The football sex abuse scandal is the game’s darkest hour.
Yesterday, sources within Operation Hydrant, the national police body coordinating historical sex abuse claims, announced that 55 professional and non-league clubs have so far been named by 350 victims claiming they were abused.
The NSPCC said on Saturday it expected the number of calls to its hotline to pass 1,000.
London (CNN)The child sex abuse scandal that has rocked the English football world has taken a new twist after a former player accused one of the world's biggest clubs of buying his silence.
Gary Johnson, a player with Chelsea during the 1970s and 1980s, alleges the Premier League club paid him £50,000 (about $63,540) and asked him to sign a confidentiality agreement last year to prevent any talk of his alleged abuse by former scout Eddie Heath.
In mid-November, a former professional soccer player told a British newspaper that as a child, he had been sexually abused for years by a well-respected youth coach. The player said he knew other players had experienced the same thing — and that a culture of silence kept the abusers out of the spotlight.
But he wasn't keeping the secret anymore.
"I want to get it out and give other people an opportunity to do the same," Andy Woodward told The Guardian. "I want to give people strength. ... I'm convinced there is an awful lot more to come out."
His interview unleashed a flood.
Over the past few days I have been looking through some of the yellowed newspaper cuttings of the Barry Bennell case, snipped out from the pages of the Crewe Chronicle, and there is one in particular to which I keep returning, from 13 June 1998, with the headline: “We could not believe Bennell guilty – Gradi.”
Professional footballers, including the former Crewe Alexandra player Andy Woodward, have been speaking out recently about their experiences of sexual abuse as children. They include alleged victims of football coach Barry Bennell, who was sentenced to nine years in prison in 1998, and are waiving their right to anonymity.
The NSPCC said a special hotline, set up after four professional footballers spoke out about their abuse, received more than 50 calls in its first two hours.
Mr Stewart, who began his professional career with Blackpool and also played for Manchester City and Liverpool, told the Mirror an unnamed coach abused him daily for four years.
It comes after two ex-Crewe players said a club coach abused them as boys.
Eleven people have contacted Cheshire Police since one of the men, Andy Woodward, went public with his story.
Mr Woodward and Steve Walters spoke of being abused at the hands of coach Barry Bennell, who was jailed for nine years in 1998.
Professional Footballers' Association chief Gordon Taylor said he expected the number of players coming forward to rise.
Mr Taylor said: "We're now seeing more and more players come out and having the confidence to come out," he said.
He was the head football coach at an elite prep school. He was also a serial pedophile who openly terrorized students for twenty-five years. So why did nobody stop him?
It isn’t easy sitting opposite Andy Woodward and hearing, close-up, the unspeakable horrors of his childhood and the reasons why, at the age of 43, he finally feels able to tell his story and free himself from the secret – “the massive, horrible burden” – that has shaped his life.
America's most famed gymnastic coaches were accused in a lawsuit Thursday of "turning a blind eye" to sexual abuse at their training center in Texas.
To many, Mike McQueary was a hero - the lone member of the Pennsylvania State University athletics staff to speak up in a bid to stop Jerry Sandusky's sexual abuse of children.
Yet within pockets of Nittany Lion fandom, he remains a pariah - the assistant coach whose testimony against the serial predator put his entire community on trial and helped tarnish the reputation of its iconic coach, Joe Paterno.
“The continued exposure and continued claims just further demonstrate that USA Gymnastics has not made it a priority and is not taking it seriously and is unresponsive,” former National Team member Jessica Armstrong said. “And that’s really, really disappointing.”
"Hastert inflicted unbelievable pain on the lives of the youth he was entrusted to care for, yet he got a slap on the wrist," Cross told the Tribune on Monday. "As hard as it is to continue to live through the events of the past, the laws in Illinois — and across the country — have to change.
Vermont Academy fired an assistant dean in 2007 for allegedly propositioning a 16-year-old female student in lewd text messages. Yet the boarding school still produced three recommendations for its former employee, and he landed a job months later at Wesleyan University in Connecticut — overseeing student sexual misconduct hearings.
Brooks School in North Andover kicked a former admissions officer out of her campus residence in 1993 after she was accused of sexual misconduct with a male student. Even after her banishment — and Brooks’s $300,000 settlement with the student and his family — the admissions officer held jobs at two more private schools in Massachusetts.
And at Emma Willard School, a private school in Troy, N.Y., a teacher was fired in 1998 after he allegedly raped a student. But the school still wrote him two recommendations, and he later found a job at a private school in Connecticut.
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