This is a good life lesson. If you choose to be very good friends with a convicted sex offender, that choice will affect your business and your own reputation.
Kudos to LTD shows for stepping away from that association, at least as it relates to the show venue.
Update:
LTD Horse Shows, after investigating, will be moving to another venue. Any suggestions would be welcomed! I (Carol) appreciate that my friends and acquaintances making me aware of SS issues.
The former owner of AAES forwarded my name and news of my interest in a winter show there to the new owner, not TN. It was my understanding that Sarah was on her own there because of affiliation issues with TN. I know Sarah from Stoneridge via rated and unrated attendance at various shows. I along with my judges and friends, think it best to find a different venue in this situation rather than have issues within our community. Though, I would say that it is a sad thing that persons would not directly contact LTD with issues if they were genuinely concerned. My contacts are public on FB and the LTD website. In the future, I would think that we could do better as individuals. If you are genuinely concerned, why wouldn’t you reach out directly rather than have guised conversation with no benefit for change?
Yes, I agree but calling out something on a discussion board vs calling someone directly is NOT really achieving your objective of informing or changing anything. After information has been exchanged you can see that it does produce results.
I sympathize.
HOWEVER, @Threeshoesfarm your first reaction when it was pointed out on this board that the connection to Navarro would be problematic for your shows was to strenuously deny, over and over, that such a connection existed. So it’s hard for me to believe that if someone had contacted you privately about these concerns that your reaction would have been any different. It took multiple people doing the due diligence and looking at publicly available posts and documentation to convince you (giving you the benefit of the doubt that you didn’t already know) that the venue you chose is connected to a convicted sex offender.
One person speaking quietly and privately usually doesn’t get the same results that the loud platform of public opinion will.
Speaking as a former professional in public affairs and media relations, I urge you to learn from this. I wish you success in your shows.
Hi there -
In light of your decision to discontinue the relationship with Wulf Crest, I decided to delete my previous comment, which admittedly, was a bit snarky.
As far as your disappointment that no one reached out to you privately about community concerns with respect to holding a show series at a facility closely tied with a known sex offender who has been banned by SafeSport…
Well… perhaps some of us assumed that you were a professional organizer, with expertise in terms of holding rated and unrated shows, and that you had a considerable depth of knowledge about rules and regulations from the various governing bodies. Perhaps some of us are of the opinion that, as a professional show organizer, the onus is actually on YOU to be aware of who in the local area of a given show is banned by USEF/affiliated organizations, and the onus is on YOU to make sure banned people don’t participate. I guess local adult amateurs and parents could go out of their way to do your due diligence for you, and then privately inform you, so that you don’t run afoul of SafeSport issues… or… you could just do your own due diligence before promoting a given series of shows or partnering with a particular venue or person.
Just a thought.
I would be more sympathetic to your position if:
You hadn’t first come on these forums and tried to repeatedly justify holding this show series at Wulf Crest by proclaiming there were 6 degrees of separation between you and Tom
Navarro
We all learned via the email shared by another poster that Tom himself has declared you a “good friend of River Chase/Wulf Crest.”
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as the saying goes.
I have been vocal before about how going personally to one actor or another in these situations is actually not the best way to handle them. There is no accountability in a privater person-to-person communication. There is also no community awareness generated. And you initially tried to deny the connection and insult the posters here as not really caring b/c they discuss on this forum as opposed to with you personally. That is neither fair nor accurate.
People who discussed it here were respectful and have responded with great civility. Your insisting all this change happen behind the scenes, where no one can be held accountable and no wider audience can know and participate, only serves to perpetuate situations like someone like Tom Navarro continuing to have access to minors even despite conviction and SS ban. Open discussion, transparency, community involvement and awareness: these are things necessary to end this plague on our sport and our society as a whole.
Shows are public events, open to the public, advertised in public, and discussed in public. This aspect of such a public event should also be discussed the same way, not swept under the rug or forced into “private conversations”. Any organiser should simply be grateful that their due diligence was done for them and they were saved from running events that associate their organisation with convicted paedophiles who have been banned for life by SS. That’s, honestly, the only reasonable reaction to the discussion here.
Mike Traurig got slapped again by Safesport, with another suspension bump. No further information available. Greg Reason has been permanently banned for abuse of power, sexual and emotional abuse, retaliation/interference, and facilitating his wife’s abuse of others and his wife Nicole (Silver Lining Stables and Reason Custom Leather, in Louisville) is also sanctioned for willingly assisting and facilitating her husband’s abuse in various ways, including retaliation and “physical misconduct”, which could include physical abuse. It sounds like the two of them were using their business to force themselves on customers or something.
So, another wife who is enabling her husband’s misconduct?
Good Lord. Sad.
Civil case filed against Bob and Debbie McDonald. https://www.chronofhorse.com/article/bob-and-debbie-mcdonald-face-civil-lawsuit-from-alleged-victims-of-child-sex-abuse
Whoa.
I believe there were issues between the two complainants, and the original SafeSport investigator assigned to the McDonald case, and that was part of the reason they declined to cooperate with the original arbitration.
It will be an interesting lawsuit to follow…
Traurig is still on interim suspension. He was suspended in October. I don’t see a “bump.”
Where are you seeing this?
That’s horrifying.
The article linked from this COTH article is the piece that Scott Reid did for the OC Register. I think he’s the one that got the SafeSport documents???
The date on the SafeSport site (link?) is now 11/12/21. The original date was in October. Maybe that’s it?
How on earth could that have happened? I thought all the safe sport documentation was supposed to be extremely confidential out of concern for the victim’s privacy.
Ah. I was looking at the USEF site.
They clearly got something. Somehow.
From the COTH article also linked a few posts above:
The portion in green in the screenshot links to the OC Register article (caution- no active link in screenshot itself; must refer to article)
Despite the confidentiality of Safe Sport documents, is it possible that one of the Jane Does had copies of, or access to, some of the documents related to her SS case, and she shared them with the OC Register reporter?
That’s what I assumed when I read the OC Register article.
The reporter who wrote it is VERY knowledgeable about SafeSport. He’s done a ton of reporting on sexual abuse issues in multiple Olympic Sports
Scott Reid is even mentioned in the Twisted podcast about Larry Nassar.
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