This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Nothing like the Torrey Green case must ever happen again.
The charges filed Thursday against the one-time Utah State University football star follow a long and twisted road toward justice. Green has maintained his innocence, but he now faces rape, kidnapping and sexual assault charges from separate incidents involving five women. He may face life in prison if convicted.
Every town and every campus faces the threat of a multiple rapist, but rarely do the investigative and victim-support people stumble in their important assignments as much as happened in this case. If not for some determined reporting from Tribune reporter Alex Stuckey, the Green case would have stayed buried in the muck of disinterest and dysfunction.
At least three of Green's alleged victims were USU students who reported their experiences to the university, but apparently nothing was done to investigate further or put any limits on Green.
Police in Logan and North Park didn't do any better. Three of the women included in the charges had been interviewed about Green's actions by one Logan police detective, who also heard from another woman whose case wasn't included in the charges. Apparently the detective was so unmoved by their stories that he got to the point where he was reassuring Green that their accusations wouldn't be a problem.
In North Park, police didn't even make a police report in one case after hearing the woman's story, but that case is now one in which Green is charged. (In all, the charging prosecutors investigated allegations from nine people before filing charges involving five of them. Four of the nine came forth after The Tribune published stories.)
And the Cache County Attorney's Office last year had considered but declined to file charges against Green in two cases, one of which they have now decided to file. The difference? After all the publicity, prosecutors interviewed multiple witnesses they didn't bother with the first time.
It's hard, no, it's impossible to conclude the mishandling of Green's case is not at least partially due to his star-athlete status. Aggie football reigns supreme in Cache Valley, and that made the women's stories either harder to believe or harder to act on. USU's football coach, the most important mentor in Green's college career, maintained he only heard about the rape allegations this summer. If that's even true, the university purposely isolated him from information he needed to do his job. Why?
Green deserves his day in court, but his adjudication must not be the only end to this. There still must be a full and public accounting of the mistakes made by USU, the police departments and prosecutors in the county attorney's office. Without that airing, how will USU students and their parents know there aren't similar cases living in the shadows?
This is a stain on northern Utah, and the stain will remain until it is scrubbed in sunlight.