Ken Starr’s Squalid Second Act

By Mimi Swartz
New York Times
June 27, 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/27/opinion/ken-starrs-squalid-second-act.html

EDWIN EDWARDS, the colorful former governor of Louisiana, had a favorite quote often attributed to the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu: “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”

I thought of this again last week as Hillary Clinton absorbed a fresh attack on her record from Donald J. Trump. Amid that, I wondered whether she’d had a chance to savor the fall of the Clintons’ nemesis, Ken Starr, and appreciate its ironies. In a political campaign as relentlessly nasty as this one, it must be hard to steal a moment of peace, much less schadenfreude.

By the time of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the dependably Republican Mr. Starr had built a prestigious career as an attorney, appellate judge and solicitor general under President George H. W. Bush. Then, in 1994, a congressional committee made Mr. Starr a special prosecutor to investigate the Clintons’ involvement in the Whitewater real estate venture and, juicier, the death of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster, a Clinton confidant.

Mr. Starr aspired higher and wanted to go deeper. Soon, his brief had expanded to investigating the sex life of a young woman named Monica Lewinsky. Relying on covert recordings of her confessions, Mr. Starr’s report read at times like a steamy romance novel: “She unbuttoned her jacket; either she unhooked her bra or he lifted her bra up; and he touched her breasts with his hands and mouth …”

The result? Mr. Clinton survived impeachment, but soiled his legacy. Both he and his wife seemed like deceitful equivocators. Questioned in front of a grand jury about his sexual relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, Mr. Clinton tried to obfuscate: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

For his part, Mr. Starr appeared like the Cotton Mather of his time: a prurient, punishing Puritan — a reputation that was hard to shake. He taught at several law schools, and worked, to his credit, to overturn some death penalty cases. Less admirably, he represented campaigners trying to roll back same-sex marriage in California in 2008.

In 2010, he returned to his home state of Texas as president of Baylor University, and was subsequently also appointed chancellor. It seemed a good match: a conservative son of a Christian minister at an august private Baptist university. With strong policies against drinking and premarital sex, Baylor has an enthusiasm for Jesus matched only by its passion for football.

The problem was that in its determination to dominate the Big 12 of college football, Baylor was willing to cover for several players dogged by accusations of sexual violence. In one particularly egregious case, a star player named Sam Ukwuachu was accused of sexually assaulting a female Baylor soccer player in 2013. But ambitious football programs apparently take a lenient view of such infractions.

A Baylor investigation didn’t even give Mr. Ukwuachu a slap on the wrist, allowing him back on campus to graduate. Only the prospect of his pending trial prevented him from taking the field. Finally, in August last year, Mr. Ukwuachu was convicted on felony counts and sentenced to six months in jail and 10 years’ probation.

The news from Baylor got worse. Another two football players and a former fraternity president were charged with some form of sexual violence. One, Tevin Elliott, is currently in prison for sexual assault. Eventually, five Baylor football players were accused of serious sexual assaults that took place between 2011 and 2015.

It was bad enough that the Waco police seemed less than interested in investigating the cases, but the university’s foot-dragging and subsequent stonewalling under Mr. Starr’s administration was stunning. Mr. Starr seemed to have trouble grasping the gravity of sexual misconduct charges — unless the accused happened to be the president of the United States. In 2013, the year Baylor’s scandal started brewing, Mr. Starr signed a letter urging community service rather than jail as punishment for a retired teacher named Christopher Kloman. Mr. Kloman had pleaded guilty to sexually molesting five female students in the 1960s and ’70s at the private school his own daughter had attended.

An independent investigation of Baylor found that the university authorities had consistently failed to protect its female students from sexual predators and neglected its Title IX responsibilities. Instead, administrators played down reports of abuse and discouraged women from bringing allegations of misconduct.

And where was President Starr? Ignoring the candlelight vigil for victims of sexual assault that Baylor students held outside his home. Ducking a media interview when the scandal broke. Issuing windy statements laced with legalese to the Baylor community about how much he cared. Refusing to comment on the situation until the external review was done. And releasing only a summary of that report, not the full document, to the public.

Finally, Mr. Starr was fired as president and later resigned as chancellor — “the captain goes down with the ship,” he told the sports channel ESPN earlier this month. But the university tossed him a pretty good lifesaver: He will continue as a professor at the law school.

As for Baylor’s pattern of protecting star athletes who abused women at the university, Mr. Starr claimed he “didn’t know what was happening.” Maybe it depends on what the meaning of the word “was” was.

Mimi Swartz, an executive editor at Texas Monthly, is a contributing opinion writer.