SafeSport, the Congress-created bureaucracy meant to shield young athletes from abuse, received nearly 9,700 reports of alleged misconduct in 2025—a 3,300% explosion from its first year—and its new CEO calls that a reason to celebrate. Parents and athletes should ask why abuse is soaring under the watch of the very organization built to stop it.
Congress authorized the U.S. Center for SafeSport in 2017 after the Larry Nassar scandal exposed how Olympic institutions covered up predation for decades. The idea was simple: build an independent body to investigate and punish abuse. But nine years in, the numbers tell a story of failure, not success. SafeSport received 281 reports its first year. By 2025, that number hit 9,700—a 20% jump over the prior year alone, according to the Denver Post. Over 2,600 individuals now sit on its Centralized Disciplinary Database. The organization's leader frames this as mission accomplished. A sane reading is that the pipeline of abuse is flowing faster than ever.
That leader is Benita Fitzgerald Mosley, an Olympic gold medalist who took over as CEO in February. Her resume raises the classic revolving-door question: she previously served as CEO of the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee—the very organization whose failures necessitated SafeSport's creation. She told the Denver Post she "helped establish the first-ever safe sport policies" at USOPC. Now she runs the watchdog that was supposed to be independent of USOPC. The fox isn't just guarding the henhouse; she built the lock.
Mosley's Denver Post opinion piece reads like a PR rollout, not a reckoning. She launched a "nationwide listening tour" and heard from over 1,000 people. Their demands: "greater communication and transparency," "fairness and consistency," "clarity," and "a better experience for those who participate in our process." That is a damning indictment dressed up as feedback. Athletes and parents are telling SafeSport it is opaque, inconsistent, and painful to deal with—and the CEO's response is a strategic plan promising to "elevate programs" and "coordinate with stakeholders" by LA28.
The Denver Post gave SafeSport's CEO the op-ed space to frame the narrative herself. The New York Post, for its part, had nothing to say about SafeSport at all—its coverage was dedicated to the surging cost of homeownership, a real crisis for working Americans but unrelated to this story. No outlet in this batch pressed SafeSport on why reports keep climbing, why athletes find the process unfair, or whether the organization's structural ties to the Olympic apparatus compromise its independence.
SafeSport was sold to the public as a safeguard against institutional failure. It has become another institution—with its own bureaucracy, its own messaging, and its own interest in survival. The question isn't whether SafeSport means well. It's whether a watchdog led by former Olympic insiders, drowning in complaints, and criticized by the very people it serves can ever be anything more than a government-sanctioned version of the system that failed those gymnasts in the first place.
