"His teacher, Robert, was also one of Florida State's superstars, a professor in training with a pile of prestigious awards and grants. He is also gay, a fact that "any of my students are gonna figure out pretty quickly," he says. The defensive back took his required writing class a few summers back, and they met early in the course for a one-on-one conference to discuss an assigned essay exploring a significant personal moment in the students' lives.
"It was just me and him in my windowless office on the fourth floor of an empty campus building," Robert says. The player submitted his essay and went down the hall for a drink, while Robert read it and promptly "freaked out."
The paper was "a very graphic, very detailed, very proud telling of how he basically got his high school classmates together to beat the shit out of this 'fag'"—a word used often in the work—"and literally kick him in the teeth to teach him a lesson." They were sick of their mark "acting like a girl," Robert recalls, and so they went about punching him in the face, emptying his gumline. The tone of the player's essay was that "he was very proud of himself. He had taken the initiative to organize this beating."
Robert panicked. The essay's victim "talked sexually, had tight clothes, and had feminine features—some of which could be certainly be said of me," he says. "Why would he give that to me? I took it in the moment as a personal threat."
When the player returned, Robert faked getting an important text and begged out of the conference, then ran down to a mentor's office to report the paper."
That's horrible if true.
