A Scout's Honor

You don’t get to choose which parts of your past are remembered. 

Longtime NBA scout Pete Philo was invited back to his home state last month to be inducted into the Upstate New York Basketball Hall of Fame. At a $75-a-head dinner in the ballroom of a hotel in Troy, Philo was hailed as a pioneer in gathering intelligence on import-ready hoops talent. He had built a sterling professional reputation through running a camp in Italy for European NBA prospects long before foreign players were en vogue, and through successful stints in the front offices of the Dallas Mavericks, Minnesota Timberwolves and Indiana Pacers. That expertise had Philo in demand for behind-the-scenes breakdowns of how overseas players are chosen in the NBA Draft.

How to reduce a child’s risk for sexual abuse — and why it’s especially important in summer

When a child heads off to summer camp or to a beach house with friends, it’s common for parents to fret over sunscreen and manners — rarely is sexual abuse top of mind.

But it should be, said Michele Booth Cole, executive director of Safe Shores, a D.C.-based organization that works with, and advocates for, youth affected by trauma and violence.

In the U.S., one in 10 children will be sexually abused before the age of 18 — and that statistic is based on reported cases of abuse. Research shows more than 60%of child victims don’t disclose the fact that they have been sexually abused.

The Biggest Deterrent to Reporting Child Sexual Abuse

In the United States, about one-third of child-sexual-abuse victims come forward with their allegations before adulthood. Another third disclose far later in life—the median age is 52—and the rest never reveal their past trauma at all. In recent years, many children’s advocates have looked to shift these low reporting numbers (and correspondingly low rates of prosecution) by addressing a legal hurdle that lies in the way of many victims seeking court-based justice: the statute of limitations.

Track coach and ex-Olympian arrested amid report he molested 31 athletes over 44 years

Former Olympic track athlete Conrad Mainwaring was arrested on one felony count of sexual battery on Wednesday amidst an ESPN investigation that reported more than 30 men were molested by the 67-year-old Los Angeles-based high school track and field coach.

The ESPN Outside The Lines report claims the abuse spanned over the course of 44 years, with the youngest alleged victim claiming abuse at age 14. 

Los Angeles Police Department detective Sharlene Johnson said the alleged victim claimed Mainwaring molested him in 2016 by masquerading it as massage treatment in which he'd also touch his genitals. The LAPD only filed one charge against Mainwaring, and Johnson said that could be a result of the statute of limitations expiring on alleged victims from the ESPN report. 

Dani Bostick Child abusers groom victims and their families. That's why this new Olympic abuse prevention policy is so flawed.

"Every parent thinks their child will tell them if someone touched them inappropriately," Nancy Hogshead-Makar, an Olympic athlete and CEO of Champion Women, recently told me. "But by the time that happens, the child is well-groomed, and it is too late. Research shows that children do not tell their parents." And, since most survivors of child sexual abuse do not disclose the abuse, abusers often continue to enjoy the trust of their victim’s family, and continue to abuse.

A Dallas soccer star says her coach abused her decades ago. Her teammates have stories too.

She has wanted, for years, to be brave enough. Today she is.

It’s a Friday in October. A few weeks ago, she watched on TV as another woman, calm and clear, accused a man of assaulting her when they were young. The nation had listened to that other woman, and many had believed her.

It’s hard to say why the courage comes on this day. But her kids are at school, the house is quiet, and she has a rare day off work.

Still in her pajamas, she turns on the computer, looks up a phone number.

She calls a university in West Virginia and leaves a message.

I’m a pediatrician and a mother, she says into the phone, and I’m calling about one of your soccer coaches. I was his player, back in Texas.

How an Abuse Victim’s Nerve and a Hidden iPhone Led to the Arrest of a Sundance Founder

Sean Escobar had been waiting for the moment for more than a quarter-century.

Over the course of an hour in September, Mr. Escobar sat at a dining room table with Sterling Van Wagenen, a founder of the Sundance Film Festival and a respected figure in the Mormon community, and asked him about a moment that had bothered Mr. Escobar since he was 13.

Why, he asked, had Mr. Van Wagenen touched his genitals?

Mr. Van Wagenen apologized and said that he had been going through difficulties in his career and his marriage, that he struggles with depression. He sounded sincere and penitent. He pledged, again and again, that he had never done anything like that before or since.

‘It Can Happen Even to Guys’: Ohio State Wrestlers Detail Abuse, Saying #UsToo

CLEVELAND — Nick Nutter, an All-American heavyweight wrestler at Ohio State turned professional martial arts fighter, sat watching the television last January as one by one, the young women, former gymnasts — some of them Olympians — took the stand in a courtroom in Michigan, and in wrenching testimony, detailed how their team doctor, Lawrence G. Nassar, had used his power to sexually abuse them.

‘I Didn’t Know How to Stop Him’: Ohio State Abuse Scandal Widens

WASHINGTON — Investigators working on behalf of Ohio State University are digging through decades of records to piece together what might have happened decades ago, when Dr. Richard H. Strauss was a team doctor and, according to recent accounts, engaged in some form of sexual misconduct with more than 100 former students.

That misconduct occurred from 1979 to 1997, those former students have said. But Ohio State’s sex abuse crisis and its apparent failure to provide abused athletes with an adequate support system may have extended to more-recent years.

Suspended coaches still working at Southern California gymnastics clubs

Two Southern California gymnastics coaches continue to work with underage gymnasts even though the sport’s national governing body has suspended them while it conducts investigations into alleged rules violations, the Southern California News Group has learned.

Colden Raisher is coaching at The Klub Gymnastics, a gym club near the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles where the top director was unaware of his suspension by USA Gymnastics on Friday.

‘Sister survivors’: Larry Nassar victims show solidarity as they receive award at ESPYs

Saying, “We may suffer alone, but we survive together,” Aly Raisman and dozens of other victims of disgraced ex-doctor Larry Nassar accepted the Arthur Ashe Courage Award on Wednesday at the 2018 ESPYs. In a powerful display of solidarity, 141 women, on behalf of perhaps hundreds more who were sexually abused over a period of decades, took the stage at the end of the awards ceremony.

Rep. Jim Jordan faces new accusation that he must have known about alleged sexual abuse at Ohio State

A seventh former Ohio State University wrestler said Saturday that he believes Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) knew about inappropriate behavior that allegedly took place in the school’s athletic department three decades ago, as two more former team members came to Jordan’s defense.

David Range, who wrestled for Ohio State in the late 1980s, said Jordan had to have known about alleged sexual misconduct by Richard Strauss, an athletic doctor whose behavior is under investigation by the school, because it happened regularly to team members and people talked about it. Jordan has denied he knew, saw or heard about any inappropriate behavior while he was an assistant wrestling coach from 1987 to 1995.

100s of USA swimmers were sexually abused for decades and the people in charge knew and ignored it, investigation finds

For decades the sexual abuse of young athletes by their coaches lingered just beneath the surface in American swimming’s otherwise golden waters.

In 2005, USA Swimming president Ron Van Pool decided it was time to bring the issue to the surface.

Giving his annual State of Swimming address, Van Pool pushed for a more aggressive approach within the sport to taking on sexual abuse.

“USA Swimming is frightfully behind the curve in this process and there are those who would have us continue to lag,” Van Pool said.

The speech, however, didn’t make much of an impression with Chuck Wielgus, then in his eighth year as USA Swimming’s executive director.

“There was nothing that struck me,” Wielgus said later in deposition.

What the parents of Larry Nassar's victims want you to understand

Here’s a sample of the kind of comments parents of Larry Nassar’s victims see online these days. Or, for that matter, just overhear at work and the grocery store:

Morgan McCaul and her mother, Deb. "It was unimaginable and hard for me to understand when I first heard it," Deb McCaul says. "Like, how could you have that happen and not know? Until I found out that that happened, and I didn’t know.”

CREDIT COURTESY OF DEB MCCAUL 

“Why don’t the parents of the Nassar victims take any responsibility?”

“I wonder how many of those girls complained to their parents, and their parents turned a deaf ear about it.”

“The parents are equally to blame. Should be sharing a cell with Nassar.”

Deb McCaul says on some level, she gets it.

“It was unimaginable and hard for me to understand when I first heard it,” McCaul says. “Like, how could you have that happen and not know? Until I found out that that happened, and I didn’t know.”

‘My insides are shattered’: Former Olympian Ariana Kukors tells of alleged abuse

NEW YORK — Ariana Kukors was 15 when she first realized her 33-year-old swim coach was interested in more than helping her swim faster, she said, when innocuous text messages about school and weekend plans shifted suddenly with a strange question: He wanted to know if she was wearing underwear.

She was 16 the first time he asked her to text a naked photo, she said, a request she claims she routinely fulfilled. Later that year, in hotel rooms at travel meets and after private workouts before school, her coach started making physical advances that, before Kukors turned 18, included sex acts she summarized as “everything but intercourse.”