The sex abuse scandal at Penn State has not just horrified the U.S. It has gone viral, the sordid details of the story spreading around the globe. Not that people overseas know or care much about American football, not that they have opinions, pro or con, about coach Joe Paterno, not that they could ever hope to understand how a publicly supported, Federally funded state university could grant almost absolute independence, not to mention a multi-million dollar budget, to a putatively amateur athletic program. No, what has riveted foreign observers are the facts of the case.
How is it possible that Jerry Sandusky allegedly assaulted young boys for more than a decade without being arrested? How is it conceivable that an eyewitness discovered Sandusky raping a 10-year-old boy in a Penn State locker room and didn’t step in and stop the crime, didn’t, according to Grand Jury testimony, say a word to Sandusky, simply phoned his father and afterward reported what he had seen to Paterno? How is it imaginable that the head coach, venerated for his professional probity, didn’t call the police, didn’t apparently do anything except kick the can down the road? How, in conscience, could the Penn State officials that Paterno alerted shirk the legal obligation to contact the police and shrug off their ethical responsibility to the victims?
Perhaps in the months ahead the legal process will produce answers to these questions. Then again, maybe apologists for Penn Sate and for college football, abetted by slick lawyers, will ensure that the full story never emerges. If the truth does get fudged or buried, there will be a sad precedent for it — one provided by pro tennis, the Teflon sport, which has for decades ignored evidence, dismissed eyewitness accounts, intimidated victims, brushed off experts and marginalized journalists who dared write about the seamier side of the game.
My introduction to sexual abuse in pro tennis came in 1991 as I was writing “Ladies of the Court,” a book about the women’s circuit. A friend and fellow tennis enthusiast, Gregory Briehl, had financed his education by traveling around and laying down the carpet for indoor events. He said it was an open secret that coaches took sexual advantage of young girls. He recounted the case histories of adolescent girls who had been coerced into sex in the hope of qualifying for national junior squads, or spots on Olympic and/or Fed Cup teams. Briehl went on to become a practicing psychologist and treated a number of players who had been abused by their coaches, resulting in deep emotional damage. As I followed the women’s tour, I was able to confirm Briehl’s claims. In interviews with hundreds of players, coaches, parents, psychologists and tennis insiders, I learned that there was no mystery about what was happening. Given the privacy-deprived nature of the circuit, how could there be? Everybody knew who was sleeping with whom. Everybody had tales about coaches and older players preying on young girls at Florida tennis academies, in European development programs and right under the noses of WTA officials who denied everything, yet continued checking players and older coaches into the same rooms at tournament hotels. Celebrated teaching pro Dennis Van der Meer estimated that 90 percent of the coach-player relationships on the women’s tour were sexual in nature. How many of them were abusive or criminal, he said, was a matter for legal authorities to determine. But, as at Penn State, the police and experts on sexual abuse were precisely the people never notified or consulted by tennis authorities.
When I heard that a USTA male coach who worked with women had been fired for sexually inappropriate comments and touching, I contacted a USTA source who anonymously corroborated the story. After this material was published, my source called in panic to warn me that the USTA had launched an in-house investigation —not to find sex offenders, but to find out who had spoken to me. Subsequently, I received a letter from the USTA demanding the name of my source and threatening legal action. On the advice of counsel, I replied with a reminder to the USTA about the First Amendment.
Interestingly, officials have denied that coaches were having sex with players, many of them under age and in no position to offer legal consent. Pam Shriver acknowledged some players and coaches were intimate, but suggested putting this in the same context as college professors sleeping with their students. However, most universities have rules governing faculty/student relationships. And given the age of many girls in pro tennis, the problem was actually analogous to high school gym teachers having sex with kids.
Over the years, I’ve tried to persuade tennis authorities and the press to take sexual abuse seriously. But as at Penn State, it’s hard to get people to pay attention and to follow up. When the French Federation fired three coaches, including Patrice Dominguez and Loic Courteau, for having sex with junior girls, this seemed an encouraging sign that even in a society with relaxed views about May-September romances there are some lines that can’t be crossed. But now Courteau has returned to coaching, and Dominguez is once again a technical director with the French Federation. The AP attempted to get an explanation of this turnabout, but not a single official would agree to be interviewed.
One year at Roland Garros, I received a tip that a former Wimbledon champion claimed she had been raped at the age of 16 by a coach who was still on the tour. When I submitted a request for an interview, the player agreed, but an official minder was sent along. Things went smoothly until I mentioned the coach and asked about his behavior. Immediately the minder interrupted, objecting to the question. After a bit of hemming and hawing, the player said the coach had done nothing wrong and sat silently while the minder declared the interview over. I complained to officials that the minder, intentionally or not, signaled the player to keep quiet on the subject of sexual abuse. To put the incident into perspective, would Penn State officials be allowed to sit in and speak up at interviews with Jerry Sandusky‘s alleged victims?
In 2007, again at Roland Garros, I ran into Isabel Demongeot, formerly a top ranked player in France whom I had interviewed for “Ladies of the Court” and who had gone on to coach Amelie Mauresmo. Over lunch she recounted a hair raising story and said she had written a memoir, “Service Volé,” about her career. She said that when she was 13, her coach, Régis de Camaret, then in his late 30s, sexually molested her. Stunned and confused, not unlike Sandusky’s victims, Isabel claims she remained silent for years as Camaret went on to rape her and subject her to sexual outrages that she believed destroyed her emotionally and ruined her as a player. In 2005, she filed charges against Camaret, who was arrested and detained for three and a half months, then released on bond pending his trial. More than a dozen other girls came forward to testify that Camaret had also sexually assaulted them. Camaret acknowledged having sex with Demongeot, but claimed she was older than 13 and had consented to it. (Now four years later Camaret’s case is still working its way through the French appeal system.)
I bought and read Demongeot’s book and tried to spread word about it. But American and British reporters remarked that it would be difficult to generate interest in a French player. Some observed that it might be different if she had ever won a major title. This reminded me of Mary Pierce and her physically abusive father, Jim. That story had interested no one until Mary’s ranking improved and her father supposedly threatened the life of a reporter for The New York Times. The message seemed to be that violence against obscure girls had little traction with the public. The boys at Penn State would certainly know how that felt.
Last year in Paris, Demongeot told me many players, among them Yannick Noah, had spoken out in support, and she had received countless letters from girls who sympathized with her and in some cases had suffered similar abuse. But Demongeot’s greatest disappointment was a lack of official response. Since she had traveled to tournaments around the world with Camaret, and had a history, on court and off, of emotional fragility, she suspected that tennis authorities knew about their relationship. But no one had offered help then, and more significantly no current official welcomed the input she offered about how the tour should handle sexual abuse. As at Penn State, an eyewitness account carried little weight with people who preferred to look the other way.
So I can understand how it took more than a decade to bring criminal charges against Sandusky. The subject of sexual abuse is squalid — unpleasant to write or read about — and it inevitably prompts vicious pushback from individuals and institutions. At Penn State there have been riots, death threats and calls for revenge against the press, against witnesses and against those who fired Joe Pa. Meanwhile, the game goes on. The cash registers ring as merrily as the bells on Old Main in State College, and the kids who were the real victims remain trivial figures in the blazing tapestry of big time, billion dollar sports.
Michael Mewshaw, author of “Short Circuit” and “Ladies of the Court,” filed this report from Rome.
