Courts: Former star athlete’s lawsuit says Archbishop Mitty, Los Gatos High failed to stop sex abuse by coach.
LOS GATOS >> A former standout track and field athlete is suing Los Gatos and Archbishop Mitty high schools on allegations that both prominent schools failed to protect her from a predatory and abusive coach who now is being prosecuted for allegedly sexually assaulting three of his athletes two decades ago.
Heather Hennessy, 38, said publicly for the first time May 6 that she was sexually exploited by Chioke “Chee” Robinson starting in 1998 when she was a 14-year-old freshman at Mitty. She said that the abuse continued after she transferred to Los Gatos High — to get away from Robinson — because he got a job there around the same time.
Robinson is being prosecuted in Santa Clara County on multiple sexual assault counts involving three women who were student-athletes under his tutelage in the late 1990s and the mid-2000s. He also previously coached at Piedmont Hills High School — which like Mitty, is in San Jose — and local club teams, and worked as a private coach. At the time of his 2019 arrest, he was an assistant coach at San Francisco State University.
The new claims in Hennessy’s lawsuit mean that at least five women have come forward either to law enforcement or in lawsuits to describe Robinson as a sexual predator.
At a news conference May 6 in front of Los Gatos High School, attorney Stephen Estey outlined the lawsuit’s claims. He said the then-23-year-old Robinson groomed Hennessy at Mitty, paying an extraordinary amount of one-to-one attention to the teenage runner, including stretching routines that were too intimate.
“It ultimately led to her being repeatedly sexually abused on that campus in that parking lot dozens and dozens of times, and the people in charge … people in charge of keeping her safe, for protecting her from sexual predators, didn’t do a thing,” Estey said. “This was an open secret.”
Hennessy said she left Mitty her sophomore year, both to get away from Robinson and to train under renowned coach Willie Harmatz at Los Gatos High. But soon after she got to her new school, Robinson was hired there as a coach and she said she promptly told Harmatz about her experiences with Robinson.
“I notified Willie Harmatz that Chioke had been molesting me and that I didn’t want to be stretched, touched anymore by him,” Hennessy said. “Instead of protecting me, Harmatz made the decision to isolate me and keep me on the other side of the track just training with him, but allowed for Robinson to still be on the track every day as a predator throughout my high school life.”
Estey said that Harmatz, who was a mandated reporter under the law, was obligated to alert authorities to what Hennessy had told him. Instead, Estey said, Harmatz stifled a 1999 criminal investigation of another student’s sexual abuse allegation against Robinson by threatening their scholarship opportunities if they implicated Robinson to police.
A similar claim about Harmatz was made in a separate lawsuit filed in January, also against the Los Gatos-Saratoga Union High School District. He disputed that account when the lawsuit was announced and couldn’t be reached for comment May 6 about Hennessy’s lawsuit.
The lawsuit, which names the Catholic Diocese of San Jose and the Los Gatos school district as primary defendants, seeks unspecified damages. Estey and Hennessy said that they want to see wholesale culture changes for sex abuse reporting at the schools.
“I want to make sure that the message gets across that these schools and coaches need to take protection of children and kids, athletes and students, serious,” Hennessy said. “I want it to stop now.”
A statement from the diocese issued May 6 said that “we take all and any allegations of abuse seriously and remain resolute in our support for victim-survivors, irrespective of the dates of abuse. We welcome the opportunity to review the complaint, but we are not able to otherwise comment on the litigation at this time.”
The Los Gatos-Saratoga Union High School District in a statement similarly said it could not comment on the lawsuit before reviewing the filing but that “the district takes these types of allegations very seriously.”
Hennessy achieved national accolades in the 800 meters before she suffered a major back injury from a cliff jump in Lake Tahoe, which she said Harmatz urged her to do as a teambuilding exercise. But she said she continued to carry the trauma in her adult life, during which she ascended to a role as a Fox Sports reporter.
It was so scarring that when she was inducted into her school’s hall of fame, she said she skipped an appearance “because this whole thing, my entire story and the abuse with both coaches and both schools, was so painful that I didn’t want to go back.”
Hennessy said May 6 that part of what inspired her to come forward after decades of suffering silently was an event last summer on the Los Gatos High football field organized by the student sexual abuse support group From Survivors For Survivors. One of the group’s co-founders, senior Sasha Ryu, said she she took Hennessy’s message to heart.
“It just feels like she’s taking back a lot of the power stolen from her,” Ryu said. “To see that is really inspiring.”