New Mexico State University officials held a meeting last month for all female student athletes following a rash of explicit phone calls many athletes received from an unidentified male caller during the fall 2016 semester.
The meeting was a follow-up to a mandatory meeting held last October. In the follow-up meeting, university staff members indicated no athlete had reported receiving harassing calls since the October meeting.
During the October meeting, university officials advised student athletes of the problem and advised them to make their public information private after many women began receiving the vulgar phone calls.
At both meetings, university officials offered advice to help athletes deal with the situation and persuade victimized women to come forward to help catch the caller.
Swimmer, Rachel Langone, was one of many women who received calls. “I received five calls over the course of six months, always around 3 a.m. on a Sunday,” Langone said. “He knew my name and would tell me he missed me and what he wanted to do to me. I ignored the last two calls and he would call six to eight times in a row over one or two hours,” she added.
NMSU officials believe the caller obtained athletes’ phone numbers from the university’s public online phonebook. The phonebook lists the full names, email addresses, phone numbers and physical addresses of students. All information is public unless students choose to “hide” their contact information through their “myNMSU” online accounts.
By logging into their “myNMSU” accounts, students can locate their contact information, and by simply clicking on “hide” instead of “show,” all personal information will be hidden from public view.
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