Silent Currents: Inside the Scandal That Rocked Paralympic Swimming
More than two years ago, Paralympic swimming champion Robert Griswold was accused of sexually abusing a teammate with an intellectual disability. After Colorado Springs police chose not to pursue criminal charges against Griswold last year, will Parker Egbert and his family ever get the justice they seek?
Silent Currents: Inside the Scandal That Rocked Paralympic Swimming
The Lawsuit
Before Paralympic swimmer Parker Egbert moved to Colorado Springs in January of 2022, the USOPC assured his parents that he'd be safe with roommate Robert Griswold. However, according to a civil lawsuit filed by the Egberts, the USOPC had already received complaints from at least six different athletes concerning Griswold and his misconduct. Parker allegedly suffered months of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of Griswold, who had previously been suspended for six months by the U.S. Center for SafeSport.
Back in September of 2020, blind swimmer Anastasia Pagonis reported that Griswold grabbed her butt and sent her a sexually inappropriate text message when she was just 16 years old — but that's not actually why he was first suspended by SafeSport, at least according to the lawsuit. SafeSport allegedly found that Griswold's only misconduct with Pagonis was providing alcohol to a minor, which the lawsuit claims was the official reason for his six-month suspension in 2020.
“Oftentimes, what USOPC tries to do is overlay exactly what they do for Olympic sport on top of Paralympic sport, and that doesn’t work. And it’s denying our specific needs as individuals. They’re creating the opportunity for abuse when they do that.”
What is the narrative? The dominant narrative is, ‘We shall overcome.’ Shut the f*$% up. You don’t overcome oppression. You don’t overcome abuse like this. The only way you do that is transparency and accountability for what has existed — and to admit your lack of knowledge and ignorance. Do you think that’s going to happen? At the USOPC? No.”
“He would take them everywhere and get them ready. It was a little weird because, us as teammates, we always were like, ‘Why isn’t there a staff member on staff to solely take care of these athletes? Why is Robert the one who is in charge? Robert’s got races, Robert’s got shit to worry about, why is he in charge of these two guys?’
“If I would have known he did some of the stuff he did before the big incident, I wouldn’t have been smiling in his face and fucking being his friend. I wouldn’t have been in any contact with the guy if I had known he did any of the stuff that was happening before.”
Welcome back to “Silent Currents: Inside the Scandal That Rocked Paralympic Swimming.” Episode three: The Lawsuit.
Ahead of the Tokyo Paralympics in 2021, deaf-blind swimmer Becca Meyers had her request for a personal care attendant denied by the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. Also known as the USOPC, the organization said the Japanese government wasn’t allowing non-essential personnel due to the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning only one personal care attendant would travel with the entire team of 34 U.S. Paralympic swimmers. Meyers was a medal contender, having broken two world records at the most recent World Championships in 2019. But after qualifying for the Tokyo Paralympics, she was forced to cut her career short rather than risk another nightmare experience like the one she had at the Rio 2016 Paralympics.
Five years prior, Meyers was assured by the USOPC that coaches and teammates would help her navigate Rio as a deaf-blind athlete. Instead, she wound up in tears on the floor of her hotel room because she wasn’t getting enough to eat. Another U.S. Paralympian also struggled in Rio without a personal care attendant, getting lost in the airport for several hours.
“What happens at the international level is that there are so many slots for teams that can travel, so you can only have so many athletes and so many coaches, etc. And in Olympic sports, they don’t need personal care attendants. But in Paralympic sport, it is needed, and it’s not being addressed. And it’s a big issue.”
That’s eight-time Paralympic champion Candace Cable, who became the first woman to medal in both the Summer and Winter Paralympic Games back in 1992. She’s one of many disability advocates who have been calling for the USOPC to better address the specific needs of Paralympic athletes by hiring more personal care attendants, or PCAs for short. If USOPC officials were listening, maybe they wouldn’t have assigned fellow athlete Robert Griswold to be the primary PCA in Tokyo for Team USA’s two swimmers with intellectual disabilities.
Griswold continued living with one of those swimmers, Parker Egbert, for seven months at the Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. Griswold lacked PCA qualifications and had a history of misconduct, but the USOPC allowed him to control Parker’s daily schedule and meals, shave his pubic hair before races, and spend unsupervised time with him in the locker room showers.
Before Parker moved to Colorado Springs in January of 2022, the USOPC assured his parents that he’d be safe with Griswold. However, according to a civil lawsuit filed by the Egberts, the USOPC had already received complaints from at least six different athletes concerning Griswold and his misconduct. Parker allegedly suffered months of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of Griswold, who had previously been suspended for six months by the U.S. Center for SafeSport. Back in September of 2020, blind swimmer Anastasia Pagonis reported that Griswold grabbed her butt and sent her a sexually inappropriate text message when she was just 16 years old, but that’s not actually why he was first suspended by SafeSport, according to the lawsuit. SafeSport allegedly found that Griswold’s only misconduct with Pagonis was providing alcohol to a minor, which the lawsuit claims was the official reason for his six-month suspension in 2020.
When Griswold returned to the Training Center in May of 2021, the Egberts’ lawsuit says that five separate athletes reported to the USOPC that Griswold routinely made them feel uncomfortable and invaded their personal space. Another athlete reported that there was something bigger that had occurred with Griswold, but it “wasn’t her story to tell.” Yet another athlete became tearful when reporting that something happened with her and Griswold in the past that rendered her incapable of living on the same floor as him at the Training Center.
Those reports never seem to have been passed along to SafeSport, and the USOPC never shared the concerns with National Team members or Parker’s family. Some swimmers heard rumors, but they often came from Griswold himself, who spun a narrative that he was the victim, as one National Team member described:
“We heard about something going on, but it came from Robert himself. He was like, ‘Yeah I’m going through SafeSport stuff, something happened with so and so.’ He would say it in a way that he would create a narrative that he was a victim in a bigger situation. I had teammates who knew what was going on with some of the other incidents, but it didn’t come from USOPC officials — it came from Robert himself. But we never really got the full details, obviously. He just said, ‘Oh, they’re trying to make up a story that I did this and that.’ He made it sound like he was the victim. So he had a lot of people on his side thinking that, ‘Yeah, girls are just gossipy and just create all this bullshit.’”
That same National Team member recalled how Parker was obsessed with making sure that Griswold wouldn’t get mad at him. They also noticed Parker picking at his butt. Only later did the National Team member recognize the habits as possible signs of something more sinister. They requested to remain anonymous due to fear of retaliation from Griswold.
After practices at the Training Center, Griswold routinely told Parker, “Come on buddy, it’s time to take a shower.” On one occasion, according to the Egberts’ lawsuit, a USOPC coach saw Parker leaving the locker room in tears after entering the showers with Griswold and asked him what had happened. Before Parker could answer, Griswold responded that Parker was fine and ushered him away from the locker room. That incident wasn’t reported by the coach until an investigation was finally conducted by the USOPC and SafeSport in November of 2022.
November of 2022 was also when the Egberts brought their civil lawsuit against Griswold and the USOPC. As you’ll recall from episode two, they were forced to drop SafeSport as a defendant in the case because of the organization’s legal immunity from eligibility decisions. The Egberts accuse the USOPC of actively covering up complaints against Griswold. In order to secure punitive damages against the USOPC, the Egberts’ lawyers must prove that the organization’s negligence was willful and reckless.
Why would the USOPC go to such lengths to protect Griswold? Maybe it’s because he was the most accomplished Paralympic swimmer among active American men, embedding himself so deeply within the program that he determined the selection process for the Tokyo Games, according to National Team members.
“He was the driving force behind the Tokyo selection procedures. And he was involved before Tokyo as well helping with classification issues with the Paralympics and the standards as well. Not sure how much influence he had before the Tokyo selection procedures, but I know he was involved with classification stuff. When coaches and members needed help, he would step in and do it.
“I always knew Robert was a little weird. We called him ‘Rain Man,’ ‘Swim-a-pedia’ because he knew fucking everything on every stat from every race in every classification from every year. On the National Team, he was our go-to guy. Everybody knew if you wanted to know how far you were from making the team, if you wanted to know what the standard was, what the record was, go to Robert and Robert would tell you — to the tenth — what you needed to swim to make the team, break the record, whatever.
Or perhaps it’s less of a conspiracy and more about the USOPC’s general indifference toward abuse within its Paralympic ranks. In 2020, former USOPC vice president of sports medicine Dr. Bill Moreau filed a whistleblower retaliation lawsuit alleging he was fired for reporting abuses. Among the cases in question was the statutory rape of a 15-year-old female Paralympic athlete. After Dr. Moreau reported the incident to USOPC officials, he received a case review from leadership where the question, “Was a crime committed?” had been marked “no.”
“They couldn’t even recognize sex abuse when it was right in front of them,” Moreau told ESPN. “Frankly, what I’m really worried about is, what if another kid gets raped and I didn’t say something?”
Retired wheelchair tennis player Karin Korb, a two-time Paralympian, believes the USOPC’s failures reflect common misconceptions about the disabled community.
“Because we are infantilized, we are often viewed or witnessed as such kind and loving people. I will tell you, personally, I will throat punch a bitch, okay? Do not assume that disabled people are kind, are loving, are not abusers — it’s human design. We are like everyone else. Just because we are disabled doesn’t mean we aren’t sexual predators, doesn’t mean we aren’t violent…”
Fellow Paralympian Candace Cable agreed with Korb.
“There’s a huge denial by the non-disabled world that disabled people could actually do something like that. And within the USOPC, it’s even bigger. It really is really massive, and within the USOPC it’s even bigger — that disabled people have the same capacity as non-disabled people. It’s rampant within there, and there’s a massive denial of what needs to change and what are the abuses that already exist on all the different levels. People don’t want to address those, and they were forced to with the Larry Nassar case. The Foundation for Global Sports Development did a massive work in bringing that forward because the USOPC didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to hear about it. ‘Money for medals’ kind of thing, is their philosophy.”
Earlier this year, the Egberts’ civil lawsuit against Griswold and the USOPC appeared to be on its way toward a settlement. The Egberts reduced their monetary demand from $100 million to $9.9 million and convinced the USOPC to schedule mediation for July. Parker began undergoing special therapy sessions to prepare for a trip back to Colorado that could retraumatize him.
But just a few months ago in June, USOPC lawyers revealed that their insurance coverage amounts to almost $10 million instead of the $1 million that had been disclosed last year during discovery. A couple weeks later, the USOPC backed out of the scheduled mediation, citing a dispute with its insurer.
A German company called HDI Global Specialty filed a lawsuit in June against the USOPC and the Egberts arguing that it should not be held liable for insurance coverage in Griswold’s case. HDI wrote that its policy provision for abuse does not apply because Griswold was not an employee of the USOPC during the time in 2021-22 when he allegedly abused Parker. The insurance company is attempting to recoup more than $600,000 in legal fees accrued by the USOPC over the past two years.
Olympic and Paralympic athletes are not technically considered employees of the USOPC even though they help generate revenue for the organization and receive benefits such as performance rewards, training support, and health insurance.
So settlement talks have essentially been tabled, temporarily. The USOPC’s insurance company won’t participate in settlement discussions until there is a ruling in its coverage case, and the USOPC said it intends to file a motion to stay that action until there is a resolution in Egbert v. USOPC — creating a settlement gridlock.
It’s a bit confusing, but the bottom line is that the USOPC hid critical information about the liability limits of their insurance policy, and now settlement talks are all but impossible for the moment. Last month, the Egberts’ attorneys filed a motion for discovery sanctions against lawyer Julie Walker and the USOPC seeking an order that would force the organization to turn over one last insurance policy that it still refuses to disclose, compensate Parker for the mental health treatment he underwent in preparation for the scheduled mediation in July, and require the USOPC to engage in renewed settlement discussions with the Egberts.
Meanwhile, Griswold recently filed his own lawsuit against SafeSport claiming that he’s been denied due process and “intentionally targeted” in a “smear campaign.” In a statement, his lawyer said that Griswold was forced to miss the Paris Paralympics earlier this month despite Colorado Springs police fully investigating the allegations and the district attorney concluding they do not meet the standard for probable cause.
Parker didn’t watch any of the Paris Paralympics that concluded last week. His mom says it’s still too painful to watch his former teammates compete.