Los Angeles: Former Olympian Ariana Kukors Smith has filed a lawsuit against USA Swimming and accused the governing body of knowing she was being sexually abused by her coach Sean Hutchison and covering it up. In her plaint, she has alleged that Hutchison started grooming her for sexual relationship at 13. He touched and kissed her when she was 16 and had sex with her at 17. “USA Swimming officials secretly agreed Hutchison should be specifically protected from the background check process,” Kukors Smith said in the filing. “Had they done so, his past would have surfaced.” Kukors Smith, who won the 200m individual medley at the 2009 World Championships in Rome and was fifth in the event at the 2012 London Olympics also said that by 2006 a number of US Swimming officials knew about Hutchison’s sexual involvement with her.
However, Hutchison has denied the claims Kukors Smith, now 28, first made online earlier this year, when USA Swimming says it first learned of them. “By the start of 2006, it was widely known within USA Swimming’s leadership group that Hutchison was engaged in a sexual relationship with plaintiff, then 16 years old,” Kukors Smith said in the lawsuit.
“Despite the ‘open secret’ status of the relationship. no one reported this reasonable suspicion of child abuse or endangerment to the authorities, no one did anything to protect plaintiff as a minor from inappropriate grooming and ultimate molestation, and no one did anything to repudiate Hutchison’s conduct to halt and/or arrest the ongoing trauma which continued well into plaintiff’s adulthood.”
