Former student sues district, alleging abuse by coach
SAN JOSE >> A former runner has sued the Los Gatos-Saratoga Union High School District and two former track and field coaches in another sexual abuse case in the South Bay involving athletes.
The suit, filed Tuesday in Santa Clara County Superior Court, identifies the student as “Jane Doe,” a woman now in her mid-30s. The suit alleges Los Gatos High School officials allowed Chioke “Chee” Robinson to sexually abuse her for more than three years.
Robinson was arrested two years ago on suspicion of sexually assaulting four girls over a 12-year period when he had worked at Los Gatos and Piedmont Hills high schools in the South Bay, authorities said. He was an assistant track coach at San Francisco State University at the time of his arrest.
The woman said Tuesday that working with authorities on the criminal case has empowered her to take civil action against Robinson, of San Jose.
“I was living a lie for a really long time,” she said in a Zoom call. If not for the help she has received, the woman said, “I’d still be living in shame, I still would be living in silence.”
According to the suit, Robinson began “grooming” the woman at age 14 when she joined the Los Gatos High girls track team as a freshman. Within a year, Robinson was kissing her and forcing her to touch his genitals, the suit says. Robinson eventually forced the girl into oral sex and intercourse with him in the high school’s track and field shed, according to the complaint.
The abuse occurred on school grounds from 1999 to 2001, the suit says. The woman said she quit the track team by her junior year.
“I had been a rising athlete my entire life,” she said Tuesday. “Being an athlete was my identity. Ultimately I became so weak I was forced to relinquish my identity.”
The woman said the situation has led to issues with anxiety, instability, insomnia and depression.
“What happened to me followed me over the next two decades and continued to drown me throughout my life,” she said in the Zoom call.
The lawsuit also names former Los Gatos High School track coach Willie Harmatz as a defendant. It says Harmatz had been notified early on about Robinson’s predatory behavior by another student, who transferred to Los Gatos High to escape Robinson’s sexual misconduct at another school. The suit alleges Harmatz threatened two studentathletes if they cooperated with the police.
Harmatz on Tuesday disputed the allegations against him. He said he did not know about Robinson’s alleged abuse until after the fact and also said he had never threatened an athlete in 25 years of coaching.
“When we all found out what was going on, he had to be released,” Harmatz said of Robinson’s firing in 2001.
However, a 2001 story in the Los Gatos WeeklyTimes reported that Harmatz kept Robinson on staff after the school’s principal had fired the sprint coach, the lawsuit says.
Jane Doe questioned why school administrators did not fire Robinson in 1999 after Los Gatos police opened an investigation into the assistant track coach’s behavior. Police investigated the coach after Jane Doe’s mother found a discarded pregnancy test in her daughter’s trash can as well as sexually explicit letters written by Robinson to the girl, according to San Jose lawyer B. Robert Allard, who filed the case with partner Lauren A. Cerri.
Jane Doe said the abuse continued after the initial investigation and destroyed her dreams of running in college. After high school, she said she worked two full-time jobs while taking one community college class at a time.
“For a long time that really killed me,” she said, adding that Robinson’s arrest in 2019 brought out trauma she had blocked for years.
Her advice to school administrators: “I should have been protected,” Jane Doe said. “I wasn’t. Pay attention to the red flags. Never wash your hands of a situation of a sexual predator to protect your reputation.”
Los Gatos-Saratoga district Superintendent Michael Grove said in a statement Tuesday that administrators have not received nor reviewed the suit and thus could not comment.
“Our district works hard to provide safe learning environments for our students — this is and shall remain one of our district’s primary goals,” the statement added.
The lawsuit comes in the wake of another former Los Gatos High track coach facing allegations of abuse. John Rembao of Ben Lomond is named along with the NCAA and its board of governors in the class-action complaint filed in the spring in the U.S. District Court in San Jose.
Rembao worked as Los Gatos High’s high jump coach until about the time he was placed on temporary suspension by the U.S. Center for SafeSport, an organization set up three years ago to protect young victims of sexual abuse. SafeSport didn’t list the nature of allegations against Rembao when it suspended him in 2019.
Another prominent South Bay track coach faces similar allegations in a lawsuit Allard’s firm filed this month on behalf of a former Valley Christian High School athlete. Allison Brown sued her alma mater on the contention that administrators failed to protect her from Greg Marshall, a coach who is currently being prosecuted on charges that he sexually abused her.