The Buffalo Bills held rookie punter Matt Araiza out of Friday night's final preseason game, as the San Diego County District Attorney's Office confirmed that it was reviewing a police investigation into an 18-year-old woman's allegations that Araiza raped her last fall at an off-campus party in San Diego.
Araiza was with the team at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, N.C., for its 7 p.m. game against the Carolina Panthers but did not play.
Araiza's agent issued a statement from the Bills punter during the first half of the game that said: “The facts of the incident are not what they are portrayed in the lawsuit or in the press. I look forward to quickly setting the record straight.”
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The coach speaks to reporters after Friday's game.
Head coach Sean McDermott in his postgame news conference declined to answer specific questions about the allegations, when the Bills learned about them, or the Bills response to them.
"It’s a situation that is extremely serious. Just hard to go through. It’s not a situation that I or we take lightly, whatsoever. I understand the sensitivity of the situation. We have work to do to continue to figure this thing out. And we’re going to do that," he said.
"I’m not going to get into details right now," he said repeatedly when asked specific questions by reporters.
The California woman who accused Araiza of rape said she remembered being “led to a room where they were already waiting” and being “face down in a random bed waiting for it to be over” as multiple men assaulted her and left her bloodied and bruised.
The woman wrote those recollections in a journal entry on Oct. 18, 2021, immediately after telling San Diego police that she was gang-raped the previous day, according to her attorney.
Bills rookie punter Matt Araiza and two former college teammates at San Diego State University have been accused in a lawsuit of gang raping a 17-year-old girl at an off-campus party last fall.
“I feel like I should be documenting how I feel just to get through it but I don’t even know how to feel,” she wrote. “A part of me can’t help but feel guilty and wonder if I could have prevented it.”
The woman was a 17-year-old high school senior at the time of the alleged rapes. Her attorney, Dan Gilleon, posted pictures of the handwritten journal entries on Twitter on Friday morning and slammed San Diego police for not asking to review them as part of their investigation.
“The super-sleuths there didn’t bother to ask if my client kept a journal. She did, starting Day One. It’s heartbreaking,” Gilleon said in the tweet.
Tanya Sierra, a spokeswoman for the San Diego County District Attorney's Office, confirmed Friday that the office was currently reviewing the investigation into the incident that was submitted by the San Diego Police Department.
"There is no timeline for how long it will take," Sierra said.
The journal entries did not mention by name Araiza or two other San Diego State football players accused in a lawsuit Gilleon filed Thursday in San Diego County Superior Court on behalf of the woman.
Araiza's attorney, Kerry Armstrong, has denied that Araiza raped the woman.
The Bills said in a statement that the organization recently became aware of the allegations against Araiza, but have not said anything more specific about what was known and when it was known.
Armstrong, a criminal defense lawyer, told a San Diego television station on Thursday that the Bills were aware of the accusations prior to the NFL draft in April, when they selected Araiza in the sixth round. But he walked back the comments with an ESPN reporter on Friday, saying that Araiza informed the Bills sometime after a Los Angeles Times story in June first reported the gang-rape allegation.
The woman's lawyer, Gilleon, said Friday that he has not heard from Bills officials since first informing them of the allegations in late July, when he says he had a phone conversation with team counsel Kathryn D’Angelo, the Associated Press reported.
Asked about the allegations against Araiza Friday night, McDermott said he planned to "find out the truth to the best of my ability. And do the right thing."
Accuser writes about the incident
The lawsuit alleges Araiza, then 21, had sex with the minor outside of a home where he had been living and then brought her inside to a room where she was repeatedly raped in the early hours of Oct. 17.
The suit alleges the then-high school senior identified as "Jane Doe" went in and out of consciousness but remembers moments as the men assaulted her. The others accused of rape in the complaint are Zavier Leonard and Nowlin Ewaliko. Leonard is on the San Diego State football team’s fall roster as a redshirt freshman. Ewaliko was on the team last year but is not on this fall’s roster.
The plaintiff described in her handwritten journal entry walking through a side gate to get to the back yard of the house where the party was held, and then socializing until being approached by a white guy with brown hair who gave her a drink and flirted with her.
She then told him she “went to Grossmont,” according to the entry.
Armstrong said in an interview on the newscast of CBS affiliate Channel 8 in San Diego that a private investigator found that the accuser was “telling everybody at the party that night that she was 18 years old and went to Grossmont College, not Grossmont High School.”
The woman said she wasn’t sure what happened next, but she was led to a room with “several guys” already there.
Why Bills punter Matt Araiza not subject to potential discipline under NFL's personal conduct policy
Araiza cannot be disciplined by the NFL because the reported incident predates his time in the NFL.
“I don’t remember how many,” she wrote. “I felt at that moment like I knew what was about to happen.”
She said she was thrown face down on a bed and sexually assaulted from behind by “several guys taking turns.”
At some point she saw a flash, as if someone may have been recording.
When everyone left, she said, she “stumbled out” and a friend found her.
“I told the crew I had just been raped, then asked to go home and sleep,” she wrote. “We left."
The plaintiff went to the San Diego Police Department on Oct. 18 and waited five hours before an officer came out to speak with her, according to the lawsuit.
She eventually was taken to a hospital for a medical forensic exam to determine if there was evidence of a sexual assault. The findings of the exam have not been made public.
The Los Angeles Times began writing about the case in June, with an investigation revealing that after seven months San Diego State University officials still hadn't launched an internal investigation or student disciplinary proceeding in the case, nor had they alerted the campus that police were investigating a reported sexual assault involving students.
The case has prompted an unusual amount of vitriol between attorneys for Araiza and his accuser.
Armstrong on Thursday described the lawsuit as a shakedown and money grab aimed at a professional athlete. Gilleon fired back on Friday with a tweet calling Armstrong a “media hungry lawyer. Gilleon later posted a statement promising to protect his client from “ridiculous insults” and to not let Araiza’s attorney “try to sway public opinion . . . without fighting fire with fire.”
