DiCaro: George McCaskey's Comments Make It Tough To Get Behind Bears

By Julie DiCaro--

(CBS) Until now, it's been relatively easy for me to reconcile being a woman, a rape "survivor" (I hate that term) and a former attorney for domestic violence victims with my NFL viewing. After all, the Bears weren't one of the teams willing to take in alleged abusers and rapists. My team never had to be forced to place a player on the commissioner's exempt list because of a public backlash. After all, the Bears are owned by a woman. My team was one of the "good ones."

Until they weren't.

It's easy to look down one's nose at the NFL's problem with violence against women, until your team goes out and signs a player -- in the Bears' case, Ray McDonald -- investigated twice for domestic violence and still under investigation for rape. It gets even harder when the chairman makes asinine statements about rape victims being inherently biased against their rapists.

This past week, Bears chairman George McCaskey was given the chance to back off those comments he had previously made. Instead, he declined and doubled-down.

From the Sun-Times:

On Tuesday, chairman George McCaskey was asked to clarify a statement he made at the NFL annual meetings in March, regarding his decision not to speak to the alleged victim because of a bias. McCaskey was criticized for his remarks.

"I did say something about that and I said the same thing in context of talking to Ray's parents," McCaskey said at the Ed Block Courage Award luncheon. "There's going to be some bias, one side or the other, depending on what their perspective is. I also said that I didn't want to interfere with any investigation on the criminal side or on the league side."

The difference here is that the Bears did talk to McDonald's parents, his coaches and a host of other character witnesses, all of whom presumably backed up McDonald's sparkling and unblemished personality. As McCaskey admitted, the Bears never made an attempt to talk to McDonald's alleged victim.

I spent 15 years in criminal and domestic violence court as both an attorney for victims and for the accused. And while I embrace the concept of innocent until proven guilty, I also understand how often abusers and rapists aren't prosecuted and why. I understand what it means when the police officer who shows up to investigate a domestic disturbance is also on the San Francisco 49ers' payroll.

Most of all, I understand why, in the fog of trying to understand being raped, victims often do and say things that seem completely counterintuitive, leading others to question their stories and rapists to go free. Most of all, I understand that most upstanding citizens don't get investigated for two different violent crimes with multiple victims.

None of this is to say that McDonald is guilty of the crimes he's accused of. The only people who ever know what goes on behind closed doors are the two people in a relationship. Not the police, not their teammates, not their coaches and certainly not George McCaskey.

And yet, after having only heard one side of McDonald's story and without having reached out to the alleged victims, their attorneys or their family members, McCaskey has made the determination that he believes McDonald. What's more, McCaskey has reduced the victims' claims of having been abused by McDonald to nothing more than "bias."

And this is the team I'm supposed to cheer for this fall.

Of course, this is made all the more infuriating by the fact that McDonald isn't exactly J.J. Watt on the football field. There are probably multiple other players who could do his job as well as he does or at least close to it.

Yet for McDonald, the Bears have jeopardized the goodwill of a significant portion of their fan base. Approximately 45 percent of NFL fans are women. One in three women will be a victim of sexual violence in her lifetime. Many of those women are loved by intelligent men with integrity with no tolerance for sexual violence. You do the math.

It's so easy for NFL teams to talk themselves out of listening to victims' stories. "Her story changed over time," goes a typical response.

Indeed. Try to remember ever detail of the most traumatic event in your life. Now make sure you get every detail the same as you recount the same story over and over while others try to poke holes in it. "She kept talking to him after the alleged rape." So did I. In fact, I had a very friendly conversation with my rapist the night after the assault.

"He's suing her for slander." Sure he is. I'll be very curious to see how far that case gets. My guess is that if McDonald can't out-litigate his alleged victim with high-priced attorneys, he'll quietly drop the lawsuit once the season is underway. And, as any attorney can tell you, it's fairly easy to force someone into just about anything once they're faced with hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorneys' fees.

My point isn't to convince fans that Ray McDonald is guilty of rape or domestic abuse. My point is that most NFL fans, as well as front offices and owners, have very little understanding of the psychology behind sexual and domestic violence. They reach decisions on player personnel based on their ignorant assumptions. Unfortunately, most cases of violence against women don't come complete with damning videotape in an Atlantic City elevator. In the vast majority of sexual violence cases, the victim is the evidence.

If for no other reason than the risk of losing the female fan, teams must make an effort to hear both sides of a story, not just the side they really want to hear. They owe that much to their fans.

As for how I plan to cheer for the Bears, the team I've loved with a white hot passion since childhood, I'm still working on it.

Julie DiCaro is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Julie on Twitter @JulieDiCaro. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.

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