Shortly after eleven on the morning of Saturday, April 5, 1986, a student at Lehigh University was walking the halls of the Stoughton House dormitory, on the third floor, when she noticed that the door to room number 301 was ajar. She peeked her head inside to check on the room’s occupant, Jeanne Ann Clery, and found the nineteen-year-old freshman’s lifeless body. When homicide detectives from the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, police department arrived, they immediately suspected foul play.
Clery was found in her own bed, with suspicious marks on her body, and an autopsy would confirm she’d been strangled and raped. She’d fought her attacker, and was still alive when she was raped and sodomized, forensic pathologists confirmed; down her back, a series of small cuts seemed to indicate she’d been threatened and held at bay with a sharp object at some point during the assault; her neck had cuts made with pieces of a broken glass bottle; and there were teeth marks on her face and breasts. Her wallet was missing, along with a camera and a radio she’d kept in her dorm room.
With the school in a panic, campus police doubled patrols and ordered all of the private school’s dormitories be locked around the clock, instead of just at night. But it soon became clear that the danger was from within the campus community: a day after the killing, two students told police that their friend, Josoph Henry, had made a shocking confession to them at a party the night before. Henry, a twenty-year-old Lehigh student from Newark, New Jersey, had burglarized Clery’s room after finding the door ajar; he left with her wallet, radio, and camera, but returned after realizing his own wallet was missing and that he might have left it in her room. Clery woke up when he returned to her room, and he decided to kill the girl so she couldn’t identify him. There were cuts still visible on Henry’s hands when police arrested him, and Clery’s missing wallet, camera, and radio were found in his room. He confessed to the crime, and later pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but was convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair.
Clery had graduated from the exclusive Agnes Irwin School, a private, all-girls academy founded by Benjamin Franklin’s great-great-granddaughter in 1869. At Lehigh, she had studied liberal arts and played on the women’s tennis team, but had spent less time on the court in the weeks leading up to her death, so she could focus on her studies. Her parents, Connie and Howard, lived a little more than an hour from Lehigh’s campus, and saw her far more often than her two older brothers, who had gone to college at Tulane in New Orleans; a week before the murder, Clery had attended mass with her parents.
“It was the happiest year of her life,” her mother said.
Soon after Henry’s conviction, the Clerys filed a $25-million lawsuit accusing the university of negligence, and lashed out at the school in the media. Their daughter, they claimed, had died because of “slipshod” security and the university’s “rapidly escalating crime rate, which they didn’t tell anybody about.”
Among these security lapses, they argued, was the fact that Henry, who lived off campus, was able to gain entry to the Stoughton Hall dormitory after hours, when it was locked, because other students had used pizza boxes to keep its doors open so their friends could come and go throughout the weekend. The political dimension of the Clery family’s crusade was amplified by the racial subtext of the media coverage: local newspapers repeatedly mentioned the fact that Henry, a black man, was upset after losing a recent bid to lead a student minority group on campus, and implied that he may have had a grudge against more privileged white students. The Los Angeles Times offered its own unnecessary racial commentary, writing: “Blonde, blue-eyed Jeanne Clery was Henry’s random victim.” Equally sinister racial implications seemed to sit beneath the surface of the Clerys’ activism concerning crime on college campuses.
A felon, Connie Clery said, could be your roommate in college these days, and she argued for character references and criminal-background checks to keep criminals from gaining admission to college. The implication of such comments was, ultimately, that Henry didn’t belong at any American university—an argument not supported by his past and not compatible with American notions of criminal justice, education, and human rights. Apart from these calls for wide-scale disenfranchisement, the Clerys did advocate for more reasonable and legitimate reforms on college campuses. They argued, for instance, that people should have easy access to information about the crime rate in their own campus communities, and on this issue they steadily gained traction until, in 1992, Congress passed the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act. Among other things, the Clery Act mandated that colleges and universities maintain records, and file public reports, concerning violent crimes like murder and manslaughter, forcible and non-forcible sex offenses, robbery and burglary, and domestic violence and stalking. One of the great legacies of this law is still found in police departments and campus safety offices today, where a public Clery crime log is regularly updated and available for all to see.
Sundays were an ideal time for catching up on paperwork at the University of Oregon’s campus police department. The last of the weekend house parties were over, and with them went the attendant misdemeanors: noise complaints, fistfights, and calls about underage drinking. Later in the day, when students began flooding Knight Library to cram for the week ahead, some officers might get bored enough to hustle homeless people out of the building for the night. When reporters from the university’s student newspaper stopped by to peruse Sunday entries in the Clery crime log, they were lucky if they managed to find an amusing anecdote for the crime blotter.
On March 9, 2014, Oregon’s Clery crime log recorded a Sunday as slow as any other, but these federal crime statistics are only as honest as the police who record them. In truth, a serious crime had been reported that day, but it had not been recorded in the Clery log: a distraught father told campus police that his daughter, a freshman, had been raped multiple times after attending a house party on Saturday night; the party had been held at a house in the 1200 block of East Twenty-Second Avenue, at University Street, just a few blocks from Hayward Field, and the three men accused of raping the girl were University of Oregon basketball players. Instead of recording the report in the public log, which is checked regularly by reporters, campus police chose to keep the crime quiet; and instead of launching a criminal investigation, they passed it up the chain of command, from the campus police chief to the vice president of student affairs, Robin Holmes.
This unusual series of events was by design. As the person responsible for renewing the campus police chief’s one-year contract, Holmes held tremendous power over the school’s top law-enforcement officer, Carolyn McDermed; her predecessor, former officers said, had been forced out of the job over a disagreement with Holmes, who deliberately kept the police chief on a yearly contract as a means of exercising leverage over the department. In March of 2014, what that leverage bought was a chance at containing what promised to be a major scandal; instead of a criminal investigation, there would be a public-relations strategy of the sort that the University of Oregon was uniquely qualified to handle, as it employed some eighty communications, public relations, and marketing staff, on top of the various Nike employees who quietly contributed these services to the school in an unofficial capacity—that’s one communications professional for every 295 students enrolled at the school, which is more than the combined faculty in Oregon’s departments of history, economics, and philosophy.
The crisis these public relations professionals needed to manage was twofold: it was a problem that three Oregon basketball players had been accused of rape while representing both the school’s brand and the Nike brand; it was an even bigger problem because these accusations came just as the Ducks had advanced to the second round of the Division I national championship tournament. And so, less than thirty-six hours after the rape took place, a decision was made and a plan began to take shape: campus police would do nothing with the criminal report, school officials would delay an administrative investigation, and the matter would be kept as quiet as possible while a public-relations team developed a strategy for managing and containing the crisis.
The University of Oregon’s communications director, Julie Brown, worked swiftly. By lunch time on Monday, March 10, she already had a draft of a public-relations plan, which she emailed to her colleague, Rita Radostitz. The document was titled “UO Sexual Violence Prevention Communications Plan March 2014,” but it was not a plan for preventing sexual violence; if it had been, it might have recommended sending students an alert about the sexual assault that had taken place over the previous weekend. Instead, the report was focused on a number of “key messages” to advance in the event that the rape accusations became public. Among the key messages Brown wanted to push was the idea that the “University of Oregon provides a safe environment for its students, and leaders are committed to cultural change to focus on survivor support and shared responsibility of each member of our community to prevent and respond to misconduct.” Another section, labeled “strategies/tactics,” emphasized planting media “stories about sexual violence prevention, education and resources to inform campus audiences.”
Put more simply, the school sought to promote positive media stories about its efforts to educate its students about sexual assault, even as it failed to comply with the Clery Act by alerting them to a rape that had been reported in the community, and which involved multiple students. While seeking to portray itself as an institution focused on “cultural change” and “survivor support,” the focus was clearly on obfuscating the details of a violent crime until after the accused were finished competing in a basketball tournament.
Five days after campus police and university officials learned of the incident, detectives at the Eugene Police Department opened their own rape investigation into Brandon Austin, Damyean Dotson, and Dominic Artis, who maintain that the sex was consensual. In a police report, the victim said she’d gone to a house party hosted by another Oregon basketball player named Johnathan Lloyd. She was intoxicated, she said, and went to the bathroom, where Austin, Dotson, and Artis cornered her. When she tried to push the men away, they overwhelmed her with their size and strength, and when she reached for her cell phone, one of the men pushed it out of her reach.
“No one wants to talk to you,” they said, and proceeded to take turns raping her, according to the police report.
Later, they put her in a taxi and traveled to a different apartment, where she said they raped her again, until she cried so much that the men lost interest. The next morning, she sent her father a series of text messages about what had happened, and he immediately contacted the campus police department.
The most aggressive instigator in the assaults, she said, was Austin, who had arrived in Eugene in January after transferring from Providence College. He’d been a prized recruit at his previous school, but in early November 2013, he and a teammate were quietly suspended before playing a single game for Providence. The following month, Austin’s indefinite suspension became a season-long suspension after Providence officials found him responsible for misconduct—he and his teammate had allegedly gang-raped another Providence student. Rather than staying in Providence, he was given the option of quietly transferring to another school, where he would be eligible to play ball in the 2015 season. Oregon’s head basketball coach, Dana Altman, immediately recruited him, despite his behavior, which Altman and his assistant coach discussed with Providence officials and with Austin’s family.
Altman was hired for the men’s basketball coaching job in April 2010, but his seven-year contract proved to be so complex that it took 310 days for University of Oregon athletic director Rob Mullens to sign off on it.
“We just had to wait on the legal language,” Mullens said.
This was hardly unusual. College coaching contracts, which once consisted of nothing more than a base salary from the university, had been transformed by corporate sponsorships and media partnerships into a complex web of win bonuses, media incentives, and endorsement revenues. Some contracts even include guaranteed perks like noncommercial air travel.
Altman’s fifteen-page contract, which guaranteed him $1.8 million per year, included a $450,000 base salary from the university, plus $1.35 million for “activities related to media broadcasts and other activities” arising out of the school’s agreements with IMG Communications and Nike. Altman owed much more of his livelihood to Nike, and to the school’s broadcast partner, than to the university itself, which meant that his greater responsibility, in a sense, was to the Ducks brand and the Nike brand.
Coach Altman’s contract also included certain financial incentives for advancing through certain stages of NCAA tournament play, which might explain why he allowed Dotson and Artis to participate in Oregon’s second-round NCAA tournament win over Brigham Young University. And when Oregon was eliminated by Wisconsin during the tournament’s third round, both players saw time on the court, despite the rape accusations looming over them while Austin remained sidelined. In total, Altman received $50,000 in bonuses for his team’s performance in the tournament. Nike, meanwhile, made it through a widely viewed NCAA tournament without a major scandal surrounding players who were, in effect, walking billboards for the brand.
Several weeks after Oregon’s NCAA tournament ended, the university at last sent students an email saying that a sexual assault had been reported near campus. The email came on April 10, two days after the Eugene Police Department told the university it had completed its investigation, which Lane County District Attorney Alex Gardner declined to carry any further, citing insufficient evidence. With criminal charges off the table, the university was able to handle the rape complaint as an administrative issue under the school’s code of conduct, which required a disciplinary hearing. But the school’s administrators once again elected to ignore protocol in favor of discretion by quietly negotiating an unusual arrangement with the athletes ahead of the disciplinary hearing: if Austin, Artis, and Dotson agreed to an administrative conference in which the outcome was decided solely by the university, with no outsiders involved, school officials could guarantee that they would not be expelled, and that there would be no mention of sexual misconduct on their transcripts, which would smooth the way for each of them to quietly transfer to another university. The school also delayed the disciplinary process until immediately after the academic quarter was over, allowing the players to finish their classes in good standing and transfer to other schools without harming the Oregon basketball program’s Academic Progress Rate, which the NCAA uses to measure academic success in student-athletes. And no one, including the plaintiffs, would receive a physical copy of the final written outcome of the conference, the players were told. As more time passed, the few university officials who knew about the incident began to entertain the idea that it might remain hidden forever—a scandal that never was. They had, after all, largely avoided creating a paper trail that might become public, in part by keeping any record of the crime out of open records like the Clery crime log. But Eugene police detectives had run their own investigation, with its own paper trail, and in early May the department released a graphic twenty-four-page police report to local and national media. Shortly after seven o’clock on the evening of May 5, Julie Brown received a frantic text message from her boss, University of Oregon communications director Tobin Klinger.
“The story broke,” Klinger wrote. “We need your help getting a statement from the president on his Web site. Call ASAP. We need to get it out. It’s live, including the police report.”
Klinger didn’t need to tell Brown which story it was that had broken—this was, after all, the moment they’d prepared for since the day after the rape occurred. Now it was time for the university’s public-relations staff to implement the crisis-management plan they’d been crafting, starting with a statement from Michael Gottfredson, who had taken over as university president following Lariviere’s ouster.
“I am deeply troubled by the information contained in the police report released yesterday by the Eugene Police Department,” Gottfredson wrote in a prepared statement. “The university has rigorous internal conduct processes that we follow when we receive a report such as this, as well as legal processes and a moral commitment to our students. We share a responsibility to provide a safe learning environment for our students, a responsibility I take very seriously.”
It was, at best, a deeply disingenuous statement considering how long university officials had known about the sexual assault, how objectively lax its internal conduct and legal processes had been, and how weak its moral commitment to its students now seemed. Gottfredson personally knew about the rape accusations no later than March 19, 2014, according to court documents, which was days before Artis and Dotson played in their first NCAA tournament game of the season. But Gottfredson’s statement was just one of many rolled out by the school’s public-relations staff as it sought to promote Brown’s “key messages” in the media. Vice President of Student Affairs Robin Holmes, who is a licensed clinical psychologist, granted an interview to the Oregonian to talk about the university’s wealth of resources available to survivors of sexual assault—just as Brown’s communications plan had outlined two months earlier.
“We have counseling center staff who have specialty in regard to sexual assault,” Holmes said.
The student who accused the three basketball players of rape did, in fact, start visiting the university’s Counseling and Testing Center, where students can avail themselves of affordable counseling. She met regularly with a therapist named Jennifer Morlok, unaware that university administrators would use the therapy session notes to spy on her.
At the University of Oregon’s Counseling and Testing Center, a young woman’s case file grew thicker, piled high with evidence of the emotional distress she’d suffered after being sexually assaulted. Her therapist, Jennifer Morlok, filled the file with notes detailing her trauma, and with details from conversations about her personal life and her family. The file was a sacred object, protected by a professional ethical code and by laws like the Federal Educational Records and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Like most sacred objects, a patient’s counseling records are not obtained lightly; there are specific rules and rituals associated with gaining access to these kinds of records, so it was a surprise when Karen Stokes opened her email to find an oddly informal request for counseling records one day in December of 2014.
The request came from Shelly Kerr, who was part of a leadership team that Stokes supported as an executive assistant at the Counseling and Testing Center. In her email, Kerr asked Stokes to make a complete copy of the student’s medical file and send it to the University of Oregon’s general counsel. She asked Stokes not to stamp the copied pages, as they usually did with documents that were not originals. She also asked her not to document the fact that the file had been copied, and to discuss the matter with no one besides Kerr and two of her colleagues. Stokes was unnerved by the request, which violated a number of standard procedures and protocols, so she checked the student’s file to see if it included a consent form authorizing the disclosure of medical records to the general counsel. When she found that it did not, she printed out Kerr’s email and brought it to the young woman’s therapist, Jennifer Morlok, who was equally confused about the request. As they talked, Stokes and Morlok soon reached a conclusion about what was going on: the university had mishandled the student’s sexual-assault complaint and was anticipating a lawsuit, for which it sought to gain competitive advantage through access to the girl’s confidential therapy records.
Two days later, Stokes learned that another employee had copied the file for Kerr, who personally brought it to the general counsel’s office. It didn’t take long for Stokes and Morlok to identify a number of potential ethical and legal breaches, and on January 25, 2015, armed with the printed email, Morlok filed complaints with the Oregon Board of Psychologist Examiners, alleging that Holmes, Kerr, and two others had committed ethics violations. She also filed complaints with the Oregon State Bar, which cleared the university’s interim general counsel, Douglas Park, and associate general counsel, Samantha Hill, after finding “no evidence that the university’s lawyers knew it was illegal or fraudulent” to take custody of the student’s file. The U.S. Department of Education’s chief privacy officer, Kathleen Styles, called this a legal loophole worthy of attention. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Suzanne Bonamici further highlighted this loophole in a joint statement, emphasizing that it left students with fewer privacy protections than private citizens when it comes to health records.
“The last thing sexual assault victims should have to think about is whether their own words could be used against them when they seek help,” they wrote.
Holmes, who encouraged sexual-assault victims to take advantage of the university’s counseling services in her interview with the Oregonian, looked particularly untrustworthy after seeking private records from these kinds of sessions for use as opposition research to be used in the event of a lawsuit. And Shelly Kerr, who secured the records while attempting to cover her tracks, was fined $5,000 and forced to take ethics classes by the Oregon Board of Psychologist Examiners, which investigated Morlok’s complaint and found that Kerr had breached the student’s confidentiality. A month later, the University of Oregon reached a settlement with the student, paying her $800,000 while providing four years of free tuition, housing, and student fees.
One week after the settlement was reached, Morlok resigned in an open letter to the university’s new president, Michael H. Schill, who succeeded Scott Coltrane, who had been tapped as interim president after Gottfredson resigned in the wake of the campus rape scandal, taking with him $940,000 in severance pay. Morlok was tired of the retaliation she’d faced after speaking out, she said, and discouraged by Schill’s recent comments on the scandal.
“I do not believe any of our coaches, administrators, or other university personnel acted wrongfully,” Schill had said. “Nor do I believe that any one of them failed to live up to the high moral standards that we value and that they embody in their work every day.”
President Schill, Morlok wrote, had not spoken to her or to Kerr about their ordeal, and had failed to even consider the possibility that ethics violations had occurred, and in doing so “deflated hope by many that accountability and consequences would come to those who did wrong in leadership positions, causing harm along the way.”
“I am thankful that the Oregon Board of Psychologist Examiners looks at all the evidence and does not carry blind loyalty and PR concerns as does a university,” she wrote.
Early in 2011, Lisa Thornton took as job as an assistant in the public-records office at the University of Oregon. A decade and a half earlier, Thomas Hager’s News Bureau had been the office responsible for answering many requests for public records, which public universities produce constantly—emails, contracts, budgets, and virtually anything else generated by university employees are considered public-records, which are subject to the Freedom of Information Act and Oregon’s generous open records laws. Gradually, more and more public-records requests went through Melinda Grier’s office, earning her a reputation for keeping secret records that were meant to be public. In response to calls for greater transparency, a single public records office was created, with two full-time employees to handle all records requests, which mostly came from journalists. After just a few months on the job, Thornton was thrust into a leadership role when her boss suddenly quit, and she found herself in need of an assistant to do the job she’d been doing. The university called a local temporary work agency called Personnel Source, which sent a recent college graduate named Antonia Noori Farzan.
Farzan was hired after a brief interview and began working in October 2011. Her job was relatively straightforward: When a public records request came in, she would log it in the two internal databases used by the office of public records, noting the name of the requester, the record they were requesting, and the status of the request. Next she would send an email to the head of the department responsible for warehousing the particular record she’d need to retrieve in order to satisfy the request. Finally, she would put together an estimate of how long it would take to fulfill the request and how much it would cost in fees for the person requesting the record. On both of these points, it’s useful to know something about public-records laws. The law requires that requests are fulfilled within a reasonable amount of time, and while schools may charge reasonable fees for things like copying, they may waive those fees for requests that are deemed to be in the public interest—things Farzan was surprised to learn had eluded Thornton, who once asked her what the law meant by “public interest.”
Instead of serving the public interest by releasing public records according to the criteria clearly laid out in state and federal open-records laws, Thornton was largely concerned with two private fiefdoms within the university: the public relations department and the office of the general counsel.
“Lisa was particularly afraid that the public-relations department would get mad at her,” Farzan said. “They have a lot of clout at the university.”
Farzan witnessed this clout firsthand during her second day in the office, when members of the university public-relations staff arranged for a meeting with Thornton and her new assistant.
“She wore a fleece with the UO logo that day and told me that she had felt like she should wear some UO gear to the meeting,” Farzan said. “I guess to show institutional loyalty or whatever. She seemed worried that they would ask for her to be fired if she did anything that they weren’t happy with.”
Institutional loyalty was precisely the point of the meeting that unfolded. In light of the ongoing NCAA investigation into Willie Lyles and his recruiting services for Oregon, the public-relations staff said it was important that any public-records request that might cast the university in a negative light be funneled through their department.
“We agreed to let them know about any request that was related to a major scandal,” Farzan said. The university’s public-relations department would sometimes instruct the public-records office not to release a record, or to delay its release until they said it was okay. Requests related to Nike, the NCAA, or the faculty union were among those automatically flagged for review by the public-relations department. Eventually, Thornton’s office became even more stingy with public records.
“If there was a request from a professional journalist asking for anything more detailed than someone’s salary or the contract for a new hire, Lisa just assumed that the topic was controversial and would flag it,” Farzan said.
Controversial topics were also of special interest to Randy Geller and Douglas Park in the office of the general counsel. Thornton and Farzan cc’d Geller and Park on records requests that might prove harmful to the university’s image or upsetting to important donors or corporate partners. When they didn’t want some public record to be released, they had ways of making sure that it wasn’t. One way of doing this was to take advantage of the fact that the school is allowed to charge requesters a fee for their records based on the cost of gathering and preparing them; by claiming the records required legal review, inflating the time it might take to conduct that review, and applying the same hourly fee they might charge a corporate client for their legal services, Geller and Park could offer to release a batch of records only if the requester was willing to pay some astronomical sum. (While reporting on the Austin, Artis, and Dotson rape scandal for The New York Times, I was told it would cost $9,493.95 to process my requests for emails and text messages between Oregon communications staff and administrators in the days after the rape occurred and in the immediate aftermath of the police report’s release.) Thornton also liked to charge journalists as much as she could for records requests, even when they qualified for a public-interest fee waiver.
Another method favored by Geller, Park, and the assistant to the university president, Dave Hubin, was to redact entire pages whenever student privacy laws, like FERPA, gave them an opportunity to redact a student’s name.
There were other things about Thornton’s work that surprised Farzan.
“Her attitude toward journalists was pretty negative,” Farzan said. “Right from the start she told me that she found them annoying, and there were certain reporters from the Oregonian, the Register-Guard, and the Daily Emerald who were making the majority of the requests, so she followed them from a private Twitter account in order to try and get a sense of what they were working on.”
Thornton’s policy was to charge journalists as much as she could for records requests, and to only give the “public service” waiver if a journalist could prove there was a lot of interest in what they were writing about—a crude misreading of the meaning of the term “public interest,” which generally refers to the public good in the context of journalism. More than making journalists pay, Farzan said, Thornton loved giving them nothing at all.
“Lisa’s policy was not to give out information if she could find any reason to withhold it,” Farzan said.
This institutional obsession with secrecy trickled down from the top: Oregon administrators feared anything that might tarnish the university’s brand or damage its valuable relationship with Nike, which in turn led faculty and staff to fear the school’s powerful public-relations department. These fears, which led Thornton to disregard open-records laws in favor of absolute subservience to the university’s public-relations arm, were not unfounded. In 2015, the University of Oregon fired two Knight Library archivists for releasing documents on Frohnmayer and Lariviere without first having them vetted for confidential information by the school’s general counsel. The Society of American Archivists found the school’s reaction unusually punitive considering the benign nature of the records released. The real issue, some felt, was the fact that the documents in question had been handed over to Bill Harbaugh, a University of Oregon economics professor who often criticized the school’s administration on his blog.
Once a replacement was hired to take charge of special collections at the Knight Library, a new policy was implemented: student journalists, postgraduate researchers, and others requesting archival materials that were not part of an existing collection would be referred to the office of public records. It was an unusual policy, but struck most researchers as harmless, because most people had no inkling that the university’s office of public records was, in fact, acting as an extension of its office of public relations.
Dave Frohnmayer was unusually active for a septuagenarian retiree fighting prostate cancer. For a few years, he remained president emeritus at the University of Oregon, and practiced law at a Eugene firm called Harrang Long Gary Rudnick. His work there sometimes veered into strange territory for someone who had spent so much of his personal life in hospitals, and so much of his professional life serving Oregon taxpayers: in April 2013, for example, he testified as a paid expert witness on behalf of major tobacco companies that were seeking to avoid the payment of hundreds of millions of dollars owed to the state of Oregon under the terms of a 1998 settlement over taxpayer funds that had been lost to tobacco-related health-care costs.
Outside of the courtroom, Frohnmayer continued to fight tirelessly against FA, which still threatened the life of his last living daughter, Amy. She was approaching thirty, which made her older than either of her big sisters had lived to be. Amy was accomplished, even for a Frohnmayer: She graduated from Stanford with a degree in psychology, then enrolled in a master’s program at Oregon State University, where she studied to be a counselor. When she wasn’t studying or helping her parents out with the Fanconi Anemia Research Fund, she loved hiking, white-water rafting, and scuba diving—anything that brought her outdoors. She was a natural athlete. At South Eugene High School, she’d played varsity tennis and cofounded a cross-country ski team, and she began running half marathons while she was an undergraduate at Stanford. Sometimes she logged thirty or forty miles a week, which worried her doctors, who constantly monitored her blood values. It wasn’t recklessness, but an extraordinary determination to go after the experiences she truly wanted to have; watching her sisters die had shown her what it meant to miss out on those opportunities. When she was nineteen, Amy asked her doctors to let her run a full marathon, which they allowed her to do only after she agreed to take shots of EPO, a blood-boosting cancer drug that became famous after Lance Armstrong secretly used it to win the Tour de France.
“I guess I was kind of doping,” Amy said. “But I made it—I did all 26.2, baby.”
In 2013, Amy met Alex Winn, a pharmacist in Bend, Oregon. They began dating and by December 2014, things were serious enough that Alex went along on the Frohnmayer family’s annual vacation to Hawaii. Dave and Lynn felt blessed to see their daughter so happy and healthy as she approached her thirties—a chapter of life that doctors had always said she’d never live to see.
A few months after the Frohnmayers returned from Kauai, on March 10, 2015, Dave Frohnmayer died in his sleep at the age of seventy-four. He was eulogized at length in the pages of Oregon’s daily newspapers and weekly magazines, which noted both his long and storied political career and his tenure as the president who reshaped the University of Oregon more than any other—for better or for worse. In each of his obituaries, beneath his impressive list of accomplishments, was the line that would have pleased him most if he’d been able to read it:
“Dave is survived by his wife, Lynn, his sons, Mark and Jonathan, and his daughter Amy.”
After her husband’s death, Lynn Frohnmayer worried about the future of the Fanconi Anemia Research Fund, which continues to fund research aimed at improving and extending the lives of those living with FA. She called Phil Knight and explained how difficult it would be to raise funds without Dave’s political connections and his Harvard friends.
“I asked him for $20 million,” Lynn said, “and he gave me $10 million.”
The following year, Knight announced the gift of $10 million to the Fanconi Anemia Research Fund, payable in annual instalments of $1 million. The gift, which was made in Dave’s honor, will help identify new therapies for preventing and treating various cancers that afflict young people with FA, in the hope that more of them will live to adulthood, Lynn said.
“Phil Knight is a very honorable guy and a very caring guy,” she said. “He’s a very sentimental man, and a good man.”