More than 80 whistleblowers have testified that leaders at the Coast Guard Academy ignored decades of systemic sexual assault and harassment, in a new report released by a powerful government committee Wednesday.
The US Senate’s homeland security and government affairs subcommittee on investigations said sexual assault and harassment have been “fleet-wide problems” for the federal agency, “impacting enlisted members and officers just as pervasively as cadets”.
The report said: “For far too long, Coast Guard survivors have felt unheard and unseen. They have been brushed aside and silenced.”
Across its 48 pages, the report details how the academy fostered a culture that was “highly skeptical” of incidents being reported, silenced victims and enabled abuse.
A whistleblower who had been with the Coast Guard for more than 25 years told the subcommittee that she experienced multiple incidents of sexual harassment and assault at the academy in the 1990s but did not report the abuse because “I would not be taken seriously”.
“I saw how women who did come forward were treated. They would be blamed for causing their assault, punished for consuming alcohol or other infractions that paled in comparison to the crimes committed against them, or victims wouldn’t be believed that they were assaulted in the first place,” she said.
One whistleblower said, upon sharing with fellow cadets her sexual assault, friends and mentors didn’t believe her and spread rumors it was false. She was then “harassed on a daily basis”.
Another former cadet said that she was groped on campus in front of 20 witnesses. She struggled against her assailant in front of other cadets who “started laughing and egging him on”. She was socially ostracized when she reported the incident to the academy.
“I knew then that my career in the US Coast Guard was over before it even began,” the former cadet told the subcommittee.
When telling a counselor about a sexual assault, another cadet recalls the counselor warning her: “I will probably ruin his career. I will be subject to a psych exam and will probably be forced out.”
According to the subcommittee’s report, the Coast Guard conducted an investigation into many of these allegations over a period of six years, but ultimately kept its findings secret.
The investigation, dubbed Operation Fouled Anchor, was initiated in 2014 after a Coast Guard officer told her supervisor that she was raped by an upperclassman in 1997 while at the academy. The investigation looked at cases that occurred between 1990 and 2006.
The academy ultimately found 63 potential victims and 43 alleged perpetrators. The academy was aware of the allegations against 30 of the 43 alleged perpetrators, but only five of those were reported to the Coast Guard investigation’s unit or to local law enforcement, according to the subcommittee’s report.
Although the Coast Guard wrapped up its final investigation in 2020, it was hidden from the public until summer 2023, when CNN reported on its existence. Upon its release to the public, Coast Guard leaders apologized to the agency’s workforce and assault survivors. In 2023, the agency conducted a 90-day “accountability and transparency review” in response to the investigation’s existence being made public.
The report urges the Coast Guard to properly hold accountable “both individual perpetrators and the leadership that covered up their wrongdoing”.
“The culture will not change until the Coast Guard makes clear that sexual assault and harassment will not be tolerated.”
In June, Linda Fagan, the Coast Guard admiral who assumed office in 2022, testified in front of the subcommittee before the report’s release, saying that the agency is “taking action, the work is not done … we have not waited”.
“I want to stop creating victims, but for the victims that we do have in the organization, I am 100% committed to fully supporting them and their needs,” Fagan told the Senate subcommittee.
