How The Athletic reports on sexual abuse

Immediately after Canadian national skiing coach Bertrand Charest was arrested in 2015 for sexually abusing team members throughout the 1990s, Charest’s victims started getting calls from the media.

“There was a publicity ban on our names; media still tried to find us,” says former Olympic skier Allison Forsyth, who says she was sexually abused by Bertrand over two years.

In 2017, Charest was found guilty on 37 charges of sexually abusing young athletes he coached in the 1990s. Forsyth reached a settlement in 2023 with Charest and Alpine Canada, skiing’s governing body in Canada, after they launched a lawsuit in 2019.

“Definitely at the beginning, I was just getting a lot of cold calls (from journalists), almost with the expectation that they had a right to hear my story,” says Forsyth.

One evening, Forsyth was eating dinner with her children when she received an unexpected call from a journalist. It was from a journalist she didn’t know, so she was apprehensive about how the story would be told. With her personal reputation on the line, she wanted to make sure it was told accurately.

With more stories about sexual abuse and violence in sports being published and more survivors coming forward, sports journalists are now looking beyond the box score. Today’s sports journalists find themselves in sensitive interviews, hearing and telling stories of sexual violence. A joint investigation by CBC News and Sports journalists in 2019 uncovered that at least 222 coaches involved in amateur sports in Canada have been convicted of sexual offences since 1998, involving more than 600 minors.

The change

During the decades Joe Recupero worked in sports journalism before leaving CBC TV in 2008, sexual abuse and violence was not widely covered.

“Twenty years ago, (sexual assault) was not something that sports journalists really investigated. Sports journalism contained itself to highlights, stats and scores,” says Recupero, now an associate professor in sport media at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Sports reporter Katie Strang is part of that change. She has seen her beat change from a general assignment sports reporter at Newsday to becoming the senior investigative reporter at The Athletic, an online sports publication. Covering some of the highest-profile sexual abuse and violence stories in sports, Strang has found her career in investigative reporting.

“I would say any good journalist should recognize that no matter what they cover, they’re going to encounter stories (about sexual abuse and violence). If they want to be a good reporter, they ought to be equipped and able to cover that,” says Strang, whose first investigative efforts focused on Larry Nassar, the former U.S. gymnastics team doctor who in 2017 pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting dozens of athletes.

How to tell the story

Sports journalists need the skills to conduct sensitive interviews, report accurately and write trauma-informed sexual abuse stories.

Tamara Cherry, author of The Trauma Beat: A Case for Re-Thinking the Business of Bad News and a former CTV crime reporter, says there is a steep learning curve for sports journalists who have traditionally not reported on trauma.

“Essentially, what trauma-informed journalism is, it is understanding the impact that your job has on the trauma survivors that you’re reporting on and the impact that it has on yourself and then adjusting your actions accordingly,” says Cherry.

Forsyth said trust is extremely important. Survivors sometimes find it hard to trust reporters because of the abuse they have endured, which often was at the hand of a person in a position of trust and power.

Journalists should set the interview ahead of time and respect the survivor’s choice to share their story and how in-depth they want to go, says Forsyth. She said she needs questions to be sent to her ahead of time, a practice that is at odds with mainstream journalism ethics. Forsyth says the journalist should understand clearly what is on or off the record and that sometimes she needs to tell part of a story she does not want on the record to get to the next part of her story.

“But at the end of the day, the moral of the story is if you have athletes or anyone that are a part of a criminal trial for sexual assault, don’t hound them,” says Forsyth. “Just don’t….It’s not worth it.”

Forsyth will only work with journalists who let her see a draft of what they plan to publish to ensure accuracy, also a practice that goes against conventional journalism norms.

Strang will initially let the survivor talk to her off the record if the survivor wants to get to know her better to make them feel comfortable.

“I’m always really understanding that sexual assault is often about control and so if you can give anyone a measure of control over the process, I think it can be really, really helpful,” says Strang.

Strang does not let her sources read the story before it is published, as it is against The Athletic’s and many other organization’s editorial policies. 

“We can, in a more generalized way, give them a sense of the information that they have shared with us that will be used in the context in which it’s used in, but we would never share a copy of our stories first,” says Strang.

Strang says she tries to avoid certain terms such as “accused,” “accuser” and “alleged” when writing about a survivor.

“If a woman told the police that something happened, instead of saying a woman alleged that this happened, I would just say a woman told police that this happened,” says Strang. “That’s my preferred language.”

Forsyth cautions journalists about the language they use. She taught Sportsnet employees about using respectful language when discussing sexual abuse in 2021. Ron MacLean, host of Hockey Night in Canada, called Forsyth.

“He said ‘Allison, can you help us? I don’t think we’re speaking accurately and respectfully of survivors because we’ve never been trained,’” says Forsyth.

In her presentation to Sportsnet, she focused on the word “alleged,” which is used by journalists to avoid stating something as fact which is yet to be proven in court.

“It is very challenging for a survivor to have that label put on them when they know what happened to be true,” says Forsyth.

Before reporting on a story about a survivor, The Athletic’s Dan Robson asks himself why he wants to tell their story, why they should trust him and how he will protect them and their story.

“We want to protect the fact that they’ve experienced something that’s so traumatic and horrifying and that they live with it that if you’ve never been in that situation, you can never possibly understand,” says the senior enterprise writer at The Athletic. “It comes with a great deal of responsibility.”

How it is changing the newsroom

One step for The Athletic UK’s editor-in-chief, Alex Kay-Jelski, is ensuring he and his colleagues understand what words and behaviours can be triggering for survivors.

Kay-Jelski says that, at The Athletic, reporters and editors do not openly communicate about a story containing sexual abuse and violence with those who aren’t working on it.

Throughout the process, the editors will consult with the news organization’s legal team and ensure anyone accused of wrongdoing is given a chance to respond to the allegations before the story is published.

The pressure of writing these stories comes from the sensitivity of the topic and the risk of litigation, says Strang. Almost every story Strang writes has to go through an exhaustive legal review, ensuring the story is “bulletproof.” She is not deterred by this and stays committed to telling the stories of survivors.

“It’s a really important part of the process and I find that makes me have to do an extra level of reporting and I find that that always makes me more confident in my reporting,” says Strang. “And it also I think makes the person or persons involved with sharing their story more confident in the process and the second reason it’s a lot of pressure is people trust you with very painful, personal, private traumas generally and that’s a really, really daunting and difficult thing to do.”

Strang knows how stressful reporting these stories can be for journalists. One in 10 media workers have thought about suicide after covering difficult stories, according to a 2021 survey that examined mental health, well-being and trauma among Canadian media workers.

When working on a survivor story, Strang says she relies on family and friends for support Strang and distraction. This help, along with guidance from a therapist and insights from colleagues, helps Strang keep a clear and healthy mind. She also emphasized the importance of self-care and exercise, such as going on walks to “clear the cobwebs.”

As these stories continue to come to light, sports journalists have a role in making sports safe, says Strang.

“I think sunlight (is) the best disinfectant, making sure that people are aware of issues so that they can educate themselves.”

About the author

Thomas Scott

Thomas is in his fourth year of journalism at the University of King's College. He loves sports and has reported on a variety of them for years....