University of Washington football player Tylin “Tybo” Rogers pleaded not guilty Thursday to the alleged rape of two women.
Rogers, a sophomore running back, is charged with second- and third-degree rape, both felonies and punishable by up to life in prison and up to five years in prison, respectively. He was arrested April 5 and was released the next day after posting bond for 10% of his $300,000 bail, records show.
Rogers entered the plea in person during his arraignment in King County Superior Court in downtown Seattle, where a judge ordered sexual-assault protection orders for the two women. The order requires Rogers to stay away from the women.
Members of Rogers’ family were at the court.
“I don’t know if he behaved this way with other girls or other people, if he has anger issues or what, but he is dangerous,” said Meredith Clark, a victim advocate with the city of Seattle, reading a statement from one of the women during the hearing.
“That night, he just immediately started acting aggressive with me, he didn’t even give me the opportunity to consent, he just wanted to aggressively hurt me. We are both UW students, I am afraid of ever seeing him again or that he will send other people to talk to me. I think he’s really dangerous to me, to other people, to the community and to other girls,” Clark read from the statement.
After the hearing, Rogers’ attorney, Robert Flennaugh II, told the media outside the courtroom that “there are a lot of issues, and we’re going to address them in court.”
The trial is set for July 8.
According to charging documents posted last week, Rogers allegedly raped the first woman, a Seattle Central College student, about three months after the pair matched on the Tinder dating app in August.
The woman had agreed to let Rogers visit her at her Capitol Hill apartment the evening of Oct. 23, but told him that she was not interested in having sex, records show.
After the woman’s roommate left the apartment to go to work, Rogers allegedly grabbed the woman by her face and jaw and tried to force her to perform oral sex, records show.
The woman told Rogers “we shouldn’t do it” multiple times, but Rogers then pushed the woman’s head into the couch and proceeded to rape her, she told police, according to the affidavit.
After Rogers left her apartment, the woman wiped her body with towels and took them to Harborview Medical Center to complete a sexual assault kit, according to court documents.
The woman in late November filed a Title IX complaint against Rogers with the UW, triggering a federally mandated internal investigation, records show.
Court records show Rogers was suspended from team activities around the same time, although it was never officially announced by the athletic department or the coaching staff. Rogers wasn’t in Las Vegas on Dec. 1 for the Pac-12 championship game.
Police investigators believe the Title IX complaint is connected to Rogers being taken off the active travel roster for that game.
“We’re working through some things, some challenges he’s had off the field,” Ryan Grubb, UW’s offensive coordinator at the time and now the offensive coordinator for the Seahawks, told Sports Illustrated’s FanNation site Inside the Huskies on Dec. 13.
“I can’t comment on what it was exactly, but Tybo’s done a great job with being here, listening to directions and just working through this moment and really being a good steward of the team,” he said.
Rogers returned to practice Dec. 15. He played in both the Sugar Bowl on Jan. 1 against Texas and the College Football Playoff championship game against Michigan on Jan. 8.
Then, a 22-year-old woman contacted Seattle police on Feb. 23. She said Rogers raped her sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving.
The woman, a UW undergraduate, told police she met Rogers at a Halloween party at a house on the campus’s Greek Row. The pair matched on Tinder and eventually decided to meet at her off-campus apartment weeks later, according to a probable cause affidavit from Seattle police.
Rogers became forceful within a minute of entering the woman’s apartment, throwing her onto a bed and ripping off her clothes, the affidavit stated. He allegedly sexually assaulted the woman for about 20 minutes while she repeatedly yelled at him to stop. He at one point choked her, police said.
She told police Rogers left immediately after the alleged assault. The woman said her face and neck were red and sore for days after the attack.
Prosecutors in charging documents said Rogers was also involved in a case where he and someone else were “violently attacking a bicyclist after an altercation on the roadway.”
“If released, Rogers is likely to commit another violent crime,” prosecutors said.
Camden Malone, a 21-year-old Shoreline Community College student, told The Seattle Times that Rogers attacked him while he was biking home from work in March.
On Friday, UW released a new statement on Rogers’ arrest, claiming that it did not know the extent of the charges he faced before they were made public last Tuesday.
Friday’s statement from UW called the allegations against Rogers “serious and disturbing.” Beyond those three words, however, UW cited federal student privacy laws that prevent the university from commenting about individual students.
Troy Dannen, Washington’s athletic director until March when he left to take the same job at the University of Nebraska, declined to comment when contacted by The Times on April 10.
Former UW football coach Kalen DeBoer, now the head coach at Alabama, in a statement last week said that he can’t comment due to federal privacy laws but that he “always have and always will follow established institutional policies and procedures to ensure prompt reporting and proper handling of allegations by the appropriate authorities.”
Seattle times staff reporters Catalina Gaitán, Caitlyn Freeman and Andy Yamashita contributed to this report.