Leading sex-abuse litigator suing women's sports advocate — it's a tangled tale

In the newest twist of the under-the radar skirmishes in the area of coach sexual abuse in youth sports programs, one of the most outspoken and effective critics of the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, its national governing bodies, or NGBs, and the U.S. Center for SafeSport has sued a leading women’s sports advocate for allegedly defaming him and harming his law practice.

The plaintiff, Jonathan Little, asserts that Nancy Hogshead, the 1984 gold-medal swimmer who now heads the advocacy organization Champion Women, was in sync with the harassment of Little by the SafeSport Center. SafeSport spent more than two years investigating a false claim that Little failed to report abuse allegations to the agency, as well as to police.

The story of SafeSport’s perplexing case against Little was told by Salon in 2022. That article is cited in Little’s 84-page complaint filed Feb. 28 in Florida state court, which can be viewed here. Last year SafeSport dropped its investigation of Little, not on the merits but with an explanation that he wasn’t in the center’s jurisdiction since he’s not a member of an NGB.

Named as defendants in Little’s lawsuit, along with Hogshead, are Champion Women and the group’s COO, Alistair Casey. A native of Scotland, Casey has coached the U.S. Olympic badminton team, and after working for Little’s Indianapolis law firm, was on the staff of USA Badminton when Hogshead was on its board of directors.

The Little suit drops during yet another period of descent into chaos by Olympic movement bodies in their efforts — or at least their P.R. gestures toward — stemming widespread abuse in youth sports programs.

Last month, the expected new CEO of USA Swimming, Chrissi Rawak, currently the University of Delaware's athletic director, abruptly withdrew "due to unforeseen personal circumstances." The swimming news site SwimSwam broke the fuller context: USA Swimming had learned that a complaint against Rawak had just been lodged at the SafeSport Center. "These matters, which we are only now coming to understand, were previously unknown," USA Swimming said in a statement, and had not been disclosed to USA Swimming during its vetting of Rawak.

For those of you keeping score, we have also reached the first anniversary of a surprisingly strong report from a congressional commission — on which Hogshead served — calling for a comprehensive revamp of the U.S. Center for SafeSport and for wresting control of youth sports programs at the grassroots levels away from USOPC and the NGBs. These recommendations were years in the making but have received next to no news media coverage. (The New York Times didn’t even bother to report the release of the commission’s work.)

Little’s lawsuit is a thorough overview of his history of fighting abuse by going to court on behalf of survivors and, in many cases, extracting large undisclosed settlements from the Olympic entities for what could be described, at the very least, as their ancillary culpability. Whether his defamation action will be successful remains to be seen. Hogshead represents a different and, as seen in this case, feuding business model of using legal pressure to extract concessions from sports entities under Title IX, the federal law mandating gender equality.

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The Little complaint lays out the same basic facts of the 2022 Salon article, but adds the charge that Hogshead falsely and damagingly piggybacked on SafeSport’s retaliatory investigation of Little, one of its leading critics. (Hogshead acknowledged receiving Salon's request for comment but has not otherwise responded.)

Here's some important backstory: Little was on the track team at Indiana University from 2001 to 2003. His girlfriend at the time was Indiana swimmer Brooke Taflinger. Their friends at the Bloomington campus included two other swimmers, Susan Woessner and Meghan Ryther. Woessner would become USA Swimming’s founding director of SafeSport before resigning in disgrace in 2018 amid reports of her alleged relationship with Sean Hutchison, a swimming coach who was the subject of her department’s first high-profile investigation. In 2011, USA Swimming exonerated Hutchison, but it later settled a lawsuit by former Olympian Ariana Kukors over her accusations that Hutchison had groomed and abused her from a young age.

Ryther has served on the boards of both the SafeSport Center and USA Swimming, and also of swimming’s offshore self-insurance subsidiary, the United States Sports Insurance Company, which was created to ward off abuse lawsuits. Officially incorporated in Barbados, USSIC was put into “run-off mode” and its assets were sold a decade ago.

Among the Little lawsuit’s sidebar charges are that Woessner, Ryther and SafeSport have lied about the long-running allegations of former swimmer Sarah Ehekircher, which were dormant for decades but have finally reached a court docket in Colorado. According to Little, Olympic and swimming officials derailed a police investigation into the circumstances of a late-1980s sexual encounter in California between Ehekircher and her coach, Scott MacFarland, by falsely stating that Ehekircher was above the age of consent at the time. 

After Taflinger, Little’s former girlfriend, helped send Brian Hindson — her age-group coach in Kokomo, Indiana — to prison for, among other things, operating peeping-tom video cameras in his team’s locker room, it launched Little’s career as one of the country’s most prolific and successful litigators on behalf of youth sports coach abuse victims. The Saeed & Little law firm, in which his wife Jessica Wegg also practices, has sued — along with USOPC, SafeSport and USA Swimming — the NGBs for tennis, taekwondo, fencing and other sports.

It was Little and Wegg who were largely responsible for breaking the billion-dollar scandal of former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, who committed hundreds of acts of sexual abuse against young gymnasts. 

In 2010, the new lawsuit complaint states, Nancy Hogshead began consulting for Little.

In his experience fighting the sports powers over abuse and related coverups, Little came to appreciate that both the law and the most effective tactics for policy changes called for reporting illegal acts to law enforcement, rather than to sports organization functionaries. Little, according to his complaint, “began advising his clients to report sex abuse within their sport to actual law enforcement first, before reporting to SafeSport, and to wait until law enforcement gave the go-ahead to report to SafeSport.”

This position was reinforced, he says, when he learned that Woessner and Ryther had tipped off Hutchison about the complaint against him, allowing Hutchison to flee the Seattle area and remove incriminating evidence before the Department of Homeland Security could organize a search of his home.

In 2018, former Olympic badminton coach Casey began sharing information with Saeed & Little on abuse cases. Saeed & Little formally hired him as a researcher the next year.

During the same period, in an extraordinary takeover, USA Badminton’s board was stacked with athletes rather than Olympic bureaucrats. In response, the lawsuit says, USOPC moved to decertify USA Badminton as an NGB, evidently a step that had not been undertaken in recent history, even with scandal-plagued USA Gymnastics.

In 2019, USA Badminton hired Little as legal counsel, in part to thwart the decertification threat, which USOPC eventually abandoned. In 2020, Casey joined the badminton staff.

According to Little, his aggressive style eventually brought him into conflict with Hogshead. He further claims that Casey, who later left to join Champion Women, conspired with Hogshead by sharing Little's confidential law-firm emails and records with her. Hogshead, Little alleges, used his words out of context in communications with various outside parties, including major news media, to create the impression that Little had suppressed information in SafeSport cases — a gross distortion of his position regarding providing all such information to police agencies first and only later to SafeSport.

SafeSport opened its investigation of Little in 2021 before closing it on technical grounds last January. Shortly thereafter, USA Badminton dropped his legal services.

Before that, the complaint says, the false charges against Little were reported to the FBI, according to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, though the status of the investigation spurred by Grassley “is not known at this time.” Little says he responded to Grassley’s bizarre accusation that he was suppressing knowledge of child rape by providing "hundreds of pages of emails and documents and accompanying privilege logs" to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The lawsuit details multiple examples of Little’s modus operandi: promptly reporting sports coach sexual abuse allegations to law enforcement first and to SafeSport second, often almost simultaneously.

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Little says he and Hogshead were at loggerheads when he disagreed with her tactics in confronting universities and entities over violations of Title IX, the federal law mandating gender equality in higher education sports programs. According to Little, Hogshead and Casey came up with a plan to instigate claims against major college sports conferences, and then to settle them by creating more scholarships for women athletes through the creation of new badminton clubs. Little believes that after the USA Badminton board stalled this plan, in response to his advice that it was legally and practically flawed, Hogshead and Casey were angry at the loss of their projected consulting fees for masterminding the Title IX compliance process.

The conflict between Little and Casey-Hogshead came to a head over reports from ESPN and in the Washington Post that USA Badminton CEO Linda French had fired Casey over his purported insistence on reporting to SafeSport the abuse accusations against a coach named Don Chew. A March 13, 2023, Hogshead email blast that was widely circulated — Little himself received it directly — alleged that “USA Badminton General Counsel Jon Little and CEO Linda French directed Casey not to report” child rape allegations.

Little says that he’s suing now because his subsequent dismissal by USA Badminton has cost his firm upwards of $100,000 in fees, and damaged his reputation among prospective clients.