USA Swimming’s Abusive Culture and Revictimizing Methods Near a Reckoning in the Case of Persistent Whistleblower Sarah Ehekircher

by Irvin Muchnick

As soon as changes in statute-of-limitations wrinkles for civil lawsuits allowed it, Sarah Ehekircher found a lawyer, Jonathan Little, who could help her sue USA Swimming over her years of abuse – the root events of which involved her claim of having been raped at age 17 by her coach in Colorado, Scott MacFarland.

Today Ehekircher and the national sport governing body are in mediation. If mediation should fail, a jury trial looms.

Readers of this site are familiar with my championing of Sarah’s story. I made it a full chapter of my book last year, for dual reasons. The first reason is simply that I believe her versions of various disputed events.

But the same could be said for the survivors of the vast majority of similar anecdotes that have come across my desk (though not every single one). The more important reason Sarah has been worth the level of coverage given her is that her abuses ricocheted across decades, across state lines, across key sport leaders, and eventually pivoted to sexual harassment of her as a coach, when she was working under John Leonard, the former boss of the American Swimming Coaches Association. Leonard is a major villain of the sport’s saga of abuse and unaccountability. Sarah is something of the Zelig figure in this shameful tale.

In the current lawsuit against USA Swimming, discovery brims with facts and inferences that add on to our understanding. Concussion Inc. readers already know that the U.S. Center for Safe Sport’s so-called investigator Kathleen Smith, and its so-called director of legal affairs Michael Henry, conned and sandbagged Sarah. They already know the pernicious role of a Coloradan named Tanya Burch, who smeared Sarah to Safe Sport from the jump of their so-called investigation. Burch also peppered me with incoherent and ungrammatical smears via email, using a burner account and a phony name. We know this was Burch, in part, because she later used the same fake name and email account to smear a business rival of her brother, a coach in Tampa, Florida.

In Sarah’s lawsuit, the whole ballgame comes down to the exact date on which her youth coach, MacFarland, first penetrated her with his penis. It’s far from the only item in the bill of particulars of a callous, exploitive, shameful narrative of a vulnerable girl who was abused, power-tripped, and manipulated by an authority figure operating with free rein under the sanctioning of the Olympic movement. But it’s this factoid, in this scenario, that has valence in our legal system, with all its biases and limitations.

In 2010, after swimming’s abusive culture exploded into a national media story, and Chuck Wielgus, USA Swimming’s late CEO, made performative gestures toward changing things, Sarah filed a complaint with the group’s National Board of Review. The NBOR then conducted a kangaroo court hearing, which was just about covering USA Swimming’s own ass, and accepted MacFarland’s contention that his first sex with Sarah was in 1987, not 1986. Which would have been when she was 18, not 17, above the boundary of statutory rape in California, where the first time purportedly happened.

So: exonerated! MacFarland continued to coach until his “retirement” in 2018, in the face of new law opening the door for the current lawsuit, and new bad press.

In 2018, the U.S. Center for Safe Sport simply rubber-stamped the USA Swimming findings. But not before conning Sarah into an intake interview, in which she faced two lawyers for the organization without being allowed to have one of her own, for a cross-examination and dissection of every single relationship and transaction of her life, before and since. Safe Sport accepted the output of the 2010 hearing, while refusing to release any of the hundreds of pages of files from it.

In the current court case, Sarah has affidavits from two swimmers from the time, who confirm that she was with MacFarland at a meet in Irvine in 1986, when she maintains MacFarland had his first, nonconsensual sex with her. As well as in 1987. When she was 17, as well as 18. The witnesses’ names are Shannon Hair and Alex Kriek.

Maybe swimming’s powers just want to roll the dice and go before a jury that would decide whether the preponderance of the evidence supports the claim that Scott MacFarland first did it with Sarah Ehekircher some time after her 18th birthday – as if that would make everything A-OK. Or maybe swimming is ready to call off the dogs and agree to something approaching a fair measure of compensation for her interrupted life and her decades of health deficits and bills for the therapy and resources required to try to make her whole again. We’ll soon see.

Meanwhile, the discovery files tell a story not straitjacketed by rules of evidence. To cite one example, they suggest that the Irvine Police Department, after Sarah made her criminal complaint there in 2018, used the same passive, rope-a-dope playbook utilized by the sports institutions. The Irvine cops made feints toward working with Sarah to orchestrate what’s called a covert call to the alleged rapist, but never followed through. Ultimately, they ghosted Sarah and – in the pattern I’ve seen time and again in this type of story – fell back on a rationalization that the “alleged victim” had somehow ghosted them.

The tortoise-swift actions of the police could have had something to do with the fact that Malia Arrington, then chief operating officer of Safe Sport, had “assured” them that Sarah was 18 at the time of the foundational episode.

I could write another 5,000 words on what the new case records illuminate about all this. But for now, I’m going to wait and see what plays out next. I have some respect for the minutia threshold of readers.

Above all, I know that the manufacture of doubt is the game of the villains of this piece, not the good guys. Everyone with a conscience knows what happened here, in its fundamentals, and that the wronged party should prevail.