Rexrode: What I knew about an alleged 2010 rape involving Michigan State basketball

At times like this, with a scandal unfolding and the competition for information intense to the point of frantic, you’ve got to have sources.

Stuart Dunnings III was one of my best. He comes to mind as I wake up every day to new reams of information and commentary on Michigan State, the latest home for college sports turmoil. It’s also the former home of me and a place I covered stretching back to the 1990s at the campus newspaper, The State News. Michigan State football and men’s basketball was my beat from 2003-12 at the Lansing State Journal and from 2012-16 at the Detroit Free Press.

So I’ve got a lot of thoughts on this story, a staggering tragedy because of the way Larry Nassar, enabled by Michigan State and USA Gymnastics, assaulted so many girls and women over so many years. It’s also ongoing and fast moving, and the focus has shifted to Mark Dantonio and Tom Izzo because of an ESPN “Outside the Lines” report about the handling of sexual assault allegations in their programs.

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But let’s start with Dunnings, the former Ingham County (Mich.) prosecutor, and what I thought was a “scandal” in 2009. It was actually a fight at a dormitory involving several MSU football players, but months of coverage ensued and Dunnings was aggressive in charging them. He was hated at Michigan State, a University of Michigan graduate and holder of front-row, season tickets to Michigan basketball who clearly lived to torment the Spartans.

To me, he was a person who did his job the right way. He was not a Michigan State stooge. Let’s go back several more years. My wife and former rival editor at The State News — we often fought over “shared” entertainment and sports pages — covered the crime beat at the Lansing State Journal while I worked as a news copy editor.

She saw and wrote about a lot of awful things, and her series on a teen prostitution ring in Lansing, which helped break up the ring, is considerably better and more important than anything I’ve done as a journalist. Dunnings was a valued source for her. They got along well and trusted each other. So when I got the MSU athletics beat in 2003, I had an in with Dunnings that paid off several times.

That was especially true in late 2009 and early 2010, covering the fallout of that fight. I called Dunnings constantly to get any information I could. He gave me a tip that one of the MSU players involved had been charged with burglary in Florida the previous summer. I found the records and broke the story, which explained Dantonio’s previously unexplained suspension of that player during preseason camp.

I think back to that time, and how freaked out the Michigan State people were, and how angry Dantonio and Izzo were at me and other reporters, and it seems so trivial now. But another situation came up in the fall of 2010.

How the original story was reported

Keith Appling and Adreian Payne, freshmen on Izzo’s team, had allegedly sexually assaulted a woman on campus during move-in weekend. An independent publication called the Michigan Messenger broke the story, though it did not name Appling and Payne. Appling and Payne were not named publicly until the ESPN report last week.

Editors at the Lansing State Journal and Detroit Free Press decided quickly that we would hold off on writing anything until a decision was made on charges. The Detroit News ran a blurb about the Michigan Messenger story, maybe two paragraphs long. MLive.com wrote a longer piece, including some passages from the Michigan Messenger.

I know that’s often not how things go these days — witness the 2013 coverage of whether Jameis Winston would be charged with sexual assault — but I appreciated the decision of our editors. I found it careful and responsible. In the meantime, I leaned on Dunnings.

I did not try to track down the alleged victim. Nearly two years ago, in another column on sexual assault, I expressed regret over this. But I wasn’t going to investigate this crime better than the authorities. I didn’t ask MSU people much about it, either. To be honest, I just knew they’d say Appling and Payne were innocent, and I really didn’t want to hear anything negative about the woman.

Also, I was a sports beat writer, not an investigative reporter, and I was covering a football team making a Big Ten championship run, with basketball season about to start, with three young kids at home including my 2-month-old daughter … see how the excuses just tumble out when you’re feeling guilty?

How coach Tom Izzo reacted

Izzo goes off the record on just about anything, often in colorful and emotional ways. Not on this, not with me. This was an incredibly tense time at Michigan State. Dunnings and his people were determining whether two players on Izzo’s team would face charges and potentially long prison sentences.

Izzo did not suspend them at the time, and I’m not sure he punished them at all. Had he suspended them, of course, he also would have identified two alleged rapists to the public. We all knew who they were — Dunnings told me — and it was common knowledge on MSU fan message boards. But most of the world found out last week.

Izzo’s actions then told me he believed them. Otherwise, how do you even keep them on your team? When Dunnings would finally talk to me about this, as the investigation was wrapping up, I got the same thing from him in words. To sum up those off-the-record conversations, he did not believe her.

He later put out a press release explaining the decision not to prosecute an incident “on the MSU campus.” He cited the input of chief assistant prosecutor Lisa McCormick and assistant prosecutor Debra Bouck and wrote that “our office reached the conclusion that no crime had been committed.”

If you go through all the interviews and information available about that situation, you will not be certain of anything. And now the woman, Carolyn Schaner, has allowed ESPN to identify her and has given Paula Lavigne and Nicole Noren of ESPN more details on that evening. And that has made me revisit what I was thinking eight years ago.

It has made me think of Jessica Luther’s excellent book “Unsportsmanlike Conduct: College Football and the Politics of Rape,” which is heavily a criticism of media — that we inherently assume women are lying in these situations and proceed as such, even though it’s far more common for women who are assaulted to not report the crimes at all.

I never actively believed anything for certain on this situation. I remember talking with other reporters on the beat about how we’d never do any flowery features on Appling and Payne. But we essentially proceeded as if we believed Schaner lied. This goes for national media, too.

Everyone knew about the allegations, but they were quickly forgotten. On to Appling’s crossover dribble and Payne’s feathery 3-point shot.

How things have changed now

Life went on. Dunnings eventually got caught up in his own scandal, spending 10 months in jail for soliciting the services of a prostitute. He got out in September. I talked about this column with my wife this week and asked her if she thought Dunnings could have been compromised or would have covered for MSU while in office.

“I’d be surprised,” she said.

The standard for what's surprising anymore is changing, of course. For the record, I’ll be surprised if we find out Izzo or Dantonio did anything they shouldn’t have done in these investigations. If they did, they’re gone. If they didn’t, they should be around to lead a place that suddenly faces a leadership vacuum among many other issues.

I was surprised to hear about the allegations of assault and sexual assault against former Michigan State basketball player Travis Walton in the ESPN report (which he has denied). That was the only thing new to me. Shortly before I left the Free Press for The Tennessean, I got information on sexual assault allegations against MSU football players using open-records requests.

I passed those on to Chris Solari, my successor on the beat, and he got more reports and spent several months on a story that published shortly after ESPN’s did. The difficult part was putting those allegations into context considering there were no charges. But now the question of how they were handled, and by whom, is central.

Also before I left, I wrote about 10 questions facing Michigan State. At No. 9 — after all the Dantonio and Izzo sports stuff, of course — was this: “What is MSU going to do about sexual assault?”

“There have been allegations against MSU athletes in recent years, none resulting in charges, but some horrific allegations nonetheless,” I wrote. “No charges doesn’t mean no truth. So maybe selling sex at college athletics events should cease? Maybe athletes shouldn’t be coddled to the point of twisted entitlement? Maybe there should be a lot more education and enforcement within particular teams?”

Now that question is No. 1 in all of college sports. Sexual assault should be the most important topic on every campus right now. College beat reporters can do better than I did. They can do worse, too. They should be expected to use all resources available to find out what is happening with the teams they cover.

Penn State and Baylor were the previous homes of scandal, and there are more ahead. But right now it’s Michigan State’s turn to display two things this corrupt system is designed to prevent — honesty and transparency.

Contact Joe Rexrode at jrexrode@tennessean.com and follow him on Twitter @joerexrode.