The reaction to ten of their University of Minnesota teammates being suspended was first to protest and then, after disclosure of the confidential Title IX report to a local television station, to not. At immediate stake was a bowl game.

The boycott ended almost as quickly as it started, with senior Drew Wolitarsky reading from a two-page typed statement affirming the team’s commitment to seeing due process for any student accused of sexual assault. Wolitarsky’s statement also expressed concern for the young woman at the center of the incident, and condemned sexual violence on campus. While it’s back to business for the Golden Gophers, the questionable circumstances surrounding the boycott’s end, the utter disregard for the lives of ten young black men, and what could be viewed as a University decision to value money and prestige over the tarnished reputations of its student body, remain. Lingering questions deserving answers.

Chris Seaton took the position that the disclosure may have been a deliberate effort by the school to interfere with the players’ exercise of their First Amendment right to protest.

There is an argument to be made that the disclosure, unlawful though it may have been, enlightened the other team members and informed their decision to end their boycott. Judge Mark Bennett made this very important point, that evidence might have persuaded the other team members to change their position.

That the intent was to silence the protest and that this is “fairly clear” escapes me. Sorry I am dense on this one but how did the disclosure allegedly silence the protest? The team members wanted answers and they got some of them. That they may not like the answers they got or disagree with them hardly silences them.

Judge Bennett is right, that if the disclosure, even if dubiously intended, provided answers that caused the students to change their position, that doesn’t “silence them.” The question was thus raised whether the school’s Title IX report, coming after the police had determined that sex was consensual, provided answers or the mechanism by which the students would be held in disrepute on campus (and perhaps in their aspiration of becoming professional football players).  I responded to Judge Bennett by questioning the integrity of the Title IX report, and the impact it would have in embarrassing team members into foregoing the exercise of free speech.

The release of the Title IX findings (which both conflicted with the conclusion of the police and are notorious for the lack of due process, facile definitional vagaries, one-sided investigation and “believe the victim no matter what” bias) put the team in an awkward, untenable and embarrassing position of appearing to back rapists.

K.C. Johnson, noting that the statement read by Wolitarsky appeared written by a Title IX bureaucrat rather than a student, reached a similar conclusion:

Local reports suggest that the players’ unity was in part eroded by the release of the university investigative report. Even construing the incident in the light most favorable to the accused players, this lengthy document revealed an ugly, troubling episode in which the accused players were almost caricatures of unfeeling misogynists. Little wonder the other players then folded.

The police investigated the alleged rape, and decided that it was not a rape, but consensual sex. There were three videos, totaling 90 seconds, which not only showed a woman engaging in consensual sex, but contradicted her allegations.

She said she felt panicked when Djam walked her into his bedroom, but later testified that he never pushed her, prevented her from leaving or said anything threatening to her.

Asked during a court hearing why she didn’t leave, she said, “I felt scared, trapped, isolated with someone I felt had power over me.”

Feelings, of course, without any physical manifestations, are hard to prove, and harder still to refute.

She estimated there were at least a dozen men. “I was shoving people off of me,” she testified. “They kept ignoring my pleas for help. Anything I said they laughed. They tried to cheer people on.”

This conduct would clearly demonstrate that she was being raped. But then, there was video.

As proof, he played them three separate videos, totaling about 90 seconds, taken that morning.

During an 8-second clip, the woman “appears lucid, alert, somewhat playful and fully conscious; she does not appear to be objecting to anything at this time,” Wente wrote in his report. After viewing two additional videos, he wrote “the sexual contact appears entirely consensual.”

Is this conclusive? No. The entirety of the engagement wasn’t recorded, and there may well have come a time when she did plea for help, shove guys off. But then, what was recorded failed to show this, and instead showed the opposite. On the one hand, there are her words about her feelings. On the other hand, there is video.

The police made a decision to rely on the objective evidence. The Title IX report took a very different approach. And what would have a greater impact on campus to the lives of football players who protested the deprivation of due process to their teammates?

The campus social justice climate was to shame the team for supporting their teammates.

As Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins wrote over the weekend, the Minnesota players “get an F in civics for their boycott.” By rushing to so strongly defend their teammates, despite not knowing what happened that night, the players showed “no recognition … that women even exist on their campus.”

Writes Jenkins: “There are a million good social-justice causes over which a major college football team could boycott. This isn’t one.”

The sense of outrage at the team was so strong that a student made a video about it:

The same point is made rather cleverly in a short skit performed by some University of Minnesota students. Written and directed by U of M undergrad Kate McCarthy, the skit plays off the moving final scene of the Robin Williams movie Dead Poets Society.

The question is whether to “believe” or follow the evidence? The answer to that question is what distinguishes the exercise of rights on campus from law. The campus has chosen to believe, and the players have succumbed to its pressure. It certainly wasn’t the purpose of this video, but it does an excellent job of demonstrating how belief matters and evidence does not.