Olympic figure skating medalist Ashley Wagner said this week that she was sexually assaulted at age 17 by the late John Coughlin, a fellow figure skater who killed himself earlier this year after he was suspended from the sport amid an investigation into alleged misconduct.
Wagner’s is reportedly the fourth sexual assault accusation against Coughlin.
She shared her story in a first-person essay published Thursday by USA Today, writing that he assaulted her in 2008 when she and the then-22-year-old Coughlin were in Colorado Springs, Colorado, for a figure skating camp. The 2014 Olympic bronze medalist said that Coughlin groped and kissed her while she was asleep in bed after a party.
“It was the middle of the night when I felt him crawl into my bed,” Wagner, now 28, wrote in USA Today. “I had been sleeping and didn’t move because I didn’t understand what it meant. I thought he just wanted a place to sleep. But then he started kissing my neck. I pretended to be deep asleep, hoping he would stop. He didn’t. When his hands started to wander, when he started touching me, groping my body, I tried to shift around so that he would think I was waking up and would stop. He didn’t.”
Wagner wrote that she felt helpless because of their size difference.
“When he continued to wander further over my body, I started to get scared because he was so much bigger than I was, and I didn’t know if I could push him off,” she wrote.
Wagner started to cry, opened her eyes and pulled Coughlin’s hand away, telling him to stop, she wrote.
“He looked at me for a few seconds, quietly got up and left the room. All of this happened over the period of about five minutes. That is such a small amount of time, but it’s haunted me ever since,” she wrote.
Wagner wrote that she told just two people about what happened, one of whom USA Today spoke with to confirm her story, but she didn’t fully understand the incident at the time.
She and Coughlin “both moved forward, never acknowledging what he did to me,” she wrote.
“In 2008, I didn’t have the knowledge and empowerment that came with the #MeToo movement. No one had explained consent to me,” she wrote. “Something that was so ambiguous then is very clear now. I was sexually assaulted.”
In a statement to USA Today, U.S. Figure Skating supported Wagner speaking out.
“What happened to Ashley should not happen to anyone, period,” spokeswoman Barbara Reichert said. “Ashley is incredibly strong; not just to have the courage to come forward with her story, but to share her experience publicly to help others. Ashley recently spoke at U.S. Figure Skating athlete safety seminars and her experience and message of empowerment had a profound impact on skaters and their parents.”