In the latest reckoning over a sex abuse scandal, San Jose State has agreed to pay $560,000 to a former deputy athletic director who was fired after standing up for a whistleblowing swim coach.
The settlement with Steve O’Brien announced Wednesday comes two weeks after the university settled a separate lawsuit with the swim coach, Sage Hopkins, who tried for years to stop a trainer’s abuse of female athletes. That settlement pays Hopkins $225,000 and promotes him to management.
“It’s a reminder of the all-too-common issue of student athletes being mistreated and the processes that result in the retaliation against those who would stand up on their behalf,” O’Brien said in an interview Wednesday, “and why people don’t come forward sooner and why this kind of abuse can go on for so long.”
The settlements came after the U.S. Department of Justice last fall ordered the university to pay $1.6 million to victims of head athletic trainer Scott Shaw, saying he was allowed to continue treating female athletes “unfettered” for more than a decade. The department issued a scathing report about the university’s handling of the athletes’ complaints and its treatment of Hopkins. The report also found that the university had retaliated against O’Brien when Athletic Director Marie Tuite fired him in March 2020.
The scandal led to the resignations late last year of university President Mary Papazian as well as Tuite and required the university to seek out more than 1,000 student athletes who may have been treated by Shaw until he voluntarily left the university in 2020.
While O’Brien said he is pleased that Papazian, Tuite and Shaw are no longer at the university, “it is a little bit unfortunate, with all of these cases that have settled, that there isn’t a fuller opportunity to have a full accountability for those actions.”
The abuse surfaced in 2009 when Hopkins came forward with allegations by a dozen female swimmers saying Shaw inappropriately touched them under their bras and underwear under the guise of therapy. An in-house investigation in 2010 concluded that Shaw’s “pressure point therapy” was a legitimate form of treatment — a finding the Justice Department later called deeply flawed. Through the decade following that first investigation, Hopkins continued his campaign against the trainer to no avail, until he took his 300-page dossier to the National Collegiate Athletic Association in late 2019.
Shortly after that, Tuite directed O’Brien to discipline the swim coach. O’Brien refused and was fired.
“I was being used as a surrogate to do what other individuals who had been accused of wrongdoing couldn’t do directly,” O’Brien said.
Although Papazian had been aware of the allegations since 2016, she didn’t order a new investigation of Shaw until the NCAA has been alerted. That new investigation sided with the student athletes.
“His case exemplifies the integrity required to stand up for what is right, regardless of the consequences,” O’Brien’s lawyer, Tamarah Prevost, said in a statement.
After he was fired, O’Brien took a job at Santa Clara University’s law school as senior assistant dean for external relations. He said he is anxious to return to a role in athletics.
No charges have been filed against Shaw, who has declined media requests. He remains under investigation by the FBI.
