The first year of high school is always exciting, a sign that you’re almost a grown up who will soon be forging your own path in life.
That’s how sexual assault survivor “Jane Doe” felt when she joined the Los Gatos High School Girls’ Track team in 1998: the world was her oyster and her future was bright.
San Jose, CA – Jan. 5, 2021 – The law firm of Cerri, Boskovich & Allard is announcing the filing of a sexual abuse lawsuit against Valley Christian High School (Santa Clara County Superior Court) and its former coach, Greg Marshall.
The lawsuit alleges that Coach Marshall began sexually abusing girls on his varsity girls’ basketball team almost as soon as he was hired in the 2001-2002 school year.
Joseph Houg, a teacher at Blossom Hill Elementary School in Los Gatos and director of the Los Gatos Youth Theater, was arrested on September 3rd for felony lewd and lascivious acts and several counts of annoying and molesting a minor. According to Cupertino Today, Joseph Houg also goes by Brian Houg within the community. Houg is 50 years old.
The Santa Clara County Sheriff Department began a months-long investigation after receiving a tip on May 14th that Houg was making sexual advances over Zoom. According to news reports, a 13-year old boy claimed Houg made him feel uncomfortable during a one-on-one Zoom meeting. The boy said Houg persistently asked to see his ab muscles. Despite trying to change the subject multiple times, the boy complied. The victim told police that another child had a similar experience during a one-on-one Zoom meeting call when Houg asked to see a pair of his underwear. As detectives investigated the two leads, another victim contacted authorities to report Houg touched him sexually in 2008. The victim at the time was 12 years old and a fifth-grade student. According to police reports, “the third victim said that Houg pulled the victim’s shorts down during physical education class and touched his abdomen and genital area.” Houg was a fifth-grade teacher and worked at the same elementary school for the past two decades.
Detectives served a search warrant on Houg’s San Jose home. The detectives seized multiple electronic storage devices. They also found “a plethora of behavior indicative of a pedophile.” According to ABC News, Detective Vince Mitre said there is “a video of him pulling a student’s shorts down, recording it, it appeared that the recording device was kind of hidden to a certain extent.” The sheriff department’s statement also included that “Houg had multiple recordings of Zoom meetings of his class performing yoga exercises, videos of young boys changing clothes and videos and images of children in their underwear.”
When former Michigan State and USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nasser admitted to sexually assaulting ten young gymnasts, he was sentenced to up to 175 years, meaning he’s expected to die in prison.
Since the Nasser scandal broke in 2016, at least 250 women say they were sexually assaulted by Nasser beginning in 1992.
One more victim has come forward: Gymnast Terin Humphrey, who won two silver medals at the 2004 Summer Olympics.
School district knew Normandie Burgos was a sexual predator but allowed him to continue teaching and coaching.
Normandie Burgos is a disgraced tennis coach who was convicted of 60 counts of sexual abuse in 2019 and is now serving 255 years in prison.
Essentially, it’s a life sentence for the 56-year-old predator who faces three civil lawsuits recently filed by Cerri, Boskovich & Allard.
The sexual abuse lawsuit brought forth by Olympian Ariana Kukors Smith has been resolved nearly two years after Mrs. Kukors Smith filed the action. The monetary settlement reached by USA Swimming’s insurance companies and Mrs. Kukors Smith will allow the 2012 Olympian to re-focus on the sport that she loves and to begin healing.
“I am glad that we were able to come to a resolution to this difficult process. As I begin the next chapter of my life, I hope that these last two years, along with the efforts of so many others, will help to provide athletes with a safer environment in which to compete,” Mrs. Kukors Smith said.
USA Swimming added the following: Throughout this process, Mrs. Kukors Smith has shown incredible strength and bravery and offered a powerful voice to all survivors. In sharing her story, Mrs. Kukors Smith thrust the very important subject matter of sexual abuse within youth serving organizations into focus and furthered important dialogue about the continued need for robust athlete protection policies and strong athlete and parent education.
David W. Chen from the New York Times takes a look at the US Tennis Association and its failure to protect young athletes from a serial sexual predator. Read the USTA Burgos story in full. Here is a summary:
According to the New York Times, with growing cases of sexual misconduct between sports coaches and athletes, the United States Olympic Committee reported, in September 2014, that all sports, except tennis, had taken the initiative to protect athletes from abusers. At the time, Gordon Smith, the tennis association’s executive director, and chief operating officer, “objected to a ‘single mandatory national entity’ overseeing abuse cases across federations.” Adding that “a sport should be able to ‘opt-out of the centralized structure’ if it could police itself.”
The problem with self-policing has shown, however, that many abusers fall through the cracks. Just a few months before this 2014 meeting, a U.S.T.A. tennis coach, Normandie Burgos, had been arrested for abusing one of his athletes. Unfortunately, it was not his first time facing criminal charges for sexual misconduct. Source: New York Times
The three lawsuits that were filed in early June 2020 are the latest volley against USA Swimming, which has come under fire for decades for condoning a culture that allowed young girls to be repeatedly abused by their coaches.
When “W.S.” met Coach Normandie Burgos he was just seven years old, a young boy who was good at tennis and wanted to get better.
There’s no disputing that Burgos wanted W.S. to become a great tennis player – he repeatedly told W.S.’s parents that he was a “champion.” But as the years passed, W.S. grew up and Coach Burgos began to want more.
Over the past 20 years, the Center for Disease Control has researched the relationship between childhood trauma and illnesses developed later in life. Traumatic experiences such as abuse or neglect, witnessing violence at home, or family with mental illness or substance abuse all had lasting negative impacts. The CDC called these events, Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). Their most recent study included 144,000 surveys, collected from respondents in 25 states from 2015-2017. These surveys included topics such as health problems, childhood experiences with divorce, abuse, domestic violence, drugs in the home, and mental illness. Crimes such as sexual abuse would also fall into the category of ACEs.
ACEs negatively impact a child, but the CDC wanted to know how these events might have triggered illnesses and preventable conditions later in life. If ACEs never occurred, issues such as coronary heart disease, depression and suicide, weight issues, substance abuse, decreased education or work opportunities, poor maternal health, cancer, or sexually transmitted diseases might be potentially preventable. Researchers could not rule out other factors, such as financial stress. Still, Jim Mercy, who oversees the CDC violence protection program, says, “there’s a lot of evidence connecting these things…and it’s become clear that the more harmful incidents a child suffers, the more likely their health suffers later.”
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