Coast Guard Academy official resigns, says she was directed to lie to Congress as part of ‘cruel’ sexual assault cover-up
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/10/politics/coast-guard-official-resigns-alleges-coverup-invs/index.html
A US Coast Guard Academy official says top leaders directed her to lie to sexual assault victims and Congress, making her an unwitting accomplice in a cover-up of decades of abuse.
As a result, Shannon Norenberg says she’s resigning from her role as the academy’s head of sexual assault prevention and issuing a public apology to survivors, saying she is no longer willing to stay silent.
“The Coast Guard lied to me,” she wrote in a public statement posted online Sunday. “I can no longer in good conscience be part of an organization that would betray me, betray victims of sexual assault, and betray the system I helped set up to hold perpetrators at the academy accountable.”
Norenberg’s explosive allegations were made in advance of a congressional hearing this week at which the Coast Guard’s first female commandant, Adm. Linda Fagan, is slated to testify about the agency’s sexual misconduct scandal.
In an exclusive interview with CNN, Norenberg said she had made it her mission to help sexual assault survivors at the Coast Guard Academy for more than a decade. She said she was devastated when she recently discovered old records showing how leaders had used her as part of the cover-up of Operation Fouled Anchor, a secret internal probe into a history of sexual assault cover-ups that CNN exposed last summer.
She wrote in her public posting that she was sent on an “apology tour” in 2019 to brief dozens of assault victims about their cases, which had previously been mishandled by academy leadership. The list of talking points she was given at the time shows she was directed to tell victims that Congress was already fully aware of the operation, which she now knows was not the case. She believes this was intended to “dissuade the victims from contacting their Members of Congress.”
The Coast Guard said it was a mistake – not a conspiracy – for the talking point about Congress to be on the list given to Norenberg. The agency added that Coast Guard officials recently interviewed a now-retired Coast Guard officer present during those victim meetings, and she said the talking point was never brought up. Norenberg said she didn’t have a precise recollection of all the meetings, but noted she had one-on-one calls with several victims outside the presence of the now-retired officer. Norenberg also said that if she had been told that Congress was unaware, she would have notified lawmakers immediately.
“Why would anyone trust anything the Coast Guard has to say about Operation Fouled Anchor at this point?” she said. Norenberg was also instructed to not include the historic assaults being investigated in data that Congress would see, she said, and was prohibited from offering survivors key paperwork that would have helped them access mental health services and veteran’s benefits available to sexual assault victims.
“We weren’t sent out there to help these people, I realized,” she wrote. “The whole thing was a cruel cover-up at the expense of the victims, with the entire purpose being to preserve the image of the Coast Guard and avoid scandal. And the Coast Guard used me as part of their plan.”