KISSES ON THE LIPS, UPPER LEG MASSAGES AND SPOONING IN BED
FORMER GYMNAST TESTIFIES AT COACH’S SEX ASSAULT TRIAL
She was a little girl in a small city with a big Olympic dream. Her chance was through her gymnastics coach — a man she now says touched her inappropriately and sexually assaulted her over years of a vigorous training regimen when she was a pre-teen and teenager.
Now a woman in her 30s, the gymnastics hopeful told a court how Dave Brubaker controlled every aspect of her life when she was training with him as a teenager.
“I would say that, at the time, Dave had full control over everything — what time I went to bed, what I ate, how I did my hair,” she said at the judge-alone trial. “Whatever he said, went. I had full trust in him.”
Brubaker, 55, pleaded not guilty to one count of sexual assault and one count of invitation to sexual touching related to the alleged incidents involving the teenaged gymnast between 2000-07.
He was initially charged with 10 sexual offences last December and was placed on administrative leave by Gymnastics Canada, where he had served as director of the women’s national team, but the number of charges were reduced Tuesday at the beginning of the trial.
The woman said she began gymnastics when she was four. By age seven, she was training 25 hours a week, before and after school.
By age 10, she was competing nationally. At 12, she and her family made the decision that she move to Burlington, Ont., with Brubaker, his wife Liz, their two boys and three other gymnasts to follow her dream.
She described routinely kissing Brubaker on the lips, part of their ritual after he asked why she kissed her dad that way. There were also massages that made her feel uncomfortable.
“I remember being hungry a lot, and near the end, I was pretty homesick,” she said.
At age 14, she moved back to Sarnia, as did the Brubakers. She continued the training before and after school, with Brubaker driving her to school and picking her up. She would kiss him goodbye when he dropped her off at school, she said, and on occasion, his hands would move down her back to her buttocks.
At the gym, “we would hug every time they said hello and every time we said goodbye.”
The woman said Brubaker would take her to his house, where he occasionally would spoon her in bed and tickle her belly, before driving her to practice. She told the court that she feared the coach would punish her in the gym if she denied his advances.
The woman, who was the first witness to testify, alleged the spooning incidents started when she was in high school and continued until she quit gymnastics at 19.
“I remember feeling like bugs were crawling under my skin,” she told the court. “I was very uncomfortable. And sick to my stomach.”
She levelled other allegations against Brubaker in court, saying that he would regularly massage her body to relieve her of soreness. Sometimes, she told the court, those massages made her uncomfortable, like when Brubaker would massage her upper thigh, under her underwear.
Several times, he massaged around her pubic area, she said. On other instances, he would touch her buttocks while hugging her goodbye.
When questioned by the defence, the woman acknowledged telling investigators that she didn’t think Brubaker’s hands went under her underwear on purpose. She also said it wasn’t uncommon for gymnasts to receive massages.
Brubaker’s defence lawyer, Patrick Ducharme, noted that the woman could not remember which hand his client used to touch her buttocks. He also noted that the officer who investigated Brubaker was related to the woman, and was the best man in her wedding.
The woman told the court that she intentionally hurt herself and quit gymnastics when she was 19 because she could no longer handle the pressures of her relationship with Brubaker. She coached for a year after that, she said, but avoided contact with Brubaker when possible.
Ducharme suggested that the woman hurt herself and quit gymnastics around the same time that she realized she wouldn’t make it to the Olympics.
“That must have put a tremendous strain on you,” he said, noting that Brubaker ended up taking other athletes to the Olympics.
Another former competitive gymnast who trained under Brubaker testified later Tuesday that her former coach suggested his trainees kiss him and his wife — also a gymnastics coach — on the cheek.
“Dave told me that we were to kiss him and Mrs. Brubaker as a way to show the other girls we had to respect them,” she told the court.
She noted, however, that for several years, the only gymnast she saw kissing Brubaker on the lips was the complainant.
The second woman also said she saw Brubaker massaging the complainant in her underwear, before turning to her and saying “you’re next.”
“I remember thinking, ‘I’m not comfortable being massaged in my underwear,’ so I went into my room and put on tights,” she said.
The charges against Brubaker, who was Canada’s head gymnastics coach at the 2016 Rio Olympics, came at a watershed moment for gymnastics in Canada.
Earlier that month, Gymnastics Canada suspended Edmonton-based coach Michel Arsenault over allegations that he sexually abused at least three gymnasts in Quebec when they were minors in the 1980s and early ’90s.
And in January, a Mississauga, Ont.-based gymnastics coach was charged with multiple offences related to allegations that he sexually abused a 15-year-old girl over a four-year period.