Not running again isn’t good enough. He should resign immediately.
I don’t agree. Were he to be forced to resign then he might think nothing of breaking the confidentiality agreement even more by calling her out. Sounds more like he badgered the victim which was harassing to her as opposed to groping, assaulting etc. and she took money in exchange for confidentiality. I think she would be harmed more than him. I agree with the states that are passing laws against payments for confidentiality that are not documented through court or civil mediation as I think it opens the door to issues more for the victim than the person doing the payoff. Let him just not run again and let her keep her confidentiality.
Meehan’s district is the one known as “Goofy Kicking Donald Duck,” so they’re saying it’s possible the district won’t even be around for the next election. They may just redistrict it away.
Steve Wynn has been outed…I don’t have a WSJ subscription but her is a snippet.
“A manicurist from a Wynn Las Vegas salon says she showed up for a private appointment in his office in 2005, where the billionaire told her to take off her clothes and demanded they have sex. She said no — but he eventually pressured her into it, the Journal reports.
She later filed a complaint with human resources, and Wynn paid her a $7.5 million settlement, sources tell the paper.”
You don’t get 7.5 million from Steve Wynn on an accusation.
^Good.
He’s a fill-in-the -blank. We are both alumni from the same wee private school - though he was there before a merger with another private school and I was there after the merger. I have been to several alumni functions he has attended and he thinks we should all fawn over him because of what he donates to the school. He has an alumni weekend every few years at one of his hotels in Vegas. I’ve never gone because I don’t like Vegas, plus all he gives is free rooms - everything else he plans for the weekend (golf, entertainment, dinners - all at his own resorts) we have to pay.
Wow. $7.5 million. That’s a lot of money.
I went through the Safesport training for youth hockey coaching a few years ago. There is probably more than one level. The one I did took over 20 hours online, and involved diet, substances, and competitive issues, as well as talking about abuse. The abuse part was the worst (or best). Coaches were made aware of how sexual predators targeted athletes, and gave specific cases such as a Olympic medal winning Judoka, and the infamous(in hockey circles) Craig James, a very successful Junior hockey coach in Canada. The steps that the predators made that led to the abuse were premeditated and diabolical. They also mentioned cases where there were false accusations made against coaches made by children, often encouraged by questionably motivated “therapists”.
My first reaction was to feel sick, and want to stop coaching, but after I calmed down I started to adopt some of the simple recommendations made in the course, such as not being alone in a room with a player, not driving a player home after a game or practice, not making physical contact with players, making sure that no cell phones were around in the dressing room, paying attention to bullying issues(which I am hyper aware of anyway), etc. I had done many of these things in the past, oblivious of the possible ramifications for me.
Bottom line is that I had to change a few ways that I might have done things in the past, such as driving someone home after practice, which I had done many times in the past to be a "good guy", and save parents some time. I am still coaching, and the changes I have made in how I do things have had little to no impact on my ability to coach, makes kids safer, AND makes a volunteer coach like myself safer.
Spending 20+ years in jail for something I didn't do? No, thank you!
Rachel Denhollander, one of the first to speak out against Nassar, and not have her complaints immediately dismissed, has written an op-ed about her painful experience.
This is interesting too - six short films that illustrate sexual harassment. This is one, annotated.
Graham James is the name of the infamous sexual predator coach who preyed on junior hockey players, young teenagers living away from home. That scandal erupted in 1996! Why was USA Gymnastics so lax for so many decades, when the risk of sexual predators in general, and sexual predators in youth sports in particular, was already well known by the time the first accusations were made?
Did you wonder why the football and men’s basketball coaches at MSU supported Nassar and Lou Anna Simon? It seems to be because the Athletics Department at MSU had a policy on sexual assault, and that policy seems to have been, “We’re for it.” They covered up reports of male athletes assaulting women as well as ignoring complaints about Nassar.
^ Just saw that. Funny how most of these guys resign when they get busted with one big yuge glaring exception.
He didn’t resign from his businesses, however. He’s still in a position to assault his employees, and we have no reason to believe he has stopped harassing.
^ Im just hoping he’ll never show his face at alumni weekend again.
Oops! Sorry to any Craig James out there. Obviously meant Graham James, as Cardinal Fang has pointed out.
Another guy on the %$& Men in Media list gets the axe:
https://www.vox.com/2018/1/29/16934552/exclusive-national-geographic-sexual-misconduct
Patrick Witty, deputy director of photography at National Geographic and contributor to the New York Times, Time and Wired, has been let go. He allegedly kissed and fondled women photographers who worked with him. If they protested, he threatened them with being blackballed from the industry. Because he was powerful in the industry and they were freelancers, if they made a fuss they would lose their careers.
So can we skip the part about why they didn’t complain? They didn’t complain because if they did complain, or give him the slap, punch or knee to the groin he so richly deserved, they wouldn’t be able to work in their field again.
There was a %$& Men in Media list, and it eventually got publicity because it was about men in the media. This doesn’t tell us that men in other fields behave better. It just tells us that a lot of people in the media are reporters, many of them women reporters, who took advantage of the moment to report out stories among people they knew. The bad actors in, oh let’s say, the dog show world aren’t molesting reporters. But any field controlled by men is a field where harassers and assaulters can threaten their victims’ careers.
Oh no! This hits too close. Poor little kiddo.
Oh dear. I remember the rumors and the resulting investigation some years ago.
Thanks for drawing that case to our attention, @BunsenBurner. I think young female athletes are particularly vulnerable, and everyone needs to be aware that it’s not a phenomenon unique to gymnastics.