Pros and Cons (31 page)

Shortly after Officer Taylor arrived at the scene, Brown was taken to nearby Fairview Southdale Hospital where a sexual assault exam was performed. Brown later told Bloomington police that her attacker’s name was Keith Henderson. She described him as a former Vikings football player. And she said that she often ran into him at the Cattle Company, a popular bar located across the parking lot from the Mobil station where he and other Vikings players were regulars.

According to police reports, Henderson got into a verbal altercation with a man who was dancing with Brown. When Brown left the bar to call her brother for a ride home, Henderson followed her outside. Angry and demanding to know where she was going, Henderson abruptly grabbed Brown and dragged her into the parking lot behind the bar. He then spun her around so that she was facing the back of the building, removed her pants, and raped her from behind. Brown told authorities that “she had to hold onto the brick wall with her hands to prevent her head from being smashed against the wall.”

“Please stop,” Brown cried, according to her police statement.

Saying nothing, Henderson continued the assault until he ejaculated inside her. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he then told Brown, echoing what he said to Sally Michaels after raping her from behind.

The report almost sounded too brazen to be true. However, the Bloomington police quickly discovered the two outstanding arrest warrants issued against Henderson in the other rape cases. And on May 26, the Hennepin County prosecutor added a third charge against Henderson, this one for criminal sexual conduct in the third degree. Later that day, the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department finally arrested and booked Henderson. On the booking sheet, Henderson’s occupation was listed as “football player.” Under employer, it read “unemployed.” His bond was set at $235,000.

On February 6, 1995, Henderson entered pleas of guilty in all three cases. As part of the agreement, the state agreed to reduce each charge to a fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct. Henderson was sentenced on April 10, 1995, to six months in jail, placed on probation for ten years, ordered to attend sex offender treatment, and required to register as a convicted sex offender in the state of Minnesota. All three victims were present in court at the sentencing hearing.

S
o how did Keith Henderson descend to the point where women were seen purely as sexual prey? Henderson’s own criminal defense attorney offered his view in an interview with the authors. “My take on Keith,” said Robert Miller, who has defended a number of accused sex offenders, “is that he started out as a superstar in high school, then he went to college as an All-American. He was somewhat of a hero all the way through. As a result, you lose perspective in the normal social setting with women because they come up to you all the time. They seek these athletes out. After a while, the players change and act differently toward women. I think it’s difficult in Keith’s position to react with women as the average man would.”

“Professional athletes are people who have done a lot to deny their true feelings because to be a pro athlete you have to deny physical pain, emotional pain, and overcome adversity,” explained quarterback McPherson. “There are a lot of things that you are in denial over. When it comes to women and sex, some players may be at a point where they say, ‘Well, she probably doesn’t want to, but I’m so good she’s going to love this.’ Because that is what you tell yourself. You lie to yourself about how good you are in what you do on the field. You have to. Because the minute you doubt yourself, you’re done as a player. You have to pump yourself up so that you can’t be beat, and then you go in with confidence. When you talk about sex as casual sex, as a recreation or as conquest, why would your attitude be any different when you approach it in that way? It is very congruent with how players live in so many other ways.”

T
he authors found no record of Henderson ever being convicted of a sex crime as a player. Yet, in examining the police files in the Henderson cases in Minnesota, the authors discovered an inconspicuous, one-page affidavit dated May 6, 1994. It was sworn out to the Bloomington police by a woman whose name was expunged from the record. In her affidavit, the woman stated that in December 1992 she had been “forced by Henderson to perform oral sex and then he forced intercourse on her.” The woman, a Minnesota native, was living out of state when she learned of the pending criminal allegations against Henderson. She agreed to fly to Minnesota and tell her experience to the police in hopes of assisting in the prosecution. In order to protect her privacy, the police removed her name from the affidavit.

Marilyn Scofield* agreed to be interviewed for this book on condition that her identity be protected.

An airline stewardess who was engaged to be married at the time of the interview, Scofield said she talked to the authors despite her concern that she might be stereotyped because she worked at Hooters when the alleged rape occurred. It was during her brief four-month employment at Hooters that she met Keith Henderson. “I met a lot of the players due to my job,” said Scofield. “Hooters had an arrangement with the Vikings. We went to a lot of the football games for promotional purposes. And the players used to come into Hooters all the time. Keith, in particular, came in a lot.”

One evening when Scofield was not scheduled to work, she went with her friend, another Hooters waitress, to visit a Vikings player at his apartment. It was the first time Scofield had ever accompanied her friend to the player’s apartment. She was unaware that other Vikings players lived in the complex, including Keith Henderson, whose apartment was just across the hall. While Scofield’s girlfriend and the Vikings player who they were visiting went to sit in the apartment complex’s hot tub, Scofield stayed behind in the player’s apartment and took a nap. To her surprise, almost immediately after dozing off, Henderson forced his way into the apartment.

“I think he saw my girlfriend and the guy who she was with leaving the apartment to go down to the hot tub,” said Scofield. “I don’t know if he saw me go in or what. He must have. I don’t know how else he would have known I was in there.”

Caught off guard, Scofield nonetheless recognized Henderson right away, having waited on him numerous times. Before she could sit up, he immediately started talking about sex. “He used a lot of foul language, and I told him that I didn’t want to have sex with him,” Scofield recalled. She then retreated to the bathroom. What Scofield described next had an eerie resemblance to what Sally Michaels experienced in Henderson’s bathroom.

“He assaulted me in the bathroom and was ripping off my clothes and then pushed me into the bedroom,” said Scofield. “He was on top of me, forcing himself on me. I totally fought him the whole way. I was kicking and screaming. I kept telling him, ‘No. You’re not going to have sex with me. Stop.’”

As Henderson was about to penetrate Scofield, her friend and the player who she was with returned from the hot tub. When Henderson heard their voices, he quickly jumped off Scofield and buttoned up his pants. When his teammate and Scofield’s girlfriend entered the room, Henderson looked down at Scofield, who was still on the bed, and said, “Thanks baby. I hope it was as good for you as it was for me.”

“He tried to make it look like we had just had consensual sex,” said Scofield.

The next day, Scofield encountered an unexpected reprimand when she reported to work. “My manager came up to me the day after I was assaulted by Keith Henderson and told me, ‘If you don’t give the players what they want, you’re going to be fired,’” said Scofield. “Keith had gone to my manager at Hooters and complained that I was rude to him. Keith was totally livid and he really came down hard on my boss.”

As a result of the treatment received from her boss, Scofield quit her job and hired an attorney who specialized in sexual harassment. “Hooters was making my job miserable because Keith Henderson complained about me,” said Scofield. “Hooters is a restaurant. Admittedly, in a place like that you expect a little harassment from the customers. I could handle that. But you don’t expect harassment from your employer.”

Scofield’s lawyer confirmed that she received an undisclosed amount of money in an out-of-court settlement with the company.

After leaving Hooters, Scofield ran into Henderson at the Cattle Company, the same club where he would later sexually assault Dawn Brown. “I saw him at the club, but I didn’t say anything to him,” said Scofield. “He was mad just because I was there. He was still furious from the night that I wouldn’t consent to have sex with him.”

When Scofield left with a male acquaintance, Henderson followed her out into the Cattle Company parking lot. As Scofield was climbing into the passenger’s side of her friend’s Bronco, Henderson brandished a knife and slashed her across the arm. Although the blade did not pierce her skin, it slashed a large hole in her thick leather jacket. “He threatened to kill me,” recalled Scofield. “He lifted me up and was shaking me against the Bronco. He was calling me all these names like ‘white bitch.’ He was screaming at me. He really wanted to hurt me. Luckily, it was a busy place and people started coming toward the vehicle when they heard him yelling. I just don’t think he wanted to literally punch me out in front of all those people.”

As soon as Henderson let go of her, Scofield scurried into the Bronco and the driver sped off. “I didn’t realize until after we had left that Keith had cut my coat with his knife.”

Scofield reported neither the sexual attack nor the knife attack to the authorities. One primary reason was that she did not want her family to find out, particularly her parents, who lived in Minneapolis. “I was actually going to press charges,” said Scofield. “But I didn’t want to go through with it. At the time I just wanted to leave Minnesota and get away. There was a lot of bad memories.”

However, when Scofield was notified by her civil attorney from the Hooters case that Henderson was wanted for raping a teenager, she felt compelled to fly to Minneapolis and cooperate with authorities. “I did go back to Minnesota and make a police statement in the case of the teenage girl who was assaulted,” Scofield confirmed to the authors. Less than a week after reporting her experience to investigators, Henderson was apprehended.

“A lot of the players were always out to get laid,” said Scofield. “But Keith was just more forceful than most. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. He just thought that because he was a professional football player, that every girl that he wanted to have sex with, should have sex with him.”

R
ape is the toughest crime for victims, without question,” said Sergeant Billington, who has since left the sex crimes unit and now oversees the training of police cadets for the Minneapolis Police Department. “In a homicide, the victim is dead. In a rape, the victim has to go over and over and over this stuff. And some of them never come out.” This is hardly the concern of coaches and general managers when a player is arrested for rape.

Players, as long as they are cutting it on the field, are permitted to slouch through their careers, their deviant lifestyles excused by the old clichÈ that NFL players live life in the fast lane. Then they retire and crash full speed into the laws and restraints that govern the rest of society.

For Lewis Billups, the term “fast lane,” however, had a more literal meaning. On April 9, 1994, eighteen months after retiring and six days after being released from federal prison, Lewis Billups was killed in a horrific car accident. Racing down Florida’s Interstate 4 at speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour, Billups lost control of his 1987 Corvette convertible, destroying over fifty feet of metal guardrail and slamming into a concrete barrier. The passenger in Billups’s car was killed on impact. Billups’s body was discovered by highway patrolmen on the roadside at approximately 1:00
A.M
. after being thrown from the vehicle. He was pronounced dead at Orlando Regional Medical Center hours later.

In the eighteen-month period following his retirement and leading up to his death, Billups was reported to authorities thirteen times for assaulting women, convicted once for raping a woman in Florida, and imprisoned by federal authorities in Georgia for stalking another woman.

For the numerous women who were the victims of his violence, Billups’s violent death was viewed as a blessing. Unlike Keith Henderson, who was shamelessly crass, Billups was a stealthy predator who coupled physical violence and threats with his sexual attacks. Known during his playing days as a gritty cornerback who harassed wide receivers, Billups was notorious among his teammates for using intimidation to get what he wanted from women—sex. “He felt a certain dominance [over women],” ex-Bengals wide receiver Tim McGee told the authors. “He felt he had power over them. He had them in control. I think that had a lot to do with confidence. It was probably an ego thing. He felt he could control them, sexually and physically.”

McGee and Billups were both drafted by the Bengals in 1986. While going on to establish himself as one of the Bengals’ all-time leading receivers, McGee also became one of Billups’s closest friends. He was one of only two Bengals players who made arrangements to attend Billups’s funeral.

“The thing about it was that Lewis was the sweetest person in the world to my wife,” McGee said, recalling Billups’s chameleon-like treatment of women. “He was the sweetest person in the world to other players’ wives too. But he was an asshole to the women he dated. When he got girls behind doors, for some reason he either hit ‘em or he wanted his way sexually. He was a spoiled brat.”

Indeed. While playing for the Bengals, Billups was arrested numerous times for abusing women and was sued in federal court for raping a woman. Never convicted, however, his career went uninterrupted despite his off-the-field violence. Tracy Fair, a Cincinnati woman who was Billups’s girlfriend through part of his career in Cincinnati, agreed to discuss her abuse with ESPN only because Billups was killed. “I was inches away from dying,” Fair said in a 1994 interview. “He beat me for three and a half hours and probably three of it was to my head. I had six plastic surgeries, six on my nose and one on my ear, just that I suffered from blows to my face. Then he cut my hair off.”