individuals about Bernie Fine. Perhaps because the reporters asked their questions in a manner designed to protect against spreading information that they did not know to be true, it is not clear whether (or which) persons interviewed became aware of the allegations Davis had made against Fine. In June 2003, after the Post-Standard declined to run the story, Davis took the allegations to ESPN. ESPN also looked into the allegations, but it too declined to run the story until eight years later—in 2011. The Special Committee’s review did not produce reliable evidence that any University administrator became aware of these media inquiries in 2002 or 2003, or at any point before Davis sent his September 2005 e-mail to the University that triggered the BSK investigation. It is clear that Bernie Fine himself knew of the media inquiries, in that he told a BSK lawyer in 2005 that he had been contacted by the press some years earlier. However, without Fine’s cooperation (which the Special Committee did not receive), we could not determine who Fine may have told about the media inquiries. Coach James Boeheim informed us that he did not learn of the media inquiries until 2005, when Fine told him about those inquiries in the context of the University’s investigation of Bobby Davis’s allegations.3 According to Coach Boeheim, Fine did not tell Boeheim in 2002 or 2003 that the press was inquiring into whether Fine had molested Bobby Davis. Assistant Coach Michael Hopkins acknowledged knowing about the media inquiries in 2002, telling us that at that time a Post-Standard reporter had asked him whether he had seen any inappropriate contact between Fine and Davis, and whether Fine had ever touched him (Hopkins)
3
Evans, without having any recollection of the details (or any notes with which to refresh his recollection) told us that he took from a 2005 conversation with Boeheim that Boeheim had known of the media inquiries when they took place, and had therefore known of them for several years. Unlike other interviews conducted in the course of BSK’s investigation, Evans’s conversations with Boeheim were not memorialized in a statement. Coach Boeheim has a clear recollection that he learned of the allegations against Fine for the first time in 2005.
16