When he finished, Tracy said, Tucker told her, “Thank you, good night, sweetheart.” She responded, “Yeah,” and he hung up.
Then she sat at her desk for a while, staring at her phone and crying.
Three months passed between the call and the next time Tracy and Tucker spoke.
At first, Tracy tried to pretend to herself that nothing had happened. Her partnership with the school was paramount and she focused on that.
Tucker, however, was not responding to her text messages. And he abruptly canceled her in-person training, planned for July 25, three days before it was supposed to take place. A team staffer told her they had double-booked, but Tracy believed she knew the real reason.
When Tracy finally got Tucker on the phone about a week later, he was angry, she said, accusing her and her assistant of gossiping about his marital problems.
Tracy recalled that Tucker made comments such as, “I can’t trust you,” “If you say anything about this, I’ll hear about it,” and “I’ll be fine, it’s you that I am worried about.” She viewed it as a threat to destroy her reputation if she spoke out about him.
Tucker at one point told her he had done nothing wrong. According to Tracy, she started to say, “Well, something…” referring to his masturbation, and Tucker interrupted, saying, “But nothing happened.”
Tucker recalled the Aug. 2 phone call much differently. He told the investigator that Tracy apologized to him for discussing his marriage with her assistant, and he accepted. Although they ended the call on good terms and discussed postponing her visit until next year, Tucker said he had lost trust in Tracy.
The training was never rescheduled, and they never spoke again.
Tracy initially stayed quiet about Tucker for the sake of her career, she said. Ultimately, she decided that if she let it slide, she wouldn’t be the person she claimed to be – the one who encourages people to speak up about sexual misconduct and hold others accountable.
She filed her complaint in December – eight months after the call. In dry and bureaucratic language, the record of that complaint begins: “The specific allegations of prohibited conduct against Respondent are as follows …” A notification was delivered to Tucker the following day.
Tucker was “absolutely shocked,” he would tell the university’s investigator. In subsequent correspondence, he and his attorney suggested Tracy’s motive: She held a vendetta against Spartans athletics because of its history of sexual misconduct scandals and falsely accused him for financial gain.
“To say that I have learned from this situation is an understatement,” Tucker wrote in a letter to the investigator on March 22. “I will never again allow myself to be duped by kindness.”
The investigation: Tucker moves to halt case as investigator gets to work
The university tapped Rebecca Leitman Veidlinger, an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Title IX attorney, to conduct the investigation.
A former Indiana sex crimes prosecutor who now heads a private practice, she also previously worked in the Title IX offices at Michigan State and the University of Michigan.
Veidlinger started her investigation in January by interviewing Tracy and six people she had identified as witnesses, including three of Tucker’s assistants who had been involved in coordinating and canceling her campus visits.
Tracy’s other three witnesses – her assistant, therapist and attorney – told Veidlinger that a distraught Tracy had disclosed the situation to them in early August, within days of her final phone call with Tucker.
Jacqueline Swanson, Tracy’s attorney who is also her friend, turned over a copy of the notes she took from their conversation on a yellow legal pad.
Ahlan Alvarado, Tracy’s assistant and best friend who had attended the April 2022 spring game, said she had been with Tracy in their hotel after the game when Tucker repeatedly called Tracy asking to meet her alone.
Alvarado said Tracy had told her previously that Tucker “liked” her and it could become a problem. She shared a screenshot of a Dec. 2 text message in which Tracy told her she had just spoken with Tucker, who had agreed they could only be friends.
“I’m glad it didn’t get weird,” Tracy wrote.
Tracy provided phone bills and emails that corroborated her timeline of events and showed Tucker had been calling her from his personal cellphone.
Although Veidlinger had interviewed all six of Tracy’s witnesses before the end of January, Tucker didn’t agree to be interviewed until late March. In the intervening weeks, he and his attorney, Jennifer Belveal, tried to stop the investigation.
Tracy said Belveal twice contacted her attorney, Karen Truszkowski, proposing a settlement agreement. Tracy said no.
Tucker and Belveal also urged Michigan State to drop Tracy’s complaint. In January, they sent a 12-page letter to the school arguing it lacked jurisdiction to investigate Tucker’s “purely personal” relationship with Tracy.
They later commissioned Brett Sokolow, board chairman and co-founder of the Association of Title IX Administrators, to write an “expert witness” report asserting that policing employees’ “off duty” activities would set a dangerous legal precedent.
“Can an employee never have phone sex?” Sokolow wrote. “How far does MSU intend to go in policing the private conduct of its employees, and how does it expect its 20,000+ employees to react when they find out that they no longer have private lives outside the reach of their employer?”
Michigan State was not persuaded. The alleged conduct would be covered by school policy, it concluded, because it took place in the context of Tracy’s work as a vendor for the school and affected their ongoing business relationship.
The case would go forward.
The findings: Records refute Tucker’s story; his attorney alleges bias
Tucker sat down for his interview on March 22.
He said he wanted to be transparent and set the record straight. But Veidlinger would note some key inconsistencies.
For instance, Tucker claimed he had made the phone sex call from home in East Lansing – not in a Florida hotel. He had just returned from a trip to Florida, he said, where he had been doing charity work unrelated to his employment with the school.
Veidlinger, however, had obtained documents showing Tucker had, in fact, been in Naples, Florida, the day of the call – attending the Greg Montgomery Foundation Golf Outing on the school’s dime.
An expense report Tucker submitted to Michigan State for his hotel and meal costs showed the trip’s purpose was “administrative” and did not involve any personal travel. The costs were paid by the Spartan Fund, the athletic department’s fundraising arm; he had flown to Florida on a donor’s private plane.
Tucker told Veidlinger he had canceled Tracy’s July 25 in-person training because his new mental conditioning coach, Ben Newman, needed to implement a new program. But Veidlinger would obtain records from the school showing Newman had been meeting weekly with the team since early June and did not hold any meetings between July 15 and 28.
During the interview, Tucker also made an explosive new allegation: He said his associate had told him that renowned ESPN investigative reporter Paula Lavigne was investigating the veracity of the gang-rape story at the heart of Tracy’s public persona. The information, Tucker said, made him question how Tracy “goes about her business.”
Veidlinger did not address this allegation in her report, but Lavigne denied the allegation.
“Neither (Tracy’s) organization nor Tracy is or has been the target of any investigative reporting,” Lavigne said in a statement to USA TODAY. “I’m perplexed that Mel Tucker would respond to a complaint of sexual harassment by involving me or ESPN.”
Tucker did not identify any witnesses who could support his version of events, including his associate, whom he said he had promised anonymity. That same associate, Tucker said, told him that Alvarado, Tracy’s assistant, had been gossiping about his marriage – a claim Alvarado denied.
Veidlinger delivered her final 106-page investigation report in July.
Along the way, she had learned that one potentially rich source of evidence was missing: Both Tracy and Tucker had deleted their text messages with each other. Tucker would tell her that he deletes his messages regularly because he receives so many; Tracy said she did so in a panic after their last phone call, feeling she needed to cut all ties with him.
Per Title IX and school policy, Veidlinger did not issue a finding of fault in her final report, but instead summarized the facts and referred the case for a hearing.
At the hearing, planned for October, both sides will have the opportunity to present evidence and make arguments. Another outside Title IX attorney hired by the school will then decide whether the evidence shows that Tucker likely violated school rules.
Among the witnesses who will be missing from Tracy’s witness list is her assistant and best friend, Alvarado. She died in a car accident in June.
Meanwhile, Belveal argued Alvarado’s death “presents yet another reason that this case should be dismissed.”
Letters Belveal sent Veidlinger throughout the case accuse her of bias against Tucker – and men more broadly.
One letter in May contained a list of 170 perceived problems with Veidlinger’s draft report and questions she should have asked Tracy and her witnesses. They included why Tracy had not returned Tucker’s gifts, why she had given him her Venmo username and what opinions she held about Michigan State basketball coach Tom Izzo, former football coach Mark Dantonio and former president John Engler, all of whom had been associated with past sexual misconduct controversies.
A fair process, Belveal wrote, would expose Tracy’s allegations as “nothing more than another agenda-driven attempt … to defame Respondent and the University.”
“We request that the investigation be reopened,” Belveal wrote, “that each of the questions be asked of the appropriate witnesses, that jurisdiction be reassessed, and that the matter be dismissed.”
Kenny Jacoby is an investigative reporter for USA TODAY covering sexual harassment and violence and Title IX. Contact him by email at kjacoby@usatoday.com or follow him on X @kennyjacoby .
