In 2020, USA Today broke an investigative series emanating from survivor reports of sexual assault and harassment by at least nine LSU football players that led to federal investigations of LSU’s domestic violence and sexual abuse mishandling and cover-ups.

However, this was not the first exposé of LSU’s sexual and gendered abuse cover-up machine. In 2015, The Times-Picayune in New Orleans published two articles, below, which report on BUREAU of CHANGE founder Margot Herster, who was the first whistleblower to warn of faculty and administrators’ sexual abuses of students, systemic gender discrimination, and LSU’s mechanisms to silence and retaliate against survivors while protecting aggressors.

Journalist Emily Lane describes the openly permissive culture of sexual abuse at LSU characterized by an atmosphere where faculty rate breasts, ogle female students’ social media photos and solicit students for “funny business” (meaning sex). She cites a survey of students, which found approximately 15% of LSU students reported that they experienced sexual abuses by their professors or graduate instructors.

The Baton Rouge-based The Advocate, which acquired The Times-Picayune in 2019, purged these articles from its online archives. In 2020, Margot Herster, with the help of Emily Lane, requested that they be reinstated. The Advocate refused.

Why would The Advocate purge and, as a result, delete from internet search results that one of its publications was the first to report on LSU’s sexual abuse cover-ups five years before the USA Today investigative reporting? For journalists and news organizations. this is normally something to show off not hide. Two facts are relevant:

(1) The Advocate is thought of by many in Louisiana as semi-state controlled media, part of a power trifecta joined with state government and the state’s flagship public university under the control of the state-appointed LSU Board of Supervisors.

(2) Sponsorship from Lousiana State University, in particular LSU football, pays bills for The Advocate. Its funding sources and unabashed cuddling with corporate and government interests that reflect in its editorial decisions, may be prime reasons that The Advocate won the media shakedown with means to take over the financially struggling Times-Pic in 2019.

Emily Lane, “Complaints of sexual harassment, unequal pay and misused funds at LSU prompted instructor’s retaliatory firing, lawsuit alleges,” The Times Picayune, March 6, 2015

Emily Lane, “Sexually harassed or discriminated against, has it happened to you?” The Times Picayune, March 6, 2015