ANNAPOLIS, Md. — As midshipmen were graduating from the Naval Academy here last week, Navy investigators were conducting an investigation into reports that several football players had serially raped a female midshipman at an off-campus party last year. 
 
 Three Navy football players are under investigation in the case, according to Naval Academy officials. No charges have been brought, but the academy has delayed the graduation of one of the three midshipmen and his commissioning in the Navy, according to academy officials and others briefed on the inquiry. The academy’s superintendent, Vice Adm. Michael H. Miller, is expected to receive a final report from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service in the next week or two and then decide whether to proceed with charges, according to academy officials. 
 
 The investigation, stemming from an April 2012 party, has sputtered off and on for more than a year, hampered in part by the woman’s initial refusal to cooperate, the officials said. She was ashamed and then later felt intimidated, according to her Washington lawyer, Susan Burke. In a series of interviews, the female midshipman said that she was upset that she had faced disciplinary action for under-age drinking at the party while the football players were permitted to play last season. 
 
 Academy officials acknowledged the inquiry but declined to comment further. “Naval Academy leadership is monitoring the progress of this investigation and evaluating the appropriate options for adjudication,” a spokesman said in a statement. “It is completely inappropriate to make any other public comment on this investigation or any ongoing investigation, as we risk compromising the military justice process.” 
 
 Academy officials said that the players were allowed to play for the team last fall because no charges had been brought in the case and they were accorded the presumption of innocence as a result. Officials described the case as delicate and complex, and one in which the investigation has been hampered by the limits of the available evidence. 
 
 The inquiry comes amid a growing national controversy over sexual assaults in the military — and over whether he Pentagon has reacted aggressively enough to curb them. The controversy has now reached into the cloistered world of the elite service academies. 
 
 In January, a Naval Academy instructor was charged with raping a female midshipman; the court-martial began this week. The Naval Academy has said that it had 51 total reports of unwanted sexual contact during the academic years from 2011 through 2013. 
 
 But in recent interviews, current and former female midshipmen said they believe many more episodes go unreported. They said that women, who first arrived in Annapolis in 1976 and now make up 22 percent of the student population, are often worried about the consequences. 
 
 Candace Tisdale, a midshipman and a friend of the woman at the center of the current investigation, said women at the academy learn to adapt to harassment and a sometimes-hostile climate. “The desire to be accepted by the group, and the high stress during plebe summer and plebe year, make you accept it,” she said. The academy culture teaches midshipmen to meet high moral standards but also drills into students not to “throw shipmates under the bus,” she said. 
 
 Annie Kendzior, a former midshipman who has filed a lawsuit over two alleged assaults by athletes in 2008 that she did not report to the academy until 2011, said she initially declined to pursue the cases because she “didn’t want to be labeled as this person who got varsity athletes kicked out.” 
 
 In a series of interviews, the female midshipman involved in the 2012 episode now under investigation offered an account of that April night and its aftermath. Naval Academy officials confirmed many of the basic facts that she provided in her account. 
 
 Now 21, she asked to remain anonymous, concerned about her career and reputation. She said that after that night, she was taunted and harassed by other midshipmen and suffered from depression for months. 
 
 In a public statement Friday, Ms. Burke, her lawyer, said the woman “was ostracized and retaliated against by the football players and the Naval Academy community.” ||||| Cliff Owen, AP 
 
 Kori Cioca, the lead plaintiff, said she was constantly harassed by her Coast Guard supervisor. After she made a mistake during a knot-tying quiz, he called her a "stupid f---ing female, who didn't belong in the military" and then spit in her face. After complaining to her superior, the abuse escalated to stalking, sexual harassment and ultimately rape in December 2005. Despite an admission from her rapist, commanders told Cioca if she pressed charges she would be court-martialed for lying and later faced retaliation. 
 
 Sarah Albertson was raped by a fellow Marine who outranked her in 2006. Because they had been drinking alcohol, both she and the man were charged with "inappropriate barracks conduct," and she was ordered to "respect" her assailant. Commanders forced the corporal to interact with her rapist for two more years, suspending her security clearance and downgrading her work assignments because she took prescription medicine to cope with the trauma of being forced to live and work with her rapist. 
 
 Rebekah Havrilla was an Army sergeant serving in Afghanistan in 2006 when she was sexually harassed by a supervisor and later raped by another soldier. She reported it under the military's restricted reporting policy. When she later saw her rapist at a base in Missouri, she went into shock and sought the help of a military chaplain. She said he told her "it must have been God's will for her to be raped" and recommended she attend church more often. 
 
 Cliff Owen, AP 
 
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 WASHINGTON -- It may become a landmark case to force the military to take rape and sexual assault seriously. Or it could be yet another failed attempt in a decades-long battle by women to be accepted in the armed forces.Seventeen veterans and active-duty service members today took the first step to determining that, suing the Pentagon on charges of violating their constitutional rights to serve their country.They accused two secretaries of defense of condoning, ignoring and implicitly encouraging sexual abuse in the ranks in a 42-page complaint filed in federal district court in Alexandria, Va., which contains phrases like "f---ing whore," "bitch" and "troublemaker."The plaintiffs, who include two men, come from every military branch. They charge they were victimized twice -- once by their assailants and again by the institution they served."The system is driven by rape myths," said Myla Haider, a former Army criminal investigator who was raped by a co-worker. The co-worker was later court-martialed in another case as a "serial sex offender.""There is a pervasive attitude within DOD that any man might commit these types of offenses and therefore when these things do come up it is seen as something that is commited by a peer or just another soldier" and not taken seriously, said Haider, a plaintiff in the suit.Such attitudes aren't new. Ever since the infamous Tailhook scandal broke out in 1991 after the first Gulf War, an unending series of investigations, congressional hearings, reports, training regimens and special offices have sought to end the problem that the acronym-obsessed service now has given its very own name: MST -- military sexual trauma.Eleanor Smeal of the Feminist Majority Foundation, who has watched for decades as women warriors fought to be accepted in the macho ranks of the military, said the challenge in civil court "is necessary because so much else has failed."As a Marine captain, Anuradha Bhagwati witnessed her own senior officers violate sexual harassment policies.Bhagwati is now the head of the advocacy group Service Women's Action Network. She says she has seen those violators "shirk their responsibilities to their own troops ... transfer sexual predators out of the units instead of prosecuting them, promote sexual predators during ongoing investigations and accuse highly decorated enlisted service members of lying."She called sexual violence "a plague upon the United States military" that "threatens our national security by undermining operational readiness, draining morale, harming retention and destroying lives."The stories told by Haider and other plaintiffs at a news conference this morning were harrowing. Among them:Most of the plaintiffs have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder or other mental stress problems. They charged the Pentagon with a "systemic failure to stop rape and sexual assault."The suit names former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his successor, Robert Gates, for failing to "eradicate a well-entrenched misogynistic military culture that permits Command to scoff at rape allegations, threaten victims with courts martial and exercise unfettered discretion to decide to use 'non-judicial punishment' to penalize rape and sexual assault."The lawsuit specifically cites Rumsfeld, desperate for volunteers to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, for granting "moral waivers" to recruits arrested or convicted of domestic and sexual violence. Despite a federal law making it a felony for such offenders to possess a firearm, he provided an exception to members of the military.Sex crimes, it noted, soared 24 percent in the year before Rumsfeld's resignation in 2006.Gates is charged with "failing to take reasonable steps" to protect the plaintiffs from repeated abuse. It notes that he directed the head of the Pentagon's Sexual Assault and Prevention and Response Office to ignore a congressional subpoena to testify and failed to create a centralized database of sex crimes as mandated by lawmakers.The current defense secretary's "failures to act ... led to a steady and dramatic increase" in the number of rapes and sexual assaults, rising by 25 percent in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007 and continuing to increase at double digits annually since then."Sexual assault is a wider societal problem, and Secretary Gates has been working with the service chiefs to make sure the U.S. military is doing all it can to prevent and respond to it," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said in a statement."That means providing more money, personnel, training and expertise, including reaching out to other large institutions such as universities to learn best practices. This is now a command priority, but we clearly still have more work to do in order to ensure all of our service members are safe from abuse."The lawsuit cited the Pentagon's own statistics that reported 3,230 rapes and other sexual assaults in 2009. Because the military acknowledges that 80 percent of victims don't report the crime, the real number may be more than 16,000.Moreover, the complaint charges that the Department of Defense "fails to report conviction rates from courts marital, which is critical data needed by Congress to assess whether reforms are being implemented."Still, the plaintiffs face a high hurdle.Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, said the facts as presented in the complaint are "certainly disturbing" and merit attention from Pentagon leaders. However, he said he is "skeptical that this case, as a case, will gain any traction" in court.From a legal point of view, he said, it is a steep climb for 17 plaintiffs to argue for systemic abuses in a military of some 2 million people."I don't know that a culture of sexism and misogyny has ever been recognized as a basis" for suing for violations of equal protection, he added. "Not every sexual assault is a violation of equal protection."
– The military has yet another high-profile sex-assault investigation on its hands, this one involving three unidentified players on the Navy football team, reports Military.com. They are accused of raping a drunk female midshipman during an off-campus party last year, reports the New York Times, which has interviewed the unidentified woman. The 21-year-old says she was drunk before she arrived at the party and continued drinking while there. She acknowledges that she doesn't remember much, apart from being on a bed with one player on the team and later in a car with three others. “I was sitting on my knees on the floor in the back seat,” she tells the Times. “I remember briefly seeing them, and I remember crying, and being upset and saying I’m sorry.” A day later, when she noticed bruises on her body, she says one of the players admitted they had sex with her. Soon, rumors started flying around campus on social media—including a private Facebook page for players—and the woman went to authorities when she heard another female cadet was going to report the incident. No charges have been filed, but the graduation of one of the suspects has been delayed while the investigation continues. The three were allowed to play this season.