Today, Explained - Investigating women’s soccer

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

Allegations of misconduct have rocked US women’s soccer for the last year. The Athletic’s Steph Yang breaks down a new report on the degree to which league officials ignored complaints and protected abusers. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This was supposed to be a banner year for women's soccer in the United States. After years of arguments over equitable treatment, a huge win, equal pay. They even cut a deal that would pool World Cup prize money with the men's side. Equal pay for making the team, for games and events, and for playing in the World Cup. Which by the way, the U.S. women's soccer team has won four times. But equal pay and pooling prize money didn't fix the culture of abuse. Calls for change after a scathing new report revealed systemic abuse and misconduct across U.S. women's soccer. It turns out there's been a rampant culture of abuse in women's soccer

because there's been a rampant culture of overlooking abuse in women's soccer. But now, that finally might change too. That's coming up on Today Explained. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Today Explained, Sean Ramos from.

We're going to dig into the culture of abuse in U.S. women's soccer today. But before we do, a note that we will be talking about sexual abuse. You'll hear some graphic details. With that said, let's take a moment to celebrate women's soccer in the United States, because for the most part, it is thriving. Sinclair trying to work his shots on that left front. She drives and he takes a deflection. Oh, what a save by Hope Solom. She kept it out. It is thriving. The women win more than the men internationally, as you probably know.

But women's soccer in the United States is competing with men's soccer in terms of viewership. In some cases, women's soccer even makes more money. And equal pay should have made 2022 the best year yet for women's soccer in the United States. But no. No, I think the equal pay fight, that it was a fight fight at all was kind of a canary in a coal mine situation. It was the tip of an iceberg that revealed that there's a lot more systematically going on. Well, tonight, the world of professional women's soccer is turned upside down after a shocking report that a prominent male coach is accused of coercing players into having sex. On Thursday, North Carolina's professional team, The Courage, fired coach Paul Reilly following reports he sexually coerced multiple players.

The top league canceled all of its games for this weekend, and now soccer's international governing body is investigating. How do we know that if we turn up to work every day that this is not going to happen to us, or it's not going to happen again? Because it did happen again and again and again and no one in position of power or ability stopped it there's been ongoing abuse in the national women's soccer league of which u.s soccer was a manager for a number of years since it was founded. And, you know, there were people in U.S. soccer who have an alleged degree of culpability here in ignoring or minimalizing, trivializing, perhaps even enabling some of the abuse just through their failure to act.

This is Steph Young from The Athletic. She writes about the National Women's Soccer League and the U.S. Women's National Team. A lot of the abuse you're hearing about in the show today has been known for some time, but there was just a big investigation that came out and clarified the causes. This is all coming out of a report generated by Sally Q. Yates, who was the former acting attorney general of the U.S. The results of a year-long investigation was issued this week that outlines allegations of verbal, physical, even sexual abuse within the National Women's Soccer League. of abusive coaches in NWSL. And she, you know, ran a third party investigation looking into this and then generated, I think it was 172 page report documenting in horrifying detail abuses from three coaches in particular. But the report does note that there's more they couldn't get into, but they just, they didn't have time. It had already been a year. So that's where it's all coming from right now.

Tell me about some of the specifics, which teams or was it the whole league? Well, the report itself focused on three particular coaches. So those would be Paul Riley. Riley coerced one player to have sex with him, forced two players to kiss one another, and sent unsolicited sexual pictures. Christy Hawley, who is at Racing Louisville. Christy Hawley has been fired for the club. Four calls. And Rory Dames at the Chicago Red Stars. The longtime coach for Chicago's professional women's soccer club is out.

And the report is very careful to note that there's more. It does mention stuff like Richie Burke, who was abusive to his players at the Washington Spirit. You know, one of the whistleblowers there was one of his players, Kaya McCullough. But it also notes that like to get these three coaches and talk to players about them, they interviewed over 200 people like players, staff, coaches, administrators, past and present, and they reviewed something like 89,000 documents, which they culled down from over a million documents provided by U.S. Soccer, which is typical in an investigation like this. But you can imagine now why it might have taken a year to assemble all of that into even a 172-page report. Okay, well, give us some of the details. Let's start with Paul Reilly from the Portland Thorns. Paul Reilly is a long time women's soccer coach. He's been around since the previously women's professional soccer where

he coached the Philadelphia Independence. And that's also where another alleged incident of sexual coercion occurred, where Sinead Fairley, one of his players there, later alleged that he sexually coerced her. You say that after an encounter in a hotel room, he said, we will take this to our graves. That is something that has replayed in my mind for, I mean, for 10 years. And then another player at the Portland Thorns, which he coached in the National Women's Soccer League, Mauna Shim, alleges that Paul sexually harassed her. He would send her texts. He would ask her to come to his hotel room. He tried to get her to travel alone with him to the World Cup in Canada in 2015,

that sort of thing. And he would hold her playing time over her head. This is not a national team player. She doesn't have a huge sponsorship deal. She has relatively little power in the system. So obviously she feels like Paul Reilly, who's a nationally renowned coach, can make or break her career. Ultimately, I just felt failed and silenced and like nobody was looking out for us. I felt unsafe. And then later on in the Yates report, it's also alleged that he was verbally abusive to his players, multiple teams, and most recently the North Carolina Courage, where an anonymous player said that, you know, he would make disparaging remarks about appearance and weight

and just comment on players being fat, that sort of thing. Just really damaging stuff under the guise of being concerned about fitness. Was it the same deal in Louisville with Christy Holley? Christy Holley is alleged to have coerced, harassed, assaulted a player there, Aaron Simon, at Racing Louisville, which is why he was terminated, quote unquote, for cause. It wasn't explicitly stated at the time by Racing Louisville's ownership, but he would do things apparently like he would invite her to a game film session. And then he would say, for every time that you mess up, I'm going to touch you. And then he would force his hands under her clothing into her genital areas. Really, really awful stuff.

Yikes. And what happened in Chicago with, is it Rory Dames? Rory Dames is a longtime Chicago area coach, not just for the Red Stars. But he got his start in the youth system and he owns a club there. As far as I'm aware, he still owns the club. It might be changing, but I don't think the club is exactly publicizing it. It's called Eclipse. And there were multiple allegations at the Red Stars over the years

of him being verbally abusive, harassing players, and then even having inappropriate relationships with players, inviting them to one-on-one meals, dinners, and lunches at, of all places, the Cheesecake Factory, which is just, it was such a bizarre detail that jumps out at you. Like, you're reading this really awful, grim report, and you see Cheesecake Factory, and you're just like, oh, Cheesecake Factory, and then you get back to weeping. He would belittle his players, and he would do this to youth players as well. That was included in the report that there had been reports as far back as 1998 of him being hostile to kids. This is preteens up to teenagers that

we're talking about. And, you know, there was an investigation all the way back in the 90s per the Yates report where someone in the Arlington Police Department conducted like 100 interviews. And then they ultimately decided that there wasn't enough to go on, even though they had discovered things like maybe it touched a player inappropriately while they were sitting together on a couch. He had punched a male player in the stomach, allegedly, and that he routinely, like, verbally belittled these kids with comments about their appearances, calling them losers, using, you know, foul language, that sort of thing. So, Rory Dames, you know, the pattern continued with the Chicago Red Stars in the professional environment, where he would, once again, create this hostile, abusive environment where he would belittle players, yell at them, abuse them, that sort of thing. Okay, so we've got three coaches here, Paul Reilly, Christy Hawley, and Rory Dames. But you're saying this is by no means limited to these three individuals. No, these are the three individuals the Yates report had the time and resources to get into. And they probably could have kept going. But the report notes, like, at some point, you have to deliver,

like, some kind of detail. You can't just keep going forever. And that's also really awful, right, that they could have just kept going even after a year of investigation and over 200 interviews. Because of the breadth and the difficulty of piecing through, you know, evidence that's quite old, even with respect to three of these coaches, it was a huge undertaking. And so what we thought that the best use of our resources would be, would be to identify those others, lay out what some of the evidence is there, and recognizing also that the joint investigation, the NWSL and the PA investigation, is also looking at other coaches. It sounds like there's a whole host of allegations about a ton of people. What's the pattern?

Do you see one? There are a lot of patterns at play here, but I'll give you kind of the format of generally what seems to happen. Coach comes on board. There's maybe some red flags where it'll be like, oh, he coached at like five different places in the last three years. Then the coach goes on to repeat the behavior, is quietly let go, moves to a new club, repeat. These people are allowed to move from club to club to club to club and nobody ever says anything

because there's not any kind of formalized system of reporting and because the owners or the people in charge of hiring just keep it to themselves. People in authority and decision-making positions have repeatedly failed to protect us and they have failed to hold themselves and each other accountable. What and who are you actually protecting, and what values are you upholding? You have failed in your stewardship.

More with Steph Young in a minute on Today Explained. Back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, R-A-M-P dot com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style,

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's such a good team, and the fact that there's, like, the boys' team of the men's World Cup, it's like the women's are so much better. Today explained back with Steph Young from The Athletic

talking about the pattern of abuse in women's soccer in the United States and why it's hard to break. First of all, there's no great structure for reporting this where all this stuff is accumulated in one place. So someone can be like, oh, aha, there's a lot of reports coming in and then applying all the data. What we see from the Yates report is a lot of different people have a lot of different pieces at a lot of different times. But, you know, I think a major contributing factor is this thing where coaches come in, misconduct occurs, and then they're allowed to leave and go to the next job and repeat. We are angry that it took a third-party investigation. We are angry

that it took an article in The Athletic and The Washington Post and numerous others. We're angry that it took over 200 people sharing their trauma to get to this point right now. And we are angry that it took Mana and Sinead and Aaron and Kaya and Alex and Kristen and Sam to repeatedly ask people in authority to take their abuse and their concerns seriously. Why is that? Why aren't these reports being filed somewhere so other people can see them? So I think it's a combination of it's kind of a fragmented oversight system when it comes to reports. The league didn't even have its own anti-harassment policy until I want to say roughly last year. Big HR problem, right? And then combined

with active ignorance from people who should have been able to assemble the pieces into something. It does come down a little bit to the way the league is structured. The league is ultimately a business, right? And right now NWSL has 12 teams and each one of them is their own individual business. And it's not like they're all like franchise dominoes that report to one corporate headquarters right they're all allowed their own individual uh operation they're not supposed to be interfering with each other or being overseen too much by the league top down but what that also means is there's not like a central repository and we'll see later in the Yates report that that's a recommendation,

like you need to have some kind of overarching safety officer to have like a central repository for this kind of thing. Those who were in a position to make a difference didn't. They not only failed to respond appropriately to evidence of abuse, they had also failed to institute the most basic measures. come up over and over that they received an email about some complaint or report or an end of season survey and they're like well then they forwarded it to somebody else or they ignored it or it didn't go anywhere the things you're talking about that every team is an independent entity and there's not a lot of cross communication across the league that isn't specific to women's soccer in the united states why is there such rampant abuse in this particular league? I think the actual answer, which is super dark, is that abuse is actually occurring in a lot of other leagues as well, but it's just not being reported.

There's no report that came out here, but I'm sure that there could be one. It just says there could be one in likely every single country, which is a really sad reality. But I feel like there's just so much solidarity between the things that we have to fight for. It's not covered because a lot of times what it takes in these cases is for a complainant to come forward. You can't go around to every single team peering in with a magnifying glass, constantly going, who in this organization is abusive? Who's abusive? Who's abusive? You do need some overarching controls, like we said, like some kind of safety officer or something who's in charge. How can anybody know that something is going wrong unless they're out in broad daylight? Which, to be fair, some of these coaches were out in broad daylight yelling insults at players. And unfortunately, that's often a lot to ask of someone who's been victimized and traumatized,

asking them to come forward and go through the system. Especially when they see the people who came before them maybe might have tried it. It went nowhere. And in fact, in some cases, people like Rory Dames were told that somebody had made an allegation against them and that he would go, you know, talk to that person to be like, I know you made a complaint about me. Why would you ever complain in an atmosphere like that? Especially in women's sports where you don't make a lot of money. So someone like your coach, team owner, general manager can essentially end your livelihood. It feels like another issue here is some of the abuse you're talking about is so endemic to sports. You watch sports on TV in stadiums where there's tens of thousands

of people and you see berating and sometimes even pushing around players. There's physical contact sometimes. And that's broadcast for the world to see because it's some level of acceptable. Where does that kind of behavior start? What happens to a lot of players is, and it's also noted in the Yates report, is that youth soccer, youth sports in general in the United States condition players to accept a certain standard of bad behavior because you grow up your whole life thinking a coach screaming at you is good coaching, or it's just because he cares about you or it's supposed to motivate me. You know, we raise kids in this system where coaches displace all this awful misbehavior onto the kids and, you know, the kids are expected to take some kind of life lesson from it and grow as people.

If you're a parent and your child plays youth soccer, do you know who to go to if you have a complaint about the coach? Would you know who to go to if you have a complaint about the coach? Would you know who to approach? Do you know the structure of how soccer is run in your county or your state? I bet a lot of parents don't. So when I talked about cultural factors and you talked about coaches screaming and shoving at players being broadcast and this being accepted. And people should ask themselves, yeah, why would I accept that? Why do I see that? Like, if I see in the NFL, like a grown man throwing his headset on the ground or shoving another grown man into another player, why do I think like, yeah, that's totally fine, just because it's sports. I think Americans have internalized this idea that because it's sports and there's some inherent moral value to sports in our country, and also we just love winners, that these things are just an acceptable cost to being in sports. Like, yeah, it's a high-pressure environment. It's a pressure cooker. You have to make sacrifices. I don't think anybody should have to be belittled or even physically abused at their job, no matter what the job is. Let's bring this back to women's soccer right now for a second here. Let's bring this back to the NWSL. What steps are they taking in the aftermath of this investigation?

Well, we have to remember there's a whole other report still yet to come, because not only did U.S. Soccer commission an independent investigation, N you have to do is go look at the law firms involved or like big multinational law firms. So it should give you an idea of like the resources required here in order to pull together a report. So we have a whole nother report to come. U.S. Soccer themselves has taken some immediate steps, but you have to remember, they're also limited by their member organizations. So there's some unilateral action that they can take, or that President Cindy Parlo-Cohn can take on her own. But there's a lot of things that they kind of need approval in the form of votes from the organization members. And they're supposed to have recommendations for U.S. soccer and how to immediately, well not immediately, but how to implement the recommendation in the Yates report by, I think, end of year or January of next year. And it's going to include things

like looking at, you know, like the youth coaching system, the licensing system, having overarching safety officers. And I don't know, maybe we might even have to go into a deeper restructure of the NWSL board of directors itself. But I think a lot of people are just waiting for the NWSL report before they kind of try to get into the nitty gritty of, you know, adjusting how the game is administered. I don't want to make it seem like there's an abuser around every corner. I think there's lots of great people in soccer and you can't go through life or even playing soccer, assuming everybody's out to get you you just can't function as a human being that way um but i do think that this is a time for us

to not just re-evaluate how we run things but literally how we relate to sports what value we assign to sports in our lives and in society it It's been difficult for the players. The players are not doing well. We are horrified and heartbroken and frustrated and exhausted and really, really angry. Every owner and executive and U.S. soccer official who has repeatedly failed the players and failed to protect the players who have hidden behind legalities and have not participated fully

in these investigations should be gone. In the entire landscape of women's sports, nobody ever wants to see anything like this, but hopefully this can be a moment in time that you say none of this ever happened again. Steph Young writes about women's soccer at The Athletic. Read her at theathletic.com. Our program today was produced

by Victoria Chamberlain. She had help from Matthew Collette, Laura Bullard, and Paul Robert Mounsey. This is Today Explained.