Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
The lawsuit filed Thursday by former Eastern New Mexico University basketball players surprised no one within the Portales school’s leadership.
Rumors had been circulating for weeks if not months before everything became public in 30 riveting pages filed in U.S. District Court.
So why has ENMU been so slow in publicly addressing the situation?
Our newspaper first filed a public information request with ENMU on March 27 asking for information about inappropriate university relationships and athletes receiving massages.
The only response to that formal query was they had no “records responsive to this request” beyond school policies.
At least they did not respond until Tuesday morning. After weeks of repeated questioning from our newspaper and other media outlets, Athletic Director Paul Weir finally sent a statement to The Eastern New Mexico News that he said was from the university. It said an investigation into the women’s basketball program resulted in “no findings of an abusive nature.”
The lawsuit asks more pointed questions about why ENMU waited so long to acknowledge there was a problem and why it waited so long to investigate.
According to the lawsuit, the university first became aware during the 2021-2022 school year that players had accused Glen de los Reyes – the husband of basketball coach Meghan de los Reyes -- of sexually assaulting them during supposed physical therapy.
While several unnamed university trainers were allegedly aware of the allegations, nothing much happened until coach de los Reyes was fired two weeks ago.
If university officials did anything else, they haven’t made it public. Did anyone at ENMU confront either de los Reyes before February as the lawsuit alleges? Just as important, did anyone at ENMU alert law enforcement about these allegations?
Taxpayers don’t know.
What we do know is District Attorney Quentin Ray said no police reports were filed with university police or with city of Portales police. Without a complaint, Ray said his office had nothing to investigate.
The allegations in the lawsuit are clearly criminal. Hopefully law enforcement will launch an investigation soon.
It’s understandable why any victim of sexual assault is hesitant to go public. But once stories begin to circulate, the university has an obligation to do more than conduct an internal investigation – criminal allegations require criminal investigators.
James Johnston became ENMU’s chancellor in January, so he is not responsible for anything that may have happened before his arrival. But once he learned about the assault allegations, he should have led the charge to inform the public and ensure a thorough criminal investigation was conducted.
It’s true we don’t know if the allegations in the lawsuit are true. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like ENMU has put much effort into finding out.
David Stevens is publisher of Clovis Media Inc. Email him at:
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