Parents Just Don't Understand the SRHoF

The internet is superfantastic. When I wake up and need to know the weather outside, but can’t be bothered to stand up and open the blinds… the internet is there for me. It allows me to cyberstalk every marginally attractive girl that ever attended a school with me. It’s an avenue for distributing homoerotic analyses of photographs of the Athletics Director at the University of North Texas.

And sometimes, it brings people together. I don’t mean like on the Casual Encounters forum on Craigslist… I mean the sort of bond that can only be forged when the most influential sports blog in the world publicizes your writing, which in turn allows a convicted felon's mother to scold you for your attempts at lighthearted musings on the subject of… rape.

Background: In the wake of our inaugural TinaCon, we launch a new feature: the Sports Rapist Hall of Fame. After North Texas loses a shootout against Navy, we make a special induction for Kenny Ray Morrison, a former Navy footballer currently imprisoned for indecent assault. Much to our collective surprise, Deadspin links to the post. The people flock to TYSports, including an anonymous commenter claiming to be Kenny Ray Morrison’s mother. Mom-nonymous posts a 500 word screed; not at all the typical Hall of Fame induction speech that family members of the honored generally deliver.

Excerpts from Mom-nonymous’s induction speech are presented below in quote text, with spelling/grammar/punctuation uncorrected.

Your information is so misrepresentational it is unbelievable. I am his mother and I think your statements are so clueless.

Right off the bat, I feel we are being unfairly maligned. We’ve founded our entire identity on misrepresentation. I don’t mean to spoil the mythology… but Tina Yothers is in no way affiliated with our grabass sports blog. And as far as we know, she gives our existence no sanction. We built this website on a foundation of celebrity(?) identity theft. Nothing we do in the realm of misrepresentation should be considered unbelievable. Furthermore, TYSports broke the story of Troy Aikman murdering prostitutes and other women in a Mexican border town. We broke the story of alleged prejudice against key members of the University of North Texas support staff. We invented the Barbaro Sandwich. I feel outraged that my reputation, not to mention the proud name of TYSports contributor Nappy Headed Ho, is being dragged through the metaphorical mud.

As for the cluelessness of my statements, the vast majority of the post (at least, the parts that refer to Kenny Ray Morrison) is direct quotes from other, legitimate journalistic sources. My statements consist of a bad reference to Tailhook and a Lou Gossett, Jr. joke. I admit, I’ve been caught red handed. I’ve never seen “An Officer and a Gentleman”. I’ve been exposed as clueless.

After that point, Mom-nonymous spends 261 words discussing a lot of stuff that I’m not even going to consider debating. The word ‘incident’ is thrown around in quotation marks, the victim is referred to as “so called”, the complainant (victim seems like sort of a loaded word here, complainant is the best compromise I could think of) is accused of having been overheard giggling, and is described as “not held accountable for her behaviors”. Check the comment yourselves, I’m not going to dive into any of it beyond saying that I’m not interested in attempting to convince anyone (including myself) of the facts in the case. This isn’t a courtroom, and I’m not talking to a jury. Prosecutors already did that, and 7 people were convinced that Kenny Ray was guilty.

As regards your implication about GHB the government's two drug experts found NO GHB at all. In fact it found that in a period in which my son was not in contact with her there was evidence of recreational drugs by her. This was from the governmen'ts own witnesses.

This is a reference to a comment referencing original allegations that Morrison used GHB to subdue at least one of the complainants.

From what I’ve read online in my half-assed research (I can honestly say once again that I have no first hand knowledge on the subject) when GHB is ingested, it clears the system in somewhere between 4 to 6 to 12 hours. I’m not interested in debating forensics, but I will say that the absence of proof is not in itself definitive proof of it’s absence. It doesn’t prove anything, either way.

Side note: I look forward to the day that Homeland Security confiscates my laptop. After tonight, they’ll now find an extensive archive of information on date rape drugs in addition to the hundreds of pictures of Rick Villarreal that have been there all along.

My son's emotion was for his Academy that he loved, his friends and family. He could have taken a plea but chose to fight as he was innocent.

No joking on this section. I am certainly not under the delusion that the criminal justice system is infallible. If Kenny Ray was wrongly accused, I believe he was right to defend his name and refuse to plead guilty to a crime he didn’t commit. And I honestly do hope that he was falsely accused. The alternative would mean that he committed the crimes, and a woman was raped. Honestly, I wish this whole event belonged in the False Allegations section instead of here.

Your flippant and callous remarks in no way represent the pain that our family feels. You have no access to any of the facts of the case and so therefore your remarks are baseless and piecemeal based on whatever piece or snippets you pulled together from a few newpaper articles.

First, my intent is not and never was to represent the pain of the Morrison family. Second, flippant and callous remarks are a TYSports specialty. For new visitors, our biggest controversy before this was a post defending jokes about dead people, including a partially decomposed woman found dumped (no pun intended) in a port-a-potty. Much of what I might otherwise feel compelled to type in defending our SRHoF feature is already written there. An addendum: I don’t really think there’s anything funny about rape itself, and I’m certainly not trying to make jokes at the expense of the victims. Whether the jokes are taken that way, I can’t really control, but I do know what my intent is. The purpose of the SRHoF is to joke about the culture of entitlement and lack of consequences that pervades competitive sports.

Just to be absolutely clear: Rape is not funny, at least not to me. Jokes at the expense of rape victims are not funny. But I think I can make jokes about people who feel so invincible, so sure that the rules of the world don’t apply to them, that they use other people as though they weren’t even human. And I’m not claiming definitive and authoritative knowledge that Kenny Ray Morrison committed the crimes of which he was convicted. I don’t claim to have some sort of Godlike omniscience. I’m not Todd Dodge.

You might want to save your energy for something that you know. Only two people know what happened and one of them got a free ride for poor decision making. Leave my son and our family alone. To have someone incarcerated for a "he said she said conseual event is unbearable."

First, let me say that the statement that a rape victim "got a free ride for poor decision making" is the single most callous pun ever published on TYSports. And it didn't come from me or TY; it came from the self-alleged mother of a convicted rapist. But I digress...

I’ll never know for certain who did what to whom in this situation, or why the charges of the second woman were dismissed or dropped. Unless someone has a sexy, sexy videotape they can send me a copy of, that is. What’s more, I don’t CARE to know who did what to whom. I’m not contributing to this site to be the new millennium CyberBob Woodward. I don’t presume to speak for TY, Nappy, Alex, Hormones, or Craptastic, but my hunch is that they’re probably in agreement on the matter. This is really just an avenue for us to make dick jokes to what used to be a very tiny audience. I’m not making allegations or accusations, and I’m not pretending to have any first hand or in-depth knowledge of the matter at hand. I linked to and quoted from professional journalists presenting editorially approved reports on the accusations against Kenny Ray Morrison and the ultimate conclusions of his jury.

Here’s what I do know: Mom-nonymous almost certainly found us through a link from Deadspin. Deadspin is, of course, a sports website with an emphasis on humor. It’s not CNN and it’s not a legal journal.

Keep that in mind.

To all our new visitors: Join the DJA, and remember that Tina loves you all.