Denver – He took time, patience and months of therapy before Jacqui Stevenson could leave behind anxiety and suicidal thoughts derived from a terrible experience that involves his childhood swimming coach that extended for more than two decades.
A look at his phone earlier this month forced some of those feelings to the surface.
“I checked my email and I only had a total panic attack,” Stevenson said.
The February 12 email of the general advisor Jessica Perrill began: “I am reaching a recent incident that involves The assigned researcher To its US center. For the Safeport case (The Center), Jason Krasley “.
Thus began an infused spiral with anguish for Stevenson, whose history serves as a reinforcing example of the potentially devastating undulation effect, the former police officer turned into the arrest of the Safeport investigator for sexual crimes, and the center’s response, he can have in the people whose cases he handled.
Before receiving the email, Stevenson had seen Krasley, a former vice president of Vice President of Allentown, Pennsylvania, Police Department, as the only person who had really returned her when he reported abuses in December 2022. He still believed that when the case was resolved and closed in silence, About 14 months laterWith the coach receiving a probation one year after admitting that he inappropriately kissed Stevenson when he was a teenager.
When Perrill’s email landed with a shake, informing Stevenson that Krasley had been arrested and accused of rape, robbery and other crimes that began to rethink everything.
Stevenson, now 38, who lives approximately one hour southwest of Philadelphia and works as director of an important software company, said that he also has serious doubts about the center’s position, declared in Perrill’s email, that “we currently have no reasons to believe,” Krasley had been involved in the lack of work during the three years he worked in the organization.
He wonders if expressing his doubts to the third -party audit group that the center hired to collect information about the cases that Krasley managed could lead to the center to reopen his case and, in turn, give the man he accused, who still trains the children, a possibility of having clean misdeeds of his record.
“I’m probably looking at this and going: ‘Sweet, I’m without Scottish,” said Stevenson. “And all this only confirms that he can do what he wants.”
The center said he requested the audit of third parties by caution, to guarantee the fair and adequate management of the cases.
“We recognize that cases of emotional toll review may have, so we have been working closely with experts to ensure that any scope of the parties is carried out in an informed manner by trauma, including the offer of support resources,” said CEO Ju’riese Colón.
According to Perrill’s email, The center fired Krasley On November 15, 2024, immediately upon learning of his arrest for allegedly stealing drug money seized of a raid in which he was involved as Vice Cop in 2019.
Two months later, details of new arrests for Violation accusations, sex trafficking and request prostitution, accusations dating from 2015. Krasley’s lawyer says that his client is innocent of those positions.
The center has not disseminated how many cases Krasley managed during his three years working there, although that was one of the questions. Senator Chuck GrassleyR -iowa, asked when he opened an investigation into the center earlier this month.
Stevenson said that after receiving email, she reassess the hours she had spent on the phone with Krasley, the friendly atmosphere she gave that she bordered on the overvalue and her memories telling her that “I am not a therapist, but I am here for you and we are going to get this (expletive).”
He regretted having sent her photos of her, curled up on the couch with the coach, her abuser, with her back when she was 14 years old and the coach was 21 years old.
He began to wonder if Krasley, a man in which people trust to get to the bottom of sensitive cases, some who involved sexual abuse and harassment, had properly handled other evidence that she and a friend had offered what they said they were more recent cases of the coach who abused minors.
After not finding the police in the investigation of his abuser, he is concerned that the center, which opened in 2017 to combat sexual abuse in Olympic sports, and that Stevenson once considered his last line of defense, could disappear as a result of a sordid episode like this.
“And now, everyone who tried with him has to deal with that,” he said. “What he did in his previous role has now contaminated everything he touched in Safesport. And this could knock down an organization, and then what? Safeport is not perfect, but at least it is there. “
Stevenson’s concerns date from the early 2000s, when he was under the influence of the same coach who would deliver to the center almost 20 years later.
She said that the interactions between her and the coach involved marijuana, alcohol, night parties and kisses as part of a relationship that, according to her, became an inappropriation that she really couldn’t recognize until many years passed.
More than 15 years later, he reconnected with the coach in a swimming club near his old hometown, where she herself became a coach, then a member of the club’s board. I still saw the coach of a decent light, but when he saw him exhibit some of the same behaviors he experienced as a child, the red flags began to climb.
Finally, the swimming club fired the coach, who is not being identified by AP because he never landed in the centralized disciplinary database of Safesport, nor was he accused by the police, caused his defenders to retaliate at the beginning of a petition for Stevenson to withdraw from the Board.
That sent her to a tail queue that, according to her, included suicide thoughts and a guilty consciousness because she saw that the children were in danger and felt helpless when doing something about it.
“The most difficult part for me was to take Jacqui to the finish line, and I felt that we crossed it on the line, and then hit her in the face with this,” said Mike Scime, a friend of Stevenson who helped her deal with the mental health problems that occurred as the case.
Stevenson’s own experience with the police is an example of what led to the Safeport center, which promotes its independence from traditional legal channels as one of their strengths, to argue that it will often go beyond the police and other investigation bodies to guarantee the security of athletes.
The center took about two months to assign an investigator to the case after Stevenson reported it. That researcher turned out to be Krasley.
Stevenson said the former police officer had a way of making her feel that she was the only person who really understood her problems.
“When I think about it,” he said, “he felt disturbingly similar to what (the coach) did to me when he was 14 years old.”
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Editor’s note: This story includes the discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, national suicide and crisis crisis in the US 988lifeline.org
