Kendall Francis was two days into the fall semester, sitting in a classroom at LSU, when an email told her the news. An administrative law judge had reviewed the case against defensive end Damien Shanklin, kept the university’s finding that he was responsible for forcible rape, and wiped out his punishment. This story highlights the ongoing issue of campus sexual assault and its consequences for students and universities alike. She read it at her desk.
The October before, she had spent about seven hours in a hospital having a rape kit done. In the months after, she lost weight and failed both semesters of her freshman year.
The judge, Janet Waguespack, called Shanklin’s two-semester suspension “exceedingly harsh.” She swapped it for four semesters of disciplinary probation with no restrictions. Nonconsensual penetration, she wrote, was “an error in judgment” that did not show “deliberate disregard for the dignity and autonomy” of the woman it happened to.
Read that again. LSU found it more likely than not that he raped her. That is the school’s own conclusion, under its own standard of proof. The finding stood. The penalty for rape did not.
LSU’s investigators got it right. Then the school’s own appeal process undid them, and nobody walked the finding across the street to the district attorney. The institution kept its finding, the roster kept its player, and the woman got an email.
Keep one fact in your pocket. Louisiana saw this coming. Five years ago it passed a law built to stop exactly this, and LSU signed on.
His attorneys, Grant L. Willis and Morgan H. Johnson, say he “maintains his innocence” and that what has been portrayed “is not a full account of all of the facts and circumstances.” He has not been charged, and he is entitled to his defense. Francis now takes her classes online so she won’t run into him.
Eleven months to reach a prosecutor
The encounter happened in Shanklin’s dorm room in the early hours of October 18, 2025. LSU Police were called to the football operations building at Shanklin’s request. According to records reviewed by Tiger Rag, officers classified it as a noncriminal, mental-health matter and drove Francis to Baton Rouge General.
LSU’s defenders will ask why she didn’t go to the police. The police came to her before she filed anything, and the first badge she met wrote it up as something other than a crime. LSU’s Title IX office did not get that report until December 9.
LSU signed a parish agreement requiring schools to “promptly notify law-enforcement agencies of reported power-based violence involving a possible felony.” LSU has not said whether it gave that notice. WAFB reported the final Title IX ruling was never referred to law enforcement. LSU President Wade Rousse says the school “strictly followed our policies, procedures and best practices.” I believe him. That is the problem.
Francis posted her story on TikTok on September 14. District Attorney Hillar Moore III’s office says it learned of the case September 22. She filed a criminal complaint September 28. A video got done in eight days what a university’s police force, Title IX office, and appeals process could not get done in eleven months.
Same fall, different breakdown, 1,100 miles northeast
A Cornell student known in court papers as Jane Doe says seven men gang-raped her at the Chi Phi fraternity house in October 2024. She told Cornell University Police, “I can say with 100% confidence I was raped,” according to transcripts reported by CBS News. That sentence never made it into the six-page summary sent to Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten, who declined to prosecute. Cornell expelled two of the men and suspended two. Jane Doe dropped out.
She sued in New York state court on September 16. Van Houten reopened the case eleven days later. On October 1, Gov. Kathy Hochul named Attorney General Letitia James special prosecutor. “In what world does the district attorney not interview her or even request the full transcript?” Hochul asked. The men have not been charged, and the allegations remain unproven.
At LSU the failure was the appeal. At Cornell it was the handoff. Same result: the facts died between campus and courthouse, and a woman had to go public to dig them back up.
LSU was warned five years ago
In 2021 LSU paid the Husch Blackwell law firm to audit its handling of sexual misconduct. The firm found an athletics administrator who left running back Derrius Guice’s name off rape reports because, she said, “I get a lot of public information requests.” LSU promised reform. Asked this year how Shanklin had come back to the team at all, first-year head coach Lane Kiffin said, “We just followed what university told us to.”
That line explains Baton Rouge. It explains Baylor, which fired coach Art Briles in 2016 over mishandled assault reports. Palo Alto is different. Police arrested Stanford swimmer Brock Turner the night of the assault, and a jury convicted him. Then Judge Aaron Persky gave him six months in county jail, and voters removed Persky two years later. Waguespack made the same call Persky did: the athlete’s future first.
In the Association of American Universities’ 2019 climate survey, 25.9 percent of undergraduate women reported unwanted sexual contact by force or while unable to consent. Men reported it too, at lower rates. Any fix has to work for them as well.
Title IX is not a courtroom
Title IX runs behind closed doors, and the harshest thing it can do is expel a student. When a school routes a felony into that office and nowhere else, the crime becomes a conduct file, and a conduct file can be appealed down to probation by one judge on one afternoon.
I spent 23 years in the Air Force. I know what it looks like when an institution closes ranks around its own, and I know the tell: the people with the most to lose from the truth are the ones deciding who hears it.
Parents spend August hauling mini-fridges up dormitory stairwells. We sign the tuition check believing the school has a plan for the worst night of our kid’s life, son or daughter. At LSU, the plan was a probation letter.
Now take that fact out of your pocket. Act 472 of 2021 requires every Louisiana public campus to sign an agreement with local police and prosecutors and review it every year. The East Baton Rouge version LSU signed already requires prompt notice of possible felonies, and already lets schools give it without naming the victim.
So the fix is not a new law. Notify the district attorney of every felony finding, without naming the survivor unless the survivor says yes. Publish the count every year, and put a job on the line when a notice is missed. Survivors keep control of their names. Prosecutors stop learning about rape findings from TikTok.
Parents, ask before you sign the next check: if my kid reports a sexual assault here, who tells the district attorney, how fast, and does my kid decide whether their name goes with it? Get the answer in writing.
Kendall Francis is finishing her semester from a laptop. Jane Doe is gone from Cornell. Both women carried the facts past the campus gate on their own, and only then did anyone with a badge and a subpoena pay attention. The schools that cashed their tuition checks should have carried those facts first.
Sources
- Yahoo Sports / Los Angeles Times, “LSU reduced a football player’s punishment for rape. Now the D.A. is investigating”
- Tiger Rag, “LSU Title IX Case: What Police Knew, and When”
- The Advocate, attorneys’ statement and Rousse statement
- WAFB, Francis interview (hospital visit, freshman year)
- NewsOne, Francis’s TikTok account (rape kit, hospital hours)
- WAFB, attorneys’ statement of innocence (Oct. 1, 2026)
- ESPN, police investigation
- NBC News
- CBS News, case details and Title IX outcomes
- Courthouse News, Doe v. Cornell complaint (N.Y. Supreme Court)
- Archyde, how Francis learned of the ruling
- Tiger Rag, MOU signatories and notice requirement
- ABC News, timeline
- ABC News, Hochul and Letitia James appointment
- Louisiana Board of Regents, legislative response to Act 472 of 2021
- University of Oregon, 2019 AAU survey FAQ (men’s rates measured nationally)
- Louisiana Illuminator, Husch Blackwell findings
- Washington University, 2019 AAU Campus Climate Survey national figures
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