A Utah State football player has been charged in the alleged rape and kidnapping of a woman who told police that he dragged her out of an event as she repeatedly told him, “No!”
Kingsley Holliday, 22, was charged Wednesday with three felony counts in the reported attack. He faces charges for rape, a first-degree felony; aggravated kidnapping, a third-degree felony; and forcible sodomy, a first-degree felony.
Two additional cases against Holliday were also filed in the courts Thursday, with separate felony charges for allegedly selling drugs to other USU students.
He currently is being held without bail in the Cache County jail after his arrest Monday.
A Utah State spokesperson said that the school removed the player from the football team this week, immediately after learning about his arrest, and he has been suspended as a student.
The alleged rape was first reported in September to police in North Park, an area near the Logan school where the woman said the attack occurred. Police interviewed Holliday after but said they were not able to match Holliday’s DNA to the woman’s sexual assault exam until recently.
That means Holliday was allowed to play the entire last season after the report. He was a walk-on player on the team’s offensive line. The school had celebrated his birthday last fall with a Twitter post that came about a week after the alleged assault.
School officials, though, said in a statement they were “not previously aware of the allegations” of the rape, saying that North Park never informed them of the report against Holliday in the fall.
Holliday previously played for Snow College and Southern Utah University before joining USU’s team. He is a graduate of Corner Canyon High School in Draper.
On Sept. 3, the woman who reported the player had gone to the emergency room for injuries from the alleged assault.
She told officers then that she was at an event when she bumped into the player, court records state. She said she did not know him, but he grabbed her wrist and forced her out of the building and across the street to a secluded area.
“The female described repetitively telling the male that she did not want to go and wanted to go back to her friends,” according to a probable cause statement.
She said the player raped her and then left. According to court documents, several people reported seeing the player in the area.
Police say the player denied the allegations. The player asked officers, though, if the woman was pregnant, according to a statement from police.
The player was already booked in jail when police also connected him to two alleged drug deals — one on campus and one within 100 feet of campus — involving selling medication for ADHD. The charges for those are both enhanced because of the proximity to the school.
The player’s arrest comes as Utah State — and its football program, in particular — has been under the spotlight for several years surrounding how it responds to reports of sexual assault.
Multiple students have alleged the school ignored their reports of assault in the piano department, fraternities and sororities and the football team.
In response to those cases, the Logan school was investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice, which released findings in January 2020 that said USU often failed to investigate when it knew about sexual assaults and, as a result, “rendered additional students vulnerable.”
The university had been criticized by the DOJ, specifically, for how it handled football player Torrey Green’s case. Green was convicted in 2019 of sexually assaulting six women while he was a student at the Logan school; the women said USU did not act on their reports. His conviction was upheld earlier this year.
But even after that federal report, USU football coach Blake Anderson and then-police chief Earl Morris both came under fire for derogatory comments they had made to the team in fall 2021 about sexual assault victims. Anderson apologized; Morris resigned.