IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — Long before his banishment from gymnastics and arrest after accusations he abused girls he coached, warning signs about Sean Gardner were coming from several directions — his former boss, his gymnasts and their parents.
The former boss says she brought her concerns about Gardner’s “grooming” behavior to USA Gymnastics, the sport’s national governing body. The parents and girls described telling coaches of inappropriate behavior at Gardner’s new job, an academy that produced Olympians and is owned by renowned coach Liang “Chow” Qiao.
Yet Qiao not only kept Gardner on the job — he promoted him.
Associated Press interviews with four parents whose daughters trained under Gardner and a letter obtained by the AP from Gardner’s former employer to clients at her gym revealed that concerns about the coach were reported to gymnastics authorities as far back as 2018 — four years before he was kicked out of the sport.
One girl told Qiao during a meeting in 2020 that she had been touched inappropriately by Gardner during training but Qiao said any such contact was inadvertent and intended to save athletes from injury, a parent told AP.
“She felt totally invalidated,” the parent said of the response from Qiao, who built his reputation coaching Olympic gold medalists Shawn Johnson and Gabby Douglas and China’s women’s national team.
The watchdog responsible for investigating wrongdoing in Olympic sports confirmed to AP that Qiao and several other coaches were privately sanctioned for failing to report sexual misconduct allegations against Gardner after learning about them.
Qiao did not return AP emails and phone messages seeking comment. Gardner, 38, has been jailed since his Aug. 14 arrest pending federal court proceedings in Mississippi. He hasn’t entered a plea, and court records don’t indicate if he has a lawyer. He did not return AP messages seeking comment before his arrest.
Concerns at Chow’s Gymnastics were first raised in 2019
One parent recalled attending a 2019 meeting with the parents of two other girls with Qiao to discuss their daughters’ concerns, including that Gardner was making them uncomfortable in the way he touched them while spotting and by talking about inappropriate subjects.
The parent, like the others, spoke to AP on condition of anonymity to protect their daughters. The AP generally does not identify sexual abuse victims.
The meeting came more than a year after Gardner’s former employer at a gym in Purvis, Mississippi, Candi Workman, said she discussed concerns with a USA Gymnastics attorney about “troubling behavior” involving Gardner’s “coaching and grooming behavior.”
Gardner was removed from the sport in July 2022 after the U.S. Center for SafeSport received a sexual abuse complaint and issued a temporary ban — a move it called “the only reason Gardner was barred from coaching young athletes” until his arrest.
The center forwarded that information to Iowa police, and it was another three years before the FBI arrested Gardner on charges of child sexual exploitation. Among the most damning evidence were allegations that he installed a hidden camera in the bathroom of the Mississippi gym to record girls as young as 6 undressing.
Gardner’s rise and the sport’s inability to root him out came even as news of Larry Nassar’s decades-long sexual abuse of gymnasts was in the headlines and gyms were implementing safeguards to better protect athletes. It was the inability of USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic Committee to police predators, along with inaction by the FBI after learning of the abuse, that led to SafeSport’s founding in 2017.
“This is the same type of behavior where girls aren’t believed. They are cast aside. They are tamped down,” said Megan Bonanni, a lawyer who helped secure a $138.7 million settlement for Nassar’s victims over the FBI’s failures.
“What we’re seeing with Gardner, it’s multiple institutions failing to act with the urgency that child safety demands. … Local police, SafeSport, USA Gymnastics and this gym. All of them.”
Former boss says she reported ‘troubling behavior’ in 2018
In her first comments on the case, Workman, the Mississippi gym owner, told gymnasts and their parents in a letter that she reported “troubling behavior” by Gardner to then-USA Gymnastics lawyer Mark Busby in January 2018.
Workman wrote that her concerns were related to “grooming,” which USA Gymnastics defines as a process where a person builds trust and emotional connections with a child for the purpose of sexually abusing them.
Workman did not elaborate on what she reported and hasn’t returned messages from AP seeking comment. Busby, whose job at the time related to athlete safety and is now in private practice, declined to comment when reached by AP.
The SafeSport center said it was notified by USA Gymnastics in January 2018 that one of its affiliated gyms had resolved a report involving Gardner. But the center said it didn’t investigate further because the report was not related to sexual misconduct and it did not receive detailed information.
Despite that, Gardner was able to leave Mississippi for a better job in another USA Gymnastics-affiliated facility — Chow’s Gymnastics and Dance Institute, the West Des Moines, Iowa, gym that had become a mecca for top gymnasts.
Despite concerns at Chow’s, Gardner was promoted
Chow’s Gymnastics said Gardner passed a standard USA Gymnastics background check when he was hired in 2018.
Concerns about his behavior in the gym began soon after, yet Gardner was consistently given more responsibility. Girls in one training group pushed for other adults to intervene, which resulted in the 2019 meeting between parents and Qiao.
But not long after that meeting, Chow’s Gymnastics promoted Gardner in January 2020 to head coach of a key girls’ team, telling parents in an email obtained by AP: “He has demonstrated the leadership and put good effort to do his job well.” Gardner was also director of the Chow’s Winter Classic, a meet that draws hundreds of gymnasts to Iowa every year.
Chow’s Gymnastics kept Gardner on the payroll after he was arrested in August 2021 for second-offense drunken driving, a crash in which he ran another car off the road and his blood alcohol content recorded more than three times the legal limit for driving. Gardner was sentenced to a week in jail and two years of probation.
In a statement, Chow’s Gymnastics said it acted “promptly, responsibly and in full compliance” after it received notice in April 2022 that Gardner was to be barred from one-on-one or unsupervised contact with athletes while SafeSport investigated unspecified misconduct.
Chow’s Gymnastics said that it enforced those measures and removed Gardner as head coach. The gym said it fired Gardner in July 2022 after SafeSport strengthened Gardner’s restrictions to a temporary suspension from coaching and all contact with athletes.
“Although there had been no finding of misconduct at that time, Chow’s Gymnastics chose to err on the side of protecting its athletes,” the statement said.
SafeSport said the sanctions in 2022 against Qiao and the other coaches who failed to report sexual misconduct allegations included warnings, required education, probation, and suspension in one case.
The center does not normally comment about specific cases but said in a statement to AP that it has “the ability to correct the record in light of the recent public letter issued by Chow’s Gymnastics and Dance Institute.”
Gym’s claim of prompt response infuriates parents
The gym’s statement infuriated some parents and former Chow’s pupils who said concerns about Gardner had been widely known. Several of Gardner’s students left the gym beginning in 2019 in what parents called a mass exodus.
The parents of one gymnast recalled witnessing Gardner touch another girl’s buttocks while standing behind her during practice. Gardner told the parents that his hand slipped by accident, and the father recalled warning Gardner that there “would be no accidents with my daughter.”
When that girl eventually quit the gym due in part to Gardner’s conduct, the father recalled restraining himself when Gardner came out to the parking lot to say he was sorry.
Bonanni, the attorney for survivors of Nassar’s abuse, said she is troubled by the slow response in the Gardner case and expects more victims to come forward.
“The damage caused by this kind of abuse is permanent, and it’s really long-lasting,” she said. “It changes the trajectory of a young person’s life.”
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Pells reported from Denver.
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