The University of Notre Dame enables a football player and insures things will get worse.
Enabler of the year:
The University of Notre Dame. Lizzy Seeberg told authorities an unnamed Notre Dame football player fondled her against her will and that he became so aggressive in his assault she froze in terror. Ten days later, she committed suicide. Five days after that, authorities finally interviewed the player. The mother of a former classmate of the player told reporters that even in elementary school her daughter often came home complaining about something that player had done, such as picking up a girl in their fifth grade class and throwing her. “He was bigger than everybody else, and violent.” The accused player reportedly regularly bullied other students and was expelled in the 7th grade for threatening a girl. According to reports, he was suspended in high school for throwing a desk at a teacher who’d taken away his cell phone. We might be excused for our failure to believe the football player’s assertion that everything that happened with Lizzy Seeberg, whose story was otherwise essentially the same as his, was consensual. While Ms. Seeberg clearly had her own issues—she was apparently seeing a psychiatrist for depression and anxiety before committing suicide—there is no excuse for the University to have denied the Seeberg family a disciplinary hearing or for Notre Dame’s President Father John Jenkins’ refusal to meet with the Seebergs and to have, according to Lizzy’s dad, lawyered up. But, then, the player, who Notre Dame recruited despite his shocking past and the University’s claim of how carefully it selects players, reportedly is a star.
This could be a classic case of indirect alcoholism resulting in multiple tragedies. The unnamed player exhibited reportedly awful behaviors by the fifth grade, which is strongly indicative of parental alcoholism. The behaviors may or may not now be fueled by direct alcoholism. A suicide occurs in someone who, except for depression (which can occur without benefit of drug addiction) by all accounts shows no other behavioral indications of alcoholism. A great university enables the behaviors and even protects a friend of the accused player who sent Lizzy a text: “Don’t do anything you would regret. Messing with Notre Dame football is a bad idea.” Greater tragedies may yet ensue: the player has apparently gotten away with something, which fuels alcoholic egomania. If he has the disease of alcoholism, he will continue to abuse others and such abuse is likely to escalate until greater tragedy occurs unless he somehow gets sober first. However, so long as Notre Dame and others enable, the likelihood of sobriety before tragedy is remote.