Child Athletes, Pedophile Coaches and the Exploited Power Differential
98% of the sexual abuse of underage minors playing sports is perpetrated by their coaches and teachers.[i] One study review shows that anywhere from 2-8% of young athletes are sexually molested with girls more often victims than boys,[ii] but then males report abuse significantly less frequently than females and up to 90% of all sexually abused children don’t report sex crimes at all.[iii] Results from a 2015 US Department of Education study determined that 7% of all middle and high school students were subject to physical sexual abuse by coaches, teachers or other school personnel[iv] while a Psychology Today article cites 7% of all minor and young adult athletes are sexual assault victims.[v]
Due to the unique special relationship between a coach and his child athletes, where the power differential is so pronounced with child athletes wanting to impress and please their coach vying for more playing time and successful athletic performance that potentially could lead to future scholarships or stardom, the number of sexually abused children in sports who choose not to report their abuse to parents and authorities is higher than the general population of sexually abused kids. Additionally, blowback for victims who bravely choose to disclose that a popular, respected coach abused them can be highly severe (recall Sandusky victim Aaron Fisher). Teammates, fans and community often reject accuser(s), resulting in being singled out, bullied, ridiculed, harassed and further abused.[vi]
For the distinctive reasons applied to the specific context of sports pedophilia, the actual number of abused underage athletes is likely greater than the 2-8% from available reported incidence. Despite these initial research findings, noted lead researcher David Finkelhor at the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes against Children Research Center contends that no large-scale studies to date have ever been conducted to ascertain the accurate number of youth and adolescents sexually molested by coaches.[vii] With the median age of the abusing coach at 34 years old, upwards of 96% of these pedophilia crimes against children in sports are being committed by men.[viii]
Even prior to the 2011 headlines exposing Penn State Coach Sandusky, amateur sports involving children as sex abuse victims were already plagued with a number of increasingly prevalent, well publicized pedophilia scandals.[ix] In recent years the increasing influx of underage girls participating in sports, the traditional predominance of male coaches of female athletes typically oblivious or insensitive to understanding their psychological development, especially the fragile self-image of young girls new to sports, combined with the elevated status of coaches within the youth sports culture, all these trending factors have collectively led to skyrocketing rates of child sex abuse scandals within the sports world.[x] By the very definition of the word “coach,” meaning to instruct, support, develop and direct, confers authority that rewards obedience. Moreover, athletic performance largely depends on the particular dynamics involved in a close, trusting relationship between athlete and coach.
Executive Director Dan Libowitz of Northeastern University’s Sports and Society weighs in on the coach as a powerful mentor:
Isn't that why you choose a certain coach? The thinking is, this coach is better for the child development of your kid. Whether it's at camp at age 10 or college at age 18, these coaches become huge in the development of youth. Everyone’s thinking this is the best place for my kid.[xi]
But unsuspecting parents automatically assume that a coach taking a special interest to nurture and develop their son or daughter’s athletic talents naturally has that young person’s best interest at heart.[xii] And because the vast majority of youth coaches do, and are deservedly esteemed role models and pillars of the community, child athletes easily fall prey as vulnerable targets to the ones who aren’t, the grooming pedophile coaches like Jerry Sandusky. Predatory coaches often ingratiate themselves to both parents and administrators alike in order to meticulously cultivate the “do-gooder” image as their protective safety net and potential barrier to overpower and weaken victim credibility. Furthermore, coaches feeding both parents’ and children’s lofty dreams of future stardom and athletic scholarship tend to inhibit abuse disclosure to outside authorities, be it law enforcement or to even parents themselves.
Three-time 1984 Olympic gold medal swimmer Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a civil rights attorney and Champion Women (and girls) founder,[xiii] characterizes the unhealthy, abusive dynamic repeated thousands of times between coach and young athlete when boundaries get blurred and violated:
Power of this magnitude is easily abused and fosters a sickness that can turn victims into pariahs… A coach abuses a young female athlete, and when it is discovered, team members rally to protect the popular coach, upon whom they've hung their hopes of athletic success. The problem becomes the victim, who is pressured to leave while the coach remains.[xiv]
Nancy addresses another all too common pattern:
The abuse is discovered, but the family wants to shield the victim from the shame of exposure or police involvement, and the club doesn't want the bad PR. So the coach is allowed to quietly leave the club, only to be hired again to repeat the abuse.[xv]
The third and most common scenario is when sexual abuse goes unreported. When successful coaches (like at Penn State) are so lauded and renowned, buffered and armed with such sterling reputations shared by both their community and athletes alike, underage victims may fear the abuse and rejection that would be forthcoming if they dare unveil the ugly truth. In a state of shock, feeling powerless, alone, overwhelmed, confused, ashamed and scared, child athletes can conclude that it’s their fault, or that their only option is to tough it out, learn to “stomach” the abuse, suffer in silence and otherwise repress their sexual trauma, convinced that abuse is but a sacrificial requisite to being a team sport athlete, or the paid cost of striving to reach their lifelong dream to make the Olympics, achieve professional stardom or earn that coveted, much needed college scholarship. Many withdraw and simply drop out of sports altogether without a word. Or if the traumatic shock is strong enough, the victim’s mind dissociates, forming an alter ego separate from the primary personality.[xvi]
When coaches focus so much on conditioning young athletes’ physical bodies to peak performance, appreciating the aesthetic beauty and grace of fine-tuned athletic excellence while sharing athletic locker room facilities where undressing and showering are normal daily routines, regularly traveling together for competition, perhaps more than any other single profession, male coaches gain exclusive access spending inordinate amounts of unsupervised time with their underage female and male athletes - virtually every afternoon and weekends for months and even years at a time. This professional lifestyle uniquely grants coaches ample opportunity for shared intimacy between coach and athlete that for pedophilic predators becomes too sexually stimulating and tempting to avoid criminal exploitation. A coach innately possessing pedophilic or hebephiliac tendencies and urges, potentially compounded by lack of moral development and/or unmet sexual needs, combined with a child athlete’s craving for positive attention and approval from a powerful adult authority figure, frequently exacerbated by lack of parental involvement, all these co-occurring factors can compel a coach to transgress professional boundaries and sexually offend. It’s why so many minors participating in sports today are at higher risk of sexual abuse than either they or their unsuspecting parents can even imagine.
As far back as 1995, a Canadian study found that near one in four (22.8%) of the athlete respondents on Canada’s national teams admitted that while under age 18 they had sexual intercourse with their coach or a person in a position of authority within their sport.[xvii] That same University of Winnipeg study determined that sex abuse amidst the national Canadian teams was pervasive across all sports. Responding to today’s plethora of pedo-scandals that permeate the entire sports spectrum, lead researcher Dr. Sandra Kirby in that Canadian study has stated:
It’s [sexual misconduct] not new, but in sports it seems we are doomed to be shocked and appalled all over again.[xviii]
The frequency of child sexual abuse in sports in Australia is apparently even more alarming. An Australian study of its national “elite” athletes and its regional “club” athletes under 18 indicated that 41% of the female athletes and 31% of the male athletes as minors have been sexually abused.[xix] The fact that near half of Australia’s best female athletes and a third of its best male athletes as underage victims are customarily subjected to sexual molestation is astoundingly atrocious and totally unacceptable. With numbers that high operating within national Olympic organizations in so called “civilized, developed” Western nations like Australia and Canada and the larger publicized scandals so rampant in America, the Luciferian reach of the pedo-cabal is once again criminally implicated.
Moreover, studies have determined that the more talented and skilled underage athletes are, the more prone to sexual assault they become.[xx] Katherine Starr, founder of the nonprofit advocacy group Safe4Athletes[xxi] and an underage Olympian swimmer abused by her coach, states that:
The more you’re involved in your sport, the deeper the hooks [of abuse] get. Relationships with a coach are the first relationships athletes have with an adult outside of their parents. This creates deeper pathways, and the hooks go deeper.[xxii]
The male-dominated, rarified air of elite Olympic coaches already possessing impressive track records for demanding excellence from their athletes are looked upon as authoritarian gods within popular sports culture (i.e., Penn State’s Joe Paterno). Pushing their athletes and teams to the limit and demanding total obedience and submission, pathologically controlling coaches can look upon their athletes as mere possessions, telling them what to eat, when to go to bed, dictating their social activities, controlling to the extreme virtually every aspect of their young lives, including prohibiting or limiting access to overinvolved, so called “helicopter” parents. This over-controlling, disciplinarian, micromanaging style of longtime US Gymnastics coaches Bela and Martha Karolyi restricted parents from their Texas Olympic training camp,[xxiii] the now infamous former Olympic training site where sexual abuse on an industrial scale was perpetrated by their team doctor Larry Nassar. Some of the gymnast victims have gone public verbalizing their contention that their “abusive” authoritarian coaching couple that transformed US women’s gymnastics into a powerhouse condoned Nassar’s abuse, though the coaches claim they were completely unaware.[xxiv] But more on the horrendous US Gymnastics Team scandal later.
Researchers Celia Brackenridge and Sandra Kirby found that young athletes are most vulnerable to sexual abuse when they are knocking on the door to bigtime success at higher competitive levels:
Athletes may be more susceptible to the grooming process which precedes actual sexual abuse when they have most at stake in terms of their sporting careers, that is when they have reached a high standard of performance but are just below the elite level.[xxv]
Young athletes at the threshold of high achievement competitively striving for scholarships, Olympic gold or reaching the gateway to professional stardom have the most to lose by reporting abuse to authorities. In far too many cases, they risk losing everything in life they’ve worked so hard for as well as risk alienation and harassment from teammates, sports officials and fans alike that remain blindly loyal to powerful perpetrating coaches. So underage victims too often suffer in silence, rationalizing their wrongful violations into normalized acceptance as part of the enduring sacrifice required in order to achieve success at the higher levels in their chosen sport that engulfs their entire world. One former athlete abused from age 12 to 16 described what it was like living with her coach’s abuse driven by their extreme power differential:
He threatened to take all that away. That my teammates would lose everything, too. Everything would be my fault. He threatened his own life if I wouldn’t, in his words, be his girlfriend. And that was kind of, at that point I didn’t really resist anymore.[xxvi]
Aside from the Sandusky Penn State train wreck, this early century’s biggest sports scandals reflected off the public radar and awareness are the extraordinarily high rates of sexual abuse in Canada and Australia, overshadowed by scandals of Olympic certified male coaches and team personnel routinely abusing underage girls performing at elite levels on both the US Swimming and US Gymnastics national teams. But far more than variation among individual sports, this widespread problem is reaching endemic status in all amateur sports that by its very nature is inherently global and systemically wider in scope than any of us can either measure or know. All we’re aware of is that the rate of child sexual abuse appears to be skyrocketing across the entire spectrum of amateur sports.[xxvii]
The Olympic Organization: A Corrosively Corrupt Pedophilia Haven
Prior to delving into the specifics surrounding each of the two humongous sports scandals in women’s/girls’ swimming and gymnastics, a cursory look at the organizational infrastructure of the Olympics movement sheds much needed light on how a long embedded history of pedophilia and its overt cover-up has been promulgated not just in the US, Canada and Australia, but worldwide within the far-reaching tentacles of the Olympic ranks.
At the apex of this structural power pyramid ruling over amateur athletics worldwide that taps the estimated 44 million child athletes[xxviii] is the top political governing body - the International Olympic Committee (IOC) headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland. Its executive board members consist of such notorious powerful elitists as IOC’s “honor member” - the infamous war criminal-NWO guru Henry Kissinger, the IOC president from 2001-2013-turned-current honorary president - Belgian Count and Jesuit educated[xxix] former orthopedic surgeon Jacques Rogge,[xxx] along with 100 active members and 41 honorary members largely comprised of European and Middle Eastern royalty that include Illuminati aristocracy bloodlines, prominent former politicians, CEOs, top level bureaucrats and rewarded past Olympic athletes (about 40%),[xxxi] including infiltrators from such powerfully subversive secret societies as Freemasonry, Malta Knights and the Jesuits.[xxxii] It’s worth noting that an inordinate number of IOC members are also career lawyers and judges. Similar to VIPs from the United Nations as a New World Order creation, the IOC is saturated with global movers and shakers fitting the bill indelibly linking them to the global pedophilia cabal that moves the sex trafficking network and violently shakes the innocence out of child victims. It also bears mentioning that although not every IOC member is a pedophile or pedophile enabler, similar to US Congress and other powerful geopolitical organizations, an indeterminable, relative high percentage is.
The Belgian Jacques Rogge relieved Spain’s bloody tyrant Franco’s onetime Sports Minister, Juan Antonio Samaranch as the IOC president who, like his fascist boss’s history-making longevity as Europe’s longest-lived dictatorial regime, ruled the Olympic roost for over two decades (1980-2001).[xxxiii] As the newly elected IOC president, Rogge’s first item of business on his 2001 agenda was implementation of the Youth Olympic Games for children aged 14-18.[xxxiv] Intended or not, this enormous expansion subsidizing children’s competition worldwide under the Olympics name opened the floodgate to huge pedophilia scandals in the US Gymnastics and US Swimming teams among others. Meanwhile, credited with increasing IOC revenue from $100 to $900 million, Jacques Rogge’s dozen year IOC tenure has been seriously marred by the pedo foothold allowed under his watch to seep into the Olympics Movement with scandal after scandal of criminal cover-ups still rocking national sports teams today.
Rogge’s elected successor in 2013 and current IOC prez, a 64-year old German named Thomas Bach, retains Europe’s monopolizing control over the Olympics as 8 of its last 9 total presidents have hailed from Europe, although Kuwaiti Sheik Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah apparently held court over a large bloc of IOC voting members responsible for “engineering Bach’s victory.”[xxxv] Since Thomas Bach’s private business catered to his Arab nation customers, seeking a political alliance with a powerful Arab sheikh high-up the Olympics’ political food chain proved both personally and professionally lucrative and self-serving for the current IOC president. It didn’t hurt also to be the protégée of one Horst Dassler whose father founded Adidas and used his marketing company to bribe countless sports officials, paying out $100 million for the multimedia rights to broadcast World Cup soccer, the World Track and Field Championships and the Olympics.[xxxvi] Both the IOC and its affiliate the Federation of International Football (soccer in North America) Association (FIFA) as the world’s two largest international sports organizations sponsor the world’s two largest international sporting events, the Olympics and the World Cup, both racked by a nonstop history of corruption and pedophilia scandals.
Meanwhile, IOC President Bach’s chief Kuwaiti ally, oil-rich Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah was forced to resign in May 2017 as both a FIFA Council member as well as an Executive Committee member of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC)for his criminal role in the international soccer federation’s ongoing, deepening corruption scandal. Straddling atop the world’s two largest sports organizations, Sheikh Ahmad continued sitting as President of the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) and the Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC).[xxxvii]Yet per recent release of US Justice Department documents, Sheikh Ahmad is guilty of making shady bribery deals as a power play to gain control over the AFC.[xxxviii] But this is nothing new. A WikiLeaks released US embassy cable stated that he was “widely perceived as being corrupt.”[xxxix] But Sheikh Ahmad’s lofty leadership position and kingpin dealmaker in both the IOC and the ruling Kuwaiti royal family from US Empire’s close Gulf State ally kept him from jail and prosecution. After all, royalty always comes with the entitled privilege of living above the law.
However, the Justice Department also implicated the sheikh’s right hand man as yet another bribery co-conspirator - Husain Al Mussalam.[xl] While Massalam was already the director general of the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) and vice-chairman of international relations within the Kuwait Football Association (KFA), this right hand crook was also promoted as the first vice president of the world swimming federation FINA, also rife with corruption and pedophilia scandals. But in July 2017 yet more damaging evidence emerged when a recording of Mussalam proposing an arrangement of his earning a 10% “commission” for bribery deals made with sponsors worth $40-50 million was leaked to The Times of London and Germany’s Spiegel online.[xli] For the two Olympic honchos’ blatant criminality, their nation’s hand was slapped, banning Kuwait from the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics and the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
The legal problems for the world soccer federation began in earnest in 2010 when out of nowhere but cash payouts another little obscure Gulf State Qatar suddenly, surprisingly won its bid or more aptly its bribe into hosting the 2022 World Cup. With the favored US so accustomed to bullying its way, the sore loser decided it had had enough.[xlii] So in 2011 the FBI and Justice Department, neither known for their moral high ground, began looking into years of accumulating evidence confirming the FIFA corruption bonanza along with its gross failure to internally police its own pack of greedy wolves. In May 2015 the US Justice Department collaborating with Swiss police arrested seven senior soccer officials and the FIFA-gate scandal was born, spawning multiple bribery, racketeering, wire fraud conspiracy, extortion, money laundering, obstruction of justice and tax fraud charges indicting 42 FIFA executives in all,[xliii] incriminating mostly South Americans, but also Americans such as FIFA’s North and South American Executive Committee member turned FBI informant Chuck Blazer, along with the likes of Kuwaitis Sheikh Ahmad and Massalam (though neither were ever indicted nor served jail time). Based on the corrupt rags to riches tax evader Blazer’s blazingly incriminating evidence supplied to the FBI before dying in 2017, 23 FIFA officials and marketing executives copped guilty pleas over bribes that for many years have regularly determined which nation hosts the coveted World Cup and which television companies were allowed to cover it.[xliv]
A recent flap over who’s going to host the 2026 World Cup flared up when President Trump tweeted on April 27, 2018:
The U.S. has put together a STRONG bid w/ Canada & Mexico for the 2026 World Cup. It would be a shame if countries that we always support were to lobby against the U.S. bid. Why should we be supporting these countries when they don’t support us (including at the United Nations)?[xlv]
The irony of it all when organizations like FIFA school the world on ethics that prohibit governments from exerting “undue influence” on host selection, considering FIFA’s long history of choosing where the World Cup is played based on which country bribes them with the biggest payoff. But apparently FIFA draws the line with bullying presidents threatening consequences against those nations daring to back the only other bidder - in this case Morocco, which happens to already have committed backing from Russia, France, Belgium and Luxembourg, several Caribbean, most Middle Eastern countries and virtually all of Africa.[xlvi] The 2026 winner will be announced on June 13, 2018.
The unchecked hubris, total lack of ethics and insular lack of transparency designed to shield perpetrators from oversight and accountability within the multi-tiered, bureaucratic Olympic organizations are completely over-the-top. Though the 2015 Justice Department charges applied to senior FIFA officials, it could just as easily describe the goings-on at all levels of the Olympic Movement organizations, from the IOC to the US Olympic Committee (USOC), International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF), regional and continental associations, to FINA, and a host of other world sports federations, the over 200 national Olympic Committees down to each national sports team. From the filed Justice Department charges report, paragraph 75:
The corruption of the enterprise became endemic. Certain defendants and co-conspirators rose to power, unlawfully amassed significant personal fortunes by defrauding the organizations they were chosen to serve, and were exposed and then either expelled from those organizations or forced to resign. Other defendants and co-conspirators came to power in the wake of scandal, promising reform. Rather than repair the harm done to the sport and its institutions, however, these defendants and co-conspirators quickly engaged in the same unlawful practices that had enriched their predecessors.[xlvii]
Same as the old boss syndrome that characterizes the history of the human race.
In February 2018 even a Panamanian import-export company that manufactured uniforms tried cashing in on the gravy train, pleading guilty of fraud after planning to pay a half million dollar bribe to the subsequently arrested Costa Rican federation president.[xlviii] While FIFA boss from Equator was convicted for money laundering in 2016 and is serving a 10-year prison sentence,[xlix] Brazil and Paraguay’s that were convicted in a Brooklyn federal court in December 2017 still await their sentences, with another FIFA head from Peru acquitted. Additionally, a Swiss banker from Argentina dirty laundered over $25 million dollars to the now deceased Argentine FIFA president[l] who happened to be the right hand man of five-term elected Swiss FIFA President Sepp Blatter, who was forced after 17 gluttonously scandalous FIFA years to resign in disgrace in late 2015, banished from FIFA for the next 8 years (though after appeal later reduced to half a dozen).[li]
From the Zurich headquarters, in April 2018 the current Swiss attorney general announced his office is still open to gathering more corroborative evidence from his counterparts around the world regarding his own ongoing criminal investigation into FIFA. The AG stated that there are still dozens of pending cases that include a probe into 81-year old Blatter’ alleged impropriety of “disloyal management” based on a questionable payment in 2011 made to his then heir-apparent European Association (EUFA) boss that somehow avoided the legal parameter of a criminal bribery charge, despite the exchange of 2 million Swiss francs.[lii] Backstage at a 2013 awards show, the then 76-year old Blatter apparently couldn’t hold his “blatter,” impulsively latching onto the nearest sex object, grabbing the ass belonging to Hope Solo, the twice Olympic gold medal World Cup champion US goalie.[liii] This of course came two years ahead of his dethroning, which explains why Hope may have waited to disclose this tidbit to the world during the height of the #metoo movement in November 2017.
In recent years these never ending scandalous incidents represent merely the tip of an Olympic glacial iceberg meltdown. The bottom line, the IOC and its entire Olympic Movement that includes FIFA, FINA, FIG (the gymnastics world federation) and all the other governing sports bodies are all corrosively, irreparably corrupt and scandal-riddled on an unprecedented, industrial scale.[liv] Prime case in point where shady corporate, sports and politics worlds meet, take South Korean Lee Kun-hee, head of mighty Samsung electronics.[lv] A decade ago he was busted for paying off politicians and judges in 7-figure bribes. Convicted of $7.5 million tax evasion and gross fiscal misconduct, he was sentenced to three years in prison and an $80 million fine. But because crime does pay when you’re the richest man in South Korea who pays off the right people, the then South Korean president Lee Myung-bak pardoned the corporate criminal in order to use Lee Kun-hee’s IOC kingpin status[lvi] to finagle hosting the nation’s PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics.
Lee Kun-hee was too ill to participate in the Winter Games pageantry in February, so his son and now head of Samsung Lee jae-yong filled in. But like father, like son, he too was caught buying illegal favors and sentenced to five years in prison. Then lo and behold, less than 24 hours before the South Korean Olympics opening ceremony, he won his get-out-of-jail-card on appeal.[lvii] What are the odds of that? Right on cue, Lee jae-yong was there in person representing Samsung as the too big a sponsor to be denied, propping up the morally decayed, pathetically shameful Olympic Games. And to come full circle on this thoroughly cruddy, muddy merry-go-round, the Samsung pardoner ex-prez Lee Myung-bak was just arrested in April 2018 on bribery, embezzlement and other charges, taking dirty money from Lee Kun-hee, the country’s spy agency and others.[lviii] Meanwhile, also in April 2018, Lee Myung-bak’s successor Park Geun-hyewas sentenced to 24 years behind bars for her turn at Seoul’s corruption turnstile.[lix]
This over-the-top sleaze comes as a result of a near century of US Empire neocolonialism. After all, what can be expected from a US puppet where Empire divided and killed millions of Koreans and to this day holds the two nations hostage in order to gain propaganda mileage, still aggressively occupying a current garrison of 35,000 US troops[lx] and a missile defense system aimed directly at not just North Korea but China and Siberian Russia dually perceived as an offensive capability deployment.[lxi]
In yet another most recent development in this never ending criminal saga of Olympic moral turpitude, an email exchange between son of disgraced ex-president of the International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) Lamine Diack and Samsung was recovered in a recent police raid whereby Lamine’s offspring Papa Massata Diack requested $9.5 million to secure the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Games bid for South Korea.[lxii] The IOC ethics committee was already compelled in 2015 to dump Papa’s papa Lamine Diack, the Senegalese honorary IOC member[lxiii] after his IAAF was caught accepting bribes to look the other way with dirty drug testing amongst athletes.[lxiv] This came after the Diack senior was deposed as IAAF head in 2011 for accepting millions from the notorious $100 million dollar bribe man himself Horst Drassler.[lxv] Again, like father, like son, the longstanding Olympic tradition of illicit cash flow giveaways between corrupt corporate generations and corrupt Olympic generations along with political pardons is simply how this cesspool world of the elite works.
With the stench of this moral degradation and decadence oozing throughout the world of politics, business and sport, is it any wonder the Olympic Movement’s trying desperately to prop itself up disguised as the shining unified kumbaya world umbrella when in reality it’s the Olympic bribery-fraud-pedophilia movement? Where moral corruption begins, criminal corruption follows, and where criminal corruption leads, pedophilia cover-ups are never far behind. So whistle while you work as down the pedo-rabbit hole we go.
As the supreme global sports’ governing body, the International Olympic Committee atop the power pyramid overseeing each Olympic sport’s world governing federation, each region’s governing association and each nation’s Olympic Committee, the IOC bears the brunt of responsibility first in turning a blind eye for too many years to both the rampant fraud and corruption as well as for the longest time pretending a pedophilia problem never existed throughout its ranks. The IOC is equally guilty for its long embedded opposition to enacting any anti-abuse policies to protect both its child and adult athletes from further sexual exploitation and harm. To say that those in charge up and down this Olympic crime cartel umbrella have acted with malfeasance, directly contributing to the current global pedophilia epidemic, is a gross understatement. “Olympics, Inc.” is an integral part of the international pedophilia cabal, where once again protecting the Olympic brand while generating billions of dollars in revenue from its sporting events and television rights is deemed far more important than safeguarding children’s health and well-being - another shameful constant observed throughout this book.
The next rung of criminal negligence and culpability for ruining so many scarred child athletes’ lives belongs to the 206 National Olympic Committees (NOCs include every UN member nation plus various territories), chief culprit among them the US Olympic Committee (USOC) that oversees all of America’s national sports teams with headquarters in Colorado Springs commanding an average annual revenue of a cool $230 million.[lxvi] Below the USOC are 47 national governing bodies (NGBs) that cover each Olympic and Pan American sport, many of which are also located in Colorado Springs. Two of these 47 NGBs that are the most notorious pedophilia bastions, the US Swimming and US Gymnastics teams in turn fall under their respective world federations FINA and FIG (International Gymnastics Federation, the world’s oldest international sport organization founded in 1881).[lxvii]
The near four dozen NGBs operate as fundraising sources lending the status of the Olympics label to offer memberships to thousands of athletic clubs and coaches across the country in order to attract the best athletes from very young ages, groomed to participate in the Youth Olympics in sports where younger athletes tend to excel, like gymnastics, swimming, skating and Taekwondo martial arts.[lxviii] These certified Olympic coaches and their clubs at the local levels make up the bottom rung of the Olympic pyramid infrastructure, working directly with 11 million American kids dreaming of Olympic stardom. In addition to the recent US Swimming and US Gymnastics scandals, because soccer is this planet’s most popular international sport and IOC and FIFA govern it, acting in an Olympic guardianship role over all its umbrella organizations on down to the junior soccer leagues, they bear shared responsibility for the hundreds if not thousands of boys in youth leagues in England alone that have been brutally sodomized by predatory coaches taken up in the next chapter. The sheer size and scope of these largest sports scandals are still being exposed today.
While national teams and junior leagues in America and Europe have been shaken to the core in recent years with these major scandals involving Olympic certified coaches sexually abusing underage female and male athletes for numerous decades, the glaring fact remains that their world governing bodies from the IOC, USOC, FIFA, FINA, FIG to the many NGB organizations have been simultaneously engulfed in colossal cases of criminal cover-up of both child sex crimes as well as corruption on an off-the-chart, industrial scale. This rampant lawlessness within all the global sports world’s governing entities indicates incontrovertible evidence that the gargantuan Olympic Movement’s infrastructure tied so closely to royalty and corporate politics is also tied to the global pedophilia network.
Major Pending Child Sex Abuse Cases in US Taekwondo, US Volleyball and Olympic Sports Scandals Overview
As of May 4, 2018 a brand new lawsuit has just been filed in Denver federal district court, accusing two brothers in Olympic Taekwondo, former coach Jean Lopez and three-time Olympic medalist Steven Lopez, along with the US Olympic Committee and US Taekwondo National Governing Body of “sexual abuse, exploitation, and trafficking” of four female Taekwondo athlete plaintiffs resulting from when they were underage girls and young woman over a span of more than 20 years.[lxix] Significantly, the civil suit also identifies both the USOC and USA Taekwondo as additional co-defendants for failing to protect the victims from two known Olympic sponsored sexual predators profiteering from international competitions for financial gain. In all 40 women have accused the pedo-defendants of sexual abuse. Court filed allegations specify criminal culpability extending to the two additional defendants:
Starting in 1996-97 and continuing until 2018, [the] USOC and USA TKD knowingly participated in a venture to transport and traffic plaintiffs ... around the globe to be used for the sexual benefit [of the Lopez brothers, along with unnamed coaches and officials who] will be uncovered during discovery in this case.[lxx]
This unprecedented legal case opens the floodgate for further litigation if the Denver judge permits it to proceed as is, due to implicating the larger Olympic hierarchy that includes both the US national committee and sport NGB beyond the known serial perpetrators as part of an international child sex trafficking ring. The court filed documents contend that:
By 2006, USA TKD had received written and verbal complaints that Jean Lopez and Steven Lopez were routinely sexually exploiting, assaulting, and raping multiple female athletes that were entrusted into the protection... of the USOC and USA TKD. The USOC knew or was willfully blind that the Lopez brothers represented a clear and present danger to young female athletes.[lxxi]
Aside from the two perps and their NGB, the suit cites USOC’s liability and complicity for knowingly promoting and bankrolling this criminal operation down to paying the coaches’ salaries and all travel costs involved in international competitions over the two plus decade duration. Moreover, the litigation is also calling out the US Olympic Committee for its guilt in effectively covering up the pedophilic crimes:
Ignoring repeated reports of sexual misconduct, the USOC has prioritized commercial success over safety by ignoring and then covering up complaints, deferring and diverting investigations, and continuing to financially support NGBs that tolerate or even facilitate sexual abuse by coaches and others.[lxxii]
The Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and Safe Sport Authorization Act passed by Congress in early 2018 is geared to holding these sporting institutions far more accountable than in times past for long neglecting child safety in favor of shielding offending coaches and officials, offering victims more legal access to challenging the US Olympic Committee’s responsibility to ensure all its personnel are in compliance with Safe Sport specifications and child safety policies.[lxxiii] This landmark case opens up liability to the pedo-enabling head honchos atop the massive Olympics organizational pyramid, not just for sex crimes committed by its pedophiles but for exploiting its child athletes as abuse victims within the much larger international crime cabal that operates the planet’s child sex trafficking network.
Though the primary focus of this chapter features the two biggest scandals in US Olympic sports - swimming and gymnastics, pedophilia lurks in every sport at every level. The scandal in youth soccer in England will be covered in the next chapter and section that addresses scandals beyond America and around the globe. But it’s worth a reminder again that a highly important lawsuit is ongoing charging the US Olympic Committee and USA Taekwondo for child sex trafficking and civil suits over pedophilia scandals are currently pending in other sports as well such as junior US Volleyball.
The volleyball scandal is similar to other sports scandals in that a longtime “renowned and respected” coach accused by at least a half dozen victims[lxxiv] by the mid-1990s of criminal sexual transgressions allegedly perpetrated during the 1980s was still coaching and held an elite position in the sport right up until earlier this year. For decades Rick Butler has been considered America’s most powerful coach in youth volleyball. But one of his victims, Sarah Powers-Barnhard, a current Jacksonville, Florida youth volleyball coach herself, filed a 2016 civil suit against the AAU for continuing to allow the serial sexual predator to coach at-risk minors.[lxxv] As coaches she even had to face off against her abuser in the 2016 National AAU Youth Volleyball Championships before a nationwide audience at the Wide World of Sports and Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, describing it as “torture.” Sarah’s case is still pending in a Florida court.
Despite the AAU policy that bars coaches accused of sexual misconduct from its membership rolls, until February 2018 in response to Sarah’s lawsuit and increasing public pressure, the AAU finally joined the Junior Volleyball Association as well as US Volleyball NGB in ultimately banning the 63-year old Butler for life.[lxxvi] This came after Sarah and other former players have been raising allegations against their abusive former coach for over 20 years, compelling Olympic USA Volleyball to ban Butler in 1995 only to reinstate him five years later in an administrative capacity because he happens to own the Illinois based Sports Performance Volleyball Club that trains elite national players and has won nearly 100 national championships.[lxxvii] Under increasing outside pressure from victims gone public and at least two pending lawsuits, finally USA Volleyball has permanently banned him from the sport as of January 2018.
Since the Harvey Weinstein #metoo revelations broke in late 2017, a new age has dawned when powerful sexual predators are being held more accountable by their now more listened to accusers. In May 2018 several of Rick Butler’s victims turned survivors gave their personal testimony before an Illinois Senate panel in support of extending statute of limitation laws in sexual abuse cases, especially where abusers like Butler silence the abused by threatening defamation of character lawsuits against their victims.[lxxviii] Also addressed in the hearing was mandated reporting laws and efforts to make the system more accommodating for accusers to come forth and be judiciously heard. Sarah Powers-Barnhard and Julie Romias testified about their abuse, Julie accusing Butler of sexually molesting her while on international trips and, as is typical, threatened the teen with violence if she ever spoke out. Sarah stated Butler began raping her when she was 16, adding that he made her watch porno films so she could “learn” from them.[lxxix] In February 2018 a mother of another Butler abuse victim filed a $10 million class action lawsuit against him, Butler’s wife and his elite sports club.[lxxx] Christine Tuzi claims she was raped at 16, forced to have unprotected sex “hundreds of times” and was impregnated by age 19. Immediately following her abortion, Butler coerced her into masturbating him back at his hotel room.
Among the top kingpins in youth volleyball having coached four Olympic medalists, the child sex predator misused his power and influence to abuse aspiring young elite talent and got away with it for many years through harassment and intimidation threats, all the while avoiding criminal charges to this very day. The class action suit’s attorney told the Illinois legislators at the hearing that the Butler case is part of the much larger “epidemic in youth sports,” alluding to the rampant child sexual abuse raging out of control both nationally and internationally. Additionally, abuser Rick Butler also has longstanding deep ties to the pedophilia enabling Michigan State University, the same one paying a half billion dollars out to its pedophile victims at the hands of former doctor Larry Nassar. Turns out the MSU’s current women’s volleyball coach is a former employee and protégée at Butler’s elite sports facility.[lxxxi] MSU Coach Cathy George has also publicly defended the serial child rapist’s reputation. Again, linkage between longstanding pedophiles and pedophile enablers at MSU and Olympic and amateur sports strongly suggest a larger pedophilia network operating amongst birds of a feather flocking together in the same private elitist pedo club. But at least this serial child rapist from volleyball has finally been banned for good and the pending lawsuits will offer financial compensation to a few of his victims. But Rick Butler will likely never serve a day in prison for his hundreds of crimes. Statute of limitations or protection from his pedo club?
Pedophilia cover-ups of operations on a lesser known scale may still yet be exposed showing the pervasive nature amongst countless smaller national Olympic Committees from other countries as well as among the various world sports federations that oversee Olympic sports where underage athletes compete, starting at the local community youth level as well as the international Youth Olympics and on up to the elite national and international levels.
Either abolishing or completely overhauling this gluttonous monstrosity of the global sports criminal cabal from the top on down is absolutely required if corruption and pedophilia are ever to be thoroughly rooted out. Because the US Olympic Committee along with FINA, FIG and FIFA federations are among the largest financially endowed, most powerful and guiltiest of major pedophilia scandal cover-ups abusing thousands of known American and British child athletes over recent decades, the US Swimming and US Gymnastics scandals will be the primary focus covered next in full detail starting with an overview.
At the crest of 2017’s USA Gymnastics Team scandal, a comprehensive article written by journalists Will Hobson and Steven Rich published in the Washington Post last November entitled “Every Six Weeks for more than 36 Years: When will Sex Abuse in Olympic Sports End?” reported that:
More than 290 coaches and officials associated with the United States’ Olympic sports organizations have been publicly accused of sexual misconduct since 1982, according to a Washington Post review of sport governing body banned lists, news clips and court records in several states. The figure spans parts of 15 sports and amounts to an average of eight adults connected to an Olympic organization accused of sexual misconduct every year – or about one every six weeks – for more than 36 years.[lxxxii]
And of course that’s just one newspaper’s review of just several states’ reported cases. Just think how many cases have gone unreported over the years in all 50 states and you immediately come to the realization that the indisputable fact is it must be going on every single day. And this is only taking into account coaches and officials within the Olympic umbrella in the US only, not the rest of the world or the much larger non-Olympic sports venues in public and private school systems, the Little League or Pop Warner, informal pickup games at the local neighborhood playground or community athletic field. The bottom line here is, as you read this very sentence, every single second of every single day on this earth, countless children are being sexually abused in every conceivable life arena. And with that sobering, disturbing thought, let us proceed with the largest known Olympic sports pedophilia scandals and their longstanding cover-ups, beginning with the US national swim team.
Pedophilia and the USA Swimming Scandal and Its Shameful Cover-up
No doubt there have been thousands of incidents of pedophile swim coaches forcing themselves sexually on vulnerable underage athletes. Therefore, to highlight the USA Swimming scandal, a sample of a few of the most publicized, notorious cases along with the governing body’s response (or lack thereof) will be presented.
Because throughout human history a certain percentage of the adult population, predominantly male and “guesstimated” to be between 3 and 5%,[lxxxiii] have always been predisposed to sexual attraction toward children, as a result a minority of children and child athletes have always been victimized by pedophiles and pedophile coaches. In distant times past with nominal public awareness and little to no resources available, child victims were far less apt to report sexual abuse and of course even today far more victims still don’t notify authorities than the smaller number that do. This reality should be kept in mind while considering the high profile cases that we do know about.
Among the first accounts of an American swimmer publicly disclosing that her coach sexually abused her dates back to the mid-1960s with long distance record holder Diana Nyad alleging that her International Hall of Fame Coach Jack Nelson raped her in his home when she was only 14-years old in 1964.[lxxxiv] At least five or six more times over the course of the next several years Diana Nyad maintains that the 1956 Olympian swimmer and onetime world record holder from Fort Lauderdale, Florida attempted to penetrate Diana in his office, his car and hotel room, insisting on each occasion while sexually assaulting her he’d verbalize how much he loved her. At 22 years of age, Diana finally confided in a teammate, who also admitted Nelson had sexually abused her as well. Together they brought the matter to their previous private prep school Pine Crest where their coach first molested them and was still employed. His contract was not renewed at the elite prep school later that same year but the school administrator decided against reporting their allegations to the police, though years later he’d tell the press he stood by Diana Nyad’s accusations as a credible source.
But just four years later Jack Nelson was busily coaching the US women’s swim team at the 1976 Olympics and during his highly accomplished career spanning over four decades, Nelson coached 30 state high school championship teams, six national championship teams, 40 Olympians, five Olympic medal winners, was named the 1993 Fort Lauderdale “man of the year” and for three decades held a city contract running the instructional coaching program at the esteemed Fort Lauderdale Aquatics Center, home of the International Swimming Hall of Fame.[lxxxv] And because he was such a well-liked, famous charmer of a coach (not unlike Sandusky), he managed to dodge Nyad’s nagging accusations as his pedo past only began creeping up on him not long before dementia did him in five days short of his 83rd birthday in November 2014. Nelson was never charged with any crime since his do-no-wrong image, impressive coaching record, Florida state statute of limitations and his corrupt, pedophile-enabling US Swimming NGB all effectively shielded him from accountability.
Aside from allegations first publicly aired on a 1989 talk show against her renowned six time hall of fame coach, Diana Nyad found fame in her own right swimming 27 miles around Manhattan Island, breaking the old record by nearly an hour.[lxxxvi] And until 1997 she was the world record holder as the only person to swim 102.5 unaided ocean miles over a two day period from Bahamas to Florida. Nyad never publicly mentioned the rapes again until her own 2003 International Hall of Fame induction ceremony speech at Nelson’s Fort Lauderdale Aquatic Center. As an NPR and ABC sports broadcast correspondent and journalist, Diana Nyad also wrote her autobiographical memoir that Nelson’s attorney quickly dismissed as motivation to cash in on her so called “bogus” sexual abuse claims.
Jack Nelson was not only an accused child rapist himself, he also had a history of employing and protecting fellow derelicts and pedophiles as hired swim coaches at his Fort Lauderdale Aquatics Center private school. Brazilian coach Alexandre Pussieldi was both sexually and violently abusive toward underage boys and young men. One of his assault victims filed a police report, claiming that Coach Pussieldi placed a hidden camera in a vent in order to record swimmers taking showers that rented rooms from the coach, even discovering video footage of himself and another young man.[lxxxvii] Another one of Nelson’s swimmers that he later hired would be publicly defended as a coach in good standing despite previous convictions as a steroid and ecstasy drug dealer who under oath once stated that he had helped a friend incinerate and dispose of a murder victim’s dismembered corpse. Despite his creepy dark past, the late Jack Nelson is still enshrined in Fort Lauderdale’s International Swimming Hall of Shame… oops Fame or more apt Infamy.
To provide a backdrop of how the USA Swimming National Governing Body has become so powerful in recent years, it doesn’t hurt to have Olympic history’s all-time winningest gold medal champion Michael Phelps as its 21st century poster boy capturing gold 23 times over the last four Olympics.[lxxxviii] And though Michael hasn’t touched the controversial subject of pedophilia in US Swimming, as a victim of depression himself, he has lent his support and clout calling on the USOC to aid fellow Olympian athletes transition from their sports careers to life after the Olympics.[lxxxix] Thanks in large part to his athletic prowess, US swimmers in each of the last four Summer Games have won over a third of America’s total medal count and at 16 during the 2016 Olympics, the US swim team won more gold medals than the next 10 nations combined in the sport and more than all nations competing in all the Games other than five other countries in the world.[xc] With that kind of global dominance in recent years, the corporate sponsors’ millions keep pouring in – NBC Universal, Marriott, BMW, Omega, the annual total revenue skyrocketing from $2.5 million in 2006 to near three times that amount at $7.27 million in 2016.
US Swimming currently boasts 400,000 members that include 56,000 athletes joining just within a three year stretch from 2010 to 2013. With golden poster boy Phelps, the sport’s popularity has soared to new, never before seen heights, inspiring multiple generations of young American (and worldwide) pool-goers to grow up dreaming of being the next Michael Phelps. From a 2014 report out of the 340,568 athlete members in this US Swimming NGB, 317,103 are children.[xci] That’s near 80% of this Olympic organization is comprised of children. Clearly the history of this Olympic organization’s adult leadership entrusted to nurture the growth of all its athletes, but particularly its 4 out of 5 who are the most defenseless, only goes to show that it least cares about their kids’ safety and well-being. If you want proof, look no further than how it spends its money.
With the priority of winning gold and making millions at all cost, the consequence of maintaining a systemic protection policy harboring hundreds of child rapists has raised the fiscal bar on US Swimming’s legal fees to $7.45 million from 2006-2016, largely in payouts to hundreds of sexually abused minors even surpassing 2016’s total revenue.[xcii] USA Swimming’s legal cost is ten times that of US Track and Field over this same decade. That’s because pedophiles in US Swimming will sooner act out against child athletes when they feel confident and secure that their criminal transgressions will go unnoticed and unpunished amidst its culture of sexual abuse cultivated by the notorious NGB that regularly adheres to a policy of shielding perps from all criminal responsibility. The sport’s history in recent more than decades confirms this fact.
Way back 15 years ago the head of the US Swimming task force on sexual misconduct, Hall of Fame Coach Richard Shoulberg, wrote in an email in August 2003:
I would hate to see our organization ever in the predicament of the current Roman Catholic Church — protecting child molesters![xciii]
Three months later after seeing his Zero Tolerance Policy for sexual misconduct watered down by the pedo-enablers by USA Swimming’s executive board, Shoulberg lamented:
I am disappointed on the outcome of the Board. I feel that there are too many coaches still coaching who have destroyed kids’ lives and there will be more coaches in the future who will destroy kids’ lives.[xciv]
Then in 2005, over a dozen years ago, the then USA Swimming president Ron Van Pool in his annual State of Swimming message urgently and boldly sounded the alarm:
USA Swimming is frightfully behind the curve in this process and there are those who would have us continue to lag.[xcv]
So many years ago a rare minority of important players within USA Swimming were already fearing the worse, recognizing their sport had a serious problem but leadership in the NGB wasn’t responsive. Yet in 2010 a half decade after Van Pool’s warning when asked in a deposition if he shared his earlier president’s expressed concern to make young swimmers safer from sexual abuse as a shared priority, Wielgus answered:
No, I would not…I would say that has never been our number one goal.[xcvi]
Recognizing the unresolved growing pedo-problem amongst Olympic swimming coaches and their leaders’ systemic criminal cover-up, even US Congress then became involved. Senior Democratic House member serving on the Committee for Education and the Workforce George Miller expressed his concerns in a letter dated July 9th, 2014 to FBI Director James Comey:
US Swimming has failed in a number of instances to fully investigate and take all the necessary steps to protect children when presented with allegations of sexual abuse among its ranks… [urging Comey to]fully investigate USA Swimming’s handling of both past and present cases of child sexual abuse.[xcvii]
Of course we know how Mr. Compromised and Controlled Comey’s investigations are with his not finding anything in Hillary’s thousands of emails “criminal enough ” to indict her on,[xcviii] so no surprise that little has been done in the four years since Miller’s letter. And then it was a mere year later in July 2015 that Comey’s FBI for nearly a year actually sat on knowledge that the US Gymnastics team doctor was molesting young girls, knowingly allowing yet dozens more to be harmed.[xcix] But then going back to J Edgar’s COINTELPRO the FBI’s always been steeped in sexual blackmail and pedophilia. And in recent decades its function has been to cover-up pedo-scandals. It was the FBI that assassinated the Franklin scandal Investigator Gary Caradori and his son in order to suppress Bush senior’s child raping at the White House (See Chapter 13),[c] not to mention FBI handlers orchestrating all the deadliest false flag terrorism events on US soil.[ci] Yet back in 2014 Congressman Miller attempted to seek Comey’s help to eradicate the increasing pedophilic plague preying on America’s most gifted underage Olympic athletes, after his committee confirmed that:
Detailed actionable information [about sexually abusive coaches] has been well known to USA Swimming leadership, yet because of inaction, these predators were allowed to prey with impunity.[cii]
Speaking of impunity, this nexus between top sports organizations, the FBI and rampant pedophilia exposes how the elite’s pedo-cabal essentially operates - with complete impunity. In February on the heels of the 2018 Winter Olympics, the Southern California News Group (SCNG) got its hands on thousands of pages of incriminating documents consisting of court records, depositions, emails, letters, internal memos, and press articles that confirm decades of maintaining a culture of sexual abuse within USA Swimming. Interviews were obtained of hundreds of abuse survivors, former Olympic athletes, coaches, safe sport advocates, and US Swimming officials including a number of the NGB financial benefactors.[ciii] What emerged was that for many decades top US Swimming executives, board members, officials and coaches refused to stop the rampant sex abuse being perpetrated by renowned successful coaches. The US national Swimming executive director, Chuck Wielgus, who ruled over the US Swimming NGB in Colorado Springs for two solid decades from 1997 until his death from colon cancer in 2017, did absolutely nothing to protect child athletes.
In at least 11 different cases of victims directly registering complaints against sexually abusing coaches, Wielgus and the director of Safe Sport Susan Woessner opted to not pursue investigations or take any action against high profile coaches and officials.[civ] Almost a decade ago in response to congressional pressure to clean up its pedophilia act in 2010, USA Swimming instituted Safe Sport to ostensibly adjudicate abuse claims and introduce protective prevention programs to safeguard against continued abuse. With no prior experience, Susan Woessner was hired to run Safe Sport for USA Swimming in 2013. Three time gold medalist, anti-abuse advocate and Georgetown educated attorney Nancy Hogshead-Makar said:
Susan Woessner doesn’t have the background for the job. She’s not a lawyer. She’s never worked with victims of abuse (prior to getting the job). She doesn’t have the professional background to do these types of cases. Susan was somebody hired from within USA Swimming who doesn’t have the expertise for the job.[cv]
Nancy Hogshead-Makar once asked Woessner point blank why her US Safe Sport refused to investigate an accused former US Olympic team coach and pedophile who served on US Swimming executive board member and onetime US Swimming task force member on sexual abuse. Woessner’s sorry ass response smacked reminiscent of another longtime criminal Hillary Clinton:
What does it matter? He’s no longer coaching young swimmers anymore.[cvi]
Under the woefully worthless Wielgus-Woessner watch, perhaps thousands of wounded children have been needlessly sacrificed, and most incredibly, instead of behind bars where they belonged, while it took Chuck’s death to finally stop him, Susan Woessner shamefully remained in charge making underage swimmers more unsafe all the way until February 2018,[cvii] the same month US Olympic Committee CEO and fellow longtime pedo-enabler Scott Blackmun was ousted. The flimsy excuse Woessner cites as her reason to resign was her kiss and tell confession with controversial Coach Sean Hutchison who himself is still immersed as the accused in his own pedo-scandal having allegedly had illicit sex with his onetime underage Olympian Ariana Kukors.[cviii] Even after just one kiss, the pedo-enabler might have had a slight conflict of interest in wanting to protect Hutchison amidst subsequent Kukors allegations (covered shortly).[cix] Rather than admit the blatant truth that Woessner was forced out because of her too long a history keeping US Swimming an (Un)Safe Sport, having teamed up in co-conspiracy with prevailing Olympic Swimming leadership, she only pretended she was ending abuse while maintaining a consistent record of protecting the swarms of pedo-sharks in US Swimming waters. Wielgus and Woessner’s “looking the other way” is the characteristic trademark common to every pedophilia scandal to date, be it in the sports world or beyond.
But Chuck and Susan aren’t alone. Back in the 1980s, three different head coaches from three different US Olympic sports teams along with a US Swimming vice president were all informed that a world famous swim coach began abusing an American swimmer when she was only 12-years old, and did nothing to stop it.[cx] During Wielgus’ 20-year run in charge of US Swimming, he was looped in on three separate occasions about this same predator’s ongoing crimes and also chose to do nothing. But not only did they all look the other way for so many years, but they further rewarded the sick lecher over $40,000 in grants for his owned and operated club, and continued granting him full access to all the USA Swimming facilities, US Olympic and national team events and the Olympic Training Center. Near three decades later only after the serial pedophile pleaded guilty to child rape charges was the Olympic leadership finally forced to ban Coach Rick Curl from the sport… another unsettling reminder paralleling the Sandusky Penn State scandal. Curl’s case will be discussed later.
When scandal after scandal gets replayed in the media of yet another pedophile coach getting caught in action, highly paid morons in US Swimming continue to deny, deny and deny, pretending they don’t see a problem. Take US Swimming executive board member since 1990, US Swimming president from 1998 to 2002 and FINA vice president – Dale Neuberger. In a January 2011 deposition Dale actually stated with a straight face that he was totally unaware of a single case of sexual misconduct within his US Swimming organization.[cxi] The audacity to sit and lie through their teeth is the reason the entire Olympics administration needs to either be abolished completely.
No surprise that another core of hardcore resisters to any changes that would flip the switch and protect child athletes instead of the child rapists is the American Swimming Coaches Association (ASCS). The Association’s director John Leonard while sitting on numerous US Swimming task forces and committees that determine new guidelines and policies toward sexual misconduct makes his views readily known:
I hate the whole topic.[cxii]
Because so many longtime coaches have married their swimmers, any reform that restricts coaches from touching or having physical contact with their swimmers has automatically been opposed. Despite coaches so used to having their way with both their sexually exploited athletes as well as their national governing body, under the threat of losing its US Olympics funding (which occurred only because advocacy groups pressured USOC), in September 2013 US Swimming was the last of 47 NGBs to finally make it against the Code of Conduct rules for coaches and even their adult swimmers to date or otherwise engage in romantic or sexual relations.[cxiii] It’s no doubt one of those rules put on the books to placate outside interests but never or rarely enforced.
Advocate attorney-Olympian Nancy Hogshead-Makar addresses the longtime normalized practice so accepted in swimming:
When the organization allows for marriages, allows for the 11-year-old to see her 18-year-old teammate who she thinks is a peer, she thinks they are the same, they go to the same meets, they’re staying in the same hotel, they are working out together, then she sees that (older swimmer) marrying their coach so she thinks this is true love and doesn’t recognize what an inappropriate situation this is.[cxiv]
Meanwhile, during Chuck Wielgus’ two decade reign of power playing out his delegated role colluding with powerful coaches while providing vigil for shielding their Olympian brigade of child rapists from exposure at all cost, no less than 252 swimming coaches and Olympic officials have been arrested and charged by prosecutors or ultimately disciplined for sexual abuse and misconduct of no less than 590 known child athletes under age 18.[cxv] Despite their denials, all the while board members were well aware of this infestation of pedo-crimes being committed, particularly during numerous US national team trips at competitions around the globe. It’s been uncovered that since 2010 US Swimming even keeps an ongoing list of over 30 “flagged” coaches and officials arrested or accused by police of sex crimes that include child rape and child pornography.[cxvi] Yet US Swimming refuses to ban the flagged pedophiles on its list even after their felony convictions. And then even when their perverts are finally banned, for years US Swimming refuses to disclose to the public their identities on its published list of banned coaches.
Here’s more alarming evidence of how saturated pedophilia in the US Swimming governing body has become - four of the last six years at least 20 of its coaches have been arrested, charged or convicted of the following sex crimes: rape, statutory rape, sexual assault of a 3-year old and an 8-year old, child pornography and secretly videotaping swimmers undressing in the locker room.[cxvii]Blatantly greedy acquisition of more gold medals that bring more gold hard cash literally feeding off the flesh and blood of thousands of sexually victimized cash cow kids has proven far more lucrative and important to the monsters who own and operate the coveted Olympics brand.
On a related matter the US Swimming insurance company run by current and former US Swimming officials gives yearly kickback “safety rebates” up to three quarters of a million dollars back to US Swimming based on its non-filing of civil suit sex abuse cases, in effect offering cashback incentives to squelch pedophilia claims.[cxviii] US Swimming has consistently lagged behind in sabotaging safety reforms long accepted by other sports, refusing to investigate athlete claims even when confronted with incriminating evidence from multiple sources. Bottom line, US Swimming and US Gymnastics NGBs as well as both the US Olympic Committee and the International Olympic Committee are all guilty of criminal cover-up of endemic pedophilia crimes.
Founder of the advocacy nonprofit foundation Safe4Athletes and former Olympian Katherine Starr commented on the longtime US Swimming leader Chuck Wielgus who took in a cool million a year[cxix] to let pedophiles do their damage:
Wielgus was the gatekeeper and had absolute control of the issue of coach-swimmer sexual abuse. As a result, Chuck could have been a hero and been instrumental to change the dynamic that has haunted so many. But instead he (was) a coward and single-handedly allowed sexually abusive coaching to thrive for decades in the sport, leaving a wreckage of pain that has caused great harm to many swimmers that has lasted a lifetime.[cxx]
In the aftermath of the US Gymnastics scandal where harm caused by one abuser justifies cleaning house in that sport, earlier this year San Francisco based attorney B. Robert Allard who represents abuse victims reasons that US Swimming should follow suit:
… Certainly it would be appropriate for USA Swimming where we have well over 100 [known abusers]. We are hereby demanding the immediate removal of USA Swimming’s entire Executive Leadership Team, starting with Chief Operating Officer Mike Unger, Managing Director Pat Hogan, Executive Director Debbie Hesse, Managing Director Lindsay Mintenko and especially Safe Sport Director Susan Woessner, as well as its Board of Directors. Only then we can ensure that USA Swimming will have leaders in place who take child protection seriously and won’t turn a blind eye to childhood sexual abuse because of a desire to preserve image and reputation and consequently monetary interests.[cxxi]
The housecleaning still remains unfinished business as Unger, Hess, Mintenko and the Board of Directors remain fixed in their pedo-enabling positions to this day. Only Woessner and Hogan are gone.
Monterrey, California swim coach, administrator and at one time a leading financial contributor to US Swimming Dia Rianda concludes:
This Safe Sport thing is a complete farce. USA Swimming is all about protecting their brand in any way they possibly can.[cxxii] I can’t sell the Olympic dream anymore because it’s (expletive). These people are corrupt and anyone who sits there in a leadership position and allows boys and girls to be sexually exploited, to be manipulated, to be exploited in all kinds of ways just to get that gold medal, it’s wrong and it has to stop.[cxxiii]
That US Swimming brand in 2016 alone generated near $40 million of which a quarter went to the fat cat, pedo-enabling administrators and “employee compensation and benefits.”[cxxiv] With that amount of hush money at its disposal to plug the ever-widening cracks in the damn from bursting into a full blown scandal that it’s been for decades, the Colorado Springs based US Swimming NGB has spent $132,926 on a local Denver public relations firm called Ground Floor Media specializing in “crisis communication and reputation management.” For pedo-infested swim clubs reeling from abuse claims, this damage control company puts out the “bad publicity” fire. The NGB’s strategy was laid out by a memo co-authored by Chuck Wielgus:
Our strategy moving forward will have the ultimate goal of improving the overall local swim clubs dealing with sexual abuse scandals perceptions of USA Swimming’s Safe Sport Program efforts.[cxxv][Emphasis MINE]
Yet another hefty investment of $212,068 went to DC’s B&D Consulting, a lobbying company also geared to rescuing organizations in trouble, hired for the expressed purpose of “advancing their objectives within increasingly complex policy environments.” In 2013 US Swimming also doled out another $77,627 to a Sacramento lobbying firm in order to defeat California legislators from passing a law that would have allowed extra time for child abuse victims to file civil suits against companies that employ child sex offenders.[cxxvi] Longtime former USA Swimming executive board member Mike Saltzstein admitted:
I think they were well aware that there were a number of swimmers standing in line if (the legislation) went through. It was no small list of people. It would have been financially devastating.[cxxvii]
Yet far more devastating is the lifelong damage so callously inflicted on thousands of sexually abused young swimmers over the years. Addressing USA Swimming’s leadership, Saltzstein concluded:
I’m not sure there’s the institutional incentive, intestinal fortitude, guts, if you will, to do what needs to be done. Their attitude is let’s smooth things over. Let’s hide things.[cxxviii]
Rather than attacking the root of the problem - too many child raping coaches and officials in their organization, and invest in proactive measures that would stamp out such widespread abuse, USA Swimming prefers sinking its millions into paying so called experts to cover-up its dirty business, defending the image of Safe Sport as the front company “protector” of child athletes when it actually serves the function of protecting its pedo-business as usual. Just as the Penn State pedo-enablers chose to look the other way for decades at a time, so have the Olympic Swimming honchos, absolutely knowing underage girls and boys are being brutally raped and molested. Still with rare exception, neither the offenders’ nor their enablers’ criminal actions rarely if ever are publicly acknowledged, challenged, or consequenced other than by outsiders. US Swimming leadership has forever ensured that the system is not about to change from the inside.
Implementing another damage control mechanism, in three states the Swimming NGB has arranged to pay damages for abuse victims prior to cases ever being filed in court, thus circumventing the legal process.[cxxix] Less litigation means less media to generate bad publicity. At all cost USA Swimming continues choosing to repair its crumbling criminal reputation while maximizing its damage control efforts. No matter how much money it invests to distort, lie, falsify and try to cover up the truth, this NGB’s reprehensible strategy is doomed to fail. Like cockroaches exposed to light, the pedophiles and their enablers try to run but they cannot hide. Another telling fact revealing the NGB’s misplaced priorities, in 2016 it lavishly spent a million bucks for its self-aggrandizing Golden Goggles gala and in comparison only $345,470 on Safe Sport under the pretense of cleaning up its pedo-act.[cxxx] US Swimming’s higher-ups have only used Safe Sport to placate growing outside pressures to protect child athletes as a mere front in its feeble attempt to remove the stained image of “foxes guarding the henhouse,” another running theme in every scandal cover-up throughout this book. The guilty can only continue getting away with their heinous crimes against children as long as they keep filling their top positions with fellow pedo-lovers promoted on the condition that they turn a blind eye.
And now to gain a fuller understanding of the egregious suffering put upon thousands of kids in Olympic sports, several cases will be covered to illustrate pedophilic victimization of young talented girls who began swimming early on with such promise only to be brutally blindsided by predatory coaches subsequently shielded to do only more harm by an evil system protecting its own criminals at the expense of its underage athletes. Laura Weiss was an Indianapolis freshman when her high school coach Chris Wheat began sexually abusing her. In her own words:
I had never even kissed a boy. One afternoon after practice, he asked me to come to his office. He closed the door and that was the first time he molested me and I was 14. I considered suicide many times and I can't imagine all the other girls that are probably feeling the same way. He told me I would never be allowed to swim again [if she told anyone]. So the blame was heavily put on me to keep quiet.[cxxxi]
Frozen in fear, she felt helpless and powerless. Finally, her mother discovered inappropriate text messages sent by her coach. He pleaded guilty to child sexual solicitation and sexual misconduct charges and the registered sex offender was sentenced to a decade in prison but only served 19 months. Light jail time for child rapists in sport is also a very common, big problem. But then that’s also across the boards in Hollywood, Washington DC, Rome, London. Laura Weiss’ conclusion:
I think it’s hard when you see how many girls have been abused and how many coaches have gotten away with it. It’s hard to believe something is going to change.[cxxxii]
By age 7 Jancy Thompson had already begun swimming in Bay area pools and with a natural talent and intense work ethic, soon enough she latched on to the American dream hoping to someday swim for her nation’s Olympic gold. As a child pool prodigy, her early dedication came at a sacrifice.
When you’re growing up as a swimmer and a child you’re asked to give up a lot of things. You give up your entire afternoons for training, running, weight training. You’re giving up big chunks of time all the time. You give up the normal life of a kid.[cxxxiii]
By age 11 or 12 she met her swim coach Norm Havercroft who soon began grooming her for abuse by age 15.[cxxxiv] But first came the promises to make her an Olympian if she followed his strict recipe [she later concluded] for disaster. But both Jancy’s mother and father were laissez faire parents believing their daughter was in good hands with her coach showing such acute interest in her innate ability as a swimmer. She was in “good hands” alright, and it wasn’t Allstate.
He would touch me, he would put my hands where he wanted me to touch him.
But prior to overt sexual contact, Havercroft began sending pornography, nude photos and videos of himself masturbating, eventually a webcam for cybersex. A full year before her coach began molesting Jancy, a San Jose police sergeant notified USA Swimming that another underage swimmer had reported that Havercroft had sexually abused her.[cxxxv] Yet the NGB’s silence only allowed the pedophile to harm Jancy and other victims as well.
Her coach was aggressive, denigrating her publicly while sexually molesting Jancy behind closed doors from 1997 to 2002. His brazen power-on manipulation and control over every aspect of her life had her believing the abuse was merely a normal aspect of her athletic training and development as a competitive swimmer. Other than swimming, she had no identity as his enslaved appendage and naïve underage victim. The prolonged abuse took its toll on Jancy:
I was so fearful of him, I would have nightmares at night.[cxxxvi]
One of her nightmares literally came true. After Havercroft found out that she had dreamed he was pulling her through the water on a dog leash, for Christmas he actually bought her a dog leash and took delight humiliating her, tauntingly laughing as he walked along poolside tugging on her leash. To survive this level of prolonged torment that lasted five years, enduring alone this sexual and psychological trauma, Jancy dissociated, burying the worst of it in her unconscious mind.[cxxxvii] Like so many chronically abused underage female swimmers trapped in torturously harmful relationships with their controlling pedophile coaches:
It felt wrong but it also felt right. It felt good. Because, I knew it wasn't right but he would tell me that this is good... I love you. I care about you. He would just tear me down emotionally... But then he would build me up at the same time to where I needed him to feel good. I needed him to finish my sentence. I needed him to tell me how I should feel and eventually I was just a shell of a person.[cxxxviii]
As a sophomore swimmer under scholarship at Arizona State University, Jancy’s life had grown so unbearable, she quit swimming altogether, dropping out of college.[cxxxix] But leaving swimming and her coach behind was not enough to keep her demons at bay. She felt dead, a walking zombie and shell of a person without an identity, describing it as a deadening death experience. With Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a floodgate of flashback triggers of past abuse memories surfaced, sending her into deep depression, experiencing anxiety and a psychogenic symptom of excruciating stomach pain. As her next career move in response to the chronic crimes committed against her, Jancy opted for law enforcement, managing to graduate the police academy.[cxl] But her unresolved past traumas she’d been running away from for so long chased her relentlessly, forcing her to reckon with the years of severe sexual and emotional abuse.
Jancy learned that Havercroft was also accused previously of molesting a girl not even in her teens who later settled out of court. Finally a brave 14-year old’s story seeking justice against another longtime predator coach Andy King prompted Jancy’s recovery of her past trauma and a committed desire to come clean on behalf of other victims by boldly going public.[cxli] Through the help of counseling and retaining her attorney Robert Allard, in 2010 Jancy disclosed her accusations against her coach in a civil lawsuit, accusing US Swimming of negligence claiming that the organization’s protective policy toward offenders caused her own abuse.[cxlii] Because Jancy had dared to air US Swimming’s dirty laundry in public, the Olympic organization went full force opposing her suit, expending $3.8 million to vehemently refute her claims in court.[cxliii] Since the prior police investigation of Havercroft led to no formal charges, at one point, incredibly enough, while on appeal the court had even ordered her liable to pay for her abuser’s attorney fees.
However, long before Thompson’s 2010 allegations against Havercroft, even prior to her abuse in 1997, ever since the mid-1990s, the US Swimming NGB had received numerous reports detailing this same coach’s past sexual misconduct from police, swim parents, other coaches and even a broker from the NGB’s own private insurance carrier.[cxliv] Jancy Thompson’s story demonstrates the far too common pattern of victims being re-traumatized after acting on their courageous yet painful decision to fight for truth and justice in a court of law, being subjected to having to relive the nightmare all over again at times with disastrous outcomes. After years of re-traumatization, eventually in 2014 Jancy settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. It has been extremely disheartening for her to endure such a stressful protracted ordeal and to this day still not see USA Swimming place her former coach on its public listing[cxlv] of over 150 coaches and officials banned for life.[cxlvi] As recent as 2009 Jancy Thompson found out that Norm Havercroft was still allowed to coach swimming in the Los Angeles area.
A notorious, over-the-top case where US Swimming management typically permits prominent pedophile coaches to continue harming children for many decades comes the Rick Curl case. In the early 1980s when Kelley Currin Davies was still 12-years old her Maryland coach, 34-year old Rick Curl, kissed her for the first time, grooming her for the abuse he would perpetrate over the next four years, first befriending her parents to gain their trust, even staying overnight at their family home under the pretext of taking Kelley to early morning practice, and traveling with her across the country for swim meet competitions.[cxlvii] The vulnerable little girl was taken full advantage of, falling in love with her predator coach promising she’d become an Olympic star. Finally, while a student athlete on scholarship at the University of Texas, she confided in her three coaches who would all go on to lead Team USA to multiple Olympic Games. One of the coaches, Mike Schubert, said that in 1987 Kelly told him he shouldn’t report Curl to the police because she and her parents had signed a nondisclosure agreement as part of a $150,000 court settlement they’d made with the pedophile.[cxlviii] The legal action was precipitated only after Kelley’s parents read her diary. While rumors of Curl’s sex crimes were widely circulating, the known child molester was selected to several national teams and coached Olympic medal winners from four nations at the 2000 Summer Games.
As a rare US Swimming board member vowing to expose pedophiles in his sport, former Olympian insider David Berkoff wrote in a July 2010 email to another board member:
Denying knowledge of Rick Curl, Mitch Ivey and others banging their swimmers! It’s a flat out lie. They knew about it because we (coaches and athletes) were all talking about it in late 1980s and early 1990s. I was told by several of Mitch Ivey’s swimmers that he was sleeping with (a female swimmer) in 1988… I was told Rick Curl was molesting Kelley Davies for years starting when she was 12 by some of the (University of) Texas guys. That was the entire reason I formed the abuse subcommittee. I was sick and tired of this crap. No one was standing up. No one was willing to take on these perverts.[cxlix]
It took 20 years before former University of Florida coach Mitch Ivey was banned in 2013, only after his misconduct was widely covered in the press. Team USA head coach Mark Schubert alleges that he repeatedly brought Curl’s abuse to Chuck Wielgus’ attention but as always it went in one ear and out the other. Schubert also reported Curl to the second man in charge, USA Swimming assistant executive director Mike Unger, but again to no avail. Three years after informing Wielgus, the USA Swimming boss was asked at a 2010 deposition if he’d ever heard about Curl’s sexual misconduct with any of his swimmers, and of course he flat out lied all the way to his grave:
I have never received any information about that.[cl]
Wielgus would use his standby excuse that without a swimmer directly coming forward with a complaint, USA Swimming couldn’t do anything. So in 2011 even after Kelley Davies filed a claim against Curl with the NGB that included a copy of Curl’s signed settlement agreement from the early 80s, Wielgus and his organization still did nothing. Curl was seen at the 2012 Olympic Trials both at pool deck and VIP section with his issued official USA Swimming credential.[cli] Meanwhile, the NGB also saw fit to award Curl’s club over 40 grand in grants, three quarters of which came after Schubert notified Wielgus in 2007. In 2012 Kelley Currin Davies even claimed:
The fact that Chuck Wielgus and USA Swimming allegedly tried to cover up for Rick Curl by forcing Mark Schubert to accept hush money in return for signing a confidential agreement is outrageous. If USA Swimming has any integrity they would fire Wielgus and the rest of the staff that continues to protect sexual predators.[clii]
And to think that low-life pedo-protector was about to be inducted in 2014’s International Swimming Hall of Fame, but only due to a petition signed and submitted by 19 abused swimmers whose coaches Chuck Wielgus shielded was his name withdrawn at the last moment.[cliii] It wasn’t until late 2012 after a Washington Post spread outlined Curl’s abuse that began 30 years earlier that USA Swimming finally banned Rick Curl, at the time being prosecuted and in May 2013 was sentenced to seven years in prison.[cliv] In her 40s, Kelley stated in court that her motivation to come forth years after the abuse was to show what damage chronic abuse causes, suffering from anorexia, bulimia, alcoholism that caused her 20-year marriage to end and a host of other mental health problems. Sadly, her and Rick Curl’s story is common to thousands more unprotected victims and predators shielded by the insulated Olympic umbrella. Though US Swimming’s banned-for-life coaches list is now over 150 and counting,[clv] for every name on that list, no doubt scores of unnamed monsters each damaging more child victims over the years without getting caught enough times to finally wind up on that list, totaling many thousands of children whose lives have been forever altered, impaired, and burdened by the beasts who’ve been guardedly protected by this despicable Olympic sport.
Another recent high profile headline of a swimmer accusing her coach of child sexual abuse is the previously mentioned Ariana Kukors vs. Sean Hutchison case. Emboldened by the #metoo movement and prompted to come forth with her own story in the face of the Larry Nassar case, in January 2018 another victimized swimmer Ariana Kukors went to police in her native home state of Washington to claim she was sexual assaulted at age 16 by her decade long coach she’d met at age 13. Investigators searched the 46-year old coach’s Seattle apartment in response to Kukor’s allegations that he sexually exploited her as a teen and took explicit nude photos of her at age 17.[clvi] Because of the international swim meets they both attended, Homeland Security is also participating in the ongoing investigation. From the time that the 31-year old Sean Hutchison met the gifted young swimmer, his described behavior fits the classic sexual predator profile, allegedly grooming her from age 13, asking her at 15 if she was wearing underwear as the lead-up to his first physical sexual contact at age 16 that she maintains over time only grew more and more coercively abusive. In her words:
He began by having me sit on his lap when we were alone, then progressed to kissing me in elevators, and touching me over my clothes. I’d never been physical with anyone before but I now found myself alone with him, engaging in sexual acts and trying to hide my embarrassment when he sat in the women’s locker room and watched me shower.[clvii]
As a young girl she felt overpowered by her Olympic coach’s male authority, and with him becoming increasingly manipulative and controlling, and emotionally and sexually abusive, for years she felt a hostage forced into living the lie of denial in constant fear of being exposed and confronted by rumors from her friends, teammates and family. Ultimately the penile penetration arrived as his “gift” to her for her 18th birthday, though before that she says every form of sex had already occurred for several years running. In 2011 after a Washington Post did a gossip piece spreading the rumored couple’s story around the world, USA Swimming finally, reluctantly had a private investigator call over the phone ask 19 questions that of course she denied, quickly closing the half-assed inquiry concluding no sex had occurred. And to this day, the rising star coach of the 2008 Olympic team remains in complete denial, claiming sex never occurred until after she was of legal age.
Despite enduring the shame and horror of a tormented personal life, her athletic talent carried her to a record breaking performance at the 2009 world championship in Rome. Reaching the pinnacle of success three years later earning a spot on the US Olympic team, the years of abuse had her “sneaking” into the 2012 London Olympics. Her lackluster Olympic performance failed to win a medal largely because she was burdened daily by her exiled coach back home in Washington, who remained in constant jealous contact, demanding each day that she send him nude photos of herself.[clviii] When the swimming portion of the Summer Games was over, Hutchison made certain the now retired swimmer was on the next flight home, only to be locked away in his 21st floor apartment that only he had a key, still paranoid of rumors about their relationship. Fast becoming a desperate, over-controlling “monster,” she attempted to break away as their increasingly strained relationship grew more volatile till she finally ended it at age 24, but not before learning throughout their twisted marathon affair that Hutch had a crutch, maintaining another girlfriend on the side that he claimed was for “public decoy” purposes.
Currently 28 years old, having taken years to recover from her entangled decade long abuse, Ariana Kukors can now look back on her protracted damaging ordeal with an objectivity she never had during those years held hostage:
It is so painful in this moment to look back on the shell of a person he turned me into. Because in that moment, I was programed to think that I trusted this man. And not only did I trust him but I relied on him to help me achieve my dreams.[clix]
Ariana says her reason for coming clean finally in 2018 to speak her truth is her attempt to reach out and potentially save others who may be just as vulnerable to falling victim as she once was:
… For the sake of the little girls and boys whose lives and futures hang in the grasp of a horribly powerful and manipulative person. That they may not have to go through the same pain, trauma, horror, and abuse. That their parents, mentors, and guardians are better able to spot the signs of grooming and realize its tragic consequences before it’s too late.[clx]
Attorney Robert Allard identifies this all too familiar behavioral pattern that pedophile coaches deploy in pursuit of their prey:
The coach normalizes sex with them. And he uses the carrot of Olympic glory to get what he wants. So yes, it's all about manipulation, it's all about grooming, and it's all about controlling the child's brain to get her to eventually agree to a sexual relationship that she might think is normal.[clxi]
There are literally hundreds of cases out there of known pedophile coaches having abused underage girls and thousands more unknown. Among the most egregious cases involving a coach that was allowed to move from one location to the next for over three decades harming dozens of girls aged 10-17 because the swimming governing body (that certified him back in the 1970s), at least two police forces, children’s protective services, and countless swim clubs all dropped the ball.[clxii] Former head coach at San Jose Aquatics Club Andy King may be among the most horrific of hundreds of these notorious abuse cases.[clxiii] Among dozens of his victims was a 14-year old East Bay girl who had an abortion after impregnated by the predator coach but never told anyone. Years later in connection with another 14-year old’s complaint, San Jose police interviewed her after King had serially molested scores of underage swimmers at multiple swim clubs up and down the West Coast covering a span of 31 years. The San Jose DA prosecutor summarized the case:
The red flags should have gone up when King was only massaging girls behind closed doors, traveling alone with girls to away meets, taking girls to dinner, sailing on his boat and buying them gifts. The warning signs were everywhere… [But] unfortunately, King fell through the cracks in the system: Two law enforcement investigations and suspicious conduct observed by swim coaches, parents or boards who did not adequately supervise the defendant.[clxiv]
For abusing so many girls throughout the 1980s and early 90s in California, in January 2010 the 61-year old King received a prison sentence of 40 years. But because of so many failures in the system that typically protect abusers far better than its victims, the derelict was allowed to relocate to Washington State where in the mid-1990s he continued his sexual assault rampage. Three years into his incarceration, one of his victims from Whidbey Island was awarded $1.5 million in damages in a civil suit brought against her town’s park and recreation department after the local police investigation in 2000 failed to make an arrest based on her reported allegations.[clxv]
Only in the face of the high profile US Gymnastics doctor scandal has US Swimming taken any action against any of its enablers. Along with Safe Sport director Susan Woessner’s long overdue forced resignation in February 2018, also announced that same day was Ray Hogan’s ouster, another perennial opponent to sex abuse reform.[clxvi] It was Hogan as the managing director for club development who in 2010 removed from the NGB website without approval the US Swimming executive board’s 2004 Child Protection Program that included background screening for employees and volunteers.[clxvii] Never intending to implement, Chuck Wielgus didn’t bothered hiring a Director of Child Protection as the program was eventually scrapped. At a deposition that same year 2010 when Wielgus was asked who at USA Swimming has the most knowledge about the Child Protection Program, Chuckie boy’s bodacious answer was Hogan the very man that killed it.
Pat Hogan was one of the NGB members who married (and later divorced) his child athlete whom he claims he began dating once she turned 18 a year after he began coaching her. Compromised from the start, birds of a feather always flock together. In a related incident that also contributed to Hogan’s forced retirement, in 2010 he provided a glowing recommendation for an already accused coach in Orange County California, Everett Uchiyama, to continue working with children at a Colorado Springs country club while the disgraced coach’s wife worked for Hogan in Colorado Springs.[clxviii] For all his sabotaging efforts to protect pedophiles, Pat Hogan would retain his job for another 8 years earning a cushy annual salary of $273,653. With that kind of anti-child protection leadership in charge, people like Wielgus, Woessner, Hogan and their ilk (too many still embedded) should’ve never been hired, much less fired years ago.
Hidden within this Olympic umbrella’s pervasive culture of child sexual abuse is subtle semantic nomenclature habitually and unanimously utilized by officials, coaches and sports personnel, always referring to children competing in their sport as athletes. Longtime sexual abuse prosecutor Victor Vieth tasked with assessing US Swimming’s anti-abuse program articulated this discerning observation:
Constantly, it didn’t matter who we were talking to… They always called them ‘athletes.’ We really wanted them to focus on, you’ve got 320,000 children in your organization, and you need to see them first as children before you see them as athletes. There really was the mentality of the possibility that this could be the next gold medal winner at the Olympics, and that mentality was not just among the coaches and the people running the groups; it was among the parents themselves.[clxix]
Another gaping systemic loophole protecting pedophile coaches is the lack of a standardized Code of Conduct between the nation’s NGB sport like USA Swimming and its world sport federation, in this case FINA. Accused of molesting 1972 gold medalist Olympian Deena Deardurff-Schmidt from age 11-15, longtime Coach Paul Bergen is still allowed to not only retain his renowned position in the International Hall of Fame but continue to coach underage swimmers in the US and abroad as long as they’re on other national teams.[clxx] How can a global sport federation like FINA that governs all international swimming teams not haveSafe-Sport Specific Codes or policy guidelines that universally apply to protect all child athletes in all nations? But then as long as these obvious loopholes exist, pedophile coaches - like pedophile priests - can just keep floating from one location to the next doing evermore damage.
Yet another big part of the systemic problem is that the US Olympic Committee and its numerous NGBs operating from their centrally located Colorado Springs headquarters remain so resistant to change is they heavily rely on a single go-to Colorado Springs law firm that worships the legalistic mindset of minimizing liability (i.e., protecting its own Olympic umbrella personnel and organizations) rather than protecting child athletes.[clxxi] As long as both the attorneys and Olympic leadership possess a CYA/damage control mentality and focus as the basis of how Olympic organizations do business, children as a secondary priority will always suffer and remain at high risk of abuse. Like US Swimming’s top officials, the notorious legal representation delivered by the highly powerful law firm of Bryan Cave also needs an immediate termination notice.
Nancy Hogshead-Makar points the finger at this international law firm Bryan Cave with an office strategically located virtually next door to US Olympic headquarters and most of its NGBs as a huge part of the abuse problem in Olympic sports. In a nutshell:
The problem with the USOC and USA Swimming and a lot of these other NGBs is they get their legal advice from Bryan Cave. Their eye is all on legal liability, as opposed to what would make it safest for kids.[clxxii]
Instead of working to protect child athletes, the firm strongly defended US Swimming’s longstanding policy to keep the banned coaches list confidential until a legal challenge with mounting media pressure forced a reverse in policy.[clxxiii] Bryan Cave lawyers were also instrumental in arranging with several states hush money payoff settlements with attached non-disclosure agreements for abuse victims as an unscrupulous ploy to circumnavigate the legal system and thus avoid unfavorable publicity for its pedophiles it so vehemently defends and protects. Still another legal tactic protecting pedophiles is taking full advantage of the fact that the majority of child abuse victims with so much to lose never come forth to report their abuse, providing an across the board Olympic policy to summarily dismiss “suspicions” from accusers and witnesses as merely “hearsay.”
Moreover, the same legal “liability” minds have been regularly employed to represent two thirds of the total 47 NGBs as well as serve as the US Olympic Committee’s longtime independent counsel.[clxxiv] Demonstrating just how “independent” Cave attorneys are, chronic pedo-enabling USOC CEO Scott Blackmun is a former law partner at Bryan Cave on its executive committee until 2009 who in 2008 defended US Swimming in a case filed by an abuse victim.[clxxv] Again, it’s another example of the inner club of pedo-foxes placed in charge specifically to guard the defenseless child henhouse, a worn-out theme that keeps child rapists safely raping. Their brilliantly warped “legal expert minds” got it all wrong. They rationalize enacting safeguards to protect kids will be construed as an admission that there’s an admitted problem that will only open up Olympic organizations to more liability rather than understand that they save gobs of their greedy cash flow not paying out so much in damages and defending against so many abuse cases, not to mention the efficacy of simply doing the right moral and legal thing by protecting children. Seems these “bright” legal minds have been touched by Lucifer’s “light,” yet another scandal constant and central running theme throughout this A-Z pedo-book. Those that work to protect abusers instead of the abused are definitely worshipping the wrong god.
Predictably, the biggest and most vocal opposition to making the sport safer for child athletes comes from the coaches themselves. John Leonard, the executive director of the American Swimming Association of Coaches (ASAC) doesn’t mince words voicing his objection to his coaches being required to attend mandatory training on child sexual abuse prevention:
Educate about what? Does anyone need education to know what a pedophile act is? The only education that needs to take place is parents having the courage to go to the police… The statement was made to me that ‘Protecting athletes from sex abuse is a core function of USA Swimming.’ That’s utter nonsense. The core business of USA Swimming is build, promote and achieve… The core business of the family is to keep our children safe.[clxxvi]
And finally for some good news, a huge first step milestone finally moving in the right direction to change the culture of abuse was achieved in Washington DC - of all places - when both the Senate last November and the House in January 2018 passed the Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and Safe Sport Authorization Act.[clxxvii] Little more than a week before the start of the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, bipartisan legislation finally made it mandatory for all amateur sports organizations, including the Olympics and college athletics, to report suspected child sexual abuse within 24 hours to local or federal law enforcement, or a child-welfare agency designated by the Justice Department or otherwise face committing a federal crime for failing to report. For numerous decades therapists, teachers, doctors and childcare workers have long been mandated reporters of suspected child sexual abuse as should every person employed in a job, field or profession that works regularly with minors.
Forever worried over risk of liability, protecting undeserved reputations and maximizing gold medals and profits as their bottom line priorities, heartless, psychopathic sports organization executives, administrators and their legal teams have made it their agenda to knowingly shelter and defend hardened sexual predators in their midst for numerous decades, just like at Penn State and Second Mile, protecting child rapist(s) over the health, safety and well-being of thousands of kids. Now the final holdout refusing to mandate reporting laws falls within the “spiritual and moral” realm of the Catholic Church where the Pope and his Luciferians at the Vatican still resist making their legions of priests and bishops mandatory child sex abuse reporters.[clxxviii] Another inconvenience the pedophilia scandals in the sports world are causing for the Catholic Church to squirm is a current Michigan bill aimed at increasing the statute of limitations for child sex abuse victims.[clxxix] After passing through the Michigan senate, the Catholic lobbyists have been out in full force successfully stalling the bill in the state house.[clxxx] Again, proof of worshipping the wrong god.
In February 2017 victims from the USA Gymnastics Dr. Larry Nassar scandal met with Senator Diane Feinstein, helping to pass her sponsored bill that President Trump signed within the year.[clxxxi] The law makes mandatory implementation of proactive child athlete safety measures, provides supportive legal and psychological services and includes authorizing litigation for collecting both statutory and punitive damages. Rather than force sex abuse victims to report their allegations to the Olympic national governing body (NGB) with its horrific history of cover-up, this law designates an outside, independent entity - the US Center for Safe Sport for investigation and resolution of all child abuse claims.
As an example of the systemic resistance, after US Safe Sport was forced on the USOC by Congress in 2014, dragging its heels, it took the USOC three years for US Center for Safe Sport to be finally operational, opening its Denver office doors in March 2017 as the so called outside independent investigator responsible for all NGB abuse claims.[clxxxii] The exceedingly well-financed Olympic Committee’s feeble excuse for the long delay - “difficulty” coming up with the initial $25 million startup funds. Despite the enormous wealth behind the US Olympic Committee, the fact that the US Center for Safe Sport is both underfunded and understaffed to meet its designated, dauntingly ambitious obligation appears just another set-up for intentional failure to keep its child athletes safe.
If the Safe Sport entity created in 2010 by the US Swimming NGB to ostensibly serve the same function with its abysmal track record is any indicator, the US Center for Safe Sport is doomed to failure. By sinister design, selecting pedo-enablers in key top positions like Chuck Wielgus as the NGB’s chief executive and Susan Woessner as the Safe Sport director is yet another illustrative example of the foxes guarding the henhouse, and a definite set-up for failure for changing US Swimming and the Olympics’ systemic culture of scandalous abuse and cover-up silence. Woessner’s half decade tenure proves the very critical point that Safe Sport is only as effective as the leadership running it. Her agency was never independent but completely subservient to US Swimming’s CEO Wielgus and his patented culture of pedo-enabling abuse. It also highlights yet another systemic flaw and major hurdle to tackling child sexual abuse. Up to this point the USOC has granted each NGB the autonomy of opting for its own Safe Sport (or not) that invariably always answers to NGB higher-ups. US Swimming demonstrates that this approach has failed mightily. So the big question is whether the US Center for Safe Sport really is an outside, independent entity apart from the Olympic pedo-enabling umbrella? Before child athlete victims and all child athletes can trust this designated investigator, it needs to prove that it truly is an actual objective pro-child protection organization and not just more of the same masquerading sham.
Instead of bringing all sports worldwide under one Code of Conduct umbrella requiring every national Olympic committee, every sports federation and every regional association along with every NGB in every nation to be required to meet the same stringent safe sport standard aggressively protecting all child athletes globally, currently the bureaucratic morass is a nightmare where nothing is systemically coordinated or standardized. And like so much of what’s dysfunctional and destructive today, it too seems by malefic design to protect the status quo that only continues to shield and perpetuate widespread abuse.
Abuse is abuse, be it on a worldwide scale or within one sport in one country or one sports club, and uniformly enforced anti-abuse measures applied worldwide is the only solution to this global pandemic problem. But because the pedo-cabal on a global scale always prevents holding the pedophiles in high places accountable, at this highly corrosive juncture in human history, to implement this remedy takes on a pie in the sky notion that’s out of touch with today’s cold, hard, ground-level reality. Cleaning house can never be accomplished unless that housecleaning takes place on a planetary-wide scale that necessitates removing from power and control the elite rulers that own and operate this entire international crime cabal system. Ultimately that’s the only answer to what’s been plaguing humanity for millenniums. Addressing that all-important, monumental task (outlined in this book’s Epilogue) is every decent human being’s most pressing challenge on this planet.
Returning to the micro-level analysis, instantly resistance across the boards amongst various national sports governing bodies arose when in 2012 the US Olympic Committee spoke of requiring background checks for all NGBs, all club employees, coaches and volunteers in response to external pressures from Congress and child advocacy groups.[clxxxiii] The pushback from virtually all quarters within the dysfunctional Olympic umbrella was formidable. Intimidated USOG executives claimed that their power was limited in enforcing policies they knew would be openly resisted and not complied with at the local level. Some NGBs insisted that the “one size fits all” approach doesn’t work for them, and NGBs like US Swimming and US Team Tennis opted to develop their own “customized” programs... but “customized” unfortunately for US Swimming meant succumbing to entrenched pedo-interests. Others would evoke the rationale that the cost of imposing background checks at $20 per person on all its clubs and members would lose sponsors and much needed revenue.
Granted, the nature of both bureaucracy as well as individuals used to operating with complete autonomy is to reactively oppose and defiantly challenge virtually any and all pressure to change. But the above litany of excuses are all lame and totally unjustified since status quo means kids continue suffering abuse in off-the-chart numbers. The so called Olympic umbrella ultimately needs to do what’s right by children - period! And it is the responsibility of its leadership at the top of this pyramid to impose its will and authority on all of its stratified tier levels, entities and affiliates down to the local club and coach level to clean up its filthy act and protect its millions of child athletes within its operations. All these years later this problem still persists because the will at the top of the Olympic food chain has always been either too pedo-carnivorous or too pedo-friendly.
Despite the heavy blowback, under pressure from US Congress, the US Center for Safe Sport was created in 2014 ostensibly to ensure that the Olympic NGBs begin complying with stricter standards for child abuse prevention, more effective detection and independent investigation. Based on the March 2012 revised joint USOC-Safe Sport Handbook, criminal background screening checks were delineated as required standard policy for all 47 NGBs that include down to the local level of every athletic club employee, coach and volunteer over age 18.[clxxxiv] Even though background checks have long been standard practice since the mid-1990s in youth community athletic programs for children participating in amateur sports (outside the Olympic umbrella), apparently it took till 2014 for the USOC to finally see fit to implement background checks amongst all 47 NGBs.[clxxxv] Just how strictly enforced Safe Sport policies are remains highly questionable though, based on so many unsafe sports still not operating on behalf of child athletes’ best “safe sport” interests.
In any event, leave it to the known pedo-enablers and pedo-perps within the US House of Representatives to pass a bill by an overwhelming 406-3 margin only after it surgically removes funding for the US Center for Safe Sport, leaving it still in need of funding sources, which as previously noted has posed a serious impediment to it even getting off the ground.[clxxxvi] One cannot help but ask is this the tactical loophole chosen by a pedo-infested, sexually blackmailed, compromised United States Congress to nefariously sabotage the law from actually protecting children? It bears repeating, the US Center for Safe Sport is far too underfunded and understaffed to realistically and independently investigate the high volume of child sexual abuse cases. And we still don’t know if it’s truly independent.
Additionally, on the positive side, the 2018 congressional bill judiciously extends the statute of limitation laws to 10 years after turning 18 or 10 years after victims realize that they were abused.[clxxxvii] This latter point is enormously significant since child sexual trauma is so often repressed in childhood and memories of abuse are not fully recoverable until victims reach adulthood (despite what the pedophile-ridden False Memory Foundation purports; see Chapter 2). This child protection act also stipulates the legal precedent of empowering victims of sexual abuse as well as child pornography to hold offenders accountable in both criminal and federal civil courts. Additionally, other than a parent or guardian or in an emergency situation, as an added safeguard, the bill also prohibits an adult employee or volunteer belonging to a youth athletic organization to be in a room alone with a minor unless another adult is present.
In addition to required background checks and mandated reporting, another surefire way to lower sexual abuse rates for underage female swimmers in USA Swimming is to hire more women coaches at the higher competitive ranks. Though the total number of 20,000 coaches in US Swimming are close to an even gender split, the disparity at the national team level (considered Olympic pre-trials) is pronounced, only 12% of the coaches for the most recent 2017-18 team are female.[clxxxviii] Additionally, at those top competitive elite levels, virtually all the head coaches are men. And since over 93% of the banned coaches are also men (near three quarters of them for sexual misconduct), and 94% of pedophilia crimes are committed by males,[clxxxix] it makes total sense to kill two birds with one stone - reach gender parity at the elite levels where child athletes are most preyed upon, and thereby keep young female swimmers safer both in and out of the now shark infested water.
In the lead-up to the House passing the mandated child sexual abuse reporting law in late January 2018, recognizing that the pedo-endemic in sports isn’t going away, the US House Energy and Commerce Committee informed current USA Swimming President and CEO (since June 2017) Tim Hinchey in writing that his National Governing Body is under investigation along with its other pedo-riddled cohort:
The abhorrent abuses associated with USA Gymnastics, as well as allegations in 2014, when 19 swimmers said they were sexually abused by their coaches, may raise concerns about whether your organization has sufficient mechanisms to protect your athletes from abuse and mistreatment. Accordingly, the Committee is seeking information from USA Swimming because of the role it plays in overseeing swimming and protecting all of its athletes.[cxc]
Along with letters sent to USA Gymnastics, USA Taekwondo and Michigan State, the congressional committee also requested that Hinchey and his US Olympic Swimming NGB answer the following three critical questions by February 9, 2018:
When was USA Swimming made aware of sexual abuse allegations in 2014, is USA Swimming aware of any other sexual abuse allegations within the swimming community, and does USA Swimming have policies and procedures in place to properly report, handle, and investigate sexual abuse when it has been reported to them?[cxci]
With so many in US Congress out and out pedophiles or sexually blackmailed pedophile enablers themselves, it’s a bit like the pot calling the kettle black for the House of Representatives to summon the top sporting officials in the US Olympic Committee to a May 23rd, 2018 hearing to answer for “the potentially pervasive and systemic problem of sexual abuse across the US Olympic community,” the voiced concern of the two congressional subcommittee co-chairs.[cxcii] But if it puts the Olympic umbrella on notice to clean up its pedo-act or face harsh consequences (a good start would be abolishment), then it’s a good thing. But my question is, who’s going to clean up Congress, or the entire US pedo-government, or for that matter the international pedo-cabal? Truth and reconciliations commissions as a starter perhaps. In any event, the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee is questioning USOC’s acting chief executive Susanne Lyons and Kerry Perry, the current President and CEO of USA Gymnastics, USA Swimming’s CEO Tim Hinchey, chiefs of both USA Taekwondo and USA Volleyball as well as a representative from US Safe Sport.
Aside from Mr. Hinchey directed to respond in writing to Congress’ above questions, otherwise, other than a letter professing to be earnest about cleaning up the abuse in his unholy USA Swimming house,[cxciii] and signing onto a brief to-do list that his board members came up with as their plan of action, the USA Swimming chief has kept a pretty low profile since taking over the mess his deceased pedo-enabling predecessor left him. To Hinchey’ credit, immediately upon receipt of a letter from attorney for abuse victims Robert Allard demanding the resignation of two notorious members of US Swimming’s pedo enabler club - Woessner and Hogan - Hinchey had them resigning in February. Though still early, other than that biggie, little else of any substantive import has changed. But based on a statement Hinchey made about being open to wanting to hear from abused athlete survivors, 49-year old Sarah Ehekircher stepped up for a meeting with head honcho Hinchey himself on May 1st.[cxciv]
Back in the late 1980s Sarah was groomed by her Houston coach Scott MacFarland and sexually assaulted at age 17.[cxcv] After Woessner’s Safe Sport blew off Sarah’s coach accusations in 2010, after convincing the US Center for Safe Sport to readdress her case, and a meeting with Hinchey under her belt, Sarah Ehekircher will not only be holding US Swimming and US Safe Sport to task, but she’s currently been talking also to congressional investigators at the US House Energy and Commerce Committee about “the Olympic sized problem.”[cxcvi] Incidentally, as an aside further exposing the sexist, pedo-enabling head of the coaches association John Leonard, beyond each time he opens his mouth to put his foot in it, working under Leonard at ASAC in 2004, Sarah Ehekircher maintains he engaged in hardcore sexual harassment toward her.[cxcvii] Her meeting with the USA Swimming director was Hinchey’s first test beyond the pedo-enablers’ resignations and rhetoric to show whether he’s for real or not. After his shameful organization has delivered so much abuse upon abuse to so many unjustly wronged accusers, how Mr. Hinchey handled his May meetings with Sarah and Congress and how he proceeds from here on out will go far in determining whether USA Swimming’s entrenched culture of child sexual abuse is still entrenched or not.
Longtime advocate Nancy Hogshead-Makar’s response to this year’s congressional inquiry into US Olympic sports:
We just heard 160 survivors address their abuser, Team USA’s doctor in gymnastics. Knowing the true cost, it is gratifying that Congress is looking within the Olympic sports movement and see another sport with over 100 Larry Nassar-types in a single sport; USA Swimming. That’s a much bigger scale of abuse, one worthy of inquiry. In my position as head of an organization that advocates for girls and women in sport, I hear the pain too many swimmers have suffered. There are still too many abusive coaches who are either still coaching and still in the Hall of Fame. Almost as bad; ethical coaches who have been blackballed for advocating for athletes, for doing the right thing. They’re offended by a culture of coaches that regularly go to strip clubs in the evenings after a day of competition, offended by the sexualization of young girls, but powerless to stop it.[cxcviii]
San Francisco attorney Robert Allard stated:
It’s about time. USA Swimming’s leaders have known for literally decades about dozens of pedophiles no different than Larry Nassar who have been roaming pool decks for prey across this country and did not do a damn thing about it because they were blinded by the massive amounts of money they basically extorted from amateur athletes. Countless lives of young swimmers have been ruined as a result of being sexually abused by these known predators. These leaders have redefined what it means to ‘cover up’ for child molesters. Yet, to our knowledge, not one single USA Swimming employee has received any adverse employment action of any kind and no board member has been removed from office. Personally, I hope heads roll and criminal arrests are made. There are a lot of people sitting in Colorado Springs with considerable blood on their hands. It is high time to clean house and insert a totally new leadership core within this National Governing Body which as presently constituted is corrupt to the core[cxcix].
And right on cue, one big head atop US Olympics did roll. In its feeble attempt to symbolically clean up its act, succumbing to increasing outside pressures, 8-year US Olympic Committee CEO Scott Blackmun was finally ousted three days after the February closure of the Winter Games for his pedo-enabling track record failing to protect child athletes from pedophile coaches and Olympic officials.[cc] The USOC claimed Blackmun quit his lofty post due to health reasons. But excuses like “health problems” or “desire to spend time with family” are typically given when head honchos resign in thinly veiled disgrace from entrenched high perched positions. But as this dawning age of exposing sexual predators gains momentum, jumpstarted by last October’s Hollywood Harvey downfall, at long last historical pedo-bastions of child rapists and their enablers like the Olympics are piece by piece being dismantled. Since the 1990s Blackmun has been a permanent fixture atop the Olympics Movement to suppress efforts to rid pedophilia, serving as the US Olympic Committee’s general counsel, as acting CEO and law partner in USOC’s go-to “legal department” firm Bryan Cave, all prior to his near decade long run as US Olympics Chief Executive Officer from 2010-2018.
Here’s what Olympic anti-pedophilia crusader Nancy Hogshead-Makar had to say about Blackmun’s downfall:
Let the Olympic movement take note. The money and USA’s total medal count under Scott Blackmun will be forgotten. Blackmun’s career will be defined by his unwillingness to protect children and athletes from sexual abuse within club and Olympic sports. Blackmun didn’t merely happen to preside during the great Larry Nassar devastation, he created the underlying conditions for Nassar’s evil to thrive. Like Blackmun’s good friend Chuck Wielgus, Blackmun’s legacy will be that he intentionally blocked athletes from getting help when they reported abuse.[cci]
Though the US Gymnastics scandal became Blackmun’s last straw that broke his pedo-enabling back, even before his long overdue exit, for years the USOC CEO protected a slew of US Swimming NGB pedophiles. Attorney Robert Allard’s turn to weigh in:
In 2013, I, on behalf of the countless swimmers who were molested by their swim coaches, literally begged and pleaded Scott Blackmun to get involved in the governance of USA Swimming which had proven to be rotten to the core and utterly unable and in fact unwilling to protect children from pedophile coaches. In essence he smugly told me to go ‘pound sand’ and that in his view ‘USA Swimming is making a sincere effort, backed by real resources and real people, to address the misconduct that exists not only in their sport, but in society at large.’ I later learned that he was close friends and had longstanding business relationships with many high level executives of USA Swimming. Right then and there I knew he was nothing more than a member of the ‘good old boys’ club and could not be relied upon to create a safer environment for amateur athletes. His departure is very much necessary in order for parents to start having confidence that when they entrust their children to the care of amateur sporting organizations, every effort will be made to protect them from pedophiles. With Blackmun now gone, it is imperative that the USOC put someone in charge who places the safety and welfare of athletes as its first priority.[ccii].
Part 2 follows with the USA Gymnastics Scandal.
[i] Sylvie Parent and Karim El Himi, “Sexual Abuse of Young People in Sport,” inspq.qc.ca, November 2012, https://www.inspq.qc.ca/en/sexual-assault/fact-sheets/sexual-abuse-young-people-sport.
[ii] Sylvie Parent and Karim El Himi, https://www.inspq.qc.ca/en/sexual-assault/fact-sheets/sexual-abuse-young-people-sport.
[iii]“Child Sexual Abuse Statistics,” loveourchildrenusa.org, http://loveourchildrenusa.org/child_sexual_abuse_stats.php.
[iv]“Child Sexual Abuse and Sports: Resources,” CBS News, June 20, 2015, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/child-sexual-abuse-in-sports-and-schools-resources/.
[v] Deborah Serani, “Sexual Abuse in Sports,” Psychology Today, December 1, 2011, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/two-takes-depression/201112/sexual-abuse-in-sports.
[vi] Nancy Hogshead-Makar, “How to Stop Sexual Abuse in Sports,” Athletic Business, January 2018, https://www.athleticbusiness.com/athlete-safety/how-to-stop-sexual-abuse-in-sports.html.
[vii] Lynn Zinser, “Coaching Gives Abusers Opportunity and Trust,” The New York Times, December 10, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/sports/culture-of-sports-works-against-children-especially-boys-reporting-abuse.html.
[ix] T.J. Quinn and Greg Amante, “Sex Abuse Pervasive in USA Swimming,” ESPN, April 27, 2010, http://www.espn.com/espn/otl/news/story?id=5071820.
[x] Marc Bloom, “When Athletes are one Sex, and Coaches are another,” The New York Times, June 13, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/13/health/when-athletes-are-one-sex-and-coaches-are-the-other.html.
[xi] Eric Adelson, “Why Sports and Sex Abuse too often Mix,” The Post Game, November 29, 2011, http://www.thepostgame.com/features/201111/how-widespread-sex-abuse-sports.
[xiii]“Champion Women: Advocacy for Girls and Women in Sport,” championwomen.org, http://championwomen.org/.
[xiv] Nancy Hogshad-Makar, “How to top Sexual Abuse in Sports,” Athletic Business, January 2018, https://www.athleticbusiness.com/athlete-safety/how-to-stop-sexual-abuse-in-sports.html.
[xv] Nancy Hogshad-Makar, https://www.athleticbusiness.com/athlete-safety/how-to-stop-sexual-abuse-in-sports.html.
[xvi] Mark F. Schwartz, Lori D. Galperin and William H. Masters, “Post-Traumatic Stress, Sexual Trauma and Dissociative Disorder: Issues related to Intimacy and Sexuality,” National Criminal Justice Reference Service, March 17, 1995, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Photocopy/153416NC.
[xix] Tricia Leahy, “Sexual Abuse in Sport,” Excerpt from Critical Essays in Applied Sport Psychology, eds. David Gilbourne and Mark B. Andersen, http://www.humankinetics.com/excerpts/excerpts/sexualabuseinsport-excerpt.
[xx]Saul Marks, Margo Mountjoy and Madalyn Marcus, “Sexual Harassment and Abuse in Sport: The Role of the Team Doctor,” British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2012, 46, p.905-908, bjsm.bmj.com/content/bjsports/46/13/905.full.pdf.
[xxii] Emalie Marthe, “’He Threatened to take that all away’: When Coaches Sexually Assault Athletes, Vice, September 25, 2016, https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/qvdpm5/he-threatened-to-take-all-that-away-when-coaches-sexually-assault-athletes.
[xxiii] Will Hobson and Steven Rich, “Every Six Weeks for more than 36 Years: When will Sex Abuse in Olympic Sports End?” The Washington Post, November 17, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/every-six-weeks-for-more-than-36-years-when-will-sex-abuse-in-olympic-sports-end/2017/11/17/286ae804-c88d-11e7-8321-481fd63f174d_story.html?utm_term=.4e93c0d81f51.
[xxiv] Rachel Axon and Nancy Armour, “Martha, Bela Karolyi Defend Training Environment, say they didn't know about Abuse,” USA Today, April 22, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2018/04/22/martha-bela-karolyi-defend-training-environment-usa-gymnastics/540869002/.
[xxv]Celia Brackenridge and Sandra Kirby, “Playing Safe: Assessing the Risk of Sexual Abuse to Elite Child Athletes,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport, June 23, 1997, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a1fe/585a19259091.
[xxvi] Marisa Kwiakowski and Tim Evans, “Ex-Gymnast Speaks out about her Abuse,” Indy Star, August 26, 2016, https://www.indystar.com/story/news/investigations/2016/08/26/kid-they-said-wasnt-worth/89339532/.
[xxvii] Andreas Sten-Ziemons, “The Worrying Trend of Sexual Abuse in Sports,” dw.com, September 2, 2017, http://www.dw.com/en/the-worrying-trend-of-sexual-abuse-in-sports/a-37481528.
[xxviii] Rachel Sturtz, “Unprotected,” Outside, November 2014, https://www.outsideonline.com/2162781/unprotected.
[xxix] Khaled Diab, “Catholic Schools: What’s in a Name,” The Guardian, October 8, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/oct/08/catholic-schools-education-principle-pragmatism.
[xxx] Jere Longman, “Rogge’s Legacy Doesn’t Extend to the Oppressed,” The New York Times, September 9, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/sports/olympics/departing-ioc-president-missed-opportunities-on-human-rights.html.
[xxxii] Andrew Jennings, “Meet the IOC, Ideal Candidates for a Perp Walk,” The Nation, January 22, 2014, https://www.thenation.com/article/meet-ioc-ideal-candidates-perp-walk/.
[xxxiii] Russ Kick, “Fascist Photos of Former IOC President Juan Samaranch,” memoryhole2.org, August 9, 2016, http://thememoryhole2.org/blog/samaranch-photos.
[xxxiv]“# 8,000: Mankind is more than this,” astrocohors.com, January 23, 2018, http://www.astrocohors.com/2018/01/8000-mankind-is-more-than-this/.
[xxxv] Robert Livingstone, “IOC Power Shift as Presidency Changes Hands,” gamesbids.com, September 10, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20130914220752/http://www.gamesbids.com:80/eng/other_news/1216136767.html.
[xxxvii]“Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah,” IOC Members, Olympics.org, https://www.olympic.org/sheikh-ahmad-al-fahad-al-sabah.
[xxxviii] Andy Brown, “Sheikh Ahmed’s Resignation puts Pressure on FIFA and IOC,” The Sports Integrity Initiative, May 1, 2017, http://www.sportsintegrityinitiative.com/sheikh-ahmads-resignation-puts-pressure-fifa-ioc/.
[xl] Craig Lord, “FINA Bosses Buffeted by FIFA Corruption as Kuwaiti Heir-Apparent is Accused,” swimvortex.com, May 2, 2017, https://www.swimvortex.com/fina-bosses-buffeted-by-fifa-corruption-scandal-as-kuwaiti-heir-apparent-accused/.
[xli]“Corruption Claim Hit FINA before World Event,” The Straits Times, July 20, 2017, http://www.straitstimes.com/sport/corruption-claims-hit-fina-before-world-event.
[xlii]Simon Kuper, “Soccer’s Culture of Corruption,” The New York Review of Books, book review of The Fall of the House of FIFA: The Multimillion-Dollar Corruption at the Heart of Global Soccer
[xliii] AFP, “Panama Firm Pleads Guilty in FIFA Corruption Scandal,” The Tico Times, February 22, 2018, http://www.ticotimes.net/2018/02/22/panama-firm-pleads-guilty-fifa-corruption-scandal-2.
[xliv] David Conn, “How the FBI Won ‘the World Cup of Fraud’ as FIFA Scandal Arrives in Court, The Guardian, November 6, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/nov/06/fifa-scandal-fbi-new-york-trial-chuck-blazer-sepp-blatter.
[xlv] Mary Papenfuss, “FIFA Cites Ethics Rules after Trump’s Threatening World Cup Tweet,” Huffington Post, April 27, 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fifa-warns-trump-off-bullying-for-world-cup_us_5ae3bd2ae4b04aa23f233b90.
[xlvi] Paul Kennedy, “Scorecard: Who’s Supporting Whom in World Cup Bid Race,” Soccer America Daily, April 19, 2018, https://www.socceramerica.com/publications/article/77583/scorecard-whos-supporting-whom-in-world-cup-2026.html.
[xlvii]The USA v. Jeffrey Webb et al, F.2015R00747 (New York 2015), para. 75,http://www.justice.gov/opa/file/450211/download.
[xlviii] Andrew Keshner, “Panamanian Business Planned $500G Bribe to FIFA big Eduardo Li, New York Daily News,” February 22, 2018, http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/soccer/panamanian-business-planned-500g-bribe-fifa-big-eduardo-li-article-1.3834961.
[xlix]“Ex-Ecuador Soccer President Convicted in FIFA Graft Case,” Daily Mail/Associated Press, November 19, 2016, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-3951788/Ex-Ecuador-soccer-president-convicted-FIFA-graft-case.html.
[l] Roger Gonzalez, “Swiss Banker details FIFA Corruption, Cites Bribes to Sepp Blatter Right-Hand Man,” CBS News, June 16, 2017, https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/swiss-banker-details-fifa-corruption-cites-bribes-to-sepp-blatter-right-hand-man/.
[li] Barry Petchesky, “Sepp Blatter Banned from Soccer for Eight Years,” deadspin.com, December 21, 2015, https://deadspin.com/sepp-blatter-banned-from-soccer-for-eight-years-1749048841.
[lii]“Swiss Prosecutor Appeals for Cooperation on FIFA Case File,” USA Today/AP, April 20, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/soccer/2018/04/20/swiss-prosecutor-appeals-for-cooperation-on-fifa-case-file/34032743//
[liii]“Sepp Blatter: Hope Solo Accuses Ex-Fifa President of Sexual Harassment,” BBC, November 10, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/41950198.
[lv] Sam Byford, “King of Samsung: A Chairman's Reign of Cunning and Corruption,” The Verge, November 30, 2012, https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/30/3709688/samsung-25-years-lee-kun-hee.
[lvii]“The Release of Samsung’s Boss Leaves South Koreans Exasperated,” The Economist, February 8, 2018, https://www.economist.com/news/business/21736581-appeal-court-agreed-former-president-coerced-him-paying-bribe-release.
[lviii] Hyung-Jin Kim, “Another Former South Korean Leader Charged with Corruption,” ABC News/AP, April 9, 2018, http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/south-korean-leader-charged-corruption-54330705.
[lix] Matt Stiles, “Ousted South Korean President Park Geun-hye is Sentenced to 24 Years in Prison,” Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2018, http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-south-korea-park-sentenced-20180406-story.html.
[lx] Oliver Holmes, “What is the US Military’s Presence near North Korea?” The Guardian, August 9, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/09/what-is-the-us-militarys-presence-in-south-east-asia.
[lxi] Jae-Jung Suh, “Missile Defense and the Security Dilemma: THAAD, Japan’s “Proactive Peace,” and the Arms Race in Northeast Asia,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, April 27, 2017, https://apjjf.org/2017/09/Suh.html.
[lxii]“Samsung Denies Pyeongchang Olympic Lobbying Allegation,” USA Today/AP, April 16, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2018/04/16/samsung-denies-pyeongchang-olympic-lobbying-allegation/33877893/.
[lxiii]“IOC Statement on Mr. Lamine Diack,” olympic.org, November 9, 2015, https://www.olympic.org/news/ioc-statement-on-mr-lamine-diack.
[lxiv] Nick DeMarco, “After FIFA/IAAF Corruption – Time for Institutional Change,” Sports Law Bulletin, November 13, 2015, https://www.sportslawbulletin.org/after-fifaiaaf-corruption-time-for-institutional-change/.
[lxvii]“International Gymnastics Federation,” olympic.org, https://www.olympic.org/international-gymnastics-federation.
[lxix] Rachel Sturtz and Alex Heard, “Is the USOC Running a Sex Trafficking Ring?” Outside Online, May 4, 2018, https://www.outsideonline.com/2303571/us-olympic-committee-trafficking-ring.
[lxx] Rachel Sturtz and Alex Heard, https://www.outsideonline.com/2303571/us-olympic-committee-trafficking-ring.
[lxxi] Rachel Sturtz and Alex Heard, https://www.outsideonline.com/2303571/us-olympic-committee-trafficking-ring.
[lxxii] Rachel Sturtz and Alex Heard, https://www.outsideonline.com/2303571/us-olympic-committee-trafficking-ring.
[lxxiii] Rachel Sturtz and Alex Heard, https://www.outsideonline.com/2303571/us-olympic-committee-trafficking-ring.
[lxxiv] Diana Moskovitz, “Lawsuit: Rick Butler Sexually Abused Six Girls, Threatened their Careers to Keep them Quiet,” Deadspin.com, February 28, 2018, https://deadspin.com/lawsuit-rick-butler-sexually-abused-six-girls-threate-1823408713.
[lxxv] Christian Red, “Lawsuit against AAU ongoing, but Youth Volleyball Coach Rick Butler Denies Abuse Allegations against him,” New York Daily News, April 25, 2017, http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more-sports/suit-aau-ongoing-volleyball-coach-denies-abuse-allegations-article-1.3100489.
[lxxvi] Hannah Leone, “Junior Volleyball Association is latest Group to Ban Aurora Coach Rick Butler,” Chicago Tribune, February 12, 2018, http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/aurora-beacon-news/news/ct-abn-rick-butler-jva-ban-st-0212-20180212-story.html.
[lxxvii] Dominique Mosbergen, “Top Volleyball Coach Raped Girls Hundreds of Times, Lawsuit Alleges,” Huffington Post, March 1, 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/volleyball-coach-rape-lawsuit-rick-butler_us_5a97ca41e4b07dffeb6fd215.
[lxxviii] Bill Lukitsch, “Women Recount Abuse Allegations against Suburban Volleyball Coach Rick Butler in Senate Hearing,” Chicago Tribune, May 15, 2018, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-met-illinois-legislature-rick-butler-20180515-story.html.
[lxxxi] Molly Olmstead, “Report: Michigan State Kept Ties to Youth Volleyball Coach Accused of Sexual Abuse,” Slate, April 24, 2018, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/04/michigan-state-youth-volleyball-coach-rick-butler.html.
[lxxxiv] Ashley Harrell, “Jack and Diana,” Broward Palm Beach New Times, June 14, 2007, http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/news/jack-and-diana-6310159.
[lxxxvii] Deidra Funcheon, “An Underage Sex Scandal Leads to South Florida Swimming Hall of Fame,” Miami New Times, June 5, 2014, http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/an-underage-sex-scandal-leads-to-south-floridas-swimming-hall-of-fame-6395839.
[lxxxviii]“Michael Phelps: The Most Decorated Olympian of All Time,” Olympic.org, https://www.olympic.org/michael-phelps.
[lxxxix] Haley Draznin, “Michael Phelps calls on US Olympic Committee to do more to Help Athletes Struggling with Depression,” CNN, March 30, 2018, https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/27/politics/michael-phelps-axe-files/.
[xc] Scott M. Reid, “100s of USA Swimmers were Sexually Abused for Decades and the People in Charge Knew and Ignored it, Investigation Finds,” The Orange County Register, February 16, 2018, https://www.ocregister.com/2018/02/16/investigation-usa-swimming-ignored-sexual-abuse-for-decades/.
[xci]“When the Athlete is a Child: An Assessment of USA Swimming’s Safe Sport Program,” GundersenHealth.org, January 27, 2014, https://www.gundersenhealth.org/app/files/public/3/.
[xcvii] Elliott Almond, “FBI, US Swimming Officials Talk on Abuse,” The Mercury News, October 22, 2014, https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/10/22/fbi-usa-swimming-officials-talk-on-abuse/.
[xcviii] Joe Martino, “’High Ranking People’ Protected Hillary Clinton from being Indicted – the Truth is Coming out,” Collective Evolution, March 19, 2018, http://www.collective-evolution.com/2018/03/19/high-ranking-people-protected-hillary-clinton-from-being-indicted-the-truth-is-coming-out/.
[xcix] Tyler Durden, “Over Two Dozen Teen Gymnasts Molested by Larry Nassar while FBI Sat on Case,” Zero Hedge, February 24, 2018, https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-04/over-two-dozen-teen-gymnasts-molested-larry-nassar-while-fbi-sat-case.
[c] Wayne Madsen, “FBI Killed Franklin Scandal Investigator,” rosanneworld.com/Wayne Madsen Report, June 20, 2014, http://www.roseanneworld.com/2014/06/20/special-report-fbi-killed-franklin-scandal-investigator-wayne-madsen-report/.
[ci] Joachim Hagopian, “Western State Sponsored Terrorism: False Flags Spreading Islamophobia, Race and Religious Wars and New World Disorder,” Lew Rockwell.com, December 25, 2015, https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/12/joachim-hagopian/new-world-disorder-2/.
[cii] Scott M. Reid, “Congress Investigating USA Swimming’s Handling of Sex Abuse Cases,” The Orange County Register, January 26, 2018, https://www.ocregister.com/2018/01/26/congress-investigating-usa-swimmings-handling-of-sex-abuse-cases/.
[cvii] Craig Lord, “Mark Schubert: ‘I Told USA Swimming Boss of Abuse Claims ‘Numerous Times,’” swimvortex.com, March 5, 2018, https://www.swimvortex.com/mark-schubert-i-told-usa-swimming-boss-of-abuse-claims-numerous-times-in-vain/.
[cviii] Scott McLean and Sarah Weisfelt, “Top USA Swimming Officials under Fire for Alleged Culture of Abuse,” CNN, February 24, 2018, https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/24/us/usa-swimming-abuse-allegations/.
[cix] Scott M. Reid, “USA Swimming Leaders Susan Woessner and Pat Hogan Forced out Following Reporting on Sexual Abuse,” The Orange County Register, February 22, 2018, https://www.ocregister.com/2018/02/22/usa-swimming-leaders-susan-woessner-and-pat-hogan-forced-out-following-reporting-on-sexual-abuse/.
[cxiii] Carly Geehr, “USA Swimming Passes Legislation Restricting Coach-Swimmer Relationships,” swimswam.com, September 14, 2013, https://swimswam.com/breaking-usa-swimming-passes-legislation-banning-coach-swimmer-marriages/.
[cxix] Rob Trucks, “Sexual Abuse in Women’s Sports Part II: Gold Medalist Deena Deardurff-Schmidt,” Vice, June 13, 2014, https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/gv73qj/sexual-abuse-in-womens-sports-part-ii-gold-medalist-deena-deardurff-schmidt.
[cxxvi] Scott M. Reid, “USA Swimming Works to Contain Child Sex-Abuse Scandals,” The Orange County Register, August 30, 2013, https://www.ocregister.com/2013/08/30/usa-swimming-works-to-contain-sex-abuse-scandals/.
[cxxviii] Alanna Vagianos, “Explosive Report says USA Swimming Covered up Hundreds of Sexual Abuse Cases,” Huffington Post, February 19, 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/usa-swimming-sexual-abuse_us_5a8ad81fe4b004fc3194c4b2.
[cxxxi]“Former Olympic Hopefuls say Swimming Coaches Sexually Abused them,” Inside Edition, February 2, 2018, https://www.insideedition.com/former-olympic-hopefuls-say-swimming-coaches-sexually-abused-them-40391.
[cxxxii]“Former Olympic Hopefuls say Swimming Coaches Sexually Abused them, https://www.insideedition.com/former-olympic-hopefuls-say-swimming-coaches-sexually-abused-them-40391
[cxxxvi]“Former Olympic Hopefuls say Swimming Coaches Sexually Abused them,” https://www.insideedition.com/former-olympic-hopefuls-say-swimming-coaches-sexually-abused-them-40391.
[cxxxvii]“Sexual Abuse in Women’s Sports, Part V: Ex-Swimmer Jancy Thompson,” Jancy Thompson interviewed by Rob Trucks, Vice, June 20, 2014, https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/yp8z97/sexual-abuse-in-womens-sports-part-v-ex-swimmer-jancy-thompson.
[cxxxviii] Scott McLean and Sarah Weisfelt, https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/24/us/usa-swimming-abuse-allegations/.
[cxxxix]“Sexual Abuse in Women’s Sports, Part V: Ex-Swimmer Jancy Thompson,” https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/yp8z97/sexual-abuse-in-womens-sports-part-v-ex-swimmer-jancy-thompson.
[cxl]“Jancy Thompson: Repressing My Memories wasn’t a Choice,” keepkidssafe.org, http://keepkidssafe.org/jancy-thompson-repressing-my-memories-wasnt-a-choice/.
[cxli]“Sexual Abuse in Women’s Sports, Part V: Ex-Swimmer Jancy Thompson,” https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/yp8z97/sexual-abuse-in-womens-sports-part-v-ex-swimmer-jancy-thompson.
[cxliii]“Sexual Abuse in Women’s Sports, Part V: Ex-Swimmer Jancy Thompson,” https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/yp8z97/sexual-abuse-in-womens-sports-part-v-ex-swimmer-jancy-thompson.
[cxliv] Scott M. Reid, “Swimmer Asks USA Swimming to Ban Coach after Sexual Abuse Allegations,” The Orange County Register, November 25, 2014, https://www.ocregister.com/2014/11/25/swimmer-asks-usa-swimming-to-ban-coach-after-sexual-abuse-allegations/.
[cxlv] David Adams, “USA Swimming Reportedly Ignored or Concealed 100s of Cases of Sexual Abuse,” Pedestrian, February 19, 2018, https://www.pedestrian.tv/sport/usa-swimming-abuse-allegations/.
[cxlvi] Kaylen Ralph, “Where are all the Female Head Coaches?” Glamour, March 29, 2018, https://www.glamour.com/story/elite-swimming-has-a-coaching-problem.
[cxlvii] Yvonne Wenger, “Former Swim Coach Sentenced for Child Abuse,” The Baltimore Sun, May 23, 2013, http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-05-23/news/bs-md-rick-curl-sentenced-20130523_1_former-swim-coach-rick-curl-curl-burke-swim-club.
[cliii] Kelly Whiteside, “Hall of Fame Rescinds Chuck Wielgus’ Invite amid Sexual Abuse Allegations,” USA Today, June 2, 2014,https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2014/06/02/chuck-wielgus-usa-swimming-hall-of-fame/9893275/.
[clv]“List of Individuals Permanently Suspended or Ineligible for Membership,” usswimming.org, https://usaswimming.org/utility/landing-pages/safe-sport/banned-member-list---perm.
[clvi] Levi Pulkkinen, “Seattle Olympian: My Coach Abused me on USA Swimming’s Watch,” The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February 8, 2018, https://www.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/article/Ariana-Kukors-Sean-Hutchison-Coach-Sex-Abuse-12560109.php.
[clvii] Olivia Messer, “Olympian Ariana Kukors Claims Swim Coach Called Sex a ‘Gift’ for her 18th Birthday,” The Daily Beast, February 9, 2018, https://www.thedailybeast.com/olympian-ariana-kukors-swim-coach-called-sex-a-gift-for-her-18th-birthday.
[clviii] Ariana Kukors, “My Story,” arianakukor.com, February 9, 2018, https://www.arianajkukors.com/mystory.
[clix] Scott McLean and Sarah Weisfelt, https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/24/us/usa-swimming-abuse-allegations/.
[clxi] Scott McLean and Sarah Weisfelt, https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/24/us/usa-swimming-abuse-allegations/.
[clxii]People of the State of California v. Andrew King Sentencing Statement, Outside Magazine, November 19, 2009, https://www.outsideonline.com/node/2245381.
[clxiii] Linda Goldson, “Ex-Swim Coach Andrew King Impregnated 14-year-old, Court Documents say,” San Jose Mercury News, November 19, 2009, https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/11/19/ex-swim-coach-andrew-king-impregnated-14-year-old-court-documents-say/.
[clxv] Jennifer Sullivan, “$1.5M Settlement in Woman’s Claim of 1990s Sex Abuse by Swim Coach,” Seattle Times, June 3, 2012, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/15m-settlement-in-womans-claim-of-1990s-sex-abuse-by-swim-coach/.
[clxxv] David Rieder, “Memo Sent to Congress Demanding USOC CEO Scott Blackmun Resign for Failure to Protect Athletes,” Swimming World Magazine, February 22, 2018, https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/memo-sent-to-congress-demanding-usoc-ceo-scott-blackmun-resign-for-failure-to-protect-athletes/.
[clxxvii] Lindsay Gibbs, “Congress Passes Bill to Protect Amateur Athletes from Sex Abuse,” Think Progress, January 30, 2018, https://thinkprogress.org/congress-bill-abuse-victims-d50642f8723e/.
[clxxviii] Stephanie Kirchgaessner, “Catholic Bishops not Obliged to Report Child Abuse, Vatican Says,” The Guardian, February 10, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/10/catholic-bishops-not-obliged-report-clerical-child-abuse-vatican-says.
[clxxix]“Bill Incited by Nassar Case Concerns Catholic Church,” Michigan Radio/Associated Press, February 27, 2018, http://michiganradio.org/post/bill-incited-nassar-case-concerns-catholic-church.
[clxxx] Beth LeBlanc, “House Questions Impact of Post-Nassar Statute of Limitations Bills,” The Detroit News, May 8, 2018, https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/michigan/2018/05/08/house-panel-impact-post-nassar-bills/590183002/.
[clxxxii]Tim Evans,Marisa Kwiatkowski and Mark Alesia, “Safe Sport Center: Is it the Answer to Athlete Sex Abuse?” Indy Star, March 8, 2017, https://www.indystar.com/story/news/2017/03/08/safesport-center-answer-athlete-sex-abuse/98775554/.
[clxxxiv] United States Olympic Committee Handbook, revised March 2012, https://usagym.org/pages/education/safesport/pdfs/.
[clxxxvii]”US House Approves Legislation Meant to Protect Young Athletes from Abuse,” Jurist, January 31, 2018, http://www.jurist.org/paperchase/2018/01/us-house-approves-legislation-meant-to-protect-young-athletes-from-abuse.php.
[clxxxix] Casey Schwartz, “What Science Reveals about Pedophilia,” The Daily Beast, December 7, 2011, https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-science-reveals-about-pedophilia.
[cxcii] Mike Rowbottom, “USOC and USA Gymnastics Officials called by US House of Representatives to Address "Potentially Systemic" Sexual Abuse,” Inside the Games, May 4, 2018, https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1064684/usoc-and-usa-gymnastics-officials-called-by-us-house-of-representatives-to-address-potentially-systemic-sexual-abuse.
[cxciii] Mike Chiari, “USA Swimming CEO Issues Statement amid Reports of Rampant Sexual Misconduct,” bleacherreport.com, http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2760948-usa-swimming-ceo-issues-statement-amid-reports-of-rampant-sexual-misconduct.
[cxciv] Chris DeSantis, “Tim Hinchey’s Big Moment is coming,” chrisdcoach.com, April 24, 2018, http://chrisdcoach.com/blog/2018/4/24/tim-hincheys-big-moment-is-coming.
[cxcv] Irvin Muchnick, “Sarah Ehekircher, Long-Time Coach, tells of her Youth Grooming and Abuse by Scott MacFarland, her ‘Revictimization’ by USA Swimming’s 2010 Investigation, and her Sexual Harassment by American Swimming Coaches Association Boss John Leonard,” concussioninc.org, March 6, 2018, http://concussioninc.net/?p=12656.
[cxcvi] Irvin Muchnick, “Sarah Ehekircher, Who Just Got Scott MacFarland Booted From Swimming 30+ Years After He Groomed and Abused Her, Is Talking With Congressional Investigators About the Bigger Picture,” concussioninc.org, May 13, 2018, http://concussioninc.net/?p=12907.
[cc] Scott M. Reid, “Head of U.S. Olympic Committee Resigns amid Sex Abuse Scandals in Gymnastics, Swimming,” The Orange County Register, February 28, 2018, https://www.ocregister.com/2018/02/28/head-of-u-s-olympic-committee-resigns-amid-sex-abuse-scandals-in-gymnastics-swimming/.