by Irvin Muchnick
Following the U.S. Center for SafeSport’s latest scandal – center investigator Jason Krasley was discovered to have been previously arrested, the first time on charges of stealing money from a drug bust, the second time for rape and human trafficking – the agency’s CEO, Ju’Riese Colón, is out.
This ensures another ad hominem news cycle, followed by a longer and more profound public interlude of yawns.
To be sure, Colón, SafeSport’s second chief, has been a bad joke. Last summer the Chicago Tribune was just about the only major news outlet in the country giving any boost to the just-released report of the Commission on the Future of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. The commission recommended federal funding of the SafeSport center, to eliminate the money and influence of Olympic overseers, and removing from Olympic sports governing bodies control of grassroots programs in swimming and other sports. The Tribune published both my op-ed essay and its own editorial on the issue.
In a letter to the editor in response, Colón crowed that she was in Paris, leading the first-ever SafeSport delegation at an Olympiad – as if cheering for the U.S. Olympic team in international competition had anything to do with ensuring the safety of kids under the thumb of unaccountable local coaches.
But that was just the latest in a long history of SafeSport outrages. In 2018, Colón’s predecessor, Shellie Pfohl, did her first television interview, as the story of serially molesting USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar was exploding. Pfohl showed up in a USCSS-branded pullover and focused her soundbytes on assurances that her agency’s work would never impede Olympic teams’ quests for medals.
SafeSport’s first chief investigator, Michael Henry, was a con man who didn’t have a law license yet episodically misrepresented himself to complainants as “director of legal affairs.” He was the center’s highest-paid employee and got performance bonuses even as the case backlog grew – until he left following the story of breaches in the agency’s confidential case database, whose server was being kept in the office kitchen. Henry went on to his current job as “judicial integrity officer” for the federal courts.
SafeSport’s public relations flack, Dan Hill, is another con man who lied pathetically about his one conversation with this reporter. Hill also claims to work pro bono, when nonprofit tax filings show his company has been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I’ve been working on an exploration of why last year’s congressional commission report has gotten near-zero attention (the New York Times didn’t devote a single line to its publication and findings). More on that shortly, but here’s the spoiler: No one seems to have any will for restructuring America’s broken youth sports system, by which the Olympic Committee and its commercial and flag-waving priorities make widespread sexual abuse of children an inevitable fallout – a cost of business. Evidently, anecdotal firings, accompanied by expressions of “concern,” are sufficient. The figures in Congress who were responsible for establishing the commission are safer than kid athletes: safe to stay passive about implementing toothful reforms.
