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Report: Vanderbilt Football Rape Was Payback For ‘400 Years Of Slavery’

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According to a report by The Tennessean, former Vanderbilt football player Cory Batey told the young woman whom he and three other men raped that her assault was payback “for 400 years of slavery.”

Batey was sentenced to 15 years in prison last week — the minimum sentence allowed under the law — for raping and then urinating on the unconscious victim, who was 21 years old at the time. Metro Nashville police reportedly discovered explicit photographs and video of the rape during their investigation, which were shown to the victim.

“There were five acts of sexual assault and rape committed by him and him alone, and there were seven acts of violence he was found guilty of committing against me,” the victim said in her testimony. “But sexual assault was not where the attack ended. Mr. Batey continued to abuse and degrade me, urinating on my face while uttering horrific racial hate speech that suggested I deserved what he was doing to me because of the color of my skin. He didn’t even know who I was.”

According to The Tennessean, prosecutors had successfully kept the exact words of Batey’s “horrific racial hate speech” from being used in trial. However, multiple sources told the newspaper on Friday that during the attack Batey had said: “That’s for 400 years of slavery, you bitch.”

The victim had asked the judge to give Batey a 25-year jail sentence. “On June 22nd of 2013, I was a happy, hard-working Vanderbilt student looking forward to my future,” she said during her statement. “I was twenty-one years old. I’ve seen with my own eyes what I was when Mr. Batey was done with me: a piece of trash, face down in a hallway covered in his urine and palm prints.”

Follow Peter Hasson on Twitter @PeterJHasson