My parents and I put our trust in a monster
Eerie echoes of gymnastics-doc saga in tennis pro who terrorized teen girls
Gary Wilensky was a popular tennis coach on the Manhattan prep-school circuit, well-liked by students and parents alike. Piper Weiss was a student at Chapin, the all-girls private school on the Upper East Side. She was taking private lessons from Wilensky in 1993 when he attacked one of his students in a failed kidnapping attempt and subsequently killed himself in a scandal that rocked the private-school world. In her new memoir, “You All Grow Up and Leave Me” (William Morrow, out now), Weiss writes about the abduction and its aftermath.
IN late January, Larry Nassar, the disgraced USA Gymnastics doctor, was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison for abusing more than 150 girls — at times, while their parents were in the same room. Coverage of Nassar’s abuse and the testimony of his victims raised the question:
How could this happen? We asked the same question in 1993, when my tennis instructor, Gary Wilensky, a celebrated Upper East Side girls coach, was exposed as a child stalker and violent sexual predator.
Much like Nassar, Wilensky had cultivated a largely glowing reputation as a girls coach — vetted by the United States Professional Tennis Association, hailed by elite prep schools where he served as team coach, and named Coach of the Year by the Eastern Tennis Association prior to his attack.
His hands-on approach was key to his success — known for calling parents and students with personalized progress reports and sending Valentines and birthday wishes. He was more than a coach; he was “Grandpa Gary” to the girls on the tennis team at the Brearley School on East 83rd Street, where he coached on weekdays, and a confidante to students who enrolled in his private and semiprivate lessons year after year, riding shotgun to tennis bubbles in his rattling four-door sedan and joining him for dinners out.
But scratch the surface and there was a history of firings at Point O’ Pines camp in upstate New York, Midtown Tennis, and by individuals he coached privately, at times due to his obsession with his students. There was also an arrest in 1988 for stalking three adolescents — although the case was wiped from his record after he completed six months of psychological treatment.
Wilensky favored disguises, both on and off the court — donning tutus and rolling skates at the all-girls camps north of New York City where he taught in the summers, and, as it was revealed in the wake of his abduction attempt, wearing masks, wigs and various off-putting props while filming children on the streets of Manhattan.
Five years after his stalking arrest, the 56-year-old instructor grew obsessed with a talented 17year-old player who had taken private lessons from him and who had recently cut ties when his gifts, phone calls and persistent interest in her personal life became unsettling. One night in late April 1993, after following the girl and her mother to a tournament outside of Albany, he approached them in the parking lot of their hotel — disguised as a vagrant in a trench coat and wool cap pushing a wheelchair — and proceeded to attack them with a cattle prod.
What followed in the minutes and hours ahead was a series of remarkable, unpredictable events that would expose Wilensky’s secret and make headlines worldwide. A few hours after his would-be victims escaped, police approached him in a parking lot, and he committed suicide with a shotgun.
JUST a few weeks before the end, Wilensky had confided in me that he was depressed; “You all grow up and leave me,” he remarked sadly one day as we drove in his car to a lesson. His confession solidified what I thought was our connection, and made me feel less alone as I grappled in secret with my own depression, suicidal thoughts, and self-harm. He was the one adult who treated me as if I were more mature than my 14 years, the only educator who at the time seemed to believe in my potential enough to provide free lessons and dinners on weekends.
These were grooming tactics, something I would learn years later.
Olympic gold-medalist and survivor Aly Raisman, too, recalled the gifts Nassar showered team members with and the subtle ways in which he would earn their trust. “He was always, always, always on my side,” she told Time magazine earlier this year.
“He was always that person who would stick up for me and make me feel like he had my back. The more I think about it, the more I realize how twisted he was, how he manipulated me to make me think that he had my back when he didn’t.”
Wilensky exploited the competitive climate — pitting girl against girl when he picked favorites — building trust among his preferred students by making them feel special, understood and protected when, in fact, he was their greatest threat.
I began re-examining Wilensky’s life 20 years later, when my mother handed me a folder of old newspaper articles and a Valentine he’d once sent me. It was only then that I learned the extent of his criminal past and how the warning signs were reportedly overlooked, buried or dis- missed before his final act. My initial impulse in writing about Wilensky was to get inside his mind to better understand his compulsions.
“You’ll never figure it out,” former Colonie Police Chief Steven Heider, who worked on the case in 1993, told me. “Because if you figure it out, you’re one of them.”
What I ultimately uncovered, as my research developed into a memoir, was the inner-workings of my own mind at age 14, em-embedded with mixed messages, deep-seeded insecurity and a futile sense of powerlessness. As girls, we were expected to be winners and grateful tooth- ers for our wins, keenly aware of the dangers around us but still polite to elder strangers, beautiful but self-deprecating, alluring but prudish, clever but not funny, happy but not gloating, responsive but never, ever too loud. Under Wilensky’s charge, those rules were allowed to be broken — though in reality, that wawas only so he could gget closer to his targets. If I felt any discomfort around him, my instincts were drowned by insecurity and a desperate need for approval.
Within days of the assault by Wilensky, news of his upstate torture chamber — where investigators found weapons, bed shackles, disguises, sadistic pornography and an elaborate security system designed to alert him to anyone approaching the remote cabin and anyone attempting to escape — landed on the front page of every New York newspaper.
But in my own prep-school world, a culture of silence prevailed. There was little discussion among my peers about Wilensky nd the impact his crime had on us, and no open dialogue in school about the “chamber of horrors” swirling through the news cycle. Only reporters seemed to want to ask us questions.
While investigators didn’t uncover any evidence that Wilensky had ever physically molested children, I’m hesitant to dismiss the possibility. As we learned from Nassar’s victims, abuse isn’t always immediately evident, particularly when the abusers wield power and influence within their community. Meanwhile, those who do come forward are forced to relive painful memories, risking exposure to threats, denial and even punishment. It’s conceivable that more victims of Gary Wilensky are out there, and it’s a thought that keeps me awake at night.
AT the time, prep-school parents and the institutions that had vetted Gary for years were facing public scrutiny. And while they were under pressure to protect their own reputations, our sharing stories with the media seemed, from what I gathered, a betrayal. (Although my private school wasn’t affiliated with Gary directly, my mother recalls a polite suggestion from the administration to avoid the press.)
A 2004 report commissioned by the Department of Education found that an estimated 4.5 million students in grades K through 12 have been subject to sexual misconduct by an educator. Abuse by teachers and coaches is rampant, widespread, indiscriminate and seemingly unending.
So how does this keep happening? For too long we’ve silenced the very people who have answers — the victims and potential targets of such crimes.
While the warning signs were there, from Wilensky’s 1988 stalk- ing arrest to his subsequent firings for “favoring” or obsessing over students, his reputation remained largely intact, perhaps because not enough people were listening to his victims.
Last November, as the #MeToo movement emboldened women to share their stories of abuse, one of Wilensky’s former students, Samantha Ettus, recalled in a Washington Post op-ed how his obsessive interest in her had prompted her to switch instructors. He responded by sending her gifts and letters written in “a desperate rainbow” of colorful ink. As uncomfortable as she was with his overture, her parents urged her to call and thank him for the gift.
What has changed since 1993 is that social-media movements such as #MeToo are providing a platform for young people to share their personal accounts, express solidarity and raise awareness about the complicated nature of processing abuse, and how the culture of silence surrounding it fosters the continued victimization of young girls.
Back in 1993, we didn’t have any of that. Perhaps if we did, more child predators would have been thwarted. Perhaps Raisman wouldn’t have had to look her abuser in the eye and tell the world how he impacted her. But the fact that she did was nothing short of heroic, and marked a paradigm shift that brought us closer to answering the most important question of all: How do we prevent such abuse from happening again? In short, we listen.