College Wrestling Coach Pens Batshit Blog on Son's Rape Case

C.D. Mock is a college wrestling coach at the University of North Carolina; his son Corey was a Division I collegiate wrestler until he was expelled for sexual misconduct in December (he’s since been allowed to return to school after appealing his expulsion). The elder Mock has started a blog raging against the victim, the school, and the “feminists and activists pushing the man-hating agendas” he believes got his kid in trouble.

Jessica Luther at Vice Sports has already laid out the details of Mock’s case in a December story. Molly Morris—who allowed Luther and subsequently other media outlets to publish her name—was attending University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in December of 2013, a transfer student from University of New Mexico. She says she and Mock met on Tinder and that he subsequently raped her while she was unconscious at a party. She believes he may have drugged her drink.

Morris didn’t feel ready to go to the police, but decided to pursue on-campus disciplinary charges against Mock through a Uniform Administrative Procedures Act (UAPA) hearing, a campus proceeding that works somewhat like a criminal case. She tells a familiar story about what happened next, a story that’s common in the confused clusterfuck that constitutes on-campus sexual assault trials.

Morris says she gave a statement before the hearing to associate dean of students Chad Clark, but that when she saw it, he’d changed her wording in ways she felt favored Mock (“Ms. Morris recalls regaining consciousness while She and Mr. Mock engaged in sexual intercourse,” for example, which Morris requested be changed to “Ms. Morris recalls regaining consciousness due to sharp vaginal pain. She saw Mr. Mock on top of her, she was lying flat on her back, and his penis inside her vagina.”) The hearing, she adds, consisted of four hours of questioning her, but only an hour and a half of questioning Mock; throughout the proceedings, she sat across the table from him.

The professor acting as a “judge” in the case, Joanie Sompayrac, initially cleared Mock of the sexual assault, and wrote, according to Luther, that “both parties in this case have exercised poor judgment.” She blamed Morris specifically, writing that the girl “should not have engaged in underage drinking, nor should she have been drinking beverages that were not under her control the entire evening.” But two weeks later, with no explanation or considering new evidence, Sompayrac reversed her ruling and Mock was expelled from school.

It was then that Mock’s father, C.D. Mock, a wrestling coach at UNC-Chapel Hill, started blogging about his son’s case. First he left a lengthy comment on Luther’s story, telling his son’s version of the story in graphic detail and adding, “[M]y strong and now experienced advice to you is if you choose to have sexual relations with a girl, get her on video on your phone consenting verbally.” (It’s still there.)

And then Mock senior also started a blog, where he’s continued to insist that his son is being railroaded by The Feminists. He says UTC, Jessica Luther and everyone else is pushing “a man-hating feminist agenda that now has schools handcuffed through Title IX.” He also dislikes the “yes means yes” standard of consent, which he argues leaves little choice but for men to film the women they’re having sex with to prove they consented, which even he admits is a “stupid” idea (also potentially criminal, if she’s under 18 or isn’t aware she’s being filmed, but we’ll leave that for another time). He also opines that the real way to prevent rape in college is to return to “Christian values” in society. From a post he wrote on Christmas Day:

The solution is common sense. Women are going to be sexually assaulted. And, men are going to be falsely accused of sexual assault. We have allowed our entire society to be so sexually open that these young people are bombarded constantly via TV, movies, magazines, internet, etc. with SEX every hour of every day. The feminist activist groups take the position that the answer to this problem is to lock up every male accused of sexual assault. They react this way because for years it was extremely difficult for a rape victim to get a fair shake in the legal system let alone at schools that brushed them under the carpet. My own opinion is we need to get some Christian values back into society but we all know that isn’t going to happen in this day and age. So, rather than preaching for a better world, let’s at least recognize this isn’t working and maybe we can do better.

How about this? Let’s all acknowledge this “yes means yes” idea sucks. The idea that college kids are going to whip out cell phones and record their partner saying “yes” just before sex is just stupid. It’s only a matter of time before guys figure this out and just start arguing that “the girl said yes”, even if she didn’t. Now what? Now we just assume all men are lying? It’s a totally stupid idea and it will never last and until it changes many more of us will be the carnage of “falsely accused”.

Mock doesn’t have another solution to take the place of “yes means yes,” and his understanding of sexual consent seems… shaky:

Few would argue that if a female is fully conscious, kissing and making sexual advances to a male, that this does not constitute “consent”. Now, consent to what? Only the female knows this. Once actions that clearly constitute some form of sexual activity exist, the female needs to say “no” to set the lines of behavior for it not to go further. So, the male knows either by a verbal “yes” or by her clear actions that he has a green light. That green light exists until she puts out the red light, which she can do at anytime with either a verbal “no” or any reasonable form of resistance.

In other words, the only possible way to say no to sex is a “verbal no or any reasonable form of resistance.” Mock denies that Morris was ever unconscious or too drunk to consent, and does it in the nastiest way possible:

The idea that a woman who is intoxicated has no control is ridiculous. Hate to break it to you feminists out there but the whole idea on college campus’ today is to drink alcohol in social environments to reduce inhibitions. I agree that at some point given enough alcohol one becomes unconscious and incapable of control; no one would disagree that person needs to be protected. But, to suggest that a girl who has had two drinks is incapable of saying “no” is ludicrous. Let’s poll college girls to find the truth on this; not old, single hags who hate men and have nothing to do but lobby politicians.

That’s a reference to those “man-hating feminists” who run everything, from the court system to the media to each individual college. Mock also doesn’t seem quite clear on whether having sex with an unconscious person would constitute rape.

The blog is an enormous mess and also just a generally bad idea, which Mock seems to be slowly realizing: after a story about it on news station WRAL, he wrote a post claiming that his real aim is to protect women, but that the WRAL reporter “threw me under the bus. I knew it was a risk, but I felt it was worth the risk. I was wrong. It was a mistake.”

He also defended this tweet:

And now his son is returning to campus. A Davidson County Chancery Court judge agreed to let Corey Mock go back to school pending a final ruling on his expulsion appeal. He’ll be able to take spring semester classes (his last semester, since he’s a senior). It’s not clear yet whether he’ll be allowed to graduate. His father says he won’t rest until he’s cleared his son’s name. In the meantime, Morris has filed a Title IX complaint alleging that UTC mishandled her case, triggering an investigation by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. She’s also left UTC and moved back to New Mexico.