for an entire lifetime. AKA There’s always someone else. Maintaining hot interest for a lifetime doesn’t work for very many couples.
I don’t think it’s reasonable for women to eschew male friends just because some random dude is unable to keep a mutually beneficial sexual relationship with his wife.
Sure, and if a given couple is so disenchanted with each other that the only way they can stop their partner from cheating is by preventing them from ever being alone with a member of the opposite gender, that’s no longer a relationship based on love - it’s a hostage situation - and I stand by what I said before:
That’s true about everything from “I don’t think I’ll get hit by cars if I cross the street here” to “I don’t think this bowl of soup is full of cyanide” to “I don’t think I’ll get hit by a meteorite if I walk outside.” It’s not especially useful advice.