Last week, the Wall Street Journal released a scoop—former Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze had been calling escorts from his university-issued phone during recruiting trips. But the scoop didn’t have all the details a reader might expect, thanks to the fact that athletic director Ross Bjork went out of his way to make sure he didn’t explicitly describe the people or services on the other end of the phone. He said just that the university had found “calls of a similar nature” to the one WSJ discovered Freeze had made to an escort service during a recruiting trip.
Now, ESPN has an update—the calls were expressly to escort services, and there were at least 12 of them. This follows Freeze’s resignation last month, after reports surfaced that he had called an escort service and school officials confirmed that he had engaged in a pattern of “moral turpitude.”
Per ESPN, who got Freeze’s call records on his university phone from a public records request, the calls in question took place between April 2014 and January 2017. All 12 numbers are “associated with online advertisements for female escorts,” and most of the calls lasted two minutes or less.
[ESPN]