Sedona Prince's college basketball career ended quietly, and with a loss. The TCU center put up four points, an assist, and nine rebounds before fouling out in the fourth quarter of a 58-47 defeat in the Elite Eight against one-seed Texas. Prince didn't shine much in the prior game, either, a TCU victory that mostly belonged to teammate Hailey Van Lith. Prince had been one of the faces of the push for women's equality in college sports, and then became the subject of accusations from women who said Prince had assaulted or abused them.
In total, five women have either talked to reporters, or to law enforcement, or filed documents with a court describing some form of sexual assault or physical violence by Prince. The first woman spoke out on TikTok several years ago; the most recent was in police reports filed earlier this year. Back in August, Prince said on TikTok, "I have never abused anybody in my life." In response to recent police reports in Texas, her lawyer A. Boone Almanza said Prince herself was an assault victim that day, kicked and hit in the head repeatedly "when a former friend entered her house uninvited." What happened, Almanza said, "was a traumatic event for Sedona."
As the Prince story unfolded, so did another, related one that only seems far away. ProPublica reported a few weeks ago that, as part of the Trump administration's quest to shut down the U.S. Department of Education, about 1,300 Education Department employees were told they would be laid off and placed on administrative leave. Among the divisions hardest hit by the layoffs was the Office for Civil Rights, which went from having 12 regional offices across the country to five.
OCR, was, until recently, not an office or an acronym well known to many people outside of education. Its job was to investigate reports of discrimination against students, including discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or disability. This meant, among other things, making sure colleges and universities took reports of intimate-partner violence seriously, because ignoring them would be seen as gender discrimination. Why? Because intimate-partner violence and sexual assault disproportionately, though not exclusively, affects girls and women, in ways that make it harder for them to receive an education. OCR's existence meant that a university like TCU had to make a good-faith effort to investigate reports of intimate-partner violence involving a student, whether that student was a victim or an accused perpetrator—otherwise they risked OCR launching an investigation into the university and its overall handling of intimate-partner violence and sexual assault for the entire campus community.
But that was before Trump's second term, and before a former wrestling executive with no experience in education—and some worrying experience with a high-profile sex abuse case—was put in charge of the Education Department. It was before these last months of mass government layoffs, and the exodus of government employees who left for fear of getting laid off, and the shuttering of entire offices. OCR was not the only tool that forced college sports teams to take reports of violence seriously, but it was a powerful one. What does a future without a functional OCR office look like? This year's March Madness, with Prince playing as if nothing happened, and with few in media talking about all the women who came forward, might offer a bizarre preview.
Prince's college career began at the program that ended it. She didn't play her freshman year at Texas due to a broken leg, and eventually transferred to Oregon, where Prince first became known as one of the people fighting for better treatment of college athletes. In 2020, while with the Ducks, Prince put her name, along with Arizona State swimmer Grant House, on a federal antitrust lawsuit suing the NCAA and the Power 5 conferences. A year later, Prince went viral with a TikTok video calling out the contrast between the fully stocked weight room for the teams in the men's NCAA tournament and the paltry offerings for the women, whose "weight room" was one set of hand weights. Afterward, the NCAA hired outside lawyers to review how it was doing on gender equity; that report opened its findings by calling Prince's video "the contemporary equivalent of 'the shot heard round the world.'" This time, the public humiliation of that traditionally shame-averse institution led to real change. The women's tournament now gets March Madness branding, and the games themselves have gotten better TV placements year after year.
A year later, a New York Times headline called Prince's TikTok "The Video That Changed the NCAA." The write-up was no less effusive, saying Prince "accomplished last March what generations before her could not." The lawsuit furthered her status as a change-maker, as it led to the NCAA agreeing to a $2.8 billion settlement, and a very near future in which colleges will directly pay athletes. Prince made herself into a useful player at Oregon as well, averaging 9.3 points, 4.9 rebounds, and 1.3 blocks in her final season there.
The same year that Prince became the face of the fight for equality in women's sports, a young woman posted on TikTok saying she had been "$exually assaulted/RPED … on a first date," the Washington Post reported. The woman did not name Prince, but people started tagging Prince and Oregon in the comments. The young woman, Alyssa Jimmie, is now 24; she told the Post this year that Prince penetrated her with her fingers without consent while on a date in 2019, back when Prince was at Texas. Two friends of Jimmie's confirmed to the Post that she had told them about what happened with Prince about a week afterward, and what she told them was consistent with what she told the Post. After posting the video, Jimmie got a message from Prince, which she showed the Post, telling her to "stop trying to spread false accusations." Jimmie said she took down the video out of fear; Prince’s attorney denied the allegations to the Post.
In 2024, after Prince had transferred from Oregon to TCU, Olivia Stabile, 23, posted a series of TikTok videos in which she said Prince was physically and emotionally abusive to her, culminating in Prince punching her during a trip to Mexico. Stabile also shared screenshots with the Post of WhatsApp messages that showed her talking with Prince afterward about what happened. In the messages, Prince apologized for "how I treated you this morning." When Stabile wrote back, saying Prince had hit her, Prince replied: "If you take this to social media I will sue you. You have abused me as well." She later added: "If you do want to post about our breakup, I will sue you and your family my baby until you can no longer put food on y'all's table." (Stabile sent the same account of what happened to a friend that day, and the friend shared it with the Post.)
After Stabile's posts, Prince said on Instagram that she was getting death threats. Prince's attorney also denied Stabile's allegations to the Post.
Faithlynn Caruso, 24, saw Stabile's videos and "posted that she, too, had had a violent encounter with Prince last summer, several months after the trip to Tulum," the Post reported. (Prince's lawyer did not respond to the Post when asked about Caruso.) In September, a woman going by Jane Doe sued Prince for assault/battery in Travis County, Texas. Only Prince was named as a defendant, and that lawsuit was dismissed two months later. On Jan. 18, police reports were filed with TCU and Fort Worth law enforcement describing a fight between two women, with the Fort Worth reports naming Prince. In the Fort Worth police reports, both women agreed that they got in a fight after Prince's ex-girlfriend went to Prince's home. Per the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, police wrote that both women had injuries but they could not determine who started the fight.
TCU has not said much through all this. After Stabile's series of videos went viral, the university told the Star-Telegram that Prince was still an active member of the team. When the paper got copies of the police reports, TCU said that "the university is aware of the allegations involving one of our student-athletes and is looking into the matter. In accordance with federal privacy laws, the university does not comment on student conduct matters." It has given the same statement to other outlets that asked.
And that's pretty much been it. All the usual actions of a school with a public relations crisis on its hands—lengthy statements about the work it does to ensure student safety, some hand-waving about a super secret investigative process that must play out, perhaps the hiring of an independent law firm to at least provide the appearance of impartiality—never appeared here. TCU said Prince would still play, and she still played. She made the All Big-12 first team this season, and USA Today named her its Big 12 Player of the Year.
This institutional near-silence also prevailed in coverage of the team. TCU beat Notre Dame to make it into the Elite Eight, but the broadcast barely mentioned Prince and had no talk at all about the allegations. Yes, it was her teammate Van Lith who shined brightest in that game, as she did throughout March Madness, but Prince's transfer to TCU was just as key to getting the team into the Elite Eight for the first time in the women's team's history. The only angry sports column I could find about Prince came from a man who found it unfair that she wasn't suspended, because five times in approximately 13 years male college athletes accused of assault, sexual assault, or rape were suspended from their teams and later reinstated when their names were cleared. (The columnist does not mention the many times male athletes have been suspended and later convicted of sexual assault.)
After the team's Elite Eight loss, at what was likely the final press conference of her collegiate career, Prince spoke briefly. She talked about how excited she was to have a shot at a deep postseason run at TCU. She talked about the pressure of facing the very first university she attended, Texas. Prince didn't talk about the allegations, but also nobody asked her about them. As she and her teammates walked away, they joked about how lucky these reporters had it with them as the podium. Next year's players won't be the same, they said, with Prince telling reporters, "You're gonna have to deal with PR-trained girls."
When the starters left, coach Mark Campbell told reporters that he believed this group of young women had inspired young girls to chase their dreams. "They have truly inspired a generation," he said.
The work done by the Education Department's OCR—as well as the investigations done by schools under Title IX—was far from perfect. The OCR process was bureaucratic, and could stretch on for years. The investigations done by colleges and universities into gender violence were dogged by complaints—and lawsuits—from all sides, all alleging that the process was harmful and unfair. Sometimes schools really did get it wrong. Courts did overturn student suspensions. Even the exact Title IX guidelines that OCR had to follow in its own work changed with each U.S. president. There were the Obama rules, the DeVos rules, and then the Biden rules. With each new set of rules, people working in education had to relearn what was expected of them. But at least there was an expectation that the rules existed, and must be followed.
For as much as Title IX enforcement got wrong, its greatest power lay in merely existing, while OCR loomed in the background as a mechanism to make those rules stick. The department's existence told universities that they had to try. It gave students and faculty a tool to wield when they felt like administrations were ignoring sexual assault and intimate-partner violence, among the many forms of discrimination against women. It forced administrators to consider: Do you want the federal government, via OCR, coming onto your campus and asking holistic questions about the environment you foster for women? It gave reporters a way into talking about these issues. It did not end all sexual assault and intimate-partner violence on campus, of course. But it would be dishonest to suggest that it made no difference, either.
The idea that educational institutions must provide an environment free from sexual assault and intimate-partner violence is a noble goal; in a just world, or one where institutions made more of a point of practicing what they preach, it's one that institutions would strive for even without a federal enforcement mechanism. In this world, and in a culture so soaked in sexual assault and intimate-partner violence so that no profession or religion or institution has been spared from scandal, aiming to do that work quickly and efficiently, with fairness to everyone, is a near-impossible task, even with the best of intentions. But that does not absolve us of the duty to try.
That duty is now, in many ways, little more than a moral one—a suggestion on paper, with far fewer consequences in reality due to the intentional and political demolition of the institutions in charge of those consequences. Colleges and universities are not completely off the hook, and they still can be sued by students or employees under Title IX. They still can face pressure from their own students and staff, and they will. And they could become the subject of one of Trump's capriciously targeted interventions—as has already happened. But the main government agency in charge of enforcing that broad mandate to prevent violence against women within education in all 50 states has been effectively disarmed.
What the Prince situation offers us now is a glimpse at a world without an effective OCR. What does it look like when all that institutional work to afford women the right to an education without the fear of violence is gone? It looks like this—like the vacuum within which Prince finished her college career; it sounds like silence. More than that, it marks return of the old euphemisms once used to dismiss this sort of offense—the familiar reduction of credible allegations of abuse into "off-the-court" issues or "distractions." For all their lofty language and brand-buffing pretense, universities and colleges are still institutions that follow money and power, and can be expected to act as such. So the answer to the question of why no one really talked about punishing Sedona Prince is why should they? Whom should any of the parties here fear or respect, if there's no longer any meaningful mechanism to hold them accountable? Without OCR, Title IX sits like guillotine without a blade.
The next stop in Prince's journey is the WNBA draft in April. The WNBA does have a policy on intimate-partner violence, sexual assault, and child abuse, but it won't apply to Prince until she is drafted. That won't preclude any WNBA general manager or coach from taking everything into consideration. Six WNBA GMs talked to The Athletic, all anonymously, about Prince; they all seemed more concerned with how her style of play would fit into today's WNBA than what one GM referred to as "off-court stuff" and another called "a blemish on what's been a great season for her." Right now, ESPN has Prince projected to go 12th overall to the Dallas Wings, noting that her injury history and "off-the-court issues" could hurt her draft stock somewhat. Whether it does will be down, once again, to an institution weighing various pluses and minuses before doing whatever it believes will benefit it the most. It already feels familiar.
Know anything about what's going on inside the U.S. Department of Education? Please reach out! You can reach me directly using diana@defector.com or @dmoskovitz.99 on Signal. You can also use our tips inbox.
