Hewitt whistleblower set to sue in US court

THE American woman who blew the lid off the Bob Hewitt rape scandal is suing the former tennis legend for what she says were years of sexual abuse.

Speaking from her home in Boston, Heather Crowe Conner, 54, said that from the age of 14 she had endured abuse by Hewitt in an attempt to win his “praise and admiration”.

Conner, a former tennis pro who is now a high-school teacher, has approached a US district court to sue Hewitt for hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.

She was not among the three women who laid charges against him in South Africa for sexually assaulting them during the ’80s.

But Conner, who played at Wimbledon and in the US Open, paved the way for the women to charge Hewitt criminally by first bringing his abuse to public notice five years ago.

Last month, Hewitt, 75, was sentenced by the High Court in Pretoria to six years’ i mprisonment for rape and sexual assault. His application for leave to appeal will be heard on June 19.

Conner was unsuccessful in pressing criminal charges against Hewitt, who became her personal coach in the US in 1975.

A law that extended the statute of limitations in terms of which victims of child sexual abuse could file civil lawsuits came into effect in Massachusetts last year, making it possible for Conner to bring a civil suit.

“I have filed a civil case against him because I would like to hold him accountable for medical costs incurred as a result of the damage I suffered,” she said.

Conner said their “relationship” lasted for 14 years until “I retired from the tour in 1988 at the US Open”. She said she suffered “four rapes while underage and many others after the age of 18”.

She said she had been convinced that they had a “relationship in which he loved me”.

“I did everything, train, and win for his praise and admiration. I wanted to make him proud of me. He told me I could be great when I was 14 if I worked hard.

“That is all I did, I worked hard my whole tennis-playing life to the exclusion of everything else — friends, social life, family connections.”

She declined to provide details of the lawsuit, saying this might jeopardise her case.

However, the Boston Globe reported that she was suing Hewitt for “severe and permanent emotional injury”.

“Hewitt never used any means of birth control, but required Heather to keep track of her monthly period, which caused her to have great fears regarding the possibility of pregnancy, abortion, Aids and other sexually transmitted diseases,” read her court papers, as quoted in the newspaper.