“SHE KNEW WHAT SHE WAS DOING”; Cultures of Victim-Blaming, Sexual Abuse Continue to Plague Olympic Sports
How many little girls in the U.S. ask for a pony for Christmas every year? Thousands, for certain. Heartfelt family movies paint pictures of troubled teenage girls and wild mustangs bonding against all odds and going on to win the big competition. Holiday cards show fuzzy Shetland ponies with a garland around their necks waiting for their new girl under the Christmas tree.
But what happens when the little girls actually do get ponies? They are thrust into a sport gilded with colorful ribbons, perfectly polished boots, the satisfaction of finding the perfect spot to an obstacle. Lurking under the surface of $5,000 saddles and $3,000 horse-show-weekends, though, is insidious classism and racism, workers’ rights abuses and, perhaps most prevalent of all, widespread sexual misconduct.
Horsemanship is tough, and competition is fierce. Young athletes of all genders spend countless hours practicing, “catching rides,” working in the barn. Their coach quickly becomes the most important person in their life. If they aspire to the high levels of the sport, young equestrians frequently opt for online schooling so that they can spend more time at the barn and travel more for horse shows. They become isolated from other people their age, unless there are some at the barn.
When their coach controls what horses a student rides, how often they ride, when and where they get to compete, and virtually every other important aspect of the sport, the perfect conditions for grooming are often created. One-on-one time between teens and their coaches is frequent. Horse sport, an insular community, turns a blind eye to sexual abuse in favor of keeping the peace.
In the past three years, horse sport has been rocked by the outing of abusers. George Morris, arguably the most famous figure in American horse sport, was permanently banned after a U.S. Center for Safe Sport investigation found he had sexually abused at least two young boys. Robert Gage, a prolific show jumper and coach, committed suicide after being banned for sexual misconduct with several children. Rich Fellers, an Olympic show jumper and top-level coach, was banned early last year after the Center for Safe Sport concluded that he had groomed and sexually abused one of his teenaged pupils, up-and-coming young rider Maggie Kehring.
The equestrian community’s reaction to Fellers’ ban was vitriolic and fast. The story originally broke on The Chronicle of the Horse, an equestrian lifestyle journal.
“Another star hit !! So sad,” reads one comment on the original report.
“Sounds like another Me to [sic] moment of lies,” reads another on the Chronicle’s report of Maggie Kehring originally speaking out. “No posts, no friends, no pic. Sounds like another troll trying to bring hurt to a person. FU.”
M. Kehring at the Palm Beach International Equestrian Center in early 2022. Photo courtesy of Maggie Kehring’s Instagram.
The hatred was not limited to the Internet.
“I mean Maggie would try to show and she would ride really well at home. And then she’d get into the show ring and she’d be like, every single person at the side of the ring is watching me and talking about me. And she wasn’t wrong. It was so hard,” says Carrie Kehring, Maggie’s mom and founder of #WeRideTogether. #WeRideTogether is a nonprofit founded in 2021 to address sexual abuse within horse sport.
At the time the story broke, Maggie was a junior in high school. In response to her coming forward, Carrie says she was told “she knew what she was doing,” a phrase so often used to silence female teenage victims of sexual abuse and grooming. Even though Maggie had never so much as had a boyfriend before, Carrie says people viewed it as an affair instead of abuse. Carrie knew she had to do something to change the way equestrian professionals and athletes treated, talked about, and viewed sexual abuse and its survivors.
“Our culture is one of a frat house. … Everybody seems to be okay with that,” Carrie says of the equestrian world. In September 2021, Carrie launched #WeRideTogether in collaboration with the Horse Network.
In September, #WeRideTogether and the Horse Network launched a PSA campaign aimed at raising awareness about sexual abuse in the equine industry. Featuring survivor stories, expert testimony on what grooming looks like, and quotes from news outlets, the campaign hopes to shed light on what many equestrians already know: there is a sexual abuse problem in equestrian sports.
“There’s a lot of people who when we first started WeRideTogether said, ‘You’re going to damage the sport, you’re going to ruin the sport.’ We think the sport is the most incredible thing ever. It’s my family’s lifeblood and my daughter’s lifeblood. We just want to make it stronger and better,” says Carrie on an episode of The Dressage Radio Show. One video on #WeRideTogether’s Instagram account (@weridetogether.today) shows a TikTok Maggie made featuring a number of victim blaming and diminishing Facebook comments about her. Others are roughly 3-minute long videos of survivors’ stories.
“At one point I was getting like, 12 calls a week from women in the industry telling me these terrible, terrible, terrible things,” Carrie says. According to Carrie, Maggie has had at least 40 people personally tell her their stories of abuse within equestrian sports, and hundreds of others who have shared their stories via social media.
“After we released [Maggie’s] PSA … talking about what happened to her and what grooming looks like, my family received an avalanche. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of equestrians from all over the world started reaching out to my daughter and myself and sharing their situations and what had happened to them,” Carrie says, also on The Dressage Radio Show.
A graphic from #WeRIdeTogether’s Instagram (werdetogether.today)
Maggie’s story and the subsequent founding of #WeRideTogether is not what started the equestrian community’s vitriol towards survivors of abuse. Following the Michigan State Gymnastics sex abuse scandal, Congress authorized the Protecting Young Victims from Sexual Abuse and Safe Sport Authorization Act, establishing the U.S. Center for Safe Sport. Out of all 50 Olympic sports that Safe Sport covers, equestrian has perhaps reacted the most childishly.
Notably, equestrian sport is, at most levels, dominated by women. In the U.S. 84.56% of show jumpers (the discipline in which Maggie participates) are women, according to Dressage-News.Com. However, the top levels of the sport are disproportionately dominated by male equestrians and coaches. For example, the U.S. 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games show jumping team was a 50/50 split by gender. Equestrian is the only Olympic sport in which men and women compete together.
Since 2017, equestrian professionals have advocated tirelessly to bring an end to Safe Sport. Athletes for Equity in Sport, a group founded by trainer Diane Carney following George Morris’ 2019 ban from the sport, claims to support Safe Sport’s mission but to also be against its “the lack of safeguards against weaponization of the SafeSport reporting and response process.”
False reporting is notably rare, hovering somewhere between 2-8% of all sexual misconduct reports, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.. According to the Center for Safe Sport itself and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 93% of all athletes who experience sexual misconduct do not report or formally complain. Weaponization of reporting processes is not happening. Intimidation and humiliation of young and vulnerable survivors is.
“We also seem to have [an idea] in our sport that there’s a lot of false accusations. False accusations around sexual misconduct and abuse are rare. … We don’t have a false accusation problem. We have an underreporting problem,” says Carrie.
Athletes for Equity is a nice-sounding name, but when it’s advocating to weaken an institution put in place to protect vulnerable children and survivors of sexual abuse, it isn’t fighting for equity. It’s fighting for silencing.
Male professionals in the industry are particularly apprehensive to express their support for survivors.
“What I want to say is, yes, we’re receiving a lot of support from women and from businesses but that the men in this sport are taking this crazy, weird stance on it. Which is to get super defensive about it,” says Carrie.
“Everyone is afraid of even saying that they’re on the right side of it. Because there’s so much anger and defensiveness within our industry against it.”
The same University of North Carolina study found that 18.1% of athletes who report sexual misconduct are retaliated against. This was certainly the case for Maggie, who after reporting faced intimidation and harassment from Shelley Fellers, her abuser’s wife. Shelley, who had
access to Maggie’s Spotify account, once filled one of her playlists with songs like “Homewrecker.” Shelley is currently subject to a six-year ban from the sport for abuse of process, retaliation, and failure to report.
None of the statistics about athlete sexual abuse seem to matter to some old-school equestrian professionals. According to Carrie, Athletes for Equity has raised over $2 million to support their anti-survivor mission. #WeRideTogether has raised none, and has been almost entirely funded by the Kehring family.
“We’re trying to take a very necessary topic, you know, out in the open, have a very stigma, taboo topic that we’ve been kind of okay with … as an industry. … So you have mixed comfort with that,” says Carrie.
The United States Equestrian Federation (USEF), the governing body of all horse sports in the U.S., has so far refused to become a #WeRideTogether partner, despite the United States Hunter Jumper Association (USHJA) and the United States Eventing Association (USEA) being partners. To compete in USHJA or USEA events, equestrians must be members of both a discipline-specific organization and USEF.
“You have the CEO [of USEF saying], ‘USEF supports Safe Sport, but you know, these equestrians are passionate people’ … as a Federation you’re not doing anything to educate and clear up …misconceptions except shrug and say ‘yeah, what can we do?’” says Carrie.
When Maggie came forward, she originally did not file a report with Safe Sport because of the stigma against it within the community.
“All [Maggie] had heard about it as a junior [rider] was … the professionals in my sport who said this is a terrible thing, this is a witch hunt against trainers and it harms trainers,” says Carrie.
Maggie and Carrie Kehring for #WeRideTogether.
Luckily, the new generation of talented equestrians seems to be coming around to the idea of checks against sexual abuse within the sport.
“‘I just saw my coach and 50 other trainers coming out of this meeting for Athletes for Equity at the Polo Club. I just learned about it because of the Bloomberg article, and my dad was telling me that this is an organization that’s trying to stop Safe Sport, and why is my coach there?’” Carrie says a young equestrian asked her recently.
“Just wasn’t a good look. She says, ‘You see all these older professionals coming out of this meeting trying to end this thing that is put in place to protect me. This is wrong.’ We’re trying to fix it but it’s great that the younger community is seeing this.”
As it grows, Carrie is hoping to expand #WeRideTogether to other Olympic and Paralympic sports. Participants in youth sport are more at risk of experiencing sexual abuse. A 2021 USA Today survey found that 1 out of four college athletes has experienced sexual misconduct, compared to 1 out of 10 members of the general population. Athletes are 2.5 times more likely to experience sexual abuse, with coaches generally named as the perpetrators.
#WeRideTogether is working on expanding to other U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) sports. The infamous Nassar cases out of USA Gymnastics may have originally shed a light on just how bad sexual abuse within sport communities is, but gymnastics and equestrian are by no means the only communities with sexual abuse problems. Recently the U.S. Tennis Association has come under fire for failing to disclose to star youth player and survivor Kylie McKenzie that her coach had sexually assaulted someone else years before.
USTA could have protected McKenzie in the same way USEF could protect children like Maggie. They are all failing to do so.
The Center for Safe Sport banned McKenzie’s abuser from sport for a period of two years.
“[USOPC] said in one of our conversations, ‘You guys are a gift on our doorstep. We have so many meetings talking about how to deal with this pervasive issue … nothing’s really addressing the cultural issue of it and that’s what you’re doing,’” says Carrie. #WeRideTogether is also in conversation with sport federations such as the U.S. Rowing Association, USA Swimming and the U.S. Soccer Federation.
The FBI, who originally mishandled Maggie’s sexual abuse investigation, are still in contact with Carrie about #WeRideTogether.
“‘Carrie, I have to tell you, you know when you see how bad it is within these athletic communities, what you’re doing is amazing and remarkable but it is utterly stunning and absurd that absolutely nobody has addressed this topic before,’” Carrie says an FBI employee said to her recently.
Carrie still remains hopeful that all sports, including equestrian, can flourish into healthy and safe environments for children. Maggie has left to ride in Europe, and Carrie’s youngest daughter still competes on the horse show circuit. As a younger generation ages out of the juniors and becomes equestrian professionals, attitudes towards sexual abuse and its survivors will hopefully progress in the right direction.
“If we can start to change the dialogue in equestrian and start to get people to understand it and start to educate and build awareness and start to change minds and understanding in this industry then we can do it in any sport,” Carrie says.
Find #WeRideTogether at weridetogether.today or @weridetogether.today on Instagram.
Other Sources
1. https://dressage-news.com/2019/09/02/is-equestrian-gender-equality-upset-by-female-do mination-in-only-olympic-head-to-head-sports/
2. https://www.horseandhound.co.uk/news/olympic-showjumper-rich-fellers-suspended-ove r-allegations-of-misconduct-737431
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/19/sports/George-Morris-sexual-abuse.html 4. https://uscenterforsafesport.org/survey-results/
5. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/08/26/college-athlete-report-sexual-assau lt-common-survey/8253766002/
6. https://www.chronofhorse.com/article/weridetogether-public-awareness-campaign-launch ed-to-target-sexual-abuse-in-horse-sports
7. https://www.usef.org/team-usa/teams/jumping/team/30
8. https://www.pledgesports.org/2018/12/sports-where-men-and-women-compete/ 9. https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/Publications_NSVRC_Overview_False-Reportin g.pdf
Written by: Spring 2022 Intern Madison Smith
