There's a long history of men who stand at the helm of big-time sports institutions and direct the outcome of sexual-abuse or domestic-violence allegations to suit a team’s or an organizations’s public image. Penn State president Graham Spanier created a conspiracy of silence. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and Baltimore Ravens executives initially handed out a minimal suspension over a documented case of physical abuse. Despite intimate knowledge of what had gone on, none of the men made any changes until the media got on the story. Only Spanier lost his job.

The Path to Reform: Lawyers Allard and Little outline what they think should change at USA Swimming to reform the organization.

Chuck Wielgus, of course, has defenders who say he is not part of this shameful legacy. Last May, in the wake of the petition filed by the Women’s Sports Foundation, four past presidents of USA Swimming and current president Bruce Stratton wrote to ISHOF to correct what it said were inaccuracies in the statement. “Chuck is a man of impeccable character who has been recklessly misrepresented,” they wrote, pointing to what they say is his underpublicized compassion for abuse victims. “Many don’t know that Chuck personally met with victims of abuse to hear their story,” the presidents wrote. “They were influential in helping shape his personal and professional beliefs.” Currently, there does not appear to be any effort under way to remove Wielgus from his post at USA Swimming, which paid him $908,432 in 2012.

One reason Wielgus has a solid foothold is that, by most conventional measures, U.S. swimming has been exceptionally strong during his tenure. His 17-year reign has coincided with the most successful Summer Olympics results in the governing body’s 34-year history. Ryan Lochte, Gary Hall Jr., Jenny Thompson, Amy Van Dyken, Natalie Coughlin, and 17-time gold medalist Michael Phelps all won under Wielgus’s leadership. Fans of his say he’s more than just a caretaker of talent flowing up through the system. Wielgus has been publicly battling cancer since 2006, yet in that time he has raised the sport’s profile by developing successful corporate and television sponsorships. He also helped create the USA Swimming Foundation and its signature event, the Golden Goggle Awards.

But many swimmers, women and men alike, believe that the misdeeds outlined in the WSF petition and by various journalists should be more than enough to warrant a shakeup at the top of USA Swimming.

“How does Chuck Wielgus still have his job?” says Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a three-time Olympic gold medalist and a senior director of advocacy for the WSF. A former law professor and civil rights lawyer, Hogshead-Makar has been a fierce critic of USA Swimming’s policies over the years. In addition to organizing the Wielgus petition, she worked behind the scenes with the USOC to mandate the 2013 coach-athlete relationship ban.

Two other dogged detractors of Wielgus are the journalists Muchnick and Joyce, who have spent the past two years reporting about abuse cases on Concussion Inc. They came to the subject from different paths. Muchnick, who’s based in the Bay Area, has a daughter who swam for a team coached by Jesse Stovall, who was arrested for sexually abusing another of the girls on the team in 2010. Joyce, based in New York, covered the story of Sarah Burt—a swimmer who intentionally walked into the path of a semi truck after being abused by a coach—and was starting to write extensively about USA Swimming.

In their partnership, Muchnick and Joyce have taken on stories that require deep background investigation, like the case of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, swim coach Alex Pussieldi, who allegedly recruited young male swimmers from Brazil and Mexico to live with him and then secretly filmed them in his bathroom. Muchnick, Joyce says, became the site’s “machine gun,” posting rapid-fire updates with intentionally biting headlines like “Dear Chuck Wielgus, USA Swimming: Apology Not Accepted. It’s Too Late. And You’re a Perjurer. Resign Today.” The pair has spent a significant amount of their time reporting about Wielgus.

For years, they’ve written, Wielgus never took action without a “formal complaint.” Because of ever evolving policies, in some years complaints could only be made against current member coaches, letting those who had resigned or retired off the hook. Other years, a whistle-blower was only guaranteed full protection if he or she had made a formal complaint before talking with someone. Safe Sport eventually closed the loopholes, but for years the system worked against athletes.

Until 2010, the executive director never reported a single sexual-abuse case to the authorities. In 2006, National Team director Everett Uchiyama admitted to having sex with a minor. Wielgus let him quietly resign, and the coach soon got a letter of recommendation from USA Swimming’s club-development managing director, Pat Hogan, for a job as director of aquatics at the Country Club of Colorado in Colorado Springs. When asked by a concerned parent what Uchiyama was doing there, Wielgus simply said that Uchiyama was no longer with USA Swimming and that he was unaware that Uchiyama was working with the swim team. In 2010, Uchiyama’s name appeared on the banned list.

In some cases, there’s a large amount of evidence that investigators and USA Swimming have willingly overlooked. Mitch Ivey, a former Olympic coach, had a widespread reputation for seducing his underage swimmers since the 1970s, including 17-year-old Noel Moran and 16-year-old Suzette Moran (no relation). In 1993, both cases were publicized on ESPN’s Outside the Lines.

When the program aired, Ivey was fired from his swim club, but he joined another soon after. Ivey never appeared on the banned list. When the case was brought to Safe Sport in 2011, USA Swimming’s investigator interviewed 11 individuals, including former Ivey athletes, coach colleagues, and university administrators, and said the investigation failed to produce evidence. Ivey was finally banned in 2013, after Robert Allard filed a lawsuit.

In response to these and other stories about USA Swimming’s track record, spokesman Scott Leightman told Outside that it’s been difficult for the governing body to distance itself from its past, despite the big changes the organization has made.

Robert Allard says that what’s needed is a truly independent organization that safeguards sexually abused athletes. “We have the tremendous responsibility of safeguarding children. It’s time we act like it.”

“We have taken many aggressive corrective measures to move forward to eradicate abuse,” Leightman said. “We’ve been aggressive in banning those who violate our rule book and have even brought several individuals forward to law enforcement.”

As for Wielgus’s continuing employment, Leightman asked some questions of his own. “Are personnel decisions necessary if the organization has made strides and created programs to improve itself and better serve its constituents?” he said. “Is a personnel change necessary if the actions have rectified the problems?”

The Main Existing system for protecting swimmers in the U.S., Safe Sport, was created after USA Swimming’s public image took a hit in 2010. The media glare from the two televised investigations, and the threat of litigation orchestrated by Keep Kid Safe’s attorneys, had an effect, and USA Swimming partnered with the Child Welfare League of America to launch a new program. In addition to various educational and prevention goals, Safe Sport included an Athlete Protection Policy, which spelled out rules for reporting sexual misconduct. In time, this move led to more reports of abuse and wrongdoing than USA Swimming had gotten in the previous two decades, greatly expanding the size of its original banned-members list.

In 2013, the USOC followed suit by creating the Working Group for Safe Training Environments and hiring director Malia Arrington. In 2012, it began its Safe Sport program, offering education, training, and resources to its remaining governing bodies for dealing with misconduct. The USOC required each of its 47 NGBs to put in place minimum standards for athlete protection by the end of 2013. But January 2014 came and went, and some governing bodies were still dragging their feet and wouldn’t meet the minimum standards until May 2014. Because the USOC left the responsibility of reporting, investigating, and adjudication to the NGBs, implementation was all over the map.

Few cases illustrate this as well as the one involving Bridie Farrell, a former short-track speed skater who says she was sexually abused in 1997 by fellow skater Andy Gabel. Last April, Farrell showed up at the three-day USA Safe Sport Summit, held at the Embassy Suites in downtown Denver, with a stack of postcards, two close friends, and enough nervous energy to light the entire convention center. She was there to make it clear that the system, at least for her, still isn’t working.

Bridie Farrell, a former short-track speed skater, says she was sexually abused in 1997 and 1998 by Andy Gabel, a fellow skater. Monica May

On February 28, 2013, Farrell said during an interview on Milwaukee Public Radio that she had been sexually abused by Gabel, a four-time Olympian, for two years, starting when he was 33 and she was 15. The abuse she described consisted of fondling and vaginal penetration with Gabel’s fingers.

Gabel was not a coach but a mentor. Surprisingly, he admitted to his transgressions—without using Farrell’s name—two days later in the Chicago Tribune. He resigned from the U.S. Speedskating Hall of Fame Committee and from the International Skating Union. After that, a second victim, Nikki Meyer, came forward, claiming that Gabel raped her inside a dorm at an Olympic training facility in Michigan.

U.S. Speedskating hired the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin to conduct a lengthy investigation into the governing body’s policies. Farrell’s in-depth interview about her abuse was conducted by two patent lawyers. Gabel refused to be interviewed. Despite the fact that Gabel had confessed to an inappropriate relationship with an unnamed female—presumably Farrell—U.S. Speedskating has not revoked his lifetime membership. He has never referred to Meyer by name but denies her allegations that a rape occurred, telling the media that “any relationship I had was consensual.”

Another recent example involves 20-year-old tae kwon do athlete Yasmin Brown. In September 2013, Brown filed a formal complaint against her coach, Marc Gitelman, detailing three years of alleged sexual abuse that started when she was 16. In advance of a January 2014 hearing, Brown turned in a 44-page packet to USA Taekwondo and the USOC’s ethics committee. It contained Brown’s statement, along with statements from three teammates—including two who also said they were abused—Gitelman’s ex-wife, parents to whom Gitelman had admitted to the relationship with Brown, and copies of Facebook and Twitter exchanges between Brown and Gitelman.

In the context of sex-abuse reporting, that’s a slam dunk. When Gitelman’s other employer, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, saw Brown’s packet during its own investigation into the allegations, it quickly fired him. USA Taekwando suspended Gitelman from tournaments pending its investigation, but an oversight allowed him to coach at three events in 2014.

At one of them, the U.S. Open Taekwondo Championships in Las Vegas, Brown was forced to compete with Gitelman standing just ten feet away and her former teammates cheering against her. Gitelman was not banned until April 2014. He was in the middle of appealing his suspension when he was arrested four months later for having sex with a minor.

Farrell’s and Brown’s struggles mirror Strzempko’s. Earning empathy and outrage from the public and convincing officials to take action is hard when a 40-year-old coach sleeping with a 16-year-old athlete is routinely framed as consensual. Because of this indifference, female athletes are forced to seek elusive legal remedies, sign petitions, and do anything else they can to force the hand of governing bodies.

Some women have been pushing for stricter laws at the state level. In June, Farrell advocated with other abuse victims in Albany, New York, for legislation to eliminate the statute of limitations that applies when survivors of childhood molestation decide to file for damages against their abusers. Under current law, abuse victims have only five years after they turn 18 to come forward. The bill, which hasn’t passed, would also give older victims a one-year window to report previously masked abusers.

Jancy Thompson spoke in support of California Senate Bill 131, which would give victims a one-year window to report abuse, even if the statute of limitations has run out on the case. Ben Margot/AP

In April of 2013, swimmer Jancy Thompson, a client of Allard’s, joined California state senators Jim Beall and Ricardo Lara to speak on behalf of Senate Bill 131, legislation that would make the same change for institutions in California, where survivors must come forward by the time they’re 26. Both the Catholic Church and USA Swimming lobbied heavily against the bill, arguing that private institutions would bear the brunt of the one-year window, as had happened in 2003 when a clerical error excluded public institutions from similar civil cases. That was also the year that a thousand new claims were made against the Catholic Church, for $1.2 billion in settlements. Even though Senate Bill 131 made no distinction between public and private institutions, California governor Jerry Brown vetoed it in October 2013.

Other women have tried to take on a role as self-appointed monitors. In 2011, Connie Kanen found out from a woman who had an affair with her husband, Robert Goldhahn, that he’d had multiple affairs with swimmers he coached. The woman had previously filed a complaint with USA Swimming in 2009 about the coach’s behavior, calling him a “sexual predator,” but no one from USA Swimming gave Kanen a heads-up. She e-mailed USA Swimming’s Safe Sport director, Susan Woessner, to ask why.

“From an ethical perspective, they should have let me know,” Kanen says. By that time, she and Goldhahn had moved to Blackfoot, Idaho, and opened the Snake River Sturgeon Swimming club. “They put me at risk for owning a club with a sexual predator. I had an infant at home.”

Kanen recalls that, during a phone call, Woessner said she hadn’t wanted to “ruin their marriage.” (Woessner says she doesn’t recall this.) USA Swimming continued to let Goldhahn coach. Kanen made it her job to warn other clubs about Goldhahn’s past, a task she says should have been performed by USA Swimming. In October 2012, Goldhahn shot and killed himself.