Brenda Tracy praises Jim Harbaugh for not weaponizing Mel Tucker's suspension 'for the rivalry'

As a scandal engulfing his program’s biggest in-state rival remains the biggest story in college football, Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh was asked Monday about Michigan State’s suspension of football coach Mel Tucker amid allegations of sexual harassment.

Harbaugh declined to delve into the situation, claiming he didn’t “know a thing about it,” before praising the work of Brenda Tracy, the anti-sexual violence advocate whose claims of inappropriate behavior by Tucker launched a Title IX investigation at Michigan State.

His comments didn’t go unnoticed by Tracy.

In a tweet Monday, Tracy wrote that she appreciated Harbaugh’s approach when discussing the matter.

“This situation should not be weaponized for the rivalry,” she wrote.

Brenda Tracy's previous work with Jim Harbaugh and Michigan football

Through her non-profit organization Set The Expectation, which is dedicated to ending sexual violence through prevention work with men and “engagement with agencies serving survivors and their families,” Tracy has held events with dozens of college football programs over the past several years.

There were few, if any, programs that sought her advocacy work as much as Michigan.

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She first visited Michigan in 2018 to speak with Wolverines players and coaches about her experience as a sexual assault survivor. Tracy was raped by four football players in Corvallis, Oregon, in 1998, when she was 24.

Two weeks after her speech, she was invited by Harbaugh to be an honorary captain for Michigan’s game against Western Michigan that season.

In 2019, Tracy returned to Ann Arbor to speak with new players and coaching staff. At the time, Tracy said Harbaugh was the first coach to commit to bring her in every year to work with incoming players and staff.

“I talk a lot about culture, how we can create safer cultures and how big programs can influence American culture for good or bad,” Tracy said to the website Maize n Brew in 2019. “And coach Harbaugh has obviously been listening.”

Tracy has not visited Michigan since 2019.

The allegations against Mel Tucker

Like Michigan, MSU invited Tracy to meet with its football players. She spoke to the team twice and was brought back a third time to be an honorary captain at the Spartans’ spring game.

Tracy and Tucker developed a close professional relationship that eventually morphed into something else. According to a complaint Tracy filed with Michigan State’s Title IX office in December 2022, Tucker made sexual comments about her and masturbated without her consent as the two spoke on the phone in April 2022.

Among other claims, Tracy alleges that Tucker asked her around November 2021 whether she would date him if he weren’t a married football coach (Tucker has been married for more than 20 years, but said in a statement Monday that he and his wife had been estranged “for a long time”). Tracy said she would not. Additionally, she alleged Tucker called her via FaceTime while shirtless on his bed. In another call, he asked her to meet him alone, without her assistant, after the 2022 spring game and suggested he enter her hotel through a back door so he wouldn’t be noticed.

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In a statement released Monday through his lawyer, Jennifer Z. Belveal, Tucker said Tracy’s allegations are “completely false” and “devoid of any semblance of fairness for any matter of this importance.”

Tracy released a statement of her own in response, stating that Tucker’s defense is “more of the same DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender), deflection, victim blaming and lies that I’ve been dealing with now for months.”

“Coach Tucker has been delaying and trying to stop the investigative process since the beginning,” Tracy said in the statement. “He can’t afford to go to a hearing that determines credibility of the participating parties. I believe this statement is his way of getting out of participating in the hearing.”

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Brenda Tracy praises Jim Harbaugh's comments on Mel Tucker's suspension