The first week of this autumn will mark 15 years since the Concordia University campus in River Forest was stunned by a sudden series of events that led to the firing of the winningest athletic coach in the school’s history.
On Sept. 27, 2010, Spiro Lempesis, the head baseball coach, was banned from the campus, and fired several days later when an internal investigation found that he’d videotaped sex acts between himself and a Concordia baseball player.
River Forest police were called in but found no grounds for criminal charges. After media coverage played out for a couple of weeks, and a tight-lipped university refused to release any details, the issue settled down and faded away. The student graduated in December 2011 and got married.
Lempesis, meanwhile, was exiled from baseball and worked as a manager at his father’s gyros restaurant in Rockford. He lost approximately $90,000 a year in income, including his Concordia salary, money from assistant coaching a Class A baseball team, and revenue from summer youth baseball camps. He lost his house in west suburban Montgomery, filed bankruptcy, and his wife divorced him. He has no relationship with his two daughters.
Lempesis has repeatedly acknowledged that his behavior with his player was wrong. But he adamantly insists he is innocent of ever sexually abusing minors.
“It was immoral, unethical, but not illegal,” he said. “At no point did I do anything illegal or deserve to be tried and put in jail.”
“I destroyed my family, I destroyed my career, everything I’d worked for up till then,” he said.
Lempesis is not a sympathetic figure. A federal bankruptcy judge opined while ruling in his favor that he “is not an admirable person.” And his behavior has been widely disclosed in the media.
But the legal system routinely makes distinctions between criminal and unethical behavior, even behavior some people find troubling. And an appellate court ruled almost 5 ½ years ago that Lempesis did not receive a fair trial on criminal charges. Those charges, Lempesis insists, were brought due to the homosexuality involved between two adults.
His situation then got worse.
In May 2012, an Elmhurst patrol officer found Lempesis in the backseat of a car with a male who turned out to be in high school. He was arrested and held for questioning, his car, cell phone and laptop were forensically scrubbed and his house searched. The high schooler was determined to have lied about being 19, and Lempesis was released without charges.
But the Concordia incident was publicly resurrected when school officials issued a press release that October, detailing why they had fired Lempesis two years earlier, and announcing the hiring of eminent Chicago attorney Patrick Collins to conduct a thorough investigation of Lempesis’s behavior with his former player.
Collins, a former United States Assistant Attorney, had prosecuted former governor George Ryan and sent him to prison. He reportedly spent more than 400 hours on what was said to have been an almost half-million-dollar investigation, interviewing some 40 people and examining gigabytes of documents.
In the wake of the announcement, the baseball player was contacted by Concordia and subsequently retained a lawyer.
In February 2023, Concordia released a summary of Collin’s report.
In part it read “the former coach was terminated by the university in September of 2010 after an internal review revealed that he had engaged in physical and other sexual misconduct that did not involve minors.”
“At this time all hell breaks loose in my life,” Lempesis said.
In May 2013 the former player filed his initial lawsuit, claiming breach of contract and false advertisement by Lempesis. No mention is made of alleged sexual abuse of him by Lempesis as a junior in high school.
Several months later, a former student at a middle school where Lempesis taught and coached filed a lawsuit in federal court, alleging he’d been raped by Lempesis and others.
Sometime after the media reports of the Concordia investigation and the civil lawsuits, the River Forest Police Department initiated another investigation.
Over the 2015 Labor Day weekend Lempesis was arrested at his Rockford home. He was released on $200,000 bond five days later on Sept. 9, after putting up 10 percent cash through a credit card.
On Dec. 5, 2017, after a bench trial, Circuit Court Judge Gregory Ginex found Lempesis guilty of one count of criminal sexual assault and two counts of sexual abuse. On Dec. 27, he sentenced him to 10 1/2 years in prison.
An amended lawsuit by the former player against Concordia was settled within the next several months.
Lempesis has pointed to a long list of errors in his trial but is most bitter about what he believes was central to Judge Ginex finding the former player’s testimony against him credible. A former Cook County ASA, Lempesis alleges, improperly suggested in a motion to Ginex that there might be a minor on the Concordia videotape. And even though the video shows activity well outside the time frame of the alleged criminal behavior, it played a central role in Lempesis’s conviction.
“She’d seen the tape herself, so she knows there’s no minors on the tape,” Lempesis said. “She did it just to poison the trier of fact. Willingly, knowingly.”
“Everyone knows there were no minors on that tape. The FBI had that tape. If there were any minors on that tape, I’d have been arrested, charged, prosecuted, long before 2017.”
Ginex ruled the video inadmissible, but he mentioned it at sentencing, as corroboration of Lempesis having “groomed” the former player as a teen.
Lempesis appealed his conviction on multiple grounds, and on Dec. 31, 2019, the Illinois First District Appellate Court unanimously overturned his conviction.
The three appellate justices ruled that “(Ginex) did not conduct an in camera review of Collin’s notes of interviews other than interviews Collins believed involved an inconsistent statement by (the former player).”
The justices “found errors with regard to the disclosure of evidence that could have been used to impeach (the former player’s) testimony…”
“Ginex’s limitation on Lempesis’ subpoena for evidence,” they ruled, “prejudiced defendant because defendant’s subpoena sought relevant and material information that could have aided in his defense.”
The justices also found “error with (the former player’s) testimony at trial which could have been highly prejudicial … and the thwarting of our ability to review a significant discovery ruling by the trial court without additional significant delay.”
“Under the circumstances of this case, we believe a new trial is warranted to address or avert a potentially erroneous conviction and/or undue prolonged detention.”
That legal victory would be the start of a nearly yearlong back and forth in which the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office filed multiple petitions that, despite failing, took months to be heard and ruled on. During all that time, Lempesis remained in prison.
“How can a person still spend another 11 months in prison when they have their verdict overturned and case remanded for a new trial,” Lempesis asked.
On Nov. 10, 2020, Lempesis had a bond hearing, but the state requested a continuance, saying they needed more time to prepare. On Nov. 24, Lempesis was released.
He would soon realize he faced another grinding exercise in waiting. His first court date was set for Dec. 29, 2020. Since that time, he has driven several thousand miles to court to sit through more than 40 hearings.
His next hearing is Aug. 4, and a second trial – if there is one – will begin no earlier than December, fully six years after his conviction was overturned.
A spokesperson for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office said in an email last week that the August date is a pretrial status hearing before Judge John Wilson and will be held at the Maybrook courthouse,
“What’s happened over the past 15 years is also wrong,” he said bitterly, adding, “the system has failed an innocent man.”
“I’m out of prison, but I’m not free.”