It would be like an expansion team signing a full squad of Hall of Famers, in their prime, as free agents.

My naivete / ignorance about cancellation led me to underestimate two things.

First, the enduring stigma of a moral panic (or three). One of my hoped-for BoD members told me that if I put this team together, it would ensure no one else would ever take my calls. He said that about two years ago. He recently had his first job interview since his cancellation over five years ago.

Second, the even-greater endurance of the trauma of cancellation. Looking back, none of them (of the ones I had direct contact with) were ready to get back in the game. Some were just getting out of the “leave their house and be seen in public” stage. As another prospective BoD member put it, “It’s been over seven years since my career ended publicly. Prior to that, I’d have thought you’d absorb the hit, reload and move on. If someone couldn’t do that, they probably had other issues or lacked inner strength. It couldn’t take that long. I understand things very differently now.”

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Even though I knew right from my first two phone calls with canceled people—the calls that started it all for me—the devastating effects of being canceled, I thought that, with time, they’d all get back to where they belong.

Probably in the back of my head somewhere was the idea that my Board of the Damned would be the Galt’s Gulch of sport. A refuge for those who had been rejected by and exiled from an irrational society. But instead of an autarky in a valley, where only the members would benefit from each other’s work, we’d be at the forefront of the sports industry, on both the business and performance sides of the house.

The idea of Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged entrances many idealistic young readers. It’s a beautiful and noble alternative to the standard binary of a struggling, starving, unappreciated-in-her-own-lifetime artisan and the popular, widely acclaimed, crassly commercialized sell-out. Only a few dozen people will ever see your work in the Gulch, but they truly value it, and you can truly value theirs.

I always thought of it as an inspiring plot device in an idealistic novel that offers a way to live in the real world—until a cancelled author of dystopian fiction told me: “It’s sweet, but it’s fantasy.”

She’s right, and I’d missed it in the decades I’ve been (re)reading that book.

Galt’s Gulch makes Atlas Shrugged a fantasy novel. Without this idea that all the prime movers and men of integrity are alive and whole somewhere the world cannot touch them, Atlas Shrugged would be dystopic. The lights would go out in New York City, trains would strand passengers in the desert when they weren’t colliding in tunnels, and society would collapse: everything that happens to the outside world in the book, but with no one spared the consequences.

But even that permits some hope: maybe a few of the heroes, or people like them, survived and they would be the forebears of civilization’s rebirth.

Perhaps inspired by my conversation with this author, a fully dystopic fan fic quickly came together in my head.

Instead of the men and women of the mind inexplicably abandoning their jobs and disappearing, they were all canceled—publicly, brutally, totally. In this version, there’s no mystery about why they disappeared. Dagny doesn’t need to find the mysterious “destroyer” who was snatching them away from their desks. We know who the destroyer is: a cancel mob. But she still needs to find them. Less “Who is John Galt?”, more “Whatever happened to...?” and “Where are they now?”

Her pursuit ends not in an idyllic Valhalla-in-a-valley, but at a mass grave: all the canceled people she had lost and sought had committed suicide or died deaths of despair. Instead of John Galt being the first person she sees when she opens her eyes in the valley, his is the bottom-most corpse, the first to go (or would it be more brutal if he was on top of the pile, and she missed her chance to save him by near minutes?).

Considering how regularly cancelled people talk to me about their thoughts of suicide, in addition to the suicides that I know of and the deaths of despair that I suspect, my dystopic version is closer to reality than Rand’s fantasy.

On the plus side, my version will end without a 100-page philosophical discourse thinly cloaked as a monologue.

Costs of cancelation still coming due for the rest of us

Galt’s Gulch is an effective plot device because it lets Rand show the world as it could be (life in the valley) contrasted to the world without the “good guys”; and how the gap between the two widens with each successive Atlas who shrugs, that is, each person of integrity who walks away. Rand patiently shows how the bridges don’t all collapse at once: the consequences of losing them build from daily inconveniences to national catastrophes. Instead of wrestling with the “seen and unseen,” she shows us both.

The Gulch is the common answer for two questions that create the mystery of the first two parts of the book: Why are all these people disappearing, and why is everything going to s—t?

Many people today are asking the second question. To be fair, every generation, upon reaching a certain age, feels compelled and qualified to ask that question. But rarely has there been such a cull of talent and ability as we’ve seen over the last 10–15 years of cancellations. When you start thinking of how many people we’ve lost to cancellations, that second question is much more justified and answerable.

By definition, you don’t get canceled based on performance. Quite the opposite: you get canceled for everything but.

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Talk about a widening gap between what could have been and what is. Someone gets to where they are based on ability. They get canceled because of a moral panic (or three, I can’t say that enough given the importance of the year 2020 to my work). Their successor is necessarily no better, and likely not as good.

This applies to everything from a middle manager to the CEO, a solopreneur or a head coach, which novelist gets a publishing deal and which artist gets a show.

It’s the broken window fallacy applied to jobs and lives. We’re not better off because now the replacement has those opportunities. We’re significantly worse off because we’ve destroyed one career and life, and they’re not coming back, and we’ve replaced them with less. A less capable coach, less enriching books on the shelves, more bland and blase shows to attend or stream.

We are all worse off because of cancelations.

I recognized this several years before I started researching and writing about cancellations. For some reason, one in particular—also from 2020—stood out to me as, my God, what a waste. What an absolute tragic waste. I thought the word “tragic” at the time not in reference to her, because I had no idea what cancellation actually did to the targets. I used it in reference to all of us as consumers and as society. Her company, her industry, and, at some level, all of us are poorer for having lost her.

She was also on my Board of the Damned, even though to this day I’ve not had any contact with her.

Lowering expectations in a canceled world

“Where are they now?” is another way of asking “What have we done?”

The resident heroes of Rand’s valley all have “day jobs” in the outside world, jobs outside of their real profession and well below their level of ability. Low skill, easily replaceable, often menial jobs. “[T]he kind of job that the world wishes me to hold,” Galt says.

Many canceled people are closer to the station in life that their cancellers wish them to hold than to where they were before—or where they should, and would otherwise, be. That’s true years after they were taken out.

Even today, I still sometimes find myself cheerleading a canceled person to get back in the game, whatever that might mean for them.

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Part of that is a sense of justice and rightness: they belong, at the very least, back where they were, if not a few steps ahead. I can’t stand the fact that each of their cancel mobs won. But just as much is pure self-interest: I want whatever it is they used to put out into the world. I want to watch top athletes and learn from their coaches, attend great events, read stimulating and creative books, watch shows that I actually remember a month later (and maybe even use as a starting point for an article).

Those creations and their creators were stolen and destroyed by the cancel mobs.

“They have no idea of the harm. They think I had a job for 20 years, and then I just didn’t have a job,” said the second prospective BoD member from earlier.

Most of what you’ll read at this site and in anything else I write will center on the question “What have we done to the canceled?” But a complete understanding of the consequences of cancellation and what cancellation can teach us about the human experience requires asking “What have we done to ourselves?” Cancellation is so deeply human because it entangles so many interactions between the individual and the social.

Answering that question is also essential for getting normies to care about this phenomenon enough to approach these stories with an open mind, and perhaps even read, subscribe, upgrade their subscription to paid, and buy anything that I produce in the coming years.

I no longer think about assembling my sports industry Board of the Damned. There are the two recognitions I wrote at the beginning. But it’s also because my work and ambitions in the realm of cancellation have supplanted many of my goals and plans in sports business (kinda taken over my life, tbqh).

Funnily enough, though, I’m still cold-contacting and talking to many of the same people; and, many times, connecting them with each other.

Only instead of coming together as a board, they’re my sources and subjects. And, for each other, support.

Walter Pichler has spent much of his life racing under the gun. Literally. He is an Olympic medalist in the biathlon, and won several national championships in the ski-and-shoot sport for his native country of West Germany (plus a few more in cross-country skiing). After retiring as an athlete, he coached the national biathlon teams for the United States and the United Kingdom, then coached at an elite Nordic sports center in Austria. He and his wife now live in Montana.

Today, he’s once again under the gun, in a race with much graver stakes than Olympic glory.

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In 2024, an Associated Press reporter confronted Pichler with allegations made by Joan Wilder, a Team USA biathlete from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Pichler unequivocally denied the accusation to the AP reporter. He knew something further was amiss when the AP article came out several weeks later.

The article cited Wilder’s complaint to the US Center for SafeSport that Pichler assaulted her after “the team went out one night” in 1990.

However, contrary to the AP’s reporting, the Center’s records reveal that Wilder could not pin down the incident to a single year. The Center investigated Wilder’s claim that Pichler entered her “hotel room uninvited and laid on top of [her] and told her he could help her win medals” in either November 1989 or November 1990.

“If there was a party, it wasn’t 1990,” Pichler recalls. “The party was only in 1989.”

How could he be so sure?

Like most Germans of his generation, Pichler knows where he was and what he was doing on November 9, 1989. That’s the day the Berlin Wall came down.

He was in the United States training with a group of American biathletes. One evening, after a day of training, “we were having dinner and suddenly on the news they were saying East Germany opened the borders, and people were coming into the West in a big party. The team and the coaches all said we have to celebrate this. So we celebrated it!”

Elite athletes at a training camp just a few months before their competitive season normally don’t party particularly hard. Needless to say, this was an exception, and the high spirits continued throughout the remainder of camp.

The following November, Pichler was again in the United States with the top American biathletes. But this time, he was their coach. History and geopolitics did not deliver any reasons for celebration, and the camp was much more workmanlike.

Several of the athletes the US Center for SafeSport interviewed as part of the investigation remembered participating in, or hearing about, the party on the night the Berlin Wall fell. None recalled a similar night of partying or drinking in November 1990. One said there is no way the coaching staff—with Pichler as head coach—would have allowed a party that year.

The Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act of 2017 designated the Center as the national sport safeguarding organization. The Act gives the Center nearly total, unreviewable discretion to define its jurisdiction, set its policies, conduct its investigations, and impose and enforce sanctions. Over 11 million Americans are subject to the Center’s authority. But that is an undercount, partly because of a clause at work here. The Center explicitly rejects any statutes of limitations or time bars, which is how they could take jurisdiction over an event that allegedly occurred more than 25 years before its own existence.

Under the SafeSport Code, the Center applies a “preponderance of the evidence” standard—the “more likely than not,” 51% rule— to any allegation.

After an 11-month investigation, the Center found that there was insufficient evidence to support Wilder’s claim, and that Pichler did not violate the SafeSport Code or relevant law.

This is an exceedingly rare outcome. Since 2017, only 1.7% of the Center’s investigations have ended with a finding of “no violation.” By comparison, 17% of federal criminal defendants who choose to go to trial instead of taking a plea deal (a small minority, to be fair) are acquitted.

Pichler accordingly remains eligible to work in sports. On paper, he is in the same good standing as anyone else. But in terms of his reputation and marketability, he is far from whole. The day after the Associated Press ran their article, the ski manufacturer Kästle ended their two-year consultancy contract with Pichler. A few months later, a new high-performance biathlon club in Montana extended to Pichler the opportunity to work with them. They soon retracted the offer after some prospective members of the club pointed to the top search results for Pichler’s name. He has been unable to find work in sport since.

“My name is damaged forever,” Pichler said. “I’m very disturbed. I’m mentally on the edge. I don’t know what to do anymore.”

And it could get much worse.

While the Center’s investigation was underway, teenage filmmaker Cameron Kirkegaard made a documentary rehashing the allegations against Pichler. The film, which was partially funded by a grant from the Colorado Office of Film, Television and Media, has had only one public screening. That was in October, one month before the Center issued their Notice of Decision. Kirkegaard did not respond to request for comment on whether he would update or in some way edit his film to reflect the US Center for SafeSport’s determination.

A second screening that had been scheduled for mid-January was cancelled pending a legal review. However, that appears to be complete. The film was recently shown at a film festival in Colorado, with another screening scheduled for the end of February.

That screening will be the launch event for a full public release.

Had the Center ruled against Pichler, he would be formally banned, publicly blacklisted, and everyone would know about it. The Center is required by law to “publish and maintain a publicly accessible internet website that contains a comprehensive list of adults who are barred by the Center.” This clause has devastated innumerable lives of American sportspeople, and is without precedent or comparison.

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But for Pichler and the few others in his situation, there is no parallel “white list.”

Since receiving his Notice of Decision, Pichler has pleaded with the Center to issue a statement or press release announcing the result of their investigation—anything “official” that can counter the AP’s reporting and the documentary. The Center told Pichler that they do not have any way to publicize those investigations that clear sports people of the allegations against them. The only thing they have is the blacklist, the Centralized Disciplinary Database, so “there wouldn’t be a place for us to be able to publish this information.”

The Associated Press has refused to update their December 2024 reporting with the fact that the Center cleared him of the very allegations contained within that article.

Cancelled individuals often say that they just want something they can give people that will provide the full story. That could be the relevant context of a misinterpreted act or statement; or, as in Pichler’s case, the most recent development, one that upends the entire narrative that precedes it.

A press release or even a social media post from the investigative body would satisfy Pichler and many others like him. To avoid the “Streisand Effect,” where fighting a narrative ends up amplifying it, the Center could ask each cleared individual if they would like a public statement of the outcome.

Media, social media, and search engines do the heavy lifting of cancellations. Institutions like the US Center for SafeSport—or Title IX tribunals, for another—give cancellations an official-looking stamp and formalize the reputation destruction.

There would be wide-ranging benefits if these institutions provided some mechanism of reputational recourse for individuals whom they clear of wrongdoing. Such a statement would provide a modicum of transparency and balance for these feared, opaque, and quasi-judicial power centers. It would help hold the media accountable, testing their professed commitment to the truth and pursuing a story to its end.

For the person involved, public proof of vindication could be valuable during a suit for defamation, tortious interference, or intentional infliction of emotional distress; or in the course of a job interview or simple conversation.

More significantly, it returns to them some level of control over their reputation and, by extension, their future. That’s more than hope—it can be a lifeline.

Related:

• No ‘Morning After’ for Victims of Cancellation (Reality’s Last Stand)

• First draft, final word: Cancelation, narrative foreclosure, and counter-narrative (Abuse of Process)

• Unsafe in Any Sport: The Constitutional and Structural Failure of the U.S. Center for SafeSport (Colorado Law Student Scholars)

• Congress’s Sex Abuse Enforcement Body Nailed For Fraud, Pattern Of Misconduct (The Federalist)

Photo credit: Fredrik Rubensson / Flickr, under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Below are two excerpts from his article, with some commentary from me peppering the second. The first is from his “origin story” on the topic of SafeSport.

The second is on a matter of constitutional law that has allowed the courts to prop up the US Center for SafeSport for the last few years. The main case in question, Navarro v. U.S. Ctr. for SafeSport, had oral arguments at the United States Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in December, and is awaiting the court’s ruling. The precedent at the center of that controversy, San Francisco Arts & Athletics, Inc. v. United States Olympic Committee (1986), is one that I’ve written about elsewhere, and I’ll take this chance to advance a few points that I haven’t put into article form yet.

Matt’s article is long but very readable, even for non-legal types (i.e., normies), so I encourage you to download it and give it a read.

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Excerpts edited for clarity: full court citations and footnotes removed, additional paragraph breaks inserted.

MR: I started figure skating in 2005 at the age of nine. In my career I have been lucky enough to train with some of the most decorated coaches in the world, compete at five national championships, and coach some of the best students I could have asked for. I have personally never been the subject of a SafeSport investigation, and yet my experience as a skater can be divided into a pre-SafeSport time and a post-SafeSport time.

Through my time in figure skating, I saw a culture that gravely needed oversight and reckoning. Despite the hope I felt about the change SafeSport would bring to the skating world and all U.S. sports, I was angered and disappointed with the results.

During my long presence in the sport, I saw a huge shift in culture in 2019 from one where each rink quietly dealt with their drama on their own to one where incidents were sensationalized in the media and formerly private figures were targeted by malicious actors on the internet.

The main catalyst for this was the suicide of John Coughlin, a pairs skater who took his life after a media firestorm around his SafeSport investigation.

The Coughlin case is controversial. Discussing it risks reopening old wounds, but avoiding it would be dishonest. It was a defining moment in SafeSport’s history, one of the earliest tests of how it handles the area between accusation and reputation, and, due to SafeSport’s broad confidentiality measures, one of the only ones with public information readily available.

After I retired from competitive skating, I proudly helped build a skating community as a coach. I soon saw my community be greatly affected and harmed by the actions of SafeSport.

Through my first two years in law school I have interviewed former skaters and parents of skaters and skating-adjacent parties in order to ascertain their experiences with the culture of skating and the SafeSport system. In addition, I have discussed SafeSport’s system for protecting victims with constitutional law professors, sexual assault investigators, and civil procedure experts. What I found, and what this article argues, is that SafeSport, though designed to protect athletes, now exercises quasi-judicial power without the procedural safeguards or public accountability necessary for legitimate governance.

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Navarro v. U.S. Center for SafeSport relied heavily on San Francisco Arts and Athletics v. USOC.

San Francisco Arts and Athletics held that the USOC was not a state actor, reasoning that its congressional charter and statutory rights—specifically, exclusive control over the word “Olympic”—did not amount to government control or delegation of a public function.

But that case involved a limited trademark dispute, an issue with no bearing on SafeSport’s quasi-adjudicative role. That distinction matters.

As the Supreme Court emphasized in Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co. (1974), the state action doctrine applies only when a private actor’s specific conduct is fairly attributable to the state and implicates constitutional rights.

The court in Navarro adopted SFAA’s reasoning without grappling with the fact that SafeSport, unlike the USOC, exercises adjudicative authority over individuals pursuant to a congressionally mandated scheme. It also neglected to engage with the entwinement analysis articulated in Brentwood, which recognizes that even absent formal government creation or direct control, sustained entanglement with public actors and delegated authority over public functions can render a nominally private entity a state actor.

GP: The Center, its lawyers, and safeguarding advocates would argue that nothing the Center does “implicates constitutional rights.” There is no right to participate in sport, they argue. Even if there was, that would not apply here.

The Center, their argument goes, moderates membership and eligibility decisions for private entities: the USOPC and the national governing bodies. No one has a constitutional right to belong to any private organization. Membership in any organization is a privilege, not a right—a phrase you will see and hear repeatedly from the Center and its preferred external counsel.

MR: The Navarro court failed to distinguish SafeSport’s unique role from the broader administration of amateur sports.

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By framing its adjudicative authority as merely another form of “coordination,” the opinion ignored the reality that SafeSport performs a congressionally delegated public function: imposing binding, government endorsed disciplinary sanctions that determine access to Olympic and Paralympic sport.

In Lebron, the Court made clear that what matters is not how the entity is described, but whether it serves public ends under the direction or influence of the government, a standard that SafeSport clearly meets.

Navarro ignored the practical reality that SafeSport operates as the final arbiter of eligibility in Olympic and Paralympic sports, a role with profound reputational and economic consequences. While SafeSport is nominally private, its statutory mandate, exclusive disciplinary jurisdiction, and control over a public-facing registry of alleged abusers place it squarely within the state action doctrine under Lebron. It is not merely coordinating amateur sports, but administering federally authorized, coercive discipline, with public consequences and no alternative forum.

GP: POSIWID is a systems theory principle, not a legal one. But it should be. The purpose of a system is what it does. POSIWID.

The US Center for SafeSport investigates and adjudicates claims of wrong-doing; and, if they determine that a violation occurred, they deprive both the respondent (i.e., the accused) and the other 11 million Americans under the Center’s jurisdiction of certain liberty interests.

The SafeSport Code prohibits anyone covered by the Code from knowingly engaging in any sort of sport-related activity with someone that the Center has suspended. That abrogates the right to contract for both the respondent and anyone who may wish to hire, contract with, or otherwise transact with that person. Any extant relationships are, effectively, rendered null and void. Parties to a contract with a suspended individual must immediately breach that contract, or risk being sanctioned themselves, even if both parties mutually and voluntarily wish to maintain the relationship.

By listing people on the Centralized Disciplinary Database, the Center causes irreparable harm to their reputation. While reputation has fallen far down the hierarchy of individual rights, there are common law traditions that assert that individuals have either a property interest or a liberty interest in their reputation. The Center’s public blacklisting impairs one’s right to their reputation regardless of whether you argue from liberty or property.

These are the unavoidable, inevitable, and provable consequences of the Center executing its authority and mission under the Ted Stevens Act and the SafeSport Code.

Whatever else the Center does or does not do with regards to safe guarding American athletes or simply moderating eligibility decisions for private entities, infringing on rights is what it does.

MR: SafeSport matches all three factors from Lebron. It was designated and empowered by Congress, tasked with enforcing public norms around athlete protection, and remains under active congressional supervision through oversight hearings, funding structures, and statutory reporting obligations.

This is a far cry from the circumstances in NCAA v. Tarkanian (1988), a case where the Supreme Court declined to find state action because the NCAA operated independently of any statutory framework, exercised no exclusive public function, and was not created or controlled by the government. SafeSport, by contrast, was empowered by federal statute and operates as the sole adjudicator of abuse complaints within Olympic and Paralympic sports.

SafeSport’s power to issue binding suspensions, publicize misconduct findings, and determine eligibility across the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic movement closely resembles the kind of public functional government control described in Lebron: a congressionally empowered entity serving public ends and operating under continuing federal oversight. While most competitions themselves may be privately organized, SafeSport’s congressionally delegated authority effectively controls access to the entire national amateur sports system, leaving no practical alternative for affected athletes. This is fundamentally different from the passive promotional role at issue in SFAA v. USOC.

GP: One paragraph from the SFAA decision should start the wrecking ball swinging at the entire edifice of the US Center for SafeSport:

“This Court also has found action to be governmental action when the challenged entity performs functions that have been ‘traditionally the exclusive prerogative’ of the Federal Government... Neither the conduct nor the coordination of amateur sports has been a traditional governmental function.”

Few actions are as traditionally exclusive to the government as curtailing individual rights in response to a determination of wrong-doing.

Moreover, this is a function that cannot be delegated. Neither the legislative nor the executive branches can delegate functions that are the sole remit of their co-equal, the judicial branch.

Even if the Center offered the full suite of due process rights that we afford to defendants in criminal and civil courts, its actions would still be constitutionally impermissible. The ability to curtail individual rights is exclusively the function of the government.

MR: SafeSport itself has cited a case called Behagen v. Amateur Basketball Association of the U.S. (10th Cir. 1989), to argue that the Center is a private actor not subject to constitutional constraints. In Behagen, the Tenth Circuit held that the Amateur Basketball Association (a National Governing Body subordinate to the USOC, henceforth ABA) was not a state actor for constitutional purposes. The court reasoned that because the [USOC], which certifies NGBs, was itself not a governmental entity under [SFAA], it followed that a subordinate organization like the ABA could not be one either.

Both the SafeSport Code and arbitral appeals [invoke] Behagen’s reasoning to conclude that SafeSport, like the USOC and NGBs, performs only private functions. However, this posture offers no recognition of SafeSport’s unique statutory origins or its binding disciplinary authority, which includes the power to bar individuals from participation in federally recognized sport.

By lumping SafeSport together with the entities it was created to oversee, this argument misapplies precedent and ignores the significant state action concerns raised in Lebron and Brentwood.

GP: The “lumping” is even shallower than that. The US Center for SafeSport is statutorily independent of the USOPC. But because said statute encompasses the USOPC, the NGBs, and the Center under Section 36 Chapter 2205 of the United States Code, the Center’s advocates argue that court rulings that apply to one of those entities automatically apply to another.

As Paul Sherman, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, tweeted on a different matter:

“The Constitution doesn’t care what section of the state code a law is in, it cares what it does.”

MR: The analogy to Behagen, a case concerning an NGB acting under USOC certification, ignores SafeSport’s unique structural role: it is not merely a participant within the Olympic hierarchy, but a federally empowered regulator of that system, tasked with policing misconduct on behalf of Congress. The ABA functioned as a National Governing Body operating under the oversight of the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) which the Supreme Court has explicitly held is not a government actor.

By contrast, Congress authorized and empowered SafeSport to investigate and discipline both the USOC and its NGBs as an independent oversight body.

By analogizing itself to a subordinate NGB like the ABA, SafeSport invites a legal framing that undermines its own institutional narrative of oversight and independence. It cannot simultaneously claim to be a watchdog over the Olympic movement and also functionally within it when seeking immunity from constitutional oversight. While the USOC itself is not a state actor, SafeSport’s analogy to USOC-certified NGBs underscores its structural entanglement with the very system it was created to regulate.

This entanglement amplifies, rather than excuses, its need for Constitutional accountability.

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SafeSport cannot have it both ways. It cannot simultaneously claim the moral authority of an independent oversight body while invoking analogies that position it as a subordinate in the Olympic hierarchy.

Its statutory origins, exclusive authority, and public consequences make it a textbook example of a private actor performing a publicly delegated regulatory function, precisely the scenario the Court ruled on in Lebron and Brentwood.

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Congress authorized SafeSport to solve a crisis of accountability. By insulating it from constitutional review, it has replaced one form of unaccountable power (NGBs) with another. Recognizing state action restores the balance. In its current form, SafeSport’s unchecked authority is shaped less by law and more by the unpredictable forces of public opinion, which in skating is largely funneled through the sport’s rumor-driven media ecosystem.

That sets Matt up for his next section. As you’ll see from the title, it hits straight at the core of my work, laying out how the Center is a vehicle for cancelations:

When Law Fails, Narrative Rules: Media Based Enforcement in the Absence of Due Process

Photo credit: Daniel Huizinga / Flickr, under CC BY 2.0.

It gets worse. A few weeks prior, the coach texted her: “Are you 18?”

Between those two messages, amongst others, the athlete thanked the coach for a gift he gave her.

The first two don’t require much creativity to read in the worst way possible. The third might not be a red flag for people unfamiliar with the proscriptions of “safe guarding,” but gift giving is frequently construed as a grooming behavior. The US Center for SafeSport, for example, lists “the exchange of gifts” as a “boundary violating coaching behavior” and a potential element of an “intimate relationship.”

I’m the coach in those texts. In the wrong hands, they end my career and maybe my life. Each is benign. But if truth and context mattered, there wouldn’t be cancelations.

“No Innocent Construction” was the other finalist for the name of this site.

“No innocent construction” is an element of defamation law in many states. It first came to my attention in Brian Holzgrafe’s defamation suit against Daniel Lozier. Holzgrafe was the head men’s and women’s tennis coach at Quincy University in Illinois. Lozier, who had been on the men’s team, accused Holzgrafe of having a sexual relationship with a female tennis player on the team. Illinois defamation law and Illinois Supreme Court precedent hold that a statement, considered in context, is not defamatory per se “if it is reasonably capable of an innocent construction.”

Holzgrafe won the suit, and was awarded $3 million in damages.

Upholding the verdict, a federal judge ruled that there is “no innocent construction” of the accusations Lozier made against Holzgrafe.

Most cancelations turn on statements and actions that have a spectrum of constructions: some innocent, some absurd, some cringe-worthy, some malevolent, some criminal.

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Context normally rules out most of the latter two. But context is more than just what was said before and after the statement in question, or who else was around, where, and when. There’s a cultural context, too, and that is why sports people—coaches in particular—are such easy targets: competitive sporting environments are exclusive, and therefore unknown and truly foreign to most people.

Coaching the person, not the player

Most people’s impressions of coaches are formed by some combination of “Varsity Blues,” “Miracle,” “Ted Lasso,” and their history-teacher-baseball-coach from high school. As someone who has inadvertently become a valuable red cell sounding board recently texted me, “90% of my regrets in life boil down to me not realizing how little consequence there would have actually been if I just told my sports coaches to f--k off when I was a kid.”

Contrast that to a story a friend shared with me:

At the team camp before the 2015 World Championships, I went into the dining hall early one day to work. My roomie for the camp, a full-time employee of the federation, was FaceTiming with one of his athletes who was competing on a different continent before coming to join us. I looked at him like I was going to leave, but he waved me to sit down. I could hear the entire conversation.

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When they were saying goodbye, I heard her say “I love you, best friend.” And he said “I love you, too, best friend.”

Grooming, power imbalance, intimate relationship, Coach Svengali levels of control... Anyone on the outside who heard that call could understandably think the worst, take it to the media or a safe guarding organization, who would make it even worse than that, and use it to end the coach’s career, reputation, and life. If anyone knew that my friend had heard the call and not fulfilled his duty as a mandatory reporter—even if he had nothing more than an ungenerous suspicion based on a fragment of a phone call—they could end him as well.

Here’s the immediate context, which I removed above:

She was distraught—long time on the road, hadn’t competed well, had a huge trip to join us—and then started bawling. He talked her down and they came up with a plan.

And the broader context, given my friend’s decades in elite sport:

I think it was an interaction between two adults who had been working together for years in high stress, lonely circumstances.

It wasn’t a regular occurrence for me, but it wasn’t uncommon, either. I could come up with more than a dozen athletes, men and women, who said “I love you” at some point. Usually post-collegiate athletes, usually getting the shit kicked out of them on the road, sometimes going through extreme family / relational stress.

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Innocent construction vs. absolute malice

A coach sent a player a picture of himself from the waist down, wearing cut-offs with the caption, ‘Joining?’” The player responds “I’ve outgrown my Jean shorts :/ legs too big,” to which the coach replied “Booo.”

About a year earlier, David Huelsman was coaching the Gators’ men’s water polo team. The team was in Providence, Rhode Island, for a competition and was killing time in a thrift store. Someone had the idea that they should all buy pairs of cheap jeans and cut them into jorts to wear on the pool deck before taking the water for their first game. They all did, they all had a laugh, the other teams had a laugh, and it became the sort of silly memory and inside joke that bonds teams together.

The Gainesville (FL) Main Street Daily News omitted this backstory, but did include another uncorroborated jort-related allegation from the player. The article presented a single, extreme construction to lead the readers to a single conclusion.

If someone who was not on the trip had leaked the “jort texts,” someone who didn’t know that everyone on the team participated and everyone at the pool saw the Gators’ jorts (before seeing much more of the Gators when they removed the jorts to begin play in Speedos), their sense of concern might lead them to suspect the worst and take action accordingly.

This would be the standard move from “The Cancel-Your-College-Coach Playbook”: “vague allegations brought forth anonymously, then interpreted in the worst possible light via a steadfast refusal to interrogate context, culture, or professional best practices.”

That is not what happened here. A player who unequivocally knew the truth purposefully gave an absurdly malicious—and, knowing the full context, likely homophobic—version of specific events to the media.

There are two possible constructions of the article itself. First, the journalism student who wrote this article—his third about David Huelsman—is the only person close to the University of Florida men’s water polo team who did not know the backstory behind these texts. Alternatively, he knew and willfully chose to omit it from his reporting, at the expense of the truth and David Huelsman’s career and reputation.

Neither is particularly innocent, but neither would end the reporter’s career as effectively as he ended Huelsman’s.

Chew on this: Cancelations collapse reality

Schroedinger’s Cat is a famous thought experiment in physics, one that reached escape velocity and took hold in pop culture as early as the 1970s.

A cat sits in a sealed box with some radioactive material, and a radiation detector connected to a vial of poison. When the material lets off some radiation, the detector breaks the vial of poison, killing the cat. But radioactive metals don’t decay at a regular, predictable rate. We can not know if the cat is dead unless we open the box. But the lid is also connected to the vial: if you open the box, the cat dies immediately.

So if you take a look, was the cat dead or did you kill it by looking?

A coach who asked to remain anonymous in case of future legal or administrative action told me this story:

“A staff member had this quirk about how it was bad luck to take the last stick of gum in a pack. She once offered me a stick of gum, and when I said, no, thanks, she hesitated. ‘I don’t want to open it, because if there’s only one stick then that’s bad luck for me.’

“I said, ‘If you were given a pack of gum that might or might not have one stick in it, the gum would exist in a state of existence and non-existence at exactly the same time. It would be Schrodinger’s Gum.’ Some time later, I put some paperwork on her desk along with a pack of gum with a Post-It note that said ‘Schrodinger’s Gum.’

“That came out in the university’s investigation into me. They confronted me with it, looking for some sexual interpretation of it. ‘What did you mean by this?’ It’s a joke, I said. Schrodinger’s Gum.

“’I have no idea what that means.’

“Erwin Schrodinger. The German physicist.

“’I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

“Well, it’s one of the most famous thought experiments in all of science. It’s about this cat in a box, and he’s alive or not until there’s a deterministic event.”

“’I’ve never heard of that.’

“She got on my case, and I said ‘How is it possible that you’ve never heard of that? I just don’t understand how you don’t know who Erwin Schrodinger is. How is it you’re this stupid?’ Yes, I was being a bit of a dick and I probably shouldn’t have said it because it pissed her off, but come on.”

This incident happened while this coach’s cancelation was still in the “internal inquest” stage, before the media took over. He had some sense of the distortion and disconnection from reality involved in such incidents. But things hit differently in the first person. “At that moment, it became clear to me how batshit things were. One of the reasons I pushed back was my disbelief that this could be a thing.”

Schrodinger used his cat not to explain how the universe works, but to expose the contradictions and absurdities that had gained traction in his field of quantum theory.

Schrodinger’s Gum does both: it illustrates how cancelations work by exemplifying uncontested absurdities and irrationality. This coach’s inquisitors could not conceive of an innocent construction because they couldn’t process his words at face value. They lacked all context, so they presumed malevolence. Their ignorance was proof of his guilt.

Quantum of solace

“Why them and not me?” is the fundamental question of survivor’s guilt.

The vast majority of coaches—myself included—have done the vast majority of what got other coaches canceled.

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Let’s return to the texts from the beginning of this article. “my hips are so tight/sore” “Are you 18?” “thanks for the gift”

The day before her hips were “so tight/sore,” we did a training session with a high volume of new exercises, emphasizing eccentric muscle activity in the adductors. She is a centerback in soccer, a position that requires kicking the ball 40+ yards repeatedly during a game, so this was highly specific training. For additional context, we did the training outdoors, mid-morning, at a public school’s track next to a fire station: lots of old people walking laps, and a building full of burly, sworn-to-protect men.

“Are you 18?” Yes, she was. That meant I could use a guest pass for her later that week at the gym I belong to, in order to introduce her to some weight-lifting exercises and techniques she would likely see in college and when playing professionally.

As for the gift, a high school graduation present.

Three texts, three innocent constructions.

Why did I not get canceled for them, while so many other coaches were canceled for similar things? Why do I still get to have these rich and rewarding experiences, and they don’t?

Is it simply because this athlete and I (and now you beautiful, understanding people) were the only ones to read these texts?

Maybe others did, and even if they were unsure and had a bit of side-eye, they gave them an innocent construction because they know me, her, and what the coach-athlete relationship really is.

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Schrodinger wasn’t comfortable with some of the conclusions of quantum theory. His colleague Albert Einstein didn’t like some of its implications. “God does not play dice with the universe,” the latter wrote.

Part of maturing as a sports person is recognizing the role of random chance—luck—against the backdrop of rigorous preparation. Coaches accept that a fluke goal or a freak injury can determine your season, or whether you keep or get a job. Tragically, we now rely on luck to not get canceled for doing our job by people who know nothing about our job and the relationships it entails and requires.

Every act of coaching has become another roll of the dice.

I’ll keep doing it until my luck runs out.

Related:

• The Cancel-Your-College-Coach Playbook (James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal)

• Call Her Lawyer: Costs of Cancelation Rising for the Accusers (The American Thinker)

• First draft, final word: Cancelation, narrative foreclosure, and counter-narrative (Abuse of Process)

Photo credit: From The Garden of Schrodinger’s Cats, Jeroen van Luin / Flickr under CC BY 2.0.

Kurt started playing soccer at age 5, and assumed it would always be a part of his life. Over the last two years, he’s learned that it would always be a part of his life and there is nothing he can do about it.

Kurt (not his real name because of potential litigation) earned a “D” coaching license from the US Soccer Federation (USSF) in 2007. The “D” license is standard for coaching a high school team.

Like most people and their early-career certifications, it receded from his mind and résumé over the nine years he coached. When a long-time friend took her first job as a high school coach in 2022, she didn’t ask to see Kurt’s certification paperwork. She just asked him to come out of his seven-year “retirement” and bring his experience to her staff as a volunteer assistant coach.

He resigned after a few months. The head coach was “having conversations with athletes, at team events, outside of any realm of acceptability” and he didn’t want to be a part of that environment or team culture. About a month later, he and another staff member reported the head coach to the school administration.

The head coach—who had been a friend for years—responded by filing a temporary restraining order against him, which a court quashed at the first hearing.

Because he had been away from coaching for so long, he was only vaguely familiar with the US Center for SafeSport when he received an email from them on September 11, 2023. “A pretty easy day to remember, for two reasons now,” he says. That email informed him that the Center had placed “temporary sanctions” against him based on complaints they had received of “inappropriate behavior.”

None of that made sense to him.

Congress authorized the Center to be the “national safe sport organization” in 2018 in the aftermath of the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal at USA Gymnastics.

Congress gave the Center “jurisdiction over the [United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee], each national governing body, and each paralympic sports organization with regard to safeguarding amateur athletes against abuse, including emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, in sports.” The Center had free rein—devoid of any public, government, or outside input or review—to “develop training, oversight practices, policies, and procedures to prevent the abuse...of amateur athletes participating in amateur athletic activities through national governing bodies.”

The Center has encouraged and rewarded an expansive view of that mandate.

While pleading for Congress to increase funding to keep up with their growing backlog of thousands of complaints, the Center is diverting resources to investigate—and then often litigate—consensual relationships between adults, verbal harassment by adults in public settings, retaliation by disgruntled parents against one of Larry Nassar’s victims, and complaints against a handful of preteen girls.

Kurt was one of those diversions.

He was not being accused of abuse. The allegations against him included “emotional misconduct” towards the head coach—the one he reported and who lost her restraining order hearing; and “grooming” the players—because he had bought gifts for the entire team with his own money.

As he brought himself up to speed on the US Center for SafeSport, he quickly recognized the overreach. High school sports do not fall under the auspices of the USOPC or USSF—therefore, they are not under the jurisdiction of the US Center for SafeSport.

He learned, though, that the Center’s involvement had nothing to do with the school and everything to do with him. The Center empowers itself to get involved in any situation where the accused “is seeking to be, currently is, or was at the time of any alleged [violation]” a member of a national governing body or a license holder from a national governing body.

That confused him even more.

The Center was created 11 years after he received his “D” license, and one year after he stopped coaching. He hadn’t held a US Soccer membership since 2016. He never consented to any terms and conditions that included the Center’s jurisdiction. He never agreed to abide by or be subject to the SafeSport Code, the 50-page (at the time—now it’s over 70 pages) document through which the Center executes its Congressional mandates. Nor did he take any SafeSport training.

But now, without any hearing or opportunity to respond, he was on the same publicly searchable blacklist—the required-by-law Centralized Disciplinary Database—as Larry Nassar.

As he tried to clear his name, Kurt learned that the 3-day course he took in 2007 conferred upon him a permanent, lifetime license. US Soccer asserted they have no means to rescind it, and that coaches have no ability to resign it.

But even if he could, he would still not be free. There is no statute of limitations under the SafeSport Code.

Whether someone is a member or license holder for 1 day or 40 years, the US Center for SafeSport holds a permanent lien over that span of time.

Any allegation that can be retrofitted into that span could lead to the Center depriving that American of their ability to work or volunteer in sport, to attend their children’s sporting events, or to operate their business. Or it could justify the Center placing their name a few scrolls away from one of the most notorious sex offenders in American history.

Holders of a US Soccer “D” coaching license do not have the protection of a time limit. If they are alive, no matter where life takes them or their career, the US Center for SafeSport has a claim on each new day.

Kurt’s first step toward clearing his name was checking out of the Hotel California of professional licensure. He had to persuade US Soccer to let his license expire before he does.

In August 2025, after much back-and-forth, US Soccer told Kurt that they were unconditionally rescinding his lifetime license. But the rescission was only effective from the day of that decision, not from the day of his first request nor his last days of coaching in 2016.

He immediately notified the US Center for SafeSport that he was no longer under their jurisdiction, and renewed his request to be removed from their “temporary” listing on the Centralized Disciplinary Database. As he expected, the Center shrugged. “The decision by US Soccer to rescind your license does not affect the decision in your prior cases” because they still consider him to have been a member “at the time of [the] alleged Code violation.”

The Center was retaining jurisdiction over 18 years of his life.

Kurt no longer has a lifetime license as a soccer coach. He is not working in sport in any capacity, and has no interest in doing so. His only connection to sport is being on the Centralized Disciplinary Database. Because he had an unwanted, unknown, and now-disputed license then, he can still be punished. US Soccer might let go of his future, but they will not relinquish his past—which mortgages his future to the mercy of the US Center for SafeSport.

Over 11 million Americans are subject to the Center’s jurisdiction. That number will only rise, because the Center never removes anyone from their rolls.

US Soccer’s thousands of “D” licensees are a unique subset. They can quit coaching soccer, leave sport entirely, tear up their US Soccer membership card, burn their license, or stab it with their steely knives. But, they’ll learn, they just can’t kill the beast.

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Related:

• Soccer blacklist exposed info about teens, pros, and execs (Abuse of Process)

• The Cancel-Your-College-Coach Playbook (James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal)

Photo credit: Sonny Abesamis / Flickr, under CC BY 2.0.

Most people, though, won’t warrant an historian’s attention. If they’re in the news, that first rough draft becomes their public history by default.

When that news is an accusation, it becomes their epitaph, underscoring the narrative foreclosure that many canceled people endure.

Each of the individuals below was fully cleared by the tribunal chosen by their accuser. Whatever my thoughts about the US Center for SafeSport, the criminal justice system (if you haven’t watched HBO’s The Night Of, do so), or campus Title IX investigations, the accusers chose these venues, which adds a level of poignancy to the outcome.

For two of them—biathlon coach Walter Pichler and a coach we’ll call “Donald”—you wouldn’t know that if you searched for their name, or went looking for updates to the articles that reported on the accusations against them. Their public stories ended with each devastating first draft.

The third, water polo coach David Huelsman, experienced an unusual sequence of events. Between being fired and being canceled, Huelsman was cleared by the University of Florida’s Title IX office over a complaint he knew nothing about until his cancelation was underway.

Fire and forget

From the US Center for SafeSport’s opening in 2017 through December 31, 2024, the Center accepted jurisdiction over 12,287 complaints—about half of the total number of complaints they received. Only 214 of those resulted in a finding of no violation: 1.7%.

By comparison, in 2022, 17% of the federal criminal defendants who went to trial were acquitted (please note that the vast majority don’t go to trial).

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Walter Pichler has spent most of his life in rare territory. Pichler won a bronze medal in biathlon at the 1984 Winter Olympics, competing for a country that no longer exists in a country that no longer exists (West Germany and Yugoslavia, respectively). He won over a dozen West German national championships, and was one of the youngest ever national team coaches when he took over the US team in 1990. He went on to coach the United Kingdom’s men’s and women’s biathlon teams. Pichler then coached at an elite winter sport training center in Austria for six years before serving as head of Nordic sports for three years.

Recently, and with much less fanfare and much less joy, he became part of that 1.7%.

An Associated Press reporter called Pichler in November 2024 to ask him a few questions about biathlon. After a handful of introductory questions, the reporter asked Pichler if he knew that he was being accused of sexual harassment. Not only was that the first Pichler had heard of it: it was before the US Center for SafeSport officially heard about it.

The Center received the complaint against Pichler from former biathlete Joan Wilder (the subsequent article identified her by name) on December 5: after Wilder had sent the AP reporter down the trail. One week after Wilder filed her complaint with the Center, the AP published the article, which meant it appeared in dozens of media outlets that republish the AP’s content, from PBS on down to local newspapers. The day after the article was published on December 11, Kästle—a leading ski manufacturer—terminated Pichler’s consultant contract, effective immediately, after a two-year relationship.

The Center took the case in January 2025, and conducted interviews between April and September.

During that time, a nascent elite biathlon club in Bozeman, MT, asked Pichler to present a strategic plan for the club. He contacted the US Center for SafeSport to verify that he was permitted to have even such minimal interaction with a sports organization while under investigation. Good to go, the Center told him, because he was not under a temporary suspension. However, he still was canceled: people associated with this (and rival) clubs googled him and raised the issue until the club withdrew the offer.

While this was going on, Colorado filmmaker Cameron Kirkegaard was filming and producing a documentary about the abuse of female athletes in American biathlon, namely, Joan Wilder and Joanne Reid. Line of Fire was funded in part by a grant from the Colorado Office of Film, Television and Media. Kirkegaard did not contact Pichler for comment, nor did anyone else associated with the film.

The film debuted in October 2025.

One month later, on November 11, Pichler received the US Center for SafeSport’s decision. The Center applies a “preponderance of the evidence” standard. This standard is known as the 51% rule: is something more likely than not to have happened. The Center determined that Wilder’s accusation and evidence failed to satisfy this bar. Pichler was clear of wrongdoing.

The Associated Press has not updated nor modified their articles naming Walter Pichler in any way. They have not published any articles reporting that the Center cleared Pichler, nor has the reporter so much as tweeted this follow-up.

Line of Fire is scheduled for another showing on January 17, 2026, in Granby, CO. Cameron Kirkegaard did not respond to my request for comment about whether he would be modifying his film or his pre- / post-showing presentation to reflect the Center’s finding.

Pichler is considering legal action to block the upcoming showing.

Update: On January 16, 2026, the Colorado Biathlon Club posted on Instagram: “Due to legal threats made to CBC and Cameron Kirkegaard, we have made the difficult decision to postpone our screening of “Line of Fire” scheduled for January 17 at Snow Mountain Ranch. We have every intention of regrouping and showing the film at a later date this season. This is not a decision we take lightly but this is a necessary step for now. We hope to follow up with more information soon.”

One shot, one kill

Despite being a professional athlete, and then a coach and adviser to a range of athletes, including professionals and Olympians, Donald never set up a website for his businesses nor established a social media presence. In fact, he only ever had one article written about him. As a result, when you search for his name along with his city and sport, only one article comes up: a half-decade old piece reporting on his arrest for sexual assault.

The judge in his case dismissed all charges two-and-a-half years after his arrest.

Yet he remains permanently banned by the US Center for SafeSport.

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Being charged with a crime is a violation of the SafeSport Code, as is being subject to any criminal disposition “other than an adjudication of not guilty.” Only if you go to trial and are acquitted will the Center consider you cleared. If you never get that far because your accuser never shows up in court and the judge says enough is enough and dismisses the charges, well, that’s not enough for the Center. Individuals like Donald have to go through the process of reopening their case and pursuing a new decision.

None of this qualifies for even an italicized footnote on that one article.

Abuse of Process readers won’t be surprised to hear that the publication in question is part of Hearst Communications.

Their lack if interest in the outcomes, let alone the consequences, of their reporting is a shame, in addition to being a source of shame.

If the arrest of a local coach is newsworthy to a national media outlet, the outcome of the subsequent judicial process should be, too. The arrest is, after all, just the first step.

Had they followed the story in and out of the courtroom, they would have had plenty to write about: the jealous power politics of local sports clubs, questionable investigative practices by the police, attempts to coerce a plea (no, really, watch The Night Of), Kafka-esque policies at the US Center for SafeSport, and a series of court hearings where Donald’s defense lawyer waited for the district attorney to present witnesses and evidence that never came. All against the feverish big city backdrop of COVID-19, the MeToo movement, and Black Lives Matter.

Donald’s story is a textbook cancellation. Since it only took a single article, it might be better described as an assassination: one shot, one kill.

After taking such a shot, whether you’re a hitman or a soccer player, you don’t stand there and admire your work. You get on with your next assignment, and submit another first draft that becomes someone else’s final word.

Clear in private, cancel in public

David Huelsman was the men’s water polo coach at the University of Florida from 2016 to 2023, having played on the team as a student in the late 2000s. He was also a 17-year employee in the university’s IT department.

About a year after stepping down as the UF water polo coach, Huelsman was fired from his IT job in March 2024. Human resources resisted giving Huelsman any explanation for his termination, saying only that it was not performance-based, nor in any way related to his conduct in the IT department, but was still on adverse terms: he would be ineligible for rehire by the university system for three years.

Eventually, the Assistant Vice President for Human Resources told him that he was being fired from the IT department because the Recreational Sports department had filed a complaint against him regarding his time as water polo coach.

This was the first Huelsman had learned of any complaint—official or unofficial—against him.

He didn’t learn until months later that it was a Title IX complaint. By that time, the university’s Title IX office had resolved the situation, stating in part that the allegations did not justify a formal investigation:

Respondent is no longer affiliated with UF. All listed harmed parties in the initial report from Rec Sports were reached out to but no one stated they were harmed. The one harmed party who did make a report, their allegations do not rise to a Title IX/Gender Equity violation.

Note the self-licking ice cream cone of justification. They lead with Huelsman no longer being employed by the university—omitting that this was by the school’s choice, not his own. Then, they cite the baselessness of the accusation—the accusation used to fire him—to free themselves of the need to investigate.

And because there was no formal investigation, they never had to inform Huelsman that any of this was taking place.

Huelsman started piecing these events together in early June. A UF journalism student reporting for Main Street Daily News—a local Gainesville, FL, outlet—contacted Huelsman for a story about Huelsman’s firing. In the course of that interview, the student reporter informed Huelsman that a Title IX complaint had been filed against him.

The fact that he was fully cleared by the Title IX tribunal was mentioned in passing in the first of a series of articles over the next few weeks.

The day after the first article was published, two detectives from the University of Florida Police Department served Huelsman with a Notification of Trespass Warning, banning him from campus under threat of arrest. This was the subject of the second article.

The third article spun a years-old, team-wide inside joke about jorts (jean shorts) into a macabre tale of “a severe power dynamic” and a player who “began to wonder about how much Huelsman was thinking about his body.” If you’re unfamiliar with water polo, jorts are downright modest—practically an abaya—compared to what players wear in the pool.

The articles air anonymous accusations of ambiguous events, some of which were refuted by other players who spoke on the record. None of the accusations were ever corroborated independently or on the record. No further allegations, past or contemporary, have been brought forward about Huelsman: not from his time as a collegiate coach, not from his time as a high school coach, not from his time as a youth club coach, and not from his time as a professional club coach.

University police lifted Huelsman’s campus ban in October 2024. This fact was appended to two of the original articles some time between August 2025 and December 16, 2025, based on a review of these pages at archive.org and each page’s metadata. Those changes came after repeated entreaties by Huelsman for the outlet to amend or correct, if not retract, the articles published about him.

They are the only changes so far: Main Street Daily News site stands by the rest of their reporting.

Narrative foreclosure: Cancelation and “the pre-scripted ending”

Here’s an anecdote that’s happened enough times it’s approaching the status of “data.” When I tell people that I’ve listened to many podcasts featuring Amanda Knox or that I watched “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox” on Hulu, the first thing they say is “Foxy Knoxy! Haven’t heard that name in a while.”

Two books, a Netflix documentary, a Hulu series, two appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience plus countless other podcasts, and still for the rest of her life, more people will know her as Foxy Knoxy the Kinky Sex Murderess than Amanda Knox, the actual person.

On one of those non-JRE podcasts, “Off the Vine with Kaitlyn Bristowe,” Knox talks about Dr. Christine Marie’s work on narrative foreclosure. As Knox describes it, narrative foreclosure “is the feeling that you are not the protagonist of your own life anymore. You’re just a pawn of someone else’s [life], and the deep feeling of dread and helplessness that comes from that.”

Dr. Christine Marie adapted the concept of narrative foreclosure for media-based trauma, but it originated in the psychology of aging.

Narrative foreclosure is “the premature conviction that one’s life story has effectively ended...[that] one already knows the ending of one’s life. No other alternative endings are considered as realistic, [so] there is little left to do but play out the pre-scripted ending.”

The pre-scripted ending for a canceled person is a life of exile, emptiness, unfulfillment, looking over your shoulder, rejection, and despair.

Walter Pichler has not been offered a job since the one that was withdrawn in spring 2025. Knowing that there are many articles (and a film) reporting on the accusations and zero reporting on his exoneration, he doesn’t see how anyone in sport is going to hire him unless he first explains that he was fully cleared of the accusations against him.

But he worries that if he explains too much of his side of the story, he might run afoul of the Center’s anti-disclosure policies.

In the years post-exoneration, Donald was within a week of working with two athletes—one still playing, one retired—who not only achieved massive success within their sports, but are household names in America’s sport culture.

His friends and colleagues made all the right introductions and opened all the doors. But despite their influence and good intentions, they couldn’t overcome Google and a single article. The current player’s agent and the retired player both did a quick search on their soon-to-be coach, and sent the word back. No matter how much they trusted their friends’ recommendations, and even though knew how things turned out, they couldn’t afford to be associated with someone whose only public profile is as an accused sex offender.

Since the articles in Gainesville local media, David Huelsman has had two offers to work in IT. One was withdrawn before he could start; and he was terminated within days of starting the other, both after an employee Googled him and saw the articles.

Dr. Christine writes:

[The victim of media humiliation and misrepresentation] may believe her reputation and life legacy has been permanently destroyed. The consequence to this is the premature belief that one’s life story is essentially completed; she has reached the end of life. Freeman describes this as the phenomenon that “has the power to arrest some lives, to bring them to a stop without death occurring.” On the other hand, for those to whom it seems that the world has all but ended, it may not be a big leap to take that final step.

Over the last two and a half years, many canceled people have told me how close they were to that final step. Their fight for life is inseparable from the fight for a counter-narrative.

Michael Capiraso was one of the first. The former CEO of New York Road Runners, he has applied to over 200 jobs since he was canceled in 2020. He tapped into a 25-year deep network of contacts in sports, fashion, and media, invested tens of thousands of dollars in reputation management and career support, and has received three responses, and zero offers.

Capiraso discovered Dr. Christine’s work on cancelation in 2021. There’s no way to overstate the importance of him chancing upon the interview she gave mere weeks after he had been canceled. Several years later, she told him about narrative foreclosure and how it was integral to the forward-facing trauma of cancelation.

He had spent hours alone and with his therapists “ruminating about how I was going to go to my grave with racist and sexist on my tombstone. I couldn’t let that happen. Well, I almost did, because I had considered ending things.”

He decided that he was not willing to let the media’s portrayal of him extend to his obituary. He had to stay alive if he wanted anything other than the pre-scripted ending for himself and his family.

Acknowledging the differences in scale, Capiraso recognizes elements of his cancelation in Knox’s two-decade long saga.

“Knox didn’t want to die with people thinking that she did it,” Capiraso says. “That was one of the driving forces that kept her going. I don’t know if that was the driving force that kept me going. But my therapist used to say, you just have to put questions in people’s minds. All they saw were these negative stories and false narratives about me. When I finally got healthy enough to do it, my mission was to create the counter-narrative.”

Just give people a question.

Does any of this make sense? (see, inter alia, jorts).

For this to be true, what else has to be true?

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do? - Paul Samuelson, maybe (but probably not) quoting John Maynard Keynes

There is no legal obligation for journalists or media platforms to continually update their articles or other reporting with each new development in a story. Any attempt to impose one would violate the First Amendment as compelled speech.

However, journalists should undertake an ethical duty—if not professional ethics, then at least personal ethics—to update stories as new and relevant facts become available, or as new developments unfold.

Journalists don’t need to continuously monitor developments from every story they’ve ever written. That could be a beneficial use case for AI. But when the new information is delivered directly to them, or when the new developments come from the same source as the initial reporting, it’s difficult to understand the reluctance to add new fact.

When first drafts foreclose the future

Most people will never make the Associated Press, a sport’s hobbyist mouthpiece, The New York Times, or even local news. If they do so because they were arrested, or added to the US Center for SafeSport’s blacklist, or simply accused of something, that will be the most publicity they ever receive. It will be the top result for any search for their name, it will be the first thought people have when their name comes up in conversation, it will be the barrier between them and a normal, productive social and professional life.

From there, it’s hard to see anything other than a single pre-scripted ending.

I’m fond of the adage “We don’t stop playing because we get old. We get old because we stop playing.”

A dark twist for the canceled might be: “We don’t suffer narrative foreclosure as we approach death. We approach death when we suffer narrative foreclosure.”

Photo credit: Ludovic Peron / Flickr, under CC BY 2.0.

“The Last Yakuza” by Jake Adelstein relates the history of the Japanese yakuza through the life and underworld career of Saigo, once an upper level crime boss.

Yakuza can only leave their organization in one of two ways: death or banishment. Saigo’s 20 years as a yakuza ended with the latter.

Adelstein describes the immediate impact of hamon, banishment:

A banished yakuza is immediately treated like a leper. The rules of banishment prohibit other members from associating with the individual. Thus everyone avoids him. Your closest friend doesn’t know you within hours after you’ve been kicked out.

The freshly outcast yakuza isn’t waiting for someone to come help him, nor ruing the disloyalty or cowardice of his comrades. They are not weak or disloyal friends. They are loyal yakuza. They follow the rules, including the rules of banishment.

The yakuza’s rules of banishment are explicit, and every member knows them from their day of initiation. Associate with a banished yakuza and face banishment yourself. Given the profound sense of honor and obedience at the yakuza core, the banished member would probably shame anyone who broke ranks to help him.

Every culture and subculture has their norms of banishment. They are usually implicit, with more wiggle room than the yakuza’s.

Some subcultures make a virtue out of transgressing other subcultures’ or the mainstream culture’s rules of banishment. Jesus’ outreach to criminals, prostitutes, lepers, and other outcasts is a recurring theme of the Gospels and is foundational to Christianity. It was a rebuke to the norms of his day—and a great way to recruit new followers and, later, members.

The Western tradition prizes loyalty and steadfastness towards those close to us above almost all things—certainly above affiliation towards groups or institutions. Betrayal is one’s ticket to the Ninth Circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno. Dante’s eternal punishment distinguishes between those who betray family, country, friends or guests, and benefactors.

Three blocks of ice for betraying individuals, one for betraying a group or entity.

The immediate, total abandonment is one of the most jarring aspects of being canceled. The canceled person might understand being maligned or sold out by a rival at work, or getting the eyes-down-and-look-away treatment from acquaintances who only know what the headlines told them.

But when close friends vanish, you start questioning if you were wrong about absolutely everything: them, yourself, friendships, relationships, human nature, our culture, and our place in it.

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“The one thing that could have stopped [my cancelation] was never going to happen. It’s like what they say about firemen: when the building’s on fire, everyone else is running away from the building, but the firemen run into it. But you only do that if you have courage. No one had it. Not one of them,” a canceled person told me.

Forget trust. The canceled person loses the basis to predict what might happen next in even the smallest moments.

For a banished yakuza, the isolation—as painful as it is—confirms their understanding of the social order and their place in it. For many canceled people, the isolation and the betrayal that brought it about are an existential double-tap.

Everybody has a part to play in banishment

Being banished from a yakuza organization is not like being fired. You can’t just go work for another group. The banishment order, hamonjo, goes out to all yakuza organizations—and to the police.

The all-encompassing severance tells the rival groups: “We are so over and done with this guy that he’s not even worth your time to beat up.” Additionally, the code of honor between yakuza gangs precludes one gang from recruiting another group’s outcasts.

Likewise, it tells police: “If you want to arrest this guy, go ahead. But it’s barely worth your time. It won’t make a dent in our gang, and you won’t get any credit for taking on organized crime. He’s just a civilian now.”

The canonical description of hamon in English is in an unpublished 1981 doctoral dissertation by David H. Stark. Stark illustrates the formality of hamon (explusion) and zetsuen (permanent expulsion) with diagrams of the cards that yakuza groups would disseminate to other groups, and post within their headquarters, announcing a banishment.

This person is not good for our group. We expelled him on [date of expulsion]. He has absolutely no more relations with our group.

For zetsuen, the card reads:

The person listed on the right is expelled on [date of expulsion]. He is expelled because of his bad behavior which often opposed our group’s goals and ideals and was not permissible by the code of chivalry. Therefore, we are informing you that this person is absolutely cut off from our group. In addition, we want your honorable group to firmly reject forming any brotherhood bond, membership, friendly association, or business association with this person.

Within the yakuza subculture, the cards create a searchable, public blacklist. If you encounter someone or hear a rumor, you can check their name against the hamon and zetsuen files (or maybe a bulletin board wall of shame), and proceed accordingly.

Implicit in the reciprocal respect accorded to other groups’ banishment is a combination of trust and fear. Trust, that the other group has good cause to expel that member, and that he’s therefore not the sort of person we’d want to associate with. And fear of retaliation if either an individual or another club were to associate with him.

Stark explains:

Once expelled or discharged, an ex-member can stay in the gang’s territory but he may not claim membership or influence by virtue of past affiliation or current connection to a gang... He is banned from joining another gang, is warned against roaming the streets aimlessly, and must refrain from the use of mannerisms and styles of a gangster. If caught doing any of the above, the ex-member would be challenged by the gang.... and [attacked] until he would repent.

Canceled people are not physically exiled from their town or city. They can stay in their former employer’s and their former social circle’s “territory, but [they] may not claim membership or influence by virtue of past affiliation or current connection to” their old job, network, civic organizations, and friend group. Those entities do everything they can to distance themselves from the target of cancelation, whether they instigated the canceling or are acting out of respect and fear for whoever issued the hamonjo for the social transgression of the day.

Canceled people don’t get hired for new jobs—they don’t even get called back for interviews—they don’t get invited out for lunch or coffee, they’re removed from Facebook groups and group chats. If he or she points to their previous affiliations, those institutions are quick and loud to say “But not anymore, because we got rid of them.”

Few even speak in their defence, and when they do, it’s just that: speaking. Those in a position to actually do something for them, don’t.

Everyone except for the canceled person knows what they are supposed to do or not do. Somehow, they all know the part they are to play in the banishment. The canceled person alone, in every sense, is left to discover everybody’s role in their new social existence.

Yakuza keep pains in perspective

At least there’s no physical pain or disfigurement associated with cancelation or banishment. It could be worse, you may be thinking.

Obviously, you’re not a yakuza.

“Less severe than membership loss is the loss of a finger,” known as yubitsume, Stark writes.

The absence of physical trauma is one of the difficulties in conveying to and convincing people of the traumatic nature of cancelation. Post-traumatic stress disorder is unique among all the conditions in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V) because it requires a specific cause. Depression or anxiety, for example, are diagnosed and assessed solely by their symptoms. PTSD requires the clinician to add, “Yes, but what caused this?”

All of the possible causes in “Criterion A” for a diagnosis of PTSD are physical in some way.

Banishment, humiliation, and betrayal are outside this realm. Someone who has “merely” suffered a betrayal leading to a public humiliation, which creates a stigma that results in their social and professional banishment, cannot recieve a by-the-book diagnosis of PTSD.

The 1976 Supreme Court case Paul v. Davis upheld the government’s ability to blacklist citizens, even without criminal conviction, opening the door for everything from TSA watchlists to debanking to the US Center for SafeSport’s Centralized Disciplinary Databse.

In his prescient and insightful dissent in Paul v. Davis, Justice William Brennan wrote (emphasis added):

The hardships resulting from this official stigmatization—loss of employment and educational opportunities, creation of impediments to professional licensing, and the imposition of general obstacles to the right of all free men to the pursuit of happiness—will often be as severe as actual incarceration, and the Court today invites and condones such lawless action by those who wish to inflict punishment without compliance with the procedural safeguards constitutionally required of the criminal justice system.

Brennan and the yakuza don’t have to minimize the trauma of physical punishment to argue that the social and psychological consequences of public banishment exceed those of incarceration or partial digital dismemberment.

Stark writes that “[i]f yubitsume is thought of as punishment, it should be viewed as self-inflicted.”

Self-inflicted, starting at the line between coercion and free will. Penitent yakuza remove part of their finger “to add the necessary dimension of sincerity to an apology for misconduct and reassert their allegiance to their Boss and gang.”

Yubitsume is a hedge against hamon: taking the initiative to do something physically painful and debilitating to hopefully avoid something existentially painful and debilitating.

“Pain is easy,” said one of the most damaged canceled coaches I’ve talked to. “I’m a lifelong athlete. Everything has been hurt. But emotional is different.”

Outsiders may marvel at the fanaticism and toughness of finger-removing yakuza. But for the yakuza, it’s a matter of keeping perspective. Losing part of a finger is painful and traumatic, but it beats the “painless” alternative of having an intact hand and nothing else.

Related:

• “The Last Yakuza: Life and Death in the Japanese Underworld,” by Jake Adelstein

• An enquiry into the effects of public punishments upon criminals and upon society, by Benjamin Rush

• Run out of town (Abuse of Process)

• Defending Reputation from Defamation-by-Blacklist (American Spectator)

Cover photo: Screenshot from HBO Max’s Tokyo Vice.

Gardner was arrested in August on child pornography charges. The images in question are from 2017-2018, around the time that he was first reported to the Center and USA Gymnastics. The plaintiffs assert that had the Center or USA Gymnastics taken action against Gardner in December 2017, or if their gym had taken action against Gardner in response to complaints in late 2018, or if anyone had done anything in response to multiple complaints between 2020-22, Gardner would not have been able to sexually abuse them and other gymnasts.

I wrote about this today for The American Spectator:

The gym fired Gardner in July 2022 after the Center issued a “temporary suspension,” which immediately barred him from all sporting activities. Despite remaining in a temporary status for three years until his arrest this summer, the Center’s sanction removed him from sport....The crux of the suits is that the Center could have sanctioned Gardner at any point in the preceding four and a half years.

...

However, the suits also bring to light several thornier issues.

The suits paint a picture of a dangerous, and ultimately tragic, over-reliance on the “mandatory reporter” function of the Center, USA Gymnastics, their employees, and the owners and employees of the gym.

Anyone at any time could have called 911 or the police’s non-emergency line and made a report. Or they could have gone online to file a suspicious activity report with local, state, or federal law enforcement.

For all of the imprecations over the last 25 years of “If you see something, say something,” Americans’ ready use of tip-and-snitch lines during COVID, and the perilous ease of calling someone out on social media, these suits suggest a disturbing level of passivity around one of the few behaviors that is universally condemned.

Yet no one seems to have reached the necessary threshold of concern, impatience, or anger to go directly to law enforcement.

No substitute for the criminal justice system

It takes a lot for me to defend either the “law” or “order” side of the criminal justice system.

The criminal justice system is far from perfect—some of the long lags in the Gardner case raise their own questions. But when you need to get a monster off the streets—and if Gardner did the things he is accused of, he is a monster—you need police with guns, courts with judges and juries, and prisons with walls. Not a 501(c)3 in Denver.

And you certainly can’t count on nor wait for mandatory reporters.

That brings me to the question that is sure to come up in the comments, as it does any time this topic is on the table.

The criminal justice system often requires victims to face their predators. Yes, that can be severely traumatic, deterring the formal reporting of sexual crimes.

It’s a tension, a friction, a sticking point, a hurdle, and maybe an obstacle that stands between a victim and justice - which means it shields a perpetrator from justice.

But it is a sine qua non, a necessary condition, an inescapable cause to achieve the desired effect of justice for both the victim and the perpetrator.

That’s reality. Call it harsh and unfair as you wish.

The Center and the entire safe guarding apparatus were designed to offer victims of sexual crimes an alternative to public reporting, identification, testimony, and cross-examination. The costs of that trade-off when everything works perfectly include insufficient punishment for the perpetrator; and limited, if not superficial, protection of others. When it doesn’t work perfectly, which is most of the time, sexual predators have free rein.

As a former federal criminal defense attorney told me: “We have bad actors, including pedophiles, in every pocket of society. Because it’s not specific to sport, we already have mechanisms for dealing with people and acts like that: the criminal justice system. It may not be perfect, it has its flaws, and it may not be satisfactory to those close to the victims in horrific situations like pedophilia. But it’s a system designed to provide due process.”

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Due process that strengthens the outcome for every party: victim, criminal, and society.

The Center and the criminal justice system are complementary, in their way. When justice is the desired outcome, there’s no substitute for the criminal justice system. If something other than justice is at the heart of a complaint, the Center is purpose-built and highly experienced at providing a justice-free process and outcome.

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator.

Photo credit: Tom Matko / Flickr.

If all you saw was his schedule, or heard from a friend “I saw Michael out at some place with some person,” you might think that he was back on track, right in the mix of things.

But there’s a reason why they call it cancelation, and not postponement.

Michael half-jokes that his schedule for the week before the marathon was a bout of exposure therapy. Exposure therapy is one of the many techniques his mental health practitioners deployed for his treatment-resistant depression and post-traumatic stress disorder over the last five years.

Those sessions were often structured around landmarks of New York City’s running scene—Michael’s personal and professional community for decades.

Going back amongst the community from which he was banished, he’s looking for a few breaks to go his away.

Heading into a call with a potential corporate partner, for example, Michael is in the unusual position of hoping the person on the other side didn’t do his homework. “I instantly think these people are googling me, and they’re going into this call thinking I’m the racist and sexist. That’s what’s happening. That’s what my life is. That’s the reality of it. That’s what I face with everything,” he says.

He has less to worry about now on this front than he has at any point over the five years since his cancelation. The top search results for his name are now articles that vindicate him and his record as CEO of New York Road Runners (NYRR); and that touch on the ongoing professional, social, and psychological consequences of his cancelation. There’s also an open letter signed by hundreds of runners from around the world calling on NYRR to apologize for their treatment of him in 2020, and their role in his cancelation.

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But cancelation is a forward-facing trauma because the hoped-for remedy has painful side effects. Even positive press—this article included—leads the reader to ask: vindicated... from what? What was he accused of, tarred as, and fired over?

Cancelation: Behind the headlines

If you haven’t seen the headlines about Michael, you’ve seen plenty like them: a name, a title, and unquestionable epithets. Racist sexist. Toxic bullying environment. Inappropriate relationship, power imbalance.

These are the media humiliation and misrepresentation (MHM) component of cancelation. They have the same effect on the reader five years on as they did on day one: they brand the target as socially and professionally malignant.

Under any circumstances, they separate the target from their every social and professional community.

But during a moral panic—or three moral panics, as was the case in the summer of 2020—these articles are banishment decrees and banning orders. Anyone who gives the target a fair hearing or offers them a fresh start is aiding and abetting their social crimes—a good way to get yourself canceled.

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From June to the week of Thanksgiving 2020, Michael was managing an institutional crisis. A group of former and current employees alleged that NYRR was insufficiently inclusive for marginalized communities, that NYRR was becoming a social club for affluent runners, and that NYRR’s leadership reflected that elite rather than the diversity of the five boroughs they were supposed to serve and represent. They aired their grievances first internally, and then publicly via an anonymous Instagram account and a change.org petition, which included a call for Michael’s ouster.

Michael took these to heart, even as they became increasingly frivolous—“It’s like they were complaining about their Thanksgiving dinner,” a former NYRR executive said—and even though few called him out by name. One that did said that Michael, as CEO, had too close a relationship with the board chair, George Hirsch.

But Michael knew his record as CEO, and what the organization had accomplished during his five years at the helm. Most people at NYRR knew it, too. He had all the proof he needed to rebut the accusations both internally and, as necessary, in the media and amongst the global running community that looked to NYRR as the industry standard.

“Don’t worry, you can put all that away,” he was told by top board members. “We can handle this. You’re taking one for the team, so we’ve got your back.”

Michael thought he had a close personal, and still professionally appropriate, relationship with Hirsch. Michael had no reason to be wary when Hirsch asked him to come to his apartment the Monday before Thanksgiving, via a text that concluded with “big hugs” to Michael’s wife and daughters. At his apartment, Hirsch told Michael that he was being let go, The New York Times had the story, and Michael would have less than 24 hours to provide a statement to the Times.

The articles that The New York Times and Runner’s World published the Monday after Thanksgiving transferred all the accusations and innuendo directly and specifically onto Michael. NYRR could have rebutted the employees’ grievances using the facts and data Michael had had at the ready since June. Instead, the board cleared themselves of wrongdoing by pinning everything on him, and cleansed the organization of his transgressions by publicly firing and disowning him.

The board and the media changed the nature of the accusations—and the accusations themselves—by putting them entirely onto one person, and then putting that person’s name and face on the banishment order that went out worldwide. Those “high authority” sources spawned hundreds of articles, each one adding to the size, volume, and frenzy of the mob.

Michael’s psychiatrist (who was not the exposure therapist provider) identified three traumatic elements in his cancelation: shame, rejection, and betrayal.

Shame and rejection are standard aspects of cancelation and MHM. Betrayal is not.

“The betrayal stunned him,” this psychiatrist said. “He felt that these were people with whom he had worked, had a good relationship, and held themselves as ready to have his back and protect him.”

Betrayal is always a profound and destabilizing experience. But Michael’s betrayal by members of NYRR’s board, particularly a long-time friend and colleague, was even worse than that: it was the necessary, final ingredient for a cancelation that, years later, still had him asking “Do I want to keep living?”

Exiled in your own backyard

Not long after he answered “Yes” for the final time, three years post-cancelation, I glimpsed the extent of Michael’s avoidance behaviors firsthand.

At our first meeting, he told me about NYRR’s RunCenter. He rates building and opening the RunCenter as one of his top accomplishments at NYRR, behind growing the youth running community in NYC and increasing the number of free-of-charge events and programs across the five boroughs.

“The RunCenter was the epitome of what I wanted the community running scene to be. I made everything I possibly could free there, so it would be a welcoming place for the running community.”

“It was a hub for me for five years. At least 5-6 days a week, and usually seven, I’d have a foot in there. At some point during the day, I’d hang out there with runners, hand out bibs, hand out t-shirts, or just be there to talk with runners and the team that supported the community. I would take meetings there and meet people there for runs. I loved it.”

Given all of that, the RunCenter was the focal point for some of his more intense exposure therapy.

“It sucks standing in front of it. The therapist wanted me to walk across the street and walk in front of it, which I think I did once. She wanted me to go in it and I refused. I still do to this day.”

Michael urged me to visit the RunCenter on my way to the airport. If I did, he asked me to see if his appointment as CEO in 2015 was still on the wall-length timeline of NYRR’s history. He vacillated over whether he wanted me to report back. An hour or so later, I let him know that NYRR had not fully erased him from their history.

To this day, “it’s still one of the most hurtful things that I can think about as far as a physical place. If I get within a two block radius, I feel the PTSD take over. Even on my last birthday, when we were getting pizza before going to a filming of The Daily Show, I had to make sure we didn’t walk down that block.”

Counter-narrative is always playing catch-up

Canceled people can’t pick up where they left off because their story ended the day the mob’s stories about them took over. They had the continuity of their life stolen from them, and somebody else spliced into their story a work of fiction or just random graffitti.

Because of his persistence, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and a few other outlets have since modified their articles in some way to acknowledge the falsity of their initial claims and shallowness of their reporting. change.org took down the employees’ petition in 2022; and in November 2025, Meta removed a dozen of the posts from the anonymous Instagram account that personally disparaged Michael.

But all that does is dull the story going forward. “You spend years trying to undo something that you can’t undo. It’s never going to be gone. It’s never going to go away. You can only try to keep getting more of the truth out there so at some point people can read more of the counter-narrative than the original narrative.”

Only one major publication is still digging in their heels to stick to their original story: Runner’s World. Layering on the ironies, George Hirsch was the worldwide publisher of Runner’s World for 17 years; and the NYRR RunCenter is in a building owned by Runner’s World’s parent company, Hearst Communications.

People see what they want to believe

The downside of being able to pass as someone who’s back on track, all systems normal, is that it lets other people off the hook for the consequences of the cancelation. Anyone who might have carried a twinge of guilt over what they did to the target—or what they did not do for him—can exhale with relief: “See, it was an unfortunate chain of events, but things turned out OK.” For anyone else, the apparent normalcy keeps them ignorant of what cancelation actually is, what it does, and what it means.

Post-traumatic stress symptoms like triggers, flashbacks, avoidance behaviors, depression, and gaps in memory are common among canceled people. So are some of the consequences of PTSD, like drug and alcohol abuse, and suicidality. Interestingly, some of the more effective when-everything-else-has-failed treatments for “traditional” PTSD are similarly effective for canceled people.

Looking out the window of his apartment the week before the marathon, Michael sees the tell-tale sign of mass participation sporting events: crowd control measures and banks of port-a-johns.

“I’m probably about 200 yards from the finish line. They’re putting the police barricades on the street. The whole city is full of it. It’s a miserable few days. This was my favorite day of the year in New York City. Now it is my most difficult day of the year,” which is why he left the city for marathon weekend, as he’s done the last four years.

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Not that he eagerly returns to the city for the rest of November. Given that his cancelation was sealed the week of Thanksgiving, his most difficult day of the year is a flackback-laden opener for his worst month of the year.

Related:

• The former head of the New York marathon cleared himself in his sport. Now, he’s rebuilding (The Athletic)

• A Rough Road Back (Road Race Management)

• No ‘Morning After’ for Victims of Cancellation (Reality’s Last Stand)

However, US Soccer also kept and circulated an unofficial, internal blacklist. This list contains 20 minors, two former CEOs of the US Soccer Federation, a Women’s World Cup winner, a US Men’s National Team player, a former commissioner of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), and a former team owner in the NWSL. Four of the minors were added at age 10. They are all alongside convicted sex offenders, an undocumented immigrant accused of murder, over 200 people permanently banned from American sports, and nearly 3,000 others who have in some way run afoul of US Soccer or the US Center for SafeSport.

Due to careless controls, it was publicly accessible for at least several months, and possibly several years.

The list contains not only names but dates of birth and states of residence, making it a significant breach of data privacy in addition to the potential reputational, social, and professional harm.

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Many of the individuals on this unofficial list have not been sanctioned by the Center. Their cases have not even been adjudicated: they remain in one of two “hold” statuses, some for over three years.

Privacy and due process in equal measure

Because holds are non-conclusive and do not entail any sanction, the Center’s decisions to place a case in a hold are rarely made public. Only the parties involved and the relevant federation(s) are informed.

Congress chartered the US Center for SafeSport as the national sport safe guarding organization in 2018, after the Larry Nassar abuse scandal at USA Gymnastics.

The Center has expansive latitude to write and enforce its policies. The Centralized Disciplinary Database is one of the few specific requirements Congress imposed on the Center: “publish and maintain a publicly accessible internet website that contains a comprehensive list of adults who are barred by the Center.” While the Center’s decision regarding a complaint is almost fatally public, how the Center reaches such decisions is opaque.

The Center imposes tight restrictions on the disclosure of its proceedings and decisions. The parties to a case are free “to discuss the incident, their participation in the Center’s process, or the outcome of that process.” However, neither they nor anyone else involved may release or share any of the Center’s work products, any evidence or transcripts from the proceedings, nor any statements from the proceedings “except as may be required by law or authorized by the Center.” Doing so is a sanctionable offense in itself.

The only permitted release is that the individual sport federations “may disclose the outcome of the matter...to those parties or organizations with a need to know” so that they can act in accordance with the decision.

Upon compiling their disqualification list from the Center’s decisions and their internal processes, US Soccer made their list available to its member associations by providing a password to a shared folder on a commercial cloud storage service.

Several of those member associations published the link and password to the disqualification list on publicly available PDFs, making the list accessible to anyone online.

When someone brought this to US Soccer’s attention earlier this year, the federation responded by instructing that individual via his lawyer to destroy or delete the file, and to cease and desist from sharing it. He affirms that he has never shared the file. US Soccer subsequently changed the password to access the file in the cloud. At least one association, the US Adult Soccer Association, updated their publicly accessible PDF with the new password, keeping it available to anyone who came across that document.

At some point between May 2025 and the present, US Soccer changed the password again, and the list is no longer publicly accessible.

Several soccer associations included the unofficial list as part of a three-step process for background screening new adult volunteers, contractors, or employees; and all used the same verbiage to do so. Before bringing on someone new, these organizations were instructed to check the individual’s name against their state’s sex offender registry, the US Center for SafeSport’s Centralized Disciplinary Database, and this internal disqualification list.

That trio speaks to the destructive potential of being “listed” by a sports organization.

Sex offender registries present several constitutional problems, such as listing individuals for the remainder of their lives, even after they are released from prison. But being listed on a sex offender registry follows conviction and sentencing in a court of law, with all the due process protections those entail.

Individuals on the Center’s database or a federation’s list receive no such protections: no hearing before being listed, no adversarial process, no discovery, no neutral finder of fact, no neutral arbiter. But they still end up sex-offender-adjacent on these lists and in the minds and conversations of people within their sport: people who may be evaluating them for jobs or, in the case of the minors, recruiting them for collegiate athletics, which can spill over into college admissions.

Protecting who from what?

The presence of violent felons and infamous pedophiles on these lists forces the question: how do three 10-year old girls and some teenage boys and girls end up there? And with the Center repeatedly lamenting their case backlog and insufficient funding in front of Congress, are these kids the best use of the Center’s resources?

Soccer moms and dads will usually talk your ear off about anything involving their child and the beautiful game. Unsurprisingly, this topic is an exception. None of the few parents or coaches who responded to me were willing to speak on the record. Some mentioned the anxiety that hit them upon receiving my messages, thinking and hoping that this was hidden in the past.

But these matters are not in the past for many of them because of the nature of a SafeSport “hold.”

A case is placed on an “administrative hold” when “there is currently insufficient information to proceed with an investigation.” The Center “may re-open [the case] at any time when sufficient information is made available.”

A “jurisdictional hold” means the Center does not have jurisdiction over the accused party, typically because the individual is not a member of a sport federation. In these situations, the Center plays the long game: if “the individual becomes or seeks to become a Participant in [a national governing body’s sport], the matter will undergo the Center’s investigative process.”

There is no time bar or statute of limitations for enforcement of the SafeSport Code, so either hold is a lifetime shadow ban from sport.

Some of the other minors on the list were suspended or placed on probation for a set number of months. However, even after that time elapsed, they remain on US Soccer’s internal blacklist, extending the practical duration of their punishment. Several others are serving “temporary suspensions.” But given that over a dozen individuals on the Centralized Disciplinary Database have been “temporarily” suspended for up to six years, these young players have an uncertain future in and out of sport.

Perhaps they can get some help from the American soccer luminaries similarly tarred.

Related:

• The Sex Offender Registry: Vengeful, unconstitutional and due for full repeal (The Hill)

• Temporary punishments permanently damage athletes’ careers (Abuse of Process)

• Congress’s Sex Abuse Enforcement Body Nailed For Fraud, Pattern Of Misconduct (The Federalist)

• The Evolution of Unconstitutionality in Sex Offender Registration Laws (Hastings Law Journal)

Photo credit: Foxcroft Academy / Flickr, under CC BY 2.0.

The next day, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. The reactions and counter-reactions to Kirk’s murder made “cancel culture” the hot topic of debate and both-sides-ism at a pitch not seen since George Floyd.

But just like at that time, there is no talk nor consideration of the consequences of cancelation on the targeted individuals. That’s even less forgivable now, given that the year 2020 left us with hundreds or maybe thousands of data points.

Cancelation is not losing your late night talk show, comedy gig, campus or conference appearance, or even your job. Nor is it a day or week of social media mobbing.

It might start with a call for one of those, perhaps in response to posting #JusticeForAll instead of #BlackLivesMatter from a corporate account, or not sufficiently condemning Charlie Kirk’s murder before criticizing one of his debates. Then it reaches a disgruntled coworker or neighbor, a lazy clickbait merchant, or a catalytic algorithm. Having been summoned, the devil will not behave.

Cancelation is identity annihilation. Every professional achievement is erased. In my industry, sports, halls of fame and season-by-season records are punctuated by gaps that previously held the name of now-canceled coaches. Every personal attribute is erased—if you’re lucky—or replaced by sexist, racist, abusive, fill-in-the-blank-phobic.

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That’s what drove the individual above to despair. Everything he had done and everything he was were under threat. If things had gone further, it would have been like he had never been there. Again, only if he was lucky. Many other canceled people have had well-earned legacies not erased but over-written by cheap but indelible stains.

Cancelation is also banishment. You are not only fired from your job—you are exiled from your professional and social communities.

One former CEO who was a high profile victim of a cancelation in 2020 has sent out over 200 resumes and applications. He’s received three calls back, and no offers. A senior IT employee at a major state university received two offers shortly after he was canceled. One was revoked after the prospective employer came across the articles that canceled him in small college town media. The other company pulled theirs after speaking with the university, which chose not to mention that he been fully cleared by a Title IX investigation.

But it’s the day-to-day moments that make it unbearable. People cross the street or brusquely look away to avoid even passing contact. They make appointments with your wife’s physical therapy practice in the hope of obliquely learning how you’re doing without having to face you.

Some think that lowly of you. They believe you’re the racist sexist something-phobe from the toxic bullying environment. Some don’t want to take the risk of being seen interacting with you. Others don’t want to face the awkwardness of “Do I acknowledge him? Can I? If so, how?” That would get too close to confronting their own complicity in what they know to be an injustice and what they sense is a trauma. So they double down on the exclusion.

Unhirable due to social stigma or a public blacklist, your friends won’t talk to you, and you make midnight runs to the Wal-Mart two towns over while wearing a hoodie and dark sunglasses in the hopes of not being recognized and shamed or accosted.

Neuroscience research has demonstrated that humiliation is a more intense experience within the brain than happiness or anger.

The “social pain“ of exclusion activates regions of the brain adjacent to our experience of physical pain. Prolonged and intense social pain—like that which accompanies humiliation and exile—can have many of the same downstream health effects as prolonged and intense physical pain. That helps explain the acute and chronic medical and psychological symptoms that many canceled people experience. Those, in turn, explain the tendency for canceled people to seek relief through drugs—some prescription, some not—or alcohol.

As one canceled coach put it: “Pain is easy as a lifelong athlete. Everything has been hurt. But emotional is different.”

Many canceled people have major depression and post-traumatic stress symptoms. The canceled CEO was so deep in treatment-resistant depression that he doesn’t remember our first meeting two years ago: “There’s a lot of things I don’t remember from those years.” And before you ask, he’s a teetotaler.

All of this is lost in the phrase “cancel culture.”

“Cancel culture” keeps us at a remove from the individual. The term itself is intrinsically collective. We already don’t need to get any closer than our keyboard, nor stick around around longer than hitting “Send” or “Post.” From there, we can skip over what we’ve inflicted or induced, and instead earnestly pontificate about trends and preen about applying “your rules” to the other side.

If either side in the cultural-political divide wants to claim some moral high ground on cancel culture, they can take the time to learn about the consequences of cancelation on the targeted individuals. Go back through The New York Times, local newspapers, or college newspapers from the peak years of 2019-21 and do some follow-up reporting, some “Where are they now?” features.

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Going deep into one person’s cancelation will take most people to places they don’t want to go. It’s essential not only as a matter of ethics and civics, but of education. Cancelation opens grim doors for exploring the human condition. Limiting ourselves to “cancel culture” shields us from consequences but walls off new avenues of knowledge and understanding.

Related:

• No ‘Morning After’ for Victims of Cancellation (Reality’s Last Stand)

• Why Your Dignity Is So Vulnerable Today (Psychology Today)

• An enquiry into the effects of public punishments upon criminals and upon society. (Benjamin Rush, 1787)

• The Pillory, the Stock, and Cancel Culture (American Thinker)

After winning Olympic gold in 1960 and a bronze in 1964, Ted Nash spent nearly 60 years on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, coaching thousands of rowers—from area youth and senior citizens to elite rowers training for the Olympics. Amongst the more well-known from the latter category are tech and finance entrepreneurs Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. By the end, he was coaching the grandchildren of rowers he once (and sometimes still) coached.

Two years after his death, The New York Times published an interview that accused Nash of grooming and sexually assaulting a teenage girl in 1973.

When the Times’ article came out, an investigation into these allegations was already underway. The law firm Shearman & Sterling (now A&O Shearman) conducted the investigation pro bono at the behest of USRowing, the national governing body for the sport.

Shearman & Sterling acknowledged that their investigation was “complicated by several factors,” namely the passage of 50 years and the fact that the accused and the primary witness to events from the summer in question (although, notably, not to the alleged assault) were dead. Their final report, released in April 2024, explicitly disclaimed any evidentiary standard. It offered no conclusion about the specific accusation of assault. Shearman’s investigators found “[the accuser] credible, our investigation corroborated many of her allegations against Mr. Nash, and we did not uncover evidence that expressly refutes [her] claims or suggests a motive for [her] to fabricate her account of abuse.”

Investigating the process behind and propriety of the governing bodies’ actions are the only inquiries relevant to Nash that can be resolved with clarity, fairness, and justice. The Shearman report itself provides the best evidence that it is, itself, the fruit of a poisonous tree.

The investigation into Ted Nash started less than a year after his death, in May 2022, with a claim filed with the US Center for SafeSport.

Governing bodies collude in scull-duggery

The US Center for SafeSport emerged out of the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal at USA Gymnastics. The 2018 amendment to the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act delegated to the Center jurisdiction “over the [USOPC] and each national governing body with regard to safeguarding amateur athletes against abuse, including emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, in sports.”

Congress gave the Center sole authority to write all of its own bylaws and the SafeSport Code, which would “apply as though they were incorporated in and made a part of [this legislation].”

The SafeSport Code has never wavered from asserting “exclusive jurisdiction to investigate and resolve allegations that a Participant engaged in... Sexual Misconduct, including without limitation child sexual abuse.”

Once the Center accepts exclusive jurisdiction over a complaint, all other governing bodies are prohibited from taking any action on the matter, other than enforcing the center’s determination. Citing almost verbatim the Ted Stevens Act, the Code prohibits governing bodies and the USOPC from “interfering in, attempting to interfere in, or influencing the outcome of the Center’s investigations.”

Two weeks after receiving the complaint against Ted Nash, the Center informed the complainant and USRowing that they had accepted exclusive jurisdiction over the complaint and had “administratively closed” the matter. Administrative closures were an option for situations of “insufficient evidence, a Claimant(s) who elects not to participate in the resolution process, or other factors as determined by the Center.”

By law, that should have been the end of the matter. But a representative from the Center for SafeSport told the alleged victim “that she could raise her allegations directly with USRowing.” She pursued this option, submitting a written statement and additional documents to USRowing in October 2022.

USRowing sought independent counsel to investigate these claims. A spokesperson for USRowing said the USOPC recommended the law firm Shearman & Sterling, which began work in December 2022.

Neither the SafeSport Code nor the Ted Stevens Act authorizes the Center to devolve its authority to a national governing body to conduct investigations. Quite the opposite: they explicitly forbid national governing bodies from picking up where the Center leaves off.

When asked what authority they had to conduct an investigation after the Center had closed the matter, USRowing’s spokesperson sidestepped the question of the SafeSport Code, replying: “USRowing initiated this investigation because we determined that the gravity of [these] claims outweighed Mr. Nash’s inability to respond to these allegations as he has passed away.” The spokesperson declined to explain the process leading to that determination.

The USOPC and US Center for SafeSport did not respond to requests for comment.

However, the Center employs “Process Navigators“ to answer questions and provide clarification on matters pertaining to the Center’s authority, jurisdiction, processes, and case updates, in addition to assisting with mental health, legal, and educational support.

Presented with this chain of events—minus any identification of the governing body—a Process Navigator cited the SafeSport Code to confirm that “any allegations that the Center exercises jurisdiction over, regardless of how the case is resolved, remain within the Center’s jurisdiction, and NGBs are prohibited from any further investigation... [T]hey would not be allowed to investigate or resolve the allegations the Center exercised jurisdiction over. If they did so, they would likely be investigated for Abuse of Process.”

Dynamic incorporation: Legalese for “Feel free to make it up as you go”

The most recent version of the SafeSport Code—released a month after the Shearman report—suggests that the center recognizes the game they all played.

The Code now specifies that an administrative closure is the appropriate outcome when the accused is deceased. It also states that a “case that is Administratively Closed will not be reopened, absent extraordinary circumstances.”

Most tellingly, though, is a new footnote: “Nothing in this provision authorizes [a governing body] to conduct a parallel investigation involving allegations falling within the Center’s exclusive jurisdiction... Such conduct may constitute Interference.”

These are clarifications and additions, not modifications. USRowing can claim ambiguity or omissions in the 2022 Code, but the impropriety of their actions is the same under both versions. If anything, the 2024 Code is a tacit acknowledgment of USRowing’s wrongdoing.

The US Center for SafeSport did the right thing by administratively closing the Nash investigation.

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But by enabling an end-run on its own Code and authorizing legislation, the Center undermined any claim it has of protecting American sportspeople from either sexual abuse or institutional abuse of process.

Even safeguarding theatre has its limits

The strongest sanction the Center can deliver is to declare someone permanently ineligible from participating in any event, activity, or organization under the USOPC umbrella. That covers everything from a local track & field meet up through Team USA.

The real damage, though, comes from the Ted Stevens Act’s requirement that the Center “publish and maintain a publicly accessible internet website that contains a comprehensive list of adults who are barred by the Center.” This comes to life as the Centralized Disciplinary Database.

The ostensible purpose of the Centralized Disciplinary Database is to prevent an abusive sportsperson from moving from one team, city, or sport to another and preying on people who don’t know their past—a quick and easy background check, so to speak. In practice, though, it’s the ultimate blacklist. The general public only knows about that list because of Larry Nassar, and associates the list with him and his crimes. Being on that list—regardless of what you did and despite the lack of due process—connects you with the notorious serial pedophile who is only a few scrolls away.

Even at the peak of #MeToo or any of the other cancelation-justifying moral panics, it would have been a bit too on the nose to add a dead man to the Centralized Disciplinary Database. Permanently banning a dead man from sport and placing his name on a public blacklist do nothing to protect anyone.

If such actions send a message, it’s that the system is a tool of destruction rather than protection.

The Center’s partner entities had no qualms about performative responses. In the press release announcing the Shearman report, USRowing CEO Amanda Kraus declared that the organization was rescinding all of Nash’s USRowing honors, and that he would be ineligible for any future awards. Within a day, Nash’s achievements were scrubbed from USRowing’s website. The spokesperson told me that these decisions “were made with the full support of USRowing’s Board.”

Nothing that the governing bodies did regarding Ted Nash will protect a single youth or amateur athlete.

When widows are collateral damage

One of Nash’s athletes is still trying to wrap his head around a “movement that waits for the man to die to destroy him.” This rower kept coming back to thoughts about Nash’s widow, Jan. “Had any of this come out when Ted was alive, he could at least have had this conversation with Jan, and face whatever consequences, private or public. But with Ted gone, it’s like Jan was the only person left to destroy.

“From talking to Ted and being at his house, I knew how much Jan gave Ted to us. Her own time, energy, and money, in addition to Ted himself. You almost felt guilty about the amount of effort they both put in.”

Many of Ted Nash’s athletes have similar memories and perspectives about Jan. Even if she wasn’t physically present, she was part of each boat, shared some credit for each college scholarship, regatta win, or Olympic medal. Ted’s project was hers, too. But neither she nor Ted Nash’s estate nor other survivors have any recourse due to an unusual fissure in the law.

Bring out your dead (and defame them)!

Desecrate a corpse and you go to jail. Botch an embalming and lose your mortuary license. Disregard someone’s last will and find out just how far our civil courts will go to protect and enforce each person’s final wishes.

Defame the deceased... and carry on with your day.

That disparity is the heart of Defaming the Dead by Don Herzog, professor of law at the University of Michigan. He opens the book at a fictional funeral where one attendee speaks ill of the dead to another: “Embezzled money at work. Diddled children in the park. Popped kittens in the microwave for fun.”

Herzog argues that we all have interests that outlive us. Reputation is one, which he bolsters by talking about how our reputation is essential for the projects that we initiate during life that we intend or hope will continue after we’re gone. Presenting a hypothetical about someone spearheading an effort to revitalize city parks, he says “You die when work is just getting underway—and someone at your funeral whispers that you’ve embezzled, diddled, and popped. The story gets around. Who wants to keep working on what’s mordantly dubbed the Child Molester Park Project?”

That might be the pseudonym attached to the park on social media. But most likely, the name at the entrance to the park would be covered up—as the University of Pennsylvania did to the Coach Ted A. Nash Land Rowing Center—or erased, as USRowing did to their list of Medal of Honor awardees the same day they released the Shearman report.

Herzog’s closing argument for extending legal protections for reputation to the deceased echoes the rower quoted above.

“Your reputation after death is a final settling of accounts, unlike your reputation while alive, ordinarily in flux as you continue to act. When that account is damaged by defamation, it’s all too likely to stay that way. ‘This will always be there.’ Ordinarily, that’s the most pressing injury to reputation a dead person can suffer. It isn’t illusory.”

“This will always be there” comes from a mob moral panic and cancellation from the 1980s. It’s the pre-digital version of “the internet is forever,” which has become the epitaph for every cancelled person.

Reality’s Last Stand

No ‘Morning After’ for Victims of Cancellation

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2 years ago · 82 likes · 29 comments · George MJ Perry

Other cases—with living respondents—better exemplify the lack of due process afforded the accused, and the devastating effects this has. Those cases testify to the deficiencies in the letter of the law. The Ted Nash case—starting with the fact of his being dead—illustrates the lack of concern with the spirit of the laws, to include their purpose.

Recall what the USRowing spokesperson told me: “the gravity of [these] claims outweighed Mr. Nash’s inability to respond.”

This statement is multiple levels of meaningless.

The Center routinely imposes temporary sanctions on (living) individuals based on nothing more than “the seriousness of the allegations” (see also: Desyatov, Ivan). They do not provide the accused the opportunity to respond to the allegations before imposing those sanctions, because they are not required to. In a dark abuse of language, the Code refers to the accused as “Respondents.” Yet they can only respond to a decision—not an accusation—and only after paying the $5,000 price of admission to an arbitrator’s tribunal. And all that after their career and reputation have been permanently damaged.

The spokesperson’s justification for their ad hoc, Code-violating, legally dubious actions against the deceased Ted Nash is nothing more than standing operating procedure for the US sport safeguarding apparatus.

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Amongst the living, the US Center for SafeSport has the quasi-judicial authority to end careers and destroy lives.

When it came to Ted Nash, the Center, USRowing, the USOPC, and Shearman & Sterling combined to extend their power into the afterlife. If they managed to provide a few people and entities with a measure of validation, they did so at the expense of providing justice for anyone.

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Related:

• Ted A. Nash, A True Giant of Rowing, Has Passed (row2k)

• The Limits of Delegation to the Private Sector (The American Spectator)

• The Private Delegation Doctrine (Florida Law Review)

• No ‘Morning After’ for Victims of Cancellation (Reality’s Last Stand)

• Temporary punishments permanently damage athletes’ careers (Abuse of Process)

Photo credit: josieshowaa / Flickr, under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Edward C. Davis was a photographer for the Louisville Courier-Journal and Times. He was arrested in June 1971 for shoplifting, and pleaded not guilty in September. The charge was then “filed away with leave [to reinstate].”

Over a year later, the city of Louisville and Jefferson County police departments distributed their annual mugbook to local retailers ahead of the holiday shopping season. Davis’s name and mugshot was included, under the heading “Active Shoplifters.”

Purely by coincidence, a judge dismissed the charges against Davis a few days after the flyers went out.

But Davis’s fate was already sealed. His status as an “active shoplifter” made its way to his newsroom. His supervisor said he would not assign Davis to any projects involving local businesses, placing a low ceiling on the work he could do. Davis wrote later, “I was the only black working in the department, which made it extremely difficult for me to function. I suffered humiliation and ridicule.”

He resigned after a few months “to regain my full sanity and keep what little self-respect I had left.” But wherever he went, the listing was already there, obstructing his attempts at future employment.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky represented Davis in his suit against the Louisville and Jefferson County chiefs of police. Paul v. Davis reached the Supreme Court in 1975.

The Court acknowledged the devastation of the state branding Davis an active shoplifter. But losing his reptuation wasn’t enough. He would have had to suffer more, in some specific and judicially recognized manner, in order to sue for the violation of his due process rights. This became known as the “stigma-plus doctrine.”

Justice Brennan’s dissent recognized the license this out-of-thin-air legal standard gave government tribunals. They could, without consequence, declare people guilty of some offense “so long as the only official judgment pronounced was limited to the public condemnation and branding of a person as a Communist, a traitor, an ‘active murderer’... or any other mark that ‘merely’ carries social opprobrium.” The state now had a handy short cut around due process and justice: “publishing periodic lists of ‘active rapists,’ ‘active larcenists,’ or other ‘known criminals.’”

Substitute in terrorist (foreign or domestic), gang member, or sex offender, and we have our most prolific watchlists.

Davis’ ordeal from Louisville to the Supreme Court left him “broke, without employment, emotionally sick and in a state of anxiety.” Thousands of Americans have ended up in the same situation after being unjustly branded by public or private watchlists. They do not just ban you from places or activities—they banish you from your social and professional communities.

An unprecedented bill that will come before the Kentucky legislature next term would give the force of law to a non-profit’s blacklist.

Representative Vanessa Grossl’s (R-Georgetown) BR 868 would permit the Kentucky Horse Park’s (KHP) Mounted Police to block or remove from the park anyone on the US Center for SafeSport’s Centralized Disciplinary Database.

This list is one of the most devastating manifestations of Justice Brennan’s foresight.

Congress gave the US Center for SafeSport, a 501(c)3, a scarcely constrained mandate in response to the Larry Nassar sex abuse scandal at USA Gymnastics. Congress ordered the Center to “publish and maintain a publicly accessible internet website that contains a comprehensive list of [banned] adults.”

Many of the people on this list had as much due process as Edward Davis did before he was branded an “active shoplifter”: none.

The Center can temporarily suspend someone from sport on the basis of an allegation alone: no finding of fact, no assessing of the credibility of the accusation. Just the accusation. Temporary suspensions can linger for years. Permanent sanctions result from procedures that are non-adversarial, lack standards for discovery and disclosure, have no neutral finder of fact, and are closed and sealed from the public. Appeals start with the accused paying a $5,000 fee. That’s not for their lawyer—that’s just the price of admission.

If, like Davis, the charges against someone on the Centralized Disciplinary Database are dismissed, that person has to petition the Center for a new hearing, and no outcome is guaranteed. At least one coach is still blacklisted over three years after a judge dismissed his charges.

Set aside this non-exhaustive overview of the Center’s constitutional shortcomings. Listed individuals are already banned from US Equestrian Federation events that take place at KHP. This bill would make the entire park—state property—off-limits, 24/7/365, enforced by men with guns on horseback with the power to arrest.

Grossl and KHP argue that someone on the Centralized Disciplinary Database could sneak in or get too close to a USEF event taking place at the park, and thereby pose a threat. But this is true for any sports venue. Someone could always be lurking across the street from a swim center, soccer complex, or baseball diamond.

This bill exploits the fact that the park is public property to transform a nominally private non-profit’s Congressionally mandated public blacklist into one state entity’s mass restraining order.

Davis’ quotes above were from his contribution to a law magazine’s article, “A ‘Keep Out’ Sign on the Courthouse Doors?” By rejecting BR 868, Kentucky legislators can put a “keep out” sign on any future impingements on Kentuckians’—and Americans’—rights to reputation and due process.

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Related:

• Defending Reputation from Defamation-by-Blacklist (The American Spectator)

• Procedural Due Process and Reputational Harm: Liberty as Self-Invention (UC Davis Law Review)

  Abuse of Process

  Temporary punishments permanently damage athletes' careers

  The US Figure Skating Federation’s announcement on September 16, 2024, confirmed what many in the sport already knew: the ice dancing pair of Ivan Desyatov and Isabella Flores was one to watch in the build-up to the 2026 Winter Olympics. USFS gave Desyatov and Flores a headline berth in October’s Skate America Grand Prix, a prestigious competition and c…

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  5 months ago · 6 likes · 9 comments · George MJ Perry

  
  

  

  Photo credit: Lisa Andres / Flickr, under CC BY 2.0.
  

Exactly one month later, the pair withdrew from the Grand Prix. On October 18, the day before they should have taken the ice, the US Center for SafeSport announced that Desyatov was temporarily suspended from all sporting activities based on allegations of misconduct.

One month after that, it was Flores’ turn to confirm what everyone already knew: their season was over. Left unsaid: Desyatov’s career, and therefore maybe her own, was almost assuredly over.

“It takes only two weeks for an elite athlete to start feeling the effects of detraining,” said a former Team USA ice dancer, who wishes to remain anonymous given the controversy around Desyatov. “Most skaters will only take one full week off at a time, usually right after the season ends. After that week off, they are back training to learn the routines for the next year of competition.

“Without consistently placing high in competitions for multiple seasons and actively competing against the other skaters fighting for those few spots on the Olympic team, it is almost impossible to make it to the Olympics.”

Congress designated the US Center for SafeSport, an independent non-profit, as the national sport safeguarding organization in 2018 in the aftermath of the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal at USA Gymnastics. With no oversight or external review, the Center implements “practices, policies, and procedures to prevent the abuse...of amateur athletes participating in amateur athletic activities through national governing bodies.” Over 11 million Americans are under the Center’s jurisdiction, mostly through their membership in sport federations.

The Center can take someone out of sport without any finding of fact via “temporary measures.” Indefinite is more accurate. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in six years, the Center might remove those sanctions, or make them permanent. Whether they do so is almost irrelevant.

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One of Congress’s few specific requirements for the Center was to “publish and maintain a publicly accessible internet website that contains a comprehensive list of adults who are barred by the Center.” What it takes to get on that list—the Centralized Disciplinary Database—and share space with Larry Nassar is wholly at the Center’s discretion.

About 2,500 people are on the Centralized Disciplinary Database, with about 140 under temporary sanctions. Desyatov is in the top quartile of tenure on the temporary list. Ahead of him are 10 individuals from 2022, one from 2021, and one still-temporary case from 2019.

“The suspension, publication of a name, and slow process management are sloppy and cruel. It would violate even the most basic employment standards in any organization in the United States,” a person close to the Flores family said.

Sport is no safer

From its origins in the Nassar case, the adage “hard cases make bad law” is insufficient for any commentary on the US Center for SafeSport.

Other cases’ temporary status validate the full range of the Center’s critics.

Few people have experienced as much of the US sport safeguarding system as Nanci Moore. Her daughter, Alexis, was sexually abused for 10 years by Larry Nassar. Alexis was part of the FBI’s investigation into Nassar, and the subsequent criminal and civil trials.

In 2020, the Center acted upon a complaint and began investigating Nanci and Alexis Moore. Those investigations would go on for three years. The Center suspended both Moores from sport in March 2023 for allegations of emotional and physical misconduct. The following month, the Center determined that Nanci had violated the terms of that suspension, which they added to her record. Alexis was fully cleared of all allegations by an arbitrator in June 2023, while Nanci has stayed on the Centralized Disciplinary Database—temporarily—ever since.

The Moores have been tied up in federal court since that July, suing the Center and USA Gymnastics for breach of contract, tortious interference with a business, and defamation, among other counts.

At the other extreme of the sympathy spectrum, Sean Gardner had been a gymnastics coach since at least 2004. The Center placed him on the Centralized Disciplinary Database in 2022 over allegations of sexual abuse.

This August, the FBI arrested Gardner on child pornography charges.

In one sense, the safeguarding system worked. Within four months of receiving a complaint against Gardner, the Center separated him from sport so he could no longer groom or abuse potential victims in athletic settings. That his suspension remained “temporary” for three years had no impact on his status within sport. Gardner is now permanently banned: being arrested for a sex offense is, in itself, a violation of the SafeSport Code. The terms of his permanent suspension are the same as those of the temporary.

Despite being taken out of sport, Gardner was not taken off the streets—law enforcement did not have a predicate to act. Young athletes were, in this case, protected by the safeguarding system. But the broader population was not.

More importantly, neither Gardner nor his accusers have received justice.

This is a discomfiting part of the Gardner story for safeguarding advocates: it shows there is no substitute for the criminal justice system. Only now that some of Gardner’s accusers have gone not to the anonymity-assuring, non-adversarial non-profit but to the police will we learn, in open court, whether Gardner is a sex offender. If so, he will receive the punishment he deserves and society will be protected from him.

Justice is the missing element from any situation involving the US Center for SafeSport.

The Center’s lawyers and advocates will be quick to agree. If the Center were in the business of justice, then all the constitutional protections of our judicial system—pre-deprivation hearings, presumption of innocence, opportunity to call witnesses—would be in play. Instead, they argue that their policies and their ability to publicly banish you are merely the terms and conditions of membership in private organizations.

Drone strikes, but for athletes’ careers

There is almost no chance of justice for anyone in the Desyatov case.

The Center can impose a temporary sanction upon receiving an allegation. It does not have to perform any level of investigation, inquiry, or even double-checking. The “seriousness of the allegation”—not its credibility, and certainly not its veracity—is the Center’s basis for temporarily suspending Ivan Desyatov.

By imposing a temporary sanction, the Center shifts the burden of proof to the accuser: the allegations are presumed to be true if the accused wishes to go to arbitration.

To clear his name from the Center’s blacklist, Desyatov now has to affirmatively prove that he did not assault French ice dancer Solene Mazingue in Zagreb, Croatia, in December 2023.

In the nine months after the alleged incident, Mazingue quietly venue-shopped her accusation. She informed the Estonian federation (her ice dancing partner is Estonian), a Canadian figure skating training academy, and the Paris police. None of them have jurisdiction over an incident that took place in Croatia. Accordingly, none have acted upon her complaints.

Finally, in the US Center for SafeSport, she found an organization with unrestricted jurisdiction over an American athlete.

Three days after USFS announced that they had selected Desyatov and Flores for the Skate America Grand Prix, Mazingue posted an Instagram Reel alluding to a sexual assault by an athlete. She filed her complaint with the Center the following week, on September 26, 2024. While it took the Center four months to temporarily sanction Sean Gardner, the Center placed Desyatov on the Centralized Disciplinary Database in less than one month.

After a blitz of social media posts and a sympathetic feature in France’s Mediapart, Mazingue’s lawyer and PR agent from 2024 have gone quiet. It’s unclear if either are still representing her. Her lawyer at the time was Nabil Boudi. Boudi’s other clients last year included Islamic State fighters and Olympic gold medalist boxer Imane Khelif in his suit against J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump. If there was substance to this transnational case, Boudi’s record suggests he would be eager and adept to exploit it.

Desyatov’s case showcases the perils of delegating so much authority to an unsupervised quasi-governmental organization.

The actual but unprosecuted criminals on the Centralized Disciplinary Database are still getting away with their crimes, whether they are under “temporary” or “permanent” sanctions. Falsely or maliciously accused individuals suffer career-ending, life-long, and sometimes life-ending damage the moment the Center adds their names to the Centralized Disciplinary Database.

“Jordan” was spared the public blacklisting because he was a minor when the Center temporarily suspended him from sport.

Like Desyatov and Flores, he was recognized by his sport’s federation and media as a Team USA hopeful, in his case for the Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 2028. He was one of a few dozen youth athletes invited to a training camp that showed them how the professionals train, and to lay out the expectations and development program to get them from youth to pro.

“This was the first year I had really seen myself on that path,” he says, modestly: articles on him being part of “the next generation” go back to before he could even drive.

As a high school senior, Jordan had an offer on the table from a team in Europe, along with admissions letters from several top academic universities.

“I hadn’t solidified the pro deal. If I could be on a highly competitive European team, I can’t really go to college. Maybe an online hybrid sort of thing. But I thought if I could be really good at this sport, I want to give it a real shot and see what I can do. College is something I’m interested in, but it was like a backup.”

The pro team withdrew the offer when news of the suspension made its way through the sport. Other teams he had been speaking with started ghosting him.

“I wasn’t going to commit to college if this might all be resolved the next day, or within a few weeks. We’re just in this holding pattern. I’m taking classes part-time at a local college. That lets me train and live at home. I enjoy it and I’m making it work, but my goal is not to graduate from there. I just have no idea what will happen with all this or when.”

Unlike ice dancers, Jordan has more flexibility in the facilities and equipment he needs to train. “I don’t think too much of my fitness has dropped off. I have a pretty good understanding of training. I’m a coach as well, so I understand what kind of workouts I need to be doing. But without competing, you lose the mental sharpness that only comes from competition. That’s pretty hard to replicate when I’m training by myself with nothing on the calendar.”

Permanent damage to careers and reputations

A one-year ban is considered the “death penalty“ in college team sports. Desyatov’s career, and the Desyatov-Flores team, could not—and did not—survive a few months.

“Ivan retired, and he misses it. He is fighting to clear his name, and if there is a chance to come back, he may consider it. But could he come back today and pick up where he left off? No. He has no world standing and would need to get support of a federation. If he found a partner, they would likely need to spend one year just building the ability to skate well together, before years of working together to be truly competitive,” the person close to the Flores’s said.

“Isabella is also fighting to continue her career. This season she has been working with another skater in France. It’s too early to tell if they have the makings of a competitive team. It just takes time to work together and get their skills aligned. At the higher levels, assuming you can find two athletes with the right skills and experience, they may not really know if they are competitive until do some competitions.”

Even if it somehow all came together from an sporting perspective, the reputational damage of spending even one day on the Centralized Disciplinary Database gives the lie to the idea of temporary.

In a subjective sport like ice dancing, both skaters would carry the stigma of the sanction into every competition. “The accusation, the blacklisting, and the media coverage all leave lasting damage to a skater’s reputation, which will affect how the judges view them. Again, not just for the accused skater, but for the partner. She will be criticized and punished for not condemning and breaking ties with her partner.” Reddit forums still blast Flores for not immediately disowning Desyatov.

Jordan’s sport is more objective when it comes to competitions, but the national team selection process comes down to the federation’s decisions.

“He’s been competing in this sport since he was seven. This is his life,” Jordan’s father says. “This is what he does. He doesn’t really socialize on weekends. He hasn’t been to parties. All week, he trains before school or after school. It’s just devastating to me as a parent to see this happen.”

Most of our careers would survive a disruption of a few weeks or months. Athletes have this unique vulnerability. However, few careers—to say nothing of families and psyches—can survive the stigma, humiliation, and calumny of being added to a public database built for and headlined by child sex offenders.

The Center’s sanctions sometimes protect athletes, but they always inflict permanent damage. With authority unconstrained by accountability, the Center has made American sport a justice-free zone.