I changed gyms in my junior year of high school. 

When you're a competitive gymnast, you're pretty tied to your team and your coach, so that was unusual. I was at the same gym for nine years. But when I hadn’t reached a certain level by age 16, I sort of felt cast aside, and I was looking forward to the move. 

I joined a team that two of my very good friends were already on. The coach had watched one of my high school meets, and he was very complimentary. He seemed like a really fun, nice guy and was very excited about having me join the team. 

Really, he was a good salesman.

My new gymnastics team was made up of six people, and I was the oldest. That put me in a unique spot from the beginning. As I got to know the team and the Coach, I spent more time with them than my own family. I felt singled out, in a good way, and I felt that I became one of Coach’s favorites pretty fast.

I learned new skills and became better quite quickly because I was given a lot of attention. Coach was really good at what he did and saw a lot of potential in me, or so I thought. 

And, at 16, I really appreciated the attention. I adored him from that perspective. But I was also careful, because I didn't want to upset my teammates. I figured I was getting his attention because I was new and novel so it was interesting to have me around.

I realize, looking back, that a lot of things that were orchestrated by Coach were a strategic part of his grooming process. 

For example, he had this big Suburban, and he would drive us to our meets. This was popular with the parents, because it would save them time, since they didn't have to be there for warmups. 

I was always the first person Coach picked up and the last person he dropped off. In the beginning, I enjoyed it. I was getting to know someone I looked up to.

We’d also sleep at his house the night before the meet, and he'd take us all in the morning. I don't think that would happen now. But my team loved being together; we loved him. At the time, it was like a big sleepover, except our coach rented soft porn movies for us to watch. I learned later that he was desensitizing us.

As we spent more time with him and away from our parents, that sort of thing became the norm. 

I knew I wanted to be a collegiate gymnast, but I also wanted to be a coach because I liked working with children. Being older, I became a mentor of sorts to the younger gymnasts, and Coach and I would then instruct together daily in my free time. He would teach me how to coach the toddler-age children, and also the kids with special needs.

That strikes me because I ended up becoming a speech pathologist. Even when I was a teenager, I knew working with kids was what I wanted to do, and Coach knew that, too. 

He knew a lot of things about me because of all the time we spent together. He began to infiltrate all the things in my life that I cared about. I'm Italian, and I went on an Italian exchange during that time. Coach was also Italian, and he would try to connect through that aspect, as well as my love of children.

I realize now that the grooming process is really slow. It changes from basic compliments, and helpfulness, to very personal things. It's an evolution. At the time, it seemed normal, when really, it was so not normal.

I began to notice something was off a year and a half after joining the gym, right before I went to college. I started to feel tension in my body when I was with him. Once, when I was the last person he dropped off, he tried to kiss me.

At the time, if you had a cell phone in your car, it was mounted, and so the phone was in-between us. I got really stiff, and I remember the cold feeling of the door, and the window in the car, because my whole body was trying to get out. I remember loving that the cell phone was there between us. 

In that moment, his wife actually called, and it sort of jerked everything to stop, which was a blessing. I look back and I think, thank goodness.

I remember another feeling like that in the summertime when Coach ran a sleep-away camp with two other coaches. 

During the day, we would do all sorts of fun things at camp. But at nighttime, it became very sketchy. 

One evening, the coaches set up a maze made out of stack mats, which are the mats that can stand up when you open them. All the lights were off, and someone tackled me from behind, and planted a big kiss on me. 

I had that same feeling I felt in the car. 

At the time, I didn't know who it was, but in the morning, Coach made a comment about it, and in that instant, I knew it was him. I was upset, especially because we were teamed up to instruct together at the camp for the whole day. 

On another day at the camp, he asked me to come to his room from my dorm after I finished. "At the end of the day,” he said, “make sure you come see me." 

I knew I had to go—I couldn’t defy him—but I felt uncomfortable. I realized that anything he needed to tell me he could have told me in the morning. So, I brought my teammate along, and we knocked on the door. It was partially open, so we opened it wider, and we could see he was in there sleeping. We shut the door and let it go. 

In the morning, he said, "When I told you to come, I told you to come alone. I wanted you to come alone."

I knew then that he had actually been awake and had been in there waiting for me.

There were other instances too. Since I was both a gymnast and a junior coach, I was singled out from my team. I remember Coach would call all my teammates together, but he would leave me out. 

Or, he'd say things like, "You know, at night, there's no drinking. Everybody needs to be aware that that's not what's going to happen here." But then, he'd give me alcohol.

One night, I was just messing around, being a kid, running up and jumping on the bleachers. I thought what I was doing was cool, and I said something to him, like, "You wish you were me!"

And he said, "No. If I was you, I'd be doing my coach."

Maybe he was drinking; I have no idea. But that was the first time he'd ever said anything that blatant to me. I knew it was odd, but of course, I didn't say anything to anyone. I just laughed. 

That was my thing: I would laugh all these things off. It culminated when he thought it would be funny to pin me down and give me a hickey in front of my teammates because I was heading off to college. He thought this was funny because I was so naive.

I kept it all to myself until I went to college. That was when light was finally shed on the whole situation. 

For the first two months I was at school, Coach sent me a postcard every day. My freshman roommate, who ended up being my best friend in college, happened to get the mail one day, and the postcard he’d sent was flipped up. 

She came into our room and said, "Hey, I'm really sorry this postcard was face up, and I read it." And then she was like, "But woah, who is this guy?!" 

I told her he was my coach, and she said, "Why does he say things like this to you?"

He’d written something like, "How's my long-legged body of love?" or something equally absurd. When I think about that now, I want to throw up, but back then, it was commonplace.

Another friend and her brother, who was a senior, walked in on our conversation, and my roommate showed them the postcard. They were also stunned. The older brother said, "Are you kidding me? Has he ever sent you anything else?" 

I had no words at the time. I just opened the drawer of my desk, full of all of the mail he had sent me. There were lists of all the things he missed about me after I left for college and inappropriate things, like a package of condoms. 

At that moment, looking at the situation through someone else’s eyes, I started to think about things differently. 

As this whole thing was unfolding for me, I blew out my shoulder. I couldn't do gymnastics until I got surgery, and suddenly, I had all this time and no idea what to do with it. I had always been so busy, and I started to get really freaked out.

In October it was the college’s Parent's Weekend, and Coach was going to come get me to go watch my teammates compete. He framed it like, "You can catch up with everybody. I know you miss them all.”

And I did miss them because they were like my family.

My parents were okay with him getting me at school because I'm sure I had sold it to them. Coach had also been very strategic in winning them over to his side over the years. He was friendly and charismatic and would constantly ask them questions about what they did to get “such an amazing kid.” 

I also lied all the time to my family about things being great. They were great, for a long time. But then, when it started to become not-so-great, I didn't want to talk about it. It was easier to say that everything was fine.

Coach would call me at college, often late at night. Shortly before that Parent's Weekend, I had one phone call with him, and I don't remember what he said exactly, but he would constantly ask me very personal things, such as if I had lost my virginity yet. He kept harping on it. Before hanging up, he told me it should have been with him. 

I remember, I got off the phone, and I was super uncomfortable. I called my parents and told them I wanted to come home, and asked them to come and get me for fall break. They said, "Of course we'll come get you. Do you want us to take you to that meet?" 

I told them I just wanted to go home. 

I tried to touch base with my teammates about my true feelings shortly after. I had to make the decision to separate myself from Coach, but at the same time, I was trying to protect them. They were just not hearing it, though. It created some distance between us. 

That was hard because a lot of them were my best friends.

When school breaks would come along, Coach would have these team get-togethers, and he would call my house to make sure I was going to come. I would lie, and say I'd be there, and then no-show, because I didn't know what else to do. My mom kept asking me why I didn't want to go, but I still wasn't ready to explain. 

I think about all these things now, and I'm beside myself. 

On one hand, I am thankful that I avoided things getting overly physical with Coach because I know now, as an adult, that he was really working hard to push things along. On the other hand, I think about my own son in that situation—he’s 16 now, the same age I was then—and I'm disgusted. 

That relationship had a big impact me. 

I was affected when the whole Larry Nassar thing came out, and before that, Jerry Sandusky at Penn State. Even little things, like a recent mini TV series I watched called A Teacher, brought me right back there, because it was completely parallel. 

Abuse can happen so easily.

It all came to a head in my early thirties when my former teammate, coached by one of the other summer camp coaches who led a sister gym nearby, sent me an email. I hadn't talked to her in a decade, and she sent me this big long note about how she was going to take her coach to court for sexual abuse. 

She was reaching out to me because she knew that I was being sexually abused by my coach as well. She said that back then, her coach would tell her that my coach and I were “doing the same thing.”

That email reconnected us, and my team of six ended up getting back together to talk about everything. I found out that one of our teammates was in counseling. She happened to mention in therapy that this camp we all went to was still in operation. Because of that, as a mandatory reporter, the counselor told my teammate that she would either have to report the camp or my teammate would need to make a report.

My teammate decided to spearhead the case, and we all came together to support her. 

Both our coaches were tried: the other coach for rape and indecent battery, and my coach for perjury, because he had lied to try and save his friend. In the end, her coach got 8 to 10 years. 

We found out through the process that the two coaches had been doing this for 20 years. A lot of the people that came to testify were gymnasts like us, but from years past. It was brutal to listen to. It was the same story, just with a different group of women.

Hearing all of it, it’s funny what your brain does… 

I always thought that my coach was the ‘good guy’ who had learned bad things from this other coach. I wanted to protect him. Now that I’ve had time to process, I'm horrified by the whole thing. I recognize that there was so much strategy, not only in what my coach did to us back then but also in how he handled his own trial.

A lot of people chose not to testify against my coach for sexual abuse, which is why they were only able to get him on perjury. But I was called to testify about the inappropriateness of our relationship. 

He knew about my affinity for kids, and so the day I testified, he brought all his children and grandchildren with him to the court. He was hoping that I wouldn't be able to go through with it if they were there.

By then, I had my own kids, and the fact that he would bring kids there was so disgusting. I could see right through him and also his lawyers’ strategy. 

They kept saying things like, “Look how successful these women are,” because many of us had gone on to have good careers. There was a scientist, a doctor, a lawyer, etc. We were a bunch of high-powered women, and they were trying to tie it to him, somehow, and give him credit.

Our prosecutor warned us that it was hard to get someone convicted of perjury, but he felt so strongly about getting him for something that he wanted to try. And we succeeded: he was found guilty. 

My teammates and I stayed in contact after the trial, and we learned how we had all handled the situation differently over the years. The abuse had shown up differently in all of us: prescription drug use, obtaining degree after degree, body dysmorphia, eating disorders… 

Both of my parents have now passed away, but I was able to tell my mom about what happened before I testified. My dad passed away before knowing any of it, and I think that was a blessing. Otherwise, I think there probably would have been a homicide.

A couple of years ago, my teammate called me and said that Coach had died the day before. 

He was pretty young at the time—65—and his death came with all sorts of weird emotions for me. For one thing, he died from the same illness my father had passed away from, which was an odd coincidence. More than that, though, was the fact that I had no idea how to deal with his death.  

We loved him, and then it all went so sideways. We persecuted him, and then he went to jail, and then he died. It seemed like the ends were not tied up. We were left with a lot of grief and weirdness. I still struggle to put it into words.

I can’t help thinking that maybe things would have been different back in the day if there had been SafeSport and if I had understood what was going on. 

It turned out my friend and gymnastics teammate was being raped by the other coach the entire time that this was happening to me. At the time, I remember I was annoyed by her, because she constantly needed attention. I’d think, What is the deal with that?

That part has been super hard for me to process as an adult because my 16-year-old brain could never have understood what was really happening. I thought she was being dramatic. 

When all this came to light, one of the first things I felt I needed to do was to apologize to her. I told her that I didn't get it; I’d had no idea. She's amazing, and she understood. But I still hold that heavily. 

I think about what we’re trying to do to educate athletes now. Maybe if I had had training I would have thought, "Oh, my God, maybe something's happening to her?" Instead of assuming she's being an annoying 16-year-old.

I don't know that I have words for other survivors, but I do feel that I have words for other athletes about what to look out for. That’s why I want to share my story, because it’s very confusing when you're an athlete, and you're supposed to trust your coach. 

Coach didn't look like a pedophile, or whatever that looks like, in my brain. My experience taught me that abuse could come from someone I trusted. Someone I adored. I know other survivors will get that because that's who most often preys on us, right? 

I want people in sports who have not been victimized to know just how easily it happens.