Suspended Cheerleaders Paid Up to $1.5K as Escorts: Report

Attorney for Coastal Carolina University squad members calls accusations 'outlandish'
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Apr 7, 2017 7:31 AM CDT
Suspended Cheerleaders Were Strippers, Escorts: Report
No one's cheering about these allegations.   (Getty Images/Matt_Brown)

Details on the mystery suspension of an entire college cheerleading squad are now being filled in, thanks to an FOIA request. The Sun News has acquired a criminal investigation report compiled by South Carolina's Coastal Carolina University that indicates cheerleaders on its squad were working at strip clubs and also accepting between $100 and $1,500 (as well as shoes, clothes, and designer purses) per date to serve as escorts through a "sugar daddy" dating site. (The report does add the cheerleaders weren't believed to have provided sexual favors in these escort roles.) Of the 18 squad members, only seven didn't know anything about the escort service allegedly going on behind the scenes, the report adds.

An anonymous letter received in mid-March by school officials was what spurred the probe; it was signed by a "concerned parent" and said to be sent by a white "heavy-set" man whose identity investigators are still looking into. The letter alleged the cheerleaders were involved in boozing it up and using drugs, stripping, prostitution, and getting other people to do their homework for them. But an attorney for five of the cheerleaders calls the accusations "outlandish" and their suspension (due to a conduct investigation) "unprecedented," calling the girls "teal-bleeding" (teal is one of the school colors) athletes who are "victims of … baseless claims from an anonymous source," per the Sun News. (More cheerleaders stories.)

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