Landry Kiffin, a student at Ole Miss and the daughter of head coach Lane Kiffin, says she has become the target of vulgar signage posted around Oxford, Mississippi, ahead of Saturday’s game between Ole Miss and LSU.
“I understand emotions are high this week, and people are upset, but I’m my own person,” Kiffin said, adding that she has become the “punchline” of a sexual joke.
“I’ll never understand how someone can feel good about themselves putting such vulgar things about a girl on a giant banner hanging from their house.”
Kiffin said students are “saying really inappropriate things about me with somebody I genuinely have never met in my life, which makes it even more frustrating,” and that she hopes “people realize there is an actual person behind the jokes people make.”
The banners appear to stem from a longstanding, unconfirmed rumor circulating in Oxford that Kiffin had a relationship with a former Ole Miss player during her father’s tenure as head coach. Some fans have claimed, without evidence, that the rumor explains why the player received less playing time last season.
Kiffin remains an enrolled student at Ole Miss, and the episode has drawn attention as tensions build around Saturday’s matchup with LSU.
Readers recall the 1990 Gainesville murders
Separately, a call for firsthand recollections of the 1990 Gainesville murders — in which a killer, later dubbed the Gainesville Ripper, terrorized the University of Florida community over a 14-day period — drew dozens of responses this week. The killings coincided with Steve Spurrier’s first game as UF’s head coach, and a new ESPN 30 for 30 documentary on the case premiered this week.
Erik T., who said he was a junior at UF at the time with a younger sister who was a freshman living on campus, described the fear on campus that week.
“I was a junior at UF, and my little sister was a freshman (her first week away from home). The atmosphere on campus that week is indescribable. Me, and most of my friends were staying at other female friend’s apartments to ‘protect’ them. We were armed with bats and knives, and sleep didn’t come easily as we were just as scared.”
Another reader, Glenn S., who said he was living in Gainesville during that period, offered a similarly stark account.
“I was in Gainesville all during that time. Never seen a place so terrorized. It was an awful time.”
Additional reader accounts of the 1990 murders are expected to be compiled into a fuller retrospective later this week.
