Two women say ex-Washington RB Derrius Guice raped them at LSU when he was a freshman

The investigator interviewed the woman for three and a half hours, with breaks, over Zoom, asking detailed questions about the sexual-assault allegation, the woman said.Washington head coach Ron Rivera told reporters in a video conference Aug. 10 that the decision to cut Guice was his, but he declined to say if any factors beyond the domestic violence charges influenced the decision.“Any time you have to release a very talented young football player, it’s always a tough decision,” Rivera said. Brian McCarthy, Vice President of Communications for the NFL, said the league was unaware of any sexual-assault allegations or Title IX complaints against Guice until earlier this month.Both women told USA TODAY that Guice assaulted them in their own apartments after nights of heavy drinking. The other woman, the tennis player, said Guice raped her when she allowed him into her home after meeting him for the first time at a bar.“I was drunk and passed out on my bed,” the first woman said. The other woman said LSU emailed her after a friend reported the alleged assault, letting the woman know support services were available and asking if she wanted to file a formal complaint. “Legally, in a court, the question is, ‘Was a school deliberately indifferent to the knowledge of the sexual assault?’ That’s a tough standard for a plaintiff to meet,” Brodsky said.“But I think this could fall on the wrong side of that line.” The first woman, who did not play sports, said she lived in the same apartment complex as many athletes, Guice included, as a freshman in 2015-16. “I remember, I was like, ‘Who invited him?’” the woman told USA TODAY, saying she disliked Guice because of what she’d seen previously of his attitude and demeanor.At one point, drunk and uncomfortable with Guice’s presence, the woman said, she went into her bedroom, shut the door and passed out on her bed. Upset, the woman told her friend on the LSU women’s diving team but asked her not to say anything, she said. His description matched that of the woman’s.The former boyfriend redshirted his freshman year and said he steered clear of Guice because “I probably would have lost my (expletive) on him.” But he said LSU head football coach Ed Orgeron brought up the subject of his then-girlfriend and Guice about a year after the alleged assault, telling the athlete that he shouldn’t be bothered by it. Orgeron did not respond to a request for comment.The woman said when she heard Guice had told other players he’d had sex with her, she made it clear to them it had not been consensual. The friend told her to go and lock herself in his bedroom, which she did, but Guice pounded on the bedroom door until she opened it, she said.“I just unlocked the door and looked at him,” the woman recalled. One of the friends said the woman told her about it the day after.“She was just kind of shaken about it and not knowing what to say about it, but definitely knowing something wasn’t right,” the friend said.The woman said she had been abusing alcohol and prescription drugs before she met Guice. A rehab center employee later reported the alleged rape to LSU, she and her father said.Later that month, the woman’s father met Sell during the Southeastern Conference women’s tennis championships in Nashville and told her an LSU football player raped his daughter, he said.