NOT Collateral Damage: LSU Student Shares Rape Ordeal On TikTok

Sexual assault on campus is as American as homecoming. It happens at PWIs like Columbia, at HBCUs, in the Big 10, and the small Ivies. And for just as long, schools have been burying it.

Today, survivors are louder than ever about their assaults and about the institutions that failed them. Some file lawsuits. Some drag around the mattress they were raped on. And some make TikToks to tell the world just how f—d up it all is.

On Sept. 14, Kendall Francis, a creator who goes by Kendall Danielle, posted a video about being raped at Louisiana State University. She tells her story in a flat, get-ready-with-me tone, perhaps an unintended metaphor for the ubiquity of rape.

Kendall, a first-generation college student, told WAFB in an exclusive interview Thursday that she met the player on social media and visited him at his dorm in October 2025. What happened there cost her. She says it brought on depression and weight loss, and she failed both of her freshman semesters. “The fact my entire freshman year was taken away from me because of this experience is why I spoke out about it,” she said.

Kendall’s video opens very matter-of-factly.

“So I was raped by a football player at LSU last year in October. October 18 to be exact, at 4:30 a.m., and that day basically changed my life,” Kendall begins her video. She now takes medication for a severe anxiety disorder and has an emotional support animal, “who I love very much.”

She spent seven hours at the hospital that day getting a rape kit. Staff asked if she wanted to press charges. “His mom had texted me that morning and asked me not to press charges on him, so it didn’t ruin his career and everything like that. And then he sent me $1,000,” she says. In the Title IX report, the player claims she took the money in exchange for not pressing charges. She declined to comment, citing the criminal investigation.

Kendall didn’t press charges. She went through LSU’s Title IX process instead, and “the process did not end until the second day of classes for this fall semester.” She met every deadline, she says, but it kept getting extended “due to him or due to LSU.”

After a “pretty rough hearing,” LSU found the player accountable for rape and suspended him for one year. “Even though for rape, the suspension is two to three years,” Kendall says. “Even though he admitted on record that he did rape me, they gave him a lesser sentence, and he appealed.”

He won. Kendall found out by email. During class.

“It said EVEN though he admitted to rape, he was able to play football, able to join orgs,” she says. According to WAFB, LSU upheld the rape finding but downgraded his punishment to disciplinary probation without restrictions, which doesn’t keep him off the field.

Kendall now takes all her classes online. 

So let me get this right.
The boy admitted to rape on record.
The school said he was accountable for rape.
The school did not involve the police.
The school suspended the young man for a year, when rape violations usually get two to three times that long.
The process was brutal, lasting almost a full year.
The school dragged it out.
The boy appealed, won, is back on campus, and back on the team.
The girl is doing all her classes online with a severe anxiety disorder.

Why did she wait so long to go public? She told WAFB she thought that once LSU found him responsible, criminal charges would follow. When nothing happened, she made the video. On Monday, Sept. 21, she said she would press charges herself, though, as WBRZ reported, the police initially put her off. She says Baton Rouge police sent her to LSU Police, and LSU Police weren’t interested in digging. “I would like to see him in jail,” she told WAFB.

By Tuesday, most likely thanks to the traction on social media, the East Baton Rouge District Attorney’s office had opened a criminal investigation and requested records from LSU, both police departments and the coroner. LSU President Wade Rousse assured everyone that the school “has strictly followed our policies, procedures and best practices, including the Title IX process.”

Interesting that he mentioned Title IX.

Title IX: A Mixed Bag For Survivors

Title IX is a federal civil rights law that bans sex discrimination in schools and requires them to address rape as a form of it. But like civil rights laws flipped on their heads by white men suing for discrimination, Title IX has been weaponized by predators who sue schools, which tend to fold because they don’t want bad press or to look like they’re discriminating against men. A law built to protect women ends up protecting the men who hurt them. And so it goes.

Survivors say the process retraumatizes them in at least three ways, according to an account published by Equal Rights Advocates: Interrogation by poorly trained investigators; cross-examination by an adviser the accused gets to pick; and no hard deadlines, so schools can drag cases out as long as they like. As Kendall knows so well.

And about “strictly followed”: Tiger Rag reports that LSU signed a local agreement requiring it to promptly notify law enforcement of any reported possible felony on campus, even without naming the victim. When Tiger Rag asked whether LSU did, the school didn’t answer.

Big football, big money

Kendall said LSU protects its football players. She hit it right on the head.

At big football schools, Black players have the privileges of white men. They are GAWDS, and some have the potential to be very, very rich, in real time. Because they’re valuable to the schools, athletes often skate through: with grades, with rules, and apparently with rape. Big-time athletics comes with a heady mix of entitlement, celebrity, aggression, probably some drugs and alcohol, and most importantly… no consequences.

Why? Follow the money. LSU football brought in $117.5 million in fiscal 2025, with $66.8 million in profit, while the athletic department as a whole barely broke even. Football is paying for everything else. Game days pump tens of millions into Baton Rouge businesses. And, according to Tiger Rag, the billion-dollar LSU brand is still $25–$35 million in the hole, thanks to revenue sharing, a $54 million coaching buyout and a new $91 million contract. LSU football’s profitability matters more than ever to a lot of people.

So of course the lone Black girl is left to pick up the pieces. The Black girl is collateral damage. The Black girl can stay at home while we slap her rapist on the back for a touchdown.

That’s rape culture, an environment where rape is common and sexual violence against women is normalized and excused, expected and protected, as Marshall University’s Women’s Center defines it. It’s Diddy. And Game of Thrones. And lyrics old and new. 

The coldest part is that Kendall did all the “right” things and got not a modicum of justice, just more injustice. According to LSU, the player went to police first that morning. Tiger Rag, which obtained the initial report, says he told officers he wanted to document the encounter because he was worried she’d accuse him. That’s his account, not a finding. The officer then took Kendall to the hospital for a mental-health evaluation, and LSU Police filed the whole thing as a noncriminal mental-health matter. Meanwhile, he scrounged up $1,000, and his mama begged her to forget all about it (sometimes the ax is made out of the wood of the tree). 

Then the school dragged her through a year of delayed hearings (long enough for his suspension to run out?) and had the unmitigated gall to email her that although it found him liable for rape, he’s back on campus, back on the team, with all the attendant privileges thereof.

Kendall was caught up in a vicious vortex of sexism, misogynoir, classism and big business. A Black girl unprotected—as usual—amid the roar of the crowd on game day and the crush of dollar bills changing hands.

Editor’s note: Kendall has said she has chosen not to name the player until she is ready, and we respect that decision. He has not been arrested or criminally charged.

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