Lloyd Yates hasn’t watched a football game in years.
Friends and family always thought that was strange. After all, Yates was a “sports junkie” growing up, a star quarterback at Oak Park River Forest High School who made headlines after getting an offer to play for Northwestern.
But his time on the Wildcats was scarred by degrading and sexually abusive hazing, he told the Tribune this week in an exclusive interview. The alleged assaults left him with nightmares and persistent anxiety. Now, even watching football on TV is too much.
“I was conditioned to think this stuff is normal, and this was what goes on in college football, this is what goes on in these locker rooms,” said Yates, 26. “And I think Northwestern has a bit of work to do to make things right, and make sure that this culture doesn’t exist.”
Yates, who graduated in 2018, is one of a dozen former Northwestern players who have signed on as clients of attorneys Ben Crump and Steve Levin They told the Tribune they plan to file suit against the school in the wake of a snowballing hazing scandal which felled the university’s head football coach Pat Fitzgerald.
“What they’ve had to endure is just humiliating, deeply damaging emotionally,” Crump said. “The sexual abuse is both shocking and it’s inexcusable.”
A spokesperson for Northwestern declined to comment on the potential suit, citing a policy against commenting on pending litigation.
In a statement, the school noted that they launched an investigation into hazing allegations in short order after receiving complaints late last year.
“We have taken a number of subsequent actions to eliminate hazing from our football program, and we will introduce additional actions in the coming weeks,” the statement read.
The hazing allegations were corroborated in a report commissioned by the school; it has not been made public, though the school released a summary. In a statement, university President Michael Schill has said the investigation found 11 current or former players who corroborated the allegations.
The hazing scandal, which Schill acknowledged involved “forced participation, nudity and sexualized acts of a degrading nature,” has sent shock waves through the Northwestern community. The Daily Northwestern, a student paper, was the first to publish a former player’s allegations of “egregious and vile” behavior. Former players have since told the Tribune their experiences with hazing left them with lasting trauma.
Fitzgerald was at first issued a two-week suspension, then fired altogether after the Daily Northwestern’s story was published. His attorney told the Tribune last week that he is exploring legal action for breach of contract.
Yates and his attorneys were adamant that the culture of hazing went beyond any one person or administrator.
“This is not a case about an individual coach,” Levin said. “This is an institutional problem (that we’re) approaching as an institutional problem that we believe many people either knew about or should have known about.”
Attending Northwestern was a “no-brainer” for Yates, he said.
Training camp in Wisconsin started not long after he graduated from high school, he said. Before he even got to camp, he already had heard “horror stories” about what might happen there.
“You have to realize, we’re 17- (or) 18-year-olds, young freshmen, really excited, really anxious,” he said. “We hear these different stories, we’re trying to fit in … at the time, it’s things you hear about, you don’t really think it’s true, you don’t think it’s gonna happen to you. But, you know, it happened to me, and it happened to a lot of guys within the culture.”
Yates described the training camp hazing as “ambushes” in the dorm rooms, which players would try to prevent by locking or barricading their doors.
“We would get ambushed by you know, 10 different guys, and then they would come hold you down,” he said. “They would put you in the doggy-style position and proceed to dry-hump you. Guys would take turns, and it’s just a very degrading, dehumanizing, embarrassing act.”
Yates also experienced sexualized hazing in the locker room, including a “ritual” before practice where teammates would make players perform naked in front of everybody.
As a freshman quarterback, Yates said, he had to do a quarterback-center exchange — which requires particularly close contact — naked.
“He snapped me the football, just like you would see on Sunday, but I was in the locker room simulating the act, with no clothes on,” he said. “So obviously, that experience before I had to go on the field and practice with my teammates, was very uncomfortable … it’s just humiliating.”
Other clients have confirmed the overall pattern of abuse, Crump and Levin told the Tribune. Sometimes the hazing was triggered by mistakes on the field; the student newspaper the Daily Northwestern was first to report that the sexualized hazing practice called “running” was used to punish players for missteps.
Yates recalled a time his teammates subjected him to “running” because they believed he told a coach that the team had been out partying the night before.
“(The coach) made us do extra workouts in the weight room for that. And that pointed (to) me as a target,” he said. “So when I went in the locker room I got ran by my teammates for having to do extra stuff in the workout room.”
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Levin said the legal team intends to file a lawsuit against Northwestern that will “seek an end to this sort of behavior, and that will seek compensatory and potentially punitive damages” for the former players.
“We want to send a message that this type of behavior cannot be tolerated anywhere, let alone in collegiate or high school sports. And it needs to be stopped right now,” he said.
A separate lawsuit, filed in Cook County court this week, alleged that Fitzgerald and other university higher-ups knew about and covered up sexual misconduct as well as racial discrimination.
Yates, meanwhile, said he chose to come forward in hopes that others would feel more comfortable sharing their stories too.
“There’s a lot of denial, there’s a lot of people saying that we’re liars. I’m not a liar. We’re not liars,” he said. “I know there’s hundreds of guys who, I hope, have the courage to tell their truth and speak their truth. And I know it’s uncomfortable. I know it’s embarrassing. I know it’s awkward. But I think that’s the first step to acknowledge and address that this exists.”
The Associated Press contributed.
mcrepeau@chicagotribune.com
