‘Vanderbilt Players Laughed, Recorded Video and Texted as They Gang Raped Neuroscience Student’: Tearful Accuser Looks on as Courtroom Hears How They ‘Ruined Her Life’ in Dorm Attack

by Cassy Fiano | January 14, 2015 3:03 pm

Being drunk isn’t typically considered an excuse for doing horrible things… like, say, attacking a student and gang-raping her in her dorm room. Yet somehow, that’s the defense that a pair of Vanderbilt players are using for gang-raping a female student as they laughed — it’s not their fault, because they were drunk!

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A prosecutor in the rape trial of two former Vanderbilt football players said in his opening statements Tuesday that the defendants ruined the life of a promising young neuroscience student when they sexually assaulted her on campus in 2013.

Deputy District Attorney General Tom Thurman told Tennessee jurors that former players Brandon Vandenburg and Cory Batey giggled, shot video and sent text messages while they sexually abused her in an assault that began in a dormitory hallway.

He described in sometimes graphic detail how one former player violated the female student with a water bottle while a teammate egged him on. The prosecutor said one of the players passed out condoms and raped her.

Thurman said one of the former players urinated on her and made a racial remark. Three of the ex-players are black and one is white. The victim is white.

‘And after hearing all the proof you will be convinced they are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,’ Thurman said.

The alleged victim, an Oklahoma native, sat in the audience during opening statements wiping her eyes with a tissue. She is expected to take the stand as a witness for the prosecution later in the trial.

It takes a special kind of monster to gang-rape a girl, urinate on her, videotape the whole thing, and laugh while doing it. And to try to excuse it by being drunk just adds even more insult to injury.