No. 115: TREVIS SMITH / My interview with the predator in the joint: There has to be an easier way to make a living.

Being in Prince Albert, Sask. in February was no party. Especially in the federal penitentiary. And even more especially because the guy sitting across from me could choke me out in five seconds.

In the past couple of weeks, I wrote about two “tough” interviews or at least what I considered tough interviews: the first being Jim Brown, whom the NFL Network slotted at No. 2 in its rankings of the top 100 players of all time back in 2010, which to my mind under-rated him; the second being a phone interview with a convicted pedophile who was undergoing psychiatric treatment. Neither of these would rank as just another day at the office and at the end of each I heaved a big sigh.

The challenge with each one was simply the pressure to keep the subject on the line and not have the whole thing fall through. I was asking Jim Brown not about his career or life but rather about athletic stardom and Michael Jordan’s disinclination to use his influence on any social cause beyond selling shoes—Brown could have easily said something like “not worth my time.” The pedophile could have been suspicious of my intentions and thought I was trying to entrap him or reveal his identity in the pages of the Ottawa daily.

To these I have to add, neither left me at all fearful. I can’t say that about another piece I reported, which rattled me to my core. Back in 2006 I pitched ESPN The Magazine a story about a Trevis Smith, a former defensive captain of the Crimson Tide who was playing his trade with the Saskatchewan Roughriders. A CFL story in a U.S. mag might have seemed a reach but the hook was not just Smith’s playing pedigree but more to the point that he had been charged with aggravated sexual assault for having unprotected sex with women who didn’t know that he was HIV-positive. By his estimate when interrogated by a detective, he had been with “eight or nine women” not counting his wife, although I suspect that he was low-balling it.

Smith and his lawyer outside a Regina court.

I got a kick-the-tires green light on the story, something along the lines of a maybe. See what you dig up.

In those golden days, the mag’s resources were in the neighbourhood of unlimited and so I sat in on the trial in Regina and, after Smith was convicted, I wound up visiting him in a Saskatchewan penitentiary in Prince Albert, a maximum/medium facility with a bit over 600 beds for guests of Corrections Canada.

Yup, some sportswriters go to spring training or go on the golf tour. Me, I wind up in a penitentiary on the Prairies in February.

Now there might be few things more difficult to interview someone about than his sexual assault conviction and likewise there might be a few more daunting settings for an hour-long Q and A than a holding room inside the walls and a dozen door slamming behind you. In the holding room, I was with one guard, a former major-junior hockey player as it turned out, and I legitimately thought that if I set off Trevis Smith, he could have smoked the two of us. Despite prison food and no available gym time in maximum, he was still an imposing guy. Cuffed, manacled, mattered not. There was nowhere to run, no plexiglass between us.

Fact is, it was more the subject material and the setting that made me uncomfortable. To an extent, Smith tried to put me at ease … or play me, I can’t say for sure. I was, after all, his only possible shot at getting his side of the story out there with his appeal almost certain to founder.

These are the opening paragraphs of the interview—definitely was working me.

When he tells his story, Trevis Smith doesn't claim to be innocent but swears he's not guilty as charged and convicted. Not innocent in the eyes of God, but not guilty by the word of the law. He says he is a good man who did some bad things. That's what he apologized for in a court. That's what he owns up to as he sits in a holding room in a Canadian federal penitentiary in Prince Albert, a couple of hundred miles north of Regina. "I tried to do the right things and I lost my way," he says. "I've fallen and strayed."

Don't read this wrong, though. Trevis Smith admits he did things he couldn't have imagined all those years he slept with a Bible beside his bed. But he's confessing his sins, not confessing to the crime. "I put myself in this situation, not that I deserve it, but I can't blame anyone else," he says. "But I'm not going to admit to something I didn't do. That's not me."

Though it didn’t make it into my draft of the story, Smith did tell me that he didn’t share with his fellow inmates that he was talking to me, because they wouldn’t like this “privilege” he was getting. To call it a tough crowd doesn’t do it justice and the risks of getting shivved were real. Smith didn’t mind sharing the fact that cold sweat was his daily reality and that his status as a football player didn’t grant him immunity but made him a target.

Well, my Trevis Smith feature didn’t make the cut at the mag. Suffice it to say, with any story that involves court cases that drag out over months, the enthusiasm of editors wanes with every passing issue. And really it would have been best to do a piece in advance of the trial—by the time I could get access to Smith, he was convicted. My post mortem: got there too late. On the website, well, my e-ticket editor Jay Lovinger didn’t like the idea of his feature well become a reservoir of dropped mag pieces and declined to give it a read. I don’t blame him.

I’ll share the lede with everyone here and paid subscribers have access to the story in full the other side of the paywall. Forgive any typos, it’s a draft. The story features victims’ accounts and closes hard with the fruit of an interview that was among the most awkward and downright weird in my career: a phoner with his wife who was waiting for him in Birmingham.

(For the record, Smith did about two years behind bars before he was deported. He lost a job as a football coach at George Washington Carver High School after his history as a sex offender surfaced.)

---

From a draft to ESPN The Mag submitted Aug 7 2007

WHEN they tell their stories it's easy to see what the ladies saw in Trevis Smith beside the fact that he was a professional football player: physically impressive, educated, articulate, incredibly soft-spoken, charming, even gentle. Yes, this linebacker, all 235-pounds of him, gentle.

He was part of the team--the Saskatchewan Roughriders--but apart from the team too. Yeah, he'd cruise the bars in Regina and other cities across the Canadian Football League, but it wasn't his comfort zone. He met the ladies there, sure, but he was a player, not a playah. Not like he'd even say "playah." Not in his vocabulary.

But over time the ladies saw that it was a cover. Disguised like a defence. Not like he'd show blitz.

When the ladies tell their stories--when they first talked to each other, then to detectives--Trevis Smith is a sexual predator. What else would you call him when he has all these women in and out of the line-up. Some didn't know he was married. Some knew he was and he told them it was over or going to be soon. And some didn't care if it was going to be just for a night or once and a while. But what he didn't tell them was what he found out: he was HIV positive. When they tell their stories that's what they come back to, that he didn't tell them and kept on having unprotected sex with them.

That's the story two of them told in court in Regina. That's the story that another told newspaper reporters. The women can't be named by a court order. The way they told their stories they left it out there that many more had the same stories to tell and were too frightened, too damaged, too ashamed, too broken to come forward.

Back in February Trevis Smith stood up in a court in Regina and apologized before his sentencing. The women who had testified weren't impressed. The judge wasn't either. He didn't see the Trevis Smith the women saw when they met him. He bought their stories and gave him five-and-a-half years years for aggravated sexual assault.