New Lions coach Matt Patricia might be a sexual assulter. Well, at least it’s a coach who might be bad this time? That’s new I guess. Twist on the formula.

It came out last week that someone unearthed an old sexual assault charge on Patricia from back in ’96. Apparently he and some other creep broke into a hotel room of a college student and assaulted her. What assaulted is in this instance hasn’t been defined, but sexual assault isn’t good no matter what degree it is so that part doesn’t matter. Patricia got charged, he got indicted, and the case got dropped 10 months later due to the victim apparently not wanting to go through with a trial. So yeah. 22 years ago Matt Patricia may have been a very bad person. That’s about all we know.

First off, before anything else, so much has been made of the Lions “not doing their due diligence” in finding this information out in the job interview. I call phooey on that. The Lions didn’t find this case, no, but apparently no one else did either for need I remind you…22 years. For 22 years apparently nobody did their homework on the dude and found this? If this information was so easy to find why didn’t anyone notice it till now? I don’t blame the Lions for trusting the guy and not looking into it. Nobody else did until whoever found this out. Honestly I think it’s a bigger indictment on the Patriots that they apparently were “unaware” of this despite Patricia being an employee there for 13 years. I think the Pats probably did know but chose to be fine with it, but obviously they aren’t going to tell the public that. #Metoo is a pretty new phenomenon, it would be pretty easy to brush something like this under the rug in the 90’s and 2000’s when we didn’t give it as much attention.

I don’t know if I think Patricia did it or not. I don’t think we’ll ever know at this point. Patricia gave a pretty definitive “I AM INNOCENT” speech but like, so did Rafael Palmeiro about steroids. Remember that? Funny how that turned out to be the fattest lie. I’m not taking anything out of Patricia’s mouth at face value. If it is true, it’ll be pretty hard to prove it at this point, so there’s no use in Patricia saying anything else other than he was falsely accused. He has everything to lose and the chance it meaningfully backfires on him is small, so of course he’d lie if he did it.

I think something bad happened, and Patricia did a bad thing, the extent of which is tough to gauge (because we don’t know very much), and the woman gave up because the stress of making an accusation like this is ridiculous. The victim blaming, all that stuff which makes it so hard for victims to come forward these days would be amplified 22 years ago. I feel like if this woman was just out to falsely accuse Patricia there’d be a bigger chance we’d have already known about this, or she would have come forward since this news broke to grab some spotlight. Dropping the case so close to trial seems inherently suspicious but everything I read about the case being dropped makes it sound to me like the woman honestly just wanted to be done with it. Maybe she felt wronged and wanted justice but the justice system sucks and was just making her trauma worse with prolonged stress, so she dropped it and went ahead to move on with her life. It really sounds like a textbook case of how the justice system tends to treat sexual assault victims. At this point, if my speculation is the truth, I feel really bad for the woman. She’s had 22 years to get over this wound and now, out of the blue, the scar is likely being ripped back open. She doesn’t deserve this. If Patricia is innocent, he doesn’t deserve this either.

After 22 years, no matter what the truth, the people involved have likely moved on and this is just reopening old trauma for headlines. We aren’t suddenly going to get the truth now. The case was dropped. It was ages ago. This story will be a talking point for a little while, nothing will come of it, and everything will move on. It’s just a bummer situation. Life is pain.