Daily Stormer The Most Censored Publication in History
Oregon Live
November 17, 2014
Her name is Brenda Tracy. We met downtown over coffee on a weekday morning a couple months ago. And I was struck that nobody in the passing parade of briefcases, lattes and workday stares appeared to notice the 40-year-old as she adjusted her ponytail, wiped the tears and unloaded a story that she’s carried like a bag of bricks for years.
“I’d decided I was going to kill myself,” she said.
She emailed me a few days earlier, up late one night, unable to sleep. In a chilling account, she detailed how she reported to police that she was sexually assaulted in 1998 by four men, three of them college football players. She said she was gang raped, sodomized, robbed, and then, re-victimized — her word — when a college football coach suspended two of the players for one game and was quoted as saying his players had made, “a bad choice.”
That phrase burns her, still. All these years later, it sends her hurtling back to the rape examination at Salem Hospital, the police interview, having to tell her boyfriend and mother, and the whispers, guilt and shame. For years, she’s been hung up on that three-word hook — “a bad choice” — as if violating her body was like knocking on the wrong door in the right neighborhood.
She reported the gang rape to police in 1998. She’d told investigators the men stood around, watching it happen and cheering the others on. At one point, she said she begged one of the men to make it stop. “A bad choice?” she asked herself over the years. “I get sick of reading articles about how great a guy the coach is.”
That coach is Mike Riley.
The team was Oregon State.
Tracy’s report to police and the ensuing investigation led newscasts, raised questions and divided public sentiment when it occurred 16 years ago. She has never before been identified as the victim and has never before talked publicly about it.
Until now.
