http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vau...6592/index.htm
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In March, Iowa State announced that it would honor the contract it had signed in November with new football coach Dan McCarney, even after learning that his estranged wife, Brenda, had told police he had beaten her 20 to 30 times, beginning a few days before their marriage in 1986 and continuing periodically for nearly eight years.
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The McCarney case may be the least known of these recent episodes but is perhaps the most illuminating. The account that follows is from a police report Brenda filed with the Dane County sheriff's office in Madison, Wis., on March 6, 1994, just hours after the last of the alleged assaults took place. At that time Dan worked as defensive coordinator at Wisconsin, and he and Brenda were separated; he came by the house they formerly shared to pick up some furniture for an apartment. Brenda told police that Dan arrived earlier than an agreed-upon time, sneaked into the house while she was elsewhere and took things that weren't included in the couple's separation agreement. When he returned later that day, she told police, she demanded the return of a garage-door opener and a key to the house. Dan removed the key from the ring, threw it at her, hitting her in the face, and yelled "——you!" according to the report. He pushed her down, and when she attempted to call 911, she said, he ripped the phone cord from the wall.
Dan, who's 6'3" and 210 pounds, made one more trip to the house that day, according to the police report, a visit that ended with his slapping the 5'5", 130-pound Brenda, cursing her in front of their children and throwing her twice more to the floor, according to the police report. Several hours later Brenda filed what appears to be her first report ever to the police. The officers taking her statement found a fresh cut that they concluded was the result of one of the attacks and described her as "very truthful."
Yet in the days following Brenda's visit with the police, a number of things happened—and didn't happen—that explain how a coach might beat his wife for years with impunity. In his interview with police, Dan, after denying most of Brenda's account of the incident, raised concerns about publicity and "the reputation of the football team." For some reason Johnson assured McCarney and his lawyer that the sheriff's office "would not notify the media of this investigation," the report said. Dan had already called Brenda to say that if she went public with the latest incident, he would lose his job and she and their children would be without support, according to the report. Brenda, who hadn't worked outside the home since 1990, soon secured a restraining order but didn't press criminal charges.
Last March, after a Des Moines Register account of the private life of Iowa State's new football coach forced the university to launch a reevaluation of its decision to hire him, Brenda and Dan released a joint statement. In it they denied that there had been anything more than that single incident. With her estranged husband having signed a contract worth as much as $300,000 a year, the scenes from their marriage that Brenda had recounted to detectives a year earlier suddenly hadn't happened. No, there had never been that first beating just before the July 1986 marriage. Nor had there been one, as she had previously reported, five days after the birth of the first of their three children, Jillian, in '87, when Dan slapped her face as she held the baby. Nor had there been an incident that Brenda said had occurred on Super Bowl Sunday in '93, when she suffered a bruised cheek and black eye after confronting her husband about an affair. The Iowa State administration says it will honor rather than eat Dan's five-year deal—and Brenda will collect the $3,600-a-month support payments she was granted soon after Dan got the job with the Cyclones. ]
