Coach suspended - abuse allegations
- Thread starter Smith16
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- Jan 9, 2017
Todd was his student.
- Joined
- Mar 3, 2014
We need to know a lot more. What state did the activity occur in? What was the age of consent in that state? What is the statute of limitations, as you point out. What are the elements of a charge of sexual abuse, of rape, or other applicable statutes? Then, charges would be filed, and if there were no guilty plea to the charges, a trial to prove the elements of the crime.
My understanding is that the counts on which Nasser was convicted all involved girls under the age of consent. (I have not read the court filings, I am relying on newspaper accounts that describe the charges as involving girls between the ages of 13 and 16. And even younger
- Joined
- Feb 23, 2014
In the original NYT articles says that Callaghan started "inappropiate suxual behavior" at 15 yo, and later abused his position of power to start a full sexual relationship when Maurizi was 18 yo.
Age of consent bu state:
In no state can a 15yo consent.
Age of consent bu state:
In no state can a 15yo consent.
- Joined
- Oct 25, 2012
OK, I wrote the following comment a couple of days ago when I first saw this thread. But, I wasn't sure whether to post it, because this thread is about a specific person. And by the time I decided that I would, the conversation had moved on.
But I am posting it now, because I think it might be a relevant reply to your post.
I wonder if this interest in actually doing something about abusers is going to spread to Europe. Because there is one coach in particular who has actually been convicted of abuse against his students. But, because he only got a short ban (3 years), he has been back coaching for the past 20 years.
He even has a profile on the Pyeongchang 2018 website. Although, I don't think he was actually there (the NOC of the country he is based in has a policy of not taking him to the Olympics because of his history).
As this thread is about somebody else, it would not be appropriate to name the coach I am talking about in here. But, his story has been mentioned plenty of times elsewhere on this forum.
CaroLiza_fan
He even has a profile on the Pyeongchang 2018 website. Although, I don't think he was actually there (the NOC of the country he is based in has a policy of not taking him to the Olympics because of his history).
As this thread is about somebody else, it would not be appropriate to name the coach I am talking about in here. But, his story has been mentioned plenty of times elsewhere on this forum.
CaroLiza_fan
I should add, although the NOC of the country he is based in wants nothing to do with him, he does have the support of that country's skating Federation.
And if you have the support of the right people (as the guy I am talking about does), it can lead to major things like this being ignored or treated leniently.
Such is life :disapp:
CaroLiza_fan
- Joined
- Jun 21, 2003
It is not clear what "inappropriate sexual behavior' Callaghan is accused of. It could have just been off-color remarks. The original charge was that he started a full-blown relationship with the complainant when the complainant was 18. This was continued off and on for the next decade. The complainant stated that at the time, he (the complainant) believed the relationship was consentual, but that he later came to view it as exploitative. I think it would be hard to work up a criminal case, unless other underaged victims come forward.
- Joined
- Feb 23, 2014
That´s sounds awful.
I have read that "#Metoo" moment is trying to made his way to other areas, but cultural difference made it difficult, didn´t two women from Italy that came forward for Harvey Weinstein have to leave Italy because of harassment?
Sadly it takes a scandal for federations/ country to take things seriously, after Nassar in gymnastic, I wouldn´t be surprise if all sport federation in USA are reviewing cases of harassment presented previously...
I would like to see COI doing something to made the countries´s sport federations to take seriously the complaints, I know that before Pyeongchang there was a meeting where this was going to be discuss, but I haven´t read anything else
- Joined
- Feb 10, 2014
We need to know a lot more. What state did the activity occur in? What was the age of consent in that state? What is the statute of limitations, as you point out. What are the elements of a charge of sexual abuse, of rape, or other applicable statutes? Then, charges would be filed, and if there were no guilty plea to the charges, a trial to prove the elements of the crime.
My understanding is that the counts on which Nasser was convicted all involved girls under the age of consent. (I have not read the court filings, I am relying on newspaper accounts that describe the charges as involving girls between the ages of 13 and 16. And even younger
Callaghan worked in Buffalo, Philadelphia, Colorado Springs, San Diego and Detroit. He started coaching Mauritzi in Buffalo when he was 13, the relationship became sexual in Philly when he was 18, and Maurizi ended it in Colorado Springs when he was 23. Maurizi was 36 in 1999 when the Times article was published, so he’s 55 now. I would guess that he filed a complaint with SafeSport because the statutes of limitations for filing both civil and criminal charges in those states have run.
IIRC that case also casted a bad light on some parents who allowed all that (the case also included girls being manhandled if they didn't perform as expected) to go on because they only cared to have their daughters becoming top figure skaters.
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- Feb 14, 2018
Maybe. We really don’t know. There’s also the fact of travel for events, especially travel across state lines, which carries its own implications with regard to sexual abuse of a minor... I’ve forgotten more on this topic than most people really ever need to know and I think mulling over potential charges, statue of limitations issues, etc., is a black pit of speculation that goes nowhere and doesn’t advance our understanding.
As far as the parallels to Nassar go, he was first convicted on child pornography charges. And I don’t know what it says about me that my initial reaction to the Callaghan news was wondering if that might not be what he’s ultimately charged with as well. My heart hurts. And the more I think about this story, the angrier I become: what kind of sorry excuse for a soul does it take to let a potential preferential offender continue coaching and ruining lives? What made this one monster so valuable to USFSA rather than the dreams and childhoods of so many? You are responsible for your athletes, many of them children, and whether or not the facts of the complaint from two decades ago are all “true,” you owed it to your own to do an actual investigation and err on the side of caution, establish safety protocols, anything.
It’s a low bar to clear to be a human being in a situation like this and I’m not even surprised at the institutional failure — I’m not even surprised that I’m not surprised, and that’s the bleakest part. Maybe because I’ve lived it. The standard I had to meet is called, rather aptly, “deliberate indifference,” which is almost impossible; if one of over two dozen people had so much had transparently lied to my face and said they’d look into what happened to me, I wouldn’t have had a civil rights case. That was the most crushing part: I kept thinking that all these people I respected and loved would be decent human beings, and that went from a real hope to a futile wish to a sobbing plea because it’s the one thing I could never understand.
There are parents that are going to look bad in this. I’m ... reluctant to assign blame except to the most relevant actors. My family didn’t exactly take what happened to me well, largely because it happened in an insular professional world, and they couldn’t or wouldn’t accept that some people really were that powerful, let alone that I wasn’t able to stay if the price of entry was agreeing I was less of a person than others. I cannot even begin to imagine what kind of influence a coach would be able to exert over parents, who aren’t equipped to deal with that power imbalance (you may pay the coach, but let’s be real: the coach is in charge if you want your child to be a real competitor; how many times have we blasted “stage parents” on this board?); don’t have a decent or supportive fed that can give meaningful guidance; and the whole time something isn’t “right,” but you can’t define what’s “wrong” either... my heart hurts. I have no doubt some parents would die unspeakably gruesome deaths a thousand times over if it meant they could go back and reverse just one decision. It’s what I’d do for my friends — I don’t have children (and can’t), but I know the regret of being “too late,” of wishing there was a train you could throw yourself in front of to protect someone else from knowing what no one should have to.
Maybe the parents “look” bad, but as of now, the only people I can find fault with are Callaghan and USFSA. If it comes out parents were aware of the abuse and refused pleas for termination of the coaching relationship... theres a hell of a good universe next door. But I guess I just wanted to make a plea for empathy.
And for those of us in the USA — I will probably channel my feelings into a letter to USFSA noting my disgust with their process in handling the accusations (regardless of whether USFSA deemed them credible or not) and refusal to give them any financial support. No products with Chen on them, no US coverage of events, no ad dollars, no events, nothing. I want to see actual meaningful reforms so this never happens again (it is always happening “for the last time”); if not, I can only hope figure skating dies out in the USA. I stopped being able to enjoy gymnastics over a decade ago because of the abuse “rumors”; being a fan of figure skating is hard enough as it is, but if the USFSA doesn’t want to at least pretend to care, I see no reason why I should be expected to either.
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- Oct 25, 2012
I wasn't following the sport at the time, but unfortunately I picked up the same from what I have read about it. It is really shocking that parents could put ambition ahead of their child's wellbeing, but it does happen sometimes.
Which is why the authorities need to take coaches that do this sort of thing out of the sport completely. Because in the scenario we are discussing, the child won't have anybody to turn to if things take a sinister turn. They won't want to let their parents down. And hence the abuse will be able to continue.
CaroLiza_fan
- Joined
- Feb 23, 2014
Well if people still going to Morozov... :sarcasm:
Coaches are like therapists, psychiatrists and doctors... there shouldn´t be allowed to hold a relationship with students.
With the power a coach have a skater (athlete) could think there are not allowed to say "no"...
Coaches are like therapists, psychiatrists and doctors... there shouldn´t be allowed to hold a relationship with students.
With the power a coach have a skater (athlete) could think there are not allowed to say "no"...
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- Jul 26, 2016
I hate to say that I'm not surprised that something like this is coming out. I think this type of abuse happens in a lot of sports, if not all sports. Recently there has been news about a respected volleyball coach, a respected skiing coach, among others. In a way, I think we are at a turning point and I am hopeful that real change is on the horizon. I think no sport is immune to this and I'm hoping that "Safe Sport" really takes a lot of concrete steps to address systemic failures across all sports to protect all athletes, especially children.
This gets a whole lot more nauseating when you think about the scale of the gymnastics and swimming scandals, and makes you wonder about how far this extends into other sporting organisations including this... It's disgusting that people use their positions of power to take advantage of underage athletes that are impressionable and vulnerable, and that sporting organisations are doing little to investigate allegations properly; it's a failure of the system as much as it's the fault of predators.
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2013
This is what I find so unsettling. I don’t really care so much about age differences and all that but when you start getting into watching a kid grow up and then you pounce on them when they turn 18 it just seems awful. It’s bad enough in a social setting but in a professional capacity it just seems extra extra wrong and shouldn’t go unreported. I know I wouldn’t want to see my teenage kid turn 18 and start a relationship with their coach. Like..that’s so creepy to think about what the coach was thinking all along!! I can’t think of any way to prevent it other than word of mouth unfortunately. People shouldn’t be afraid to make this type of behavior known to help prevent it.
Sometimes? It's very common actually. Now, I'm not saying that overlooking sexual abuse is necessarily that common, but there are so many parents who are merely using their children to achieve their own personal ambitions. Their motto seems to be: "If my child looks good, I look good."
Basically, they sacrifice their children's well-being at the altar of the Trophy Child.
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2018
There will always be predators, and there is no perfect screening procedure to administer that would allow us to bar the doors, raise the drawbridge, fill the moat, and be guaranteed safety. They will always find a way in, and to believe it’s a winnable game of wits... well, I can understand why some take comfort in the idea, but that’s just throwing the dice on the just world hypothesis, and that philosophy has a nasty habit of biting its believers.
What we can do is make sure we have strong, responsive systems in place so that victims are immediately supported, abusers identified and held accountable (either in court, by expulsion from governing organizations, or both), and a culture of safety takes root. A whisper network is not a protective mechanism; it is a last resort, a friend grabbing you and making sure you don’t leave their line of sight because this is not good.
Systemic change can come from the bottom up or the top down. Or both simultaneously. The MeToo movement is a bottom up change, a rethinking of norms and redefinition of what’s acceptable conduct. Top down? That would be forcing organizations like USFSA to partner with SafeSport to write actual protocols on reporting abuse, set up an anonymous tip line, provide educational material to parents about healthy and unhealthy coaching relationships and warning signs, expel predators, and build a culture in which no one person is so “valuable” that lives can be sacrificed. Ideally, the two halves meet and we’d see a new structure entirely, a healthy model of sporting.
I’m not holding my breath, but I was a structural theorist, and I remember the words to this song. It was fun. I was allegedly good at what I did. (Ironically, it was a grotesque structure of misogyny and rape culture that caused me to leave. May the bridges I burn light my way.)
Callaghan is an alleged predator, and without going through the horror house of criminology there, suffice it to say — yes, he’s a “monster.” But he’s not the monster I fear. There were people who knew better and did nothing. (There was a father of three daughters....) There were massive systemic failures for decades. There are so many of them we are no longer shocked and so many victims we can’t remember their names. Which is its own quiet horror.
A good system will not stop every predator; that is an unfortunate reality. But Nasser isn’t unusual for what he did so much as for the absolutely gut-wrenching number of victims he alone is responsible for — it’s almost beyond comprehension — and that is what systemic failure looks like at its absolute worst. Even if we may not be able to stop every predator, there is absolutely no reason to allow them to take root and begin accumulating victims, to normalize their communities to their predation, to change the norms so that it’s understood they’re just too powerful to fight directly and can’t truly be stopped. Things and people only have the meanings we collectively agree that they do, and if we agree that it doesn’t matter how much you “win” when you’re an abuser, then goodbye untouchable status.
There will never be a satisfying answer from a predator, but there are many, many people who are not sexual predators yet were the systemic failure. Ask them for answers. Demand real change. Insist on new protocols. And, yes, there are likely more stories like this waiting to be broken. But do we want to do this again in five years? Ten? Structural change matters. Norms matter. What we, as fans, deem acceptable matters, and don’t think we aren’t part of this as well — we contribute to norm-setting, and we have the power to reward good behavior and punish the bad. This thread is literally developing norms. We are already in this. May as well see it through.
Also, the legal system is not a magic bullet. It is traumatic, slow, expensive, and sometimes the best you can do is fight to a draw or worse. Or as one lawyer said to me, “I want to do everything I can to help you... but if you choose to move forward with (your claim), I will destroy you.” I lost years of my life and got out early. How many decades have been lost here? It’s a hopeless war to fight alone. If you manage to file a complaint at all with USFSA — you know the odds of anything happening are next to zero, you know the press will be camping on your lawn, you know there is almost no upside. It’s a signal to other victims and with the faint hope that maybe, just maybe, someone will do the right thing. You stand on a ledge knowing the crowd will be screaming “JUMP” because you’ve seen enough to realize ... I can’t be the only one. It’s an attempt at, yes, structural reform. And also a form of martyrdom or just really stupid faith in humanity; I was out on a ledge myself, so I don’t know. Probably both.
Regardless, change didn’t happen twenty years ago. I think USFSA can improve their turnaround time on complaints if they want to. But we have to make them want to. Callaghan... is disgusting and evil and almost entirely beside the point. He is responsible for his heinous actions, but he has no ability to feel or express remorse, so let’s just leave that aside for now, as staring into a void helps nothing. Be angry at the monster, but be angrier he has victims. That was not inevitable. So much of this wasn’t.
But when there’s no system, there’s no way to even begin to measure the damage — how many skaters heard rumors and either quit or never seriously pursued skating? How many felt uncomfortable at the rink and stopped? Yeah. There’s an invisible bodycount too.
Structural change. Or we’re just going to keep repeating the nightmare.
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2004
Are their others out there you wouldn't/shouldnt trust your kids with? And what should skating orgs do? I got to thinking if I was head of the USFS during the time of the Eisler scandel, when he was banned in Canada, and he was working as a coach in the US, what would I have done?
It is true that he didnt break any laws in the US, I think, but he was banned in Canada....from Wiki...
Effective October 6, 2006, Eisler was suspended from coaching in Canada for a term of one year by Skate Canada after allegedly sending sexually suggestive e-mails to his 15-year-old student.[3] At the time of the ban, Eisler was coaching in California, where the Canadian ban did not apply.[2] He did not appeal the ban.[2] No criminal charges were ever filed.
Eisler is director of skating operations at the L.A. Kings Valley Ice Center in Panorama City, Los Angeles.[4]
(As an interesting aside, since Canada is very strict about letting US residents into the country for certain unsavory deeds, I wonder if the countries were reversed, if Eisler could have even gained entry into Canada?)
http://www.lundinlawpllc.com/practice-areas/washington-state-dui/entering-canada-with-a-dui/
I think we need to hear more about what is going on and see those five letters the accuser has, especially from the two students who also claim to be molested.....I wouldnt want to be in the management of the USFS right now....
It is true that he didnt break any laws in the US, I think, but he was banned in Canada....from Wiki...
Effective October 6, 2006, Eisler was suspended from coaching in Canada for a term of one year by Skate Canada after allegedly sending sexually suggestive e-mails to his 15-year-old student.[3] At the time of the ban, Eisler was coaching in California, where the Canadian ban did not apply.[2] He did not appeal the ban.[2] No criminal charges were ever filed.
Eisler is director of skating operations at the L.A. Kings Valley Ice Center in Panorama City, Los Angeles.[4]
(As an interesting aside, since Canada is very strict about letting US residents into the country for certain unsavory deeds, I wonder if the countries were reversed, if Eisler could have even gained entry into Canada?)
http://www.lundinlawpllc.com/practice-areas/washington-state-dui/entering-canada-with-a-dui/
I think we need to hear more about what is going on and see those five letters the accuser has, especially from the two students who also claim to be molested.....I wouldnt want to be in the management of the USFS right now....
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2015
From the top of my head i would say Eisler, Karel Fajfr (ex Brezina coach), Morozov.
Also Tutberidze or that coach who starved Zijun and forbade her to drink water, even though the abuse is not of a sexual misconduct nature but if i had kids i certainly wouldn't send them to them.
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