It was that moment. That surreal moment.
You wake up, take a break in the real world from that novel you’re writing… and the real world creeps right into the novel, or the fiction creeps into the news, or what the hell just happened?
Amy Carnell comes up on the page. And she comes up on the TV screen. But not for the reason you’d think. The former youth soccer sensation, later an exec with the Sounders and the Seattle Reign, alleges sexual abuse twenty years ago by her youth coach.
Carnell’s story featured by Hana Kim, Q13
At top: Creeper. (Seattle Times/Amy Carnell)
You read the article and you watch the story and you’re thinking holy hell this can’t be true can it? It must be fiction, isn’t it? Because this novel you’re writing is fiction, and it’s the same story. The one-on-one coaching. The private secret groping. The uncertainty, the “I kinda like him,” the hiding, the lies. You look at the news and you look at your novel and it’s all the same damn story.
But you know it is true and you know the news is not fiction because the stories keep coming up again and again and again and we see them and wonder how they keep coming up. How we manage to leave so many children unprotected. It’s a priest, a stepfather, a scoutmaster, or a coach, and it’s always the same story and it’s all true.
Goddammit, it keeps on happening, and while you could have taken Carnell’s abuse straight off the pages of Diamonds and Dirt, you could just as easily have found that dynamic in Sarah Ehekircher’s abuse by her swim coach, or in Irv Muchnick’s description of Irish pedophile George Gibney, or, God help us, in the actions of swim coaches right here in my little town.
There’s a carrot. The carrot looks like glory, success, championships, salvation, and only one man is worthy to offer it. Or to withhold it, and that’s the stick: banishment, ostracism, ridicule. Failure. And we can’t have that. We mustn’t. A kid and a family glom on the one to avoid the other. Especially when the coach calls you his Angel. And it goes from Angel to back rubs to love letters to fondling to a code of silence. And nobody speaks up.
They remember the stick. Can’t risk the stick. They’ll do anything to avoid the stick.
Courage to speak up: Amy Carnell (Seattle Times)
And finally when it gets too much, someone has the courage to say something. And poof, the coach in righteous anger finds a new team. He runs away, like a petulant sobbing child. And oh boy the real sobbing children he leaves in his wake. They’re always in there, that key plot element.
The manipulation, the ego, the narcissism… the grooming of parents and children… it’s all there, the whole story is always there, right down to the schism of sheeps and goats among families. Families banned, ousted, excommunicated because they rebelled or spoke up. Families shamed for telling the truth.
And always, always, the plot carries long-term damage that festers. Years after the abuser moves on to another Angel, the mental and emotional anguish lives on in his victims. Meanwhile parents and scout troops and soccer clubs and parishes — the ones who are supposed to do their damn jobs and protect the children — keep on allowing it. Right under their noses.
Carnell can’t seek criminal charges due to statutes of limitations. So she has a civil case, but more than that, she wants change. She wants mandatory training for parents and athletes on how to avoid and call out grooming and manipulative behavior that leads to sex abuse. She wants advocates designated on each team to prevent inappropriate behaviors. In other words, to do what the adults from her playing days failed so miserably to do: protect children.
Even if she’s successful, even if she wins her suits and sees sweeping changes in Youth Soccer structure, that won’t change the reality of what happened to her twenty years ago.
But Carnell’s efforts today, her courage to tell her story, may well save the life of a young athlete tomorrow. And that might help ease the pain.