LSU upheld a Title IX finding that a student-athlete was responsible for sexual assault and forcible rape in the Kendall Francis case, closing the university appeal after a complaint Francis filed in January 2026. The decision means the school’s internal process has now ended even as a criminal investigation has begun.
Francis said she went to an LSU dorm in October 2025 to visit a football player she had met through social media and later returned to her apartment in shock. LSU Police came to her apartment, took her to the hospital and she spent about seven hours there, according to her account. The name of the player has not been publicly released.
Francis’s case moved through LSU’s Title IX system on a separate track from any criminal matter. A report obtained by WAFB found the student-athlete responsible, and after he appealed, LSU’s Title IX office upheld the decision. That came months before Francis posted a series of TikTok videos that went viral and brought the case back into public view.
For Francis, the fallout was not abstract. She said the experience left her depressed, caused her to lose a lot of weight, led to a diagnosis of severe anxiety and forced her to seek therapy. She also said she failed both of her freshman semesters because of the trauma, adding that her first year of college was taken away from her because of what happened.
That public reopening of the case helped push it beyond campus discipline. The East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney’s Office has since opened a criminal investigation, and Hillar Moore said the matter had already been handled through a campus-level investigatory and review process, with LSU Police and the Baton Rouge Police Department holding information about it.
The unresolved issue now is not whether LSU acted. It did. The question is what the criminal investigation will make of a case the university already decided, and whether the evidence that satisfied a campus process will hold up in a different one.
