Two former Vanderbilt University football players are currently on trial on charges they sexually assaulted a female student in June 2013, the New York Daily News reports. In total, four former football players were indicted, but the remaining two will be tried separately. The victim was reportedly unconscious at the time of the attack.
On Tuesday, the first day of the trial for former players Brandon Vandenburg and Cory Batey, the prosecution played a surveillance video for jurors that reportedly shows the victim being carried from a car into a dorm building by Vandenburg. The other former players, the prosecutor alleged, “giggled, shot video and sent text messages while they sexually abused her in an assault that began in a hallway,” according to the Daily News.
Vandenburg and Batey are charged with “five counts of aggravated rape and two counts of aggravated sexual battery” each, the Daily News report explains.
The two other accused players, Brandon Banks and Jaborian “Tip” McKenzie, are planning to testify against Vandenburg and Batey.
According to the prosecution, the assault was a heinous act that involved the victim being urinated on and assaulted with a water bottle. One of the players also “made a racial statement,” Assistant District Attorney Tom Thurmon told jurors. Three of the former players charged are black, and the fourth is white. The victim is a white woman.
Vandenburg and Batey’s defense attorneys will argue that “alcohol,” “a culture of binge drinking” and “sexual promiscuity on campus” are to blame, since their clients were extremely inebriated at the time of the incident and were not of drinking age, according to the Daily News.
“I think the proof will be very clear at the end of the trial that alcohol played a role in what happened in that dorm room,” Worrick Robinson, the attorney who represents Batey, told jurors.
Read more at the New York Daily News.