“It was like I was in a strip club.”
ESPN’s Outside the Lines dropped a nuclear bomb on the University of Louisville Tuesday morning, reporting that on-campus sexual escapades involving basketball recruits and escorts occurred from 2010 to 2014. According to OTL, five players said “they attended parties at a campus dorm that included strippers paid for by the team’s former graduate assistant coach, Andre McGee.”
OTL also interviewed a woman named Katina Powell, an escort who detailed her exploits with players in a book titled, Breaking Cardinal Rules: Basketball and the Escort Queen.
Powell says McGee was the money man, asking which strippers would want to make extra money.
“He asked me, ‘Is there any girls that want to make extra money,’ pretty much a side deal with the players. … So I asked the girls and their eyes lit up like, ‘Well, yeah,'” Powell said. “… ‘Side deals’ were sex, and if they [the dancers] wanted to make extra money, that’s what the ‘side deal’ was, sex.”
“The recruit would pick out what girl he wanted. Andre would come to me, tell me what girl the recruit wanted, and I would tell the girl and she would say her price,” Powell said.
Powell, who appears to be a madam of sorts, claims as many as five or six strippers had sex with recruits from 2010 to 2014. Perhaps the most damning (and disgusting) part of this scandal is that Powell employed her daughters, one of whom was paid $100 to have sex with Russ Smith following the 2013 National Championship.
Obviously, all of this looks horrible for head coach Rick Pitino. If he says he’s not aware of the parties, then he’s truly clueless about his program. If he claims any acknowledgment, then he’s out the door.
You can read OTL‘s entire investigation here.
