Ex-Kansas rower says she was raped by KU football player

The suit was filed in Kansas by the parents of Daisy Tackett, who enrolled at KU as a freshman in the fall of 2014. In November of that year, the suit says, she was raped in a university dorm that housed many members of the football team and other athletes.

Generally, The Dallas Morning News does not identify rape victims by name, but in an extensive interview last month, Tackett asked that her name be used. Her parents’ suit, filed as a class action, said the university, “in its attempts to solicit students to enroll,” has repeatedly lied by claiming that its residence halls are safe. As a result, it suggested, countless students have fallen victim to sexual predators.

“What happened to our daughter need not have happened to any other student,” Amanda Tackett, Daisy’s mother, said in an interview.

“I told two people that day and then kind of dropped it,” Tackett said. “I knew that no one was going to believe it.”

She continued to see her assailant on campus, she said. He would sometimes yell at her, once publicly calling her “that bitch.” She said she started experiencing panic attacks. Daisy finally came forward to KU’s Office of Institutional Opportunity & Access, which is charged with overseeing compliance with state and federal laws and university policies on discrimination, sexual violence and other subjects.

She made that decision, she said, after learning that the same football player tried to assault a rowing teammate this past fall. That was the first time she told her parents about the rape.

“At first I was reluctant,” she said. “Then I realized if he’s assaulted two people, he has assaulted more or will assault more if we don’t do anything about it.”

After coming forward, she said, she felt ostracized. She was left behind when the rowing team made a training trip to Florida. The IOA seemed slow to provide promised escorts to class or campus parking passes, she said.

“They made it so difficult to access the resources they had,” she said. “For the last three weeks of semester, I locked myself in my room. I would leave just to practice and go to class.”

In a written statement issued Friday, the university denied that it lied to anyone about the security of its campus and dorms. It boasted of KU’s “ongoing efforts to ensure students are safe and aware of their surroundings” and of the school’s “robust support services” for victims of sexual violence.

“The suggestion that our residence halls are unsafe or that we misrepresent campus safety in our student recruitment is baseless,” the statement said.