Report: Sixth woman says she was sexually abused by Olympic taekwondo champ Steven Lopez


Nancy Armour and Rachel Axon, USA TODAY


Trigger warning: This article contains information and details about alleged sexual assault and/or violence, which may be upsetting to some readers.

© Joe Klamar, AFP/Getty Images Steven Lopez is a two-time Olympic champion in taekwondo.

A sixth woman has come forward to allege that Olympic taekwondo champion Steven Lopez sexually assaulted her, possibly after she was drugged, according to an article published Saturday by The Daily Beast.

Audrey-Ann LeBlanc, a Canadian taekwondo athlete, told The Daily Beast that Lopez raped her as another man also participated while in a Dallas hotel in May 2010,

LeBlanc said the alleged incident started after she drank a “blueberry-Gatorade-vodka concoction” that Lopez had handed her. She quickly became incapacitated. He then led her to a room where she met two of his friends.

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“He said something like, ‘It’s okay,’ and began to kiss me and pushed me back onto the bed,” she told The Daily Beast.

LeBlanc is the seventh woman to publicly allege that Steven Lopez, a three-time Olympic medalist, or Jean Lopez, his brother and coach, had sexually assaulted her.

The Lopez brothers have denied the allegations against them in the past. In 2017, when USA TODAY Sports first published the accounts of four women, Steven Lopez, now 41, said, “I’ve never — nothing, nothing at all. Nothing like that. Nothing close to that.”

In a separate 2017 interview, Jean Lopez said, “I’ve never been inappropriate with anyone.”

Attorney Howard Jacobs, who represents the brothers, denied all allegations of misconduct against the brothers when reached by USA TODAY Sports on Monday.

Dan Hill, a spokesman for the U.S. Center for SafeSport, said he could not comment on specific cases. But, speaking generally, he said new allegations could cause the center to open a new investigation even against responding parties who have proceeded through arbitration.

The Lopezes have never been charged criminally. The Department of Justice is currently investigating USA Taekwondo and several Olympic national governing bodies for their response to reports of sexual abuse, and the Daily Beast reported that an attorney from the Department of Justice interviewed LeBlanc last month.

Jacobs told USA TODAY Sports that neither of the Lopez brothers has been contacted by the Department of Justice.

Five women sued Steven and Jean Lopez, as well as USA Taekwondo and the U.S. Olympic Committee, in April 2018. (The USOC changed its name to the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee in June, after this lawsuit was filed.) A federal judge in September dismissed the claims against Jean Lopez, but the lawsuit is proceeding through discovery in the case involving Steven Lopez, USA Taekwondo and the USOPC.

SafeSport banned both Steven and Jean Lopez in 2018 for sexual misconduct involving a minor. SafeSport also found Jean Lopez, 46, responsible of sexual misconduct. Both bans were eventually lifted after the women who had filed the complaints declined to testify in arbitration proceedings.

The women who filed complaints against Jean Lopez are among those who sued the Lopez brothers, and their attorneys did not want them subjected to multiple cross-examinations. Instead, they asked SafeSport to depose the women in connection with the lawsuit, and then use those depositions in the arbitration hearings for the Lopez brothers.

But SafeSport declined to do that, and a three-person panel of arbitrators cited the lack of sworn testimony in lifting Jean Lopez’s ban in January 2019. An arbitrator cited similar reasoning in lifting Steven Lopez’s ban in December 2018 after the woman in that case declined to testify in person.

Despite the arbitrators’ decisions, World Taekwondo kept its preliminary suspensions of both brothers in place, telling USA TODAY Sports in March that “given the nature of the allegations, World Taekwondo believes this decision protects and serves the best interests of the sport, taekwondo athletes and the two individuals concerned.” That decision effectively ended Steven Lopez’s bid to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics.

World Taekwondo did not immediately return a message Monday from USA TODAY Sports asking about Steven and Jean Lopez’s current eligibility.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Report: Sixth woman says she was sexually abused by Olympic taekwondo champ Steven Lopez

LONG READ EXPOSE

These Women Are Fighting to Expose Olympic Taekwondo Legends as Predators

‘I WASN’T ALONE’ 

Behrouz Mehri/AFP via Getty Images

“Those men took something away from me I can never get back,” one accuser says of brothers Steven and Jean Lopez.

Alexandra Starr
Feb. 16, 2020

Audrey-Ann LeBlanc was a teenager in Quebec City, Canada, when she first became aware of martial arts athlete Steven Lopez. Lopez is not a household name like Simone Biles or Michael Phelps, but in taekwondo circles he is a superstar. LeBlanc enrolled in classes at the local dojo when she was in kindergarten. A few years later, in 2000, Steven won his first gold medal at the Sydney Olympics. The following year he won the first of five World Championship titles.

In 2010, the year LeBlanc met Lopez in person at the Taekwondo U.S. Open in Las Vegas, he had sparred in his third Olympics, this time along with his younger brother Mark and sister Diana. It was the first time a troika of siblings had gone to the Olympics in more than a century, a milestone feted in People magazine and on the Tonight show. Moreover, their oldest brother, Jean Lopez, had served as Olympic coach. “I was awed by that whole family,” LeBlanc told The Daily Beast. She said she was thrilled when Steven stopped to have his picture taken with her in Las Vegas; in the photograph, he flashes a big smile as he drapes an arm around her shoulder.

LeBlanc said she figured the picture-posing would be the extent of their interaction and was surprised when she ran into Lopez later and he proposed that they meet up that evening. LeBlanc agreed and donned artfully ripped jeans and a fitted, checkered pink-and-white top for the occasion. “One of those outfits that hopefully looks like you are not trying too hard,” she explained.

Lopez put her at ease, she said, solicitously walking her down Las Vegas’ main strip and then inviting her to dinner. He complimented her French-Canadian accent and asked about life in Quebec. At the end of the evening, she said, he invited her to his hotel room. LeBlanc said ordinarily she would have spurned such an offer from someone she had just met, but Steven came across as genuinely kind. “He seemed interested in me as a person,” she recalled. According to her, they had consensual sex.

Emails from Lopez began appearing in her inbox shortly afterwards. “I never thought things would end up the way they did,” Lopez wrote in one reviewed by The Daily Beast. “But I am very happy they did! It was very spontaneous. We took advantage of the time we had. Carpe diem! You have a very positive aura about you and it is very refreshing to me. Like I said your [sic] adorable!”

LeBlanc scoured the internet for photographs of Steven. “Are you a model?” she asked. “You look so good!” He wrote back, “Model? He he. What pictures did you see? You make me feel good with the nice things you say about me.”

Courtesy Audrey-Ann LeBlanc

Months later, in May 2010, LeBlanc flew to Dallas to meet with Lopez during a taekwondo regional tournament. She said that he and another athlete she had met in Las Vegas, David Montalvo, picked her up at the airport, and Montalvo left them at a hotel.

LeBlanc said that at some point over the weekend, she remembers being with Steven in a hotel room and taking a few sips from a blueberry-Gatorade-vodka concoction he had handed to her. A few minutes later she started feeling ill. At that point, she said, she could still walk and Steven led her to another hotel room where she encountered two of his friends: one was standing and another sat in a chair. LeBlanc remembers that man asked her to sit on the bed facing him.

“I began to have a feeling that something very bad was going to happen,” LeBlanc said. She said she turned to Steven, who was standing beside her, and that he reassured her. “He said something like, ‘It’s okay,’ and began to kiss me and pushed me back onto the bed.” By that point, she claimed, her body had gone inert and she could not move her hands. She said she has a memory of Steven raping her vaginally while another man attempted to put his penis into her mouth. She said the last thing she remembers is the enormous effort it took to move her head away and seeing the third man lurking in the corner of the room.

LeBlanc said she did not tell anyone what happened—and many of the details of the weekend are fuzzy, which experts say is not uncommon in trauma survivors. She does remember that she awoke the next afternoon in her own hotel room, with no pants on, her head racked with pain.

“I was like, ‘My God, what happened,’” she recalled. “I just wanted to go home.” Montalvo said that on Sunday evening Steven called him and told him to pick up LeBlanc. He and another athlete, Amber Means, drove to the hotel, where LeBlanc was standing on the street. Means remembers LeBlanc seemed confused, and LeBlanc has only a vague memory of being out to dinner with Montalvo and Means that evening.

Steven Lopez, Montalvo recalls, had checked out of the hotel and LeBlanc had no place to stay. He gave her the spare bed in his own hotel room and called a cab to take her to the airport the next morning. He told The Daily Beast that he had no knowledge of the assault, and LeBlanc said he was not involved.

I began to have a feeling that something very bad was going to happen.
— Audrey-Ann LeBlance

LeBlanc, who has never before spoken publicly about the alleged assault, found out a year and a half ago that she is far from the only woman to accuse Steven Lopez of rape. Five former U.S. taekwondo athletes have filed suit in U.S. District Court in Colorado, alleging Steven or Jean sexually assaulted them. Their lawyers say they have identified more than two dozen additional women who allege they were victimized by the Lopezes. While the claims against Jean have been dismissed, the case is proceeding against Steven on allegations that his sexual abuse of two athletes violated federal law.

The plaintiffs also sued USA Taekwondo and the U.S. Olympic Committee for failing to protect them. Federal Judge Christine Arguello dismissed the claims against the committee, but the case against USA Taekwondo is ongoing.

Through their attorney Howard Jacobs, Steven and Jean Lopez denied all allegations of sexual misconduct, including the charges leveled by LeBlanc. In media interviews, the brothers have vehemently denied the accusations. “If you can only imagine what it is like being accused of such heinous things,” Steven told KRIV, local Fox affiliate in Houston, last year. In 2017, he made similar denials to USA Today, which were echoed by Jean Lopez, who told the paper, “I’ve never been inappropriate with anyone.”

The Lopez brothers have not faced criminal charges, but in late 2019, a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., was convened to investigate the handling of sexual abuse allegations by the U.S. Olympic Committee and its affiliates. According to the Orange County Register, the grand jury has requested depositions from two current and one former U.S. Olympic Committee employee. Rhonda Sweet, a former USA Taekwondo board member, has also given testimony to the grand jury, according to a source with knowledge of the situation. And last month, an attorney from the U.S. Department of Justice met with LeBlanc in Quebec City and interviewed her about the alleged gang rape in Dallas.

To be sure, taekwondo is not the only Olympic sport racked with allegations of sexual misconduct. The most notorious case, of course, concerns former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar, who molested hundreds of girls and women under the guise of medical treatment. But coaches in Olympic sports including figure skating, swimming, and horseback riding also have been banned for sexually abusing female athletes.

Even against that backdrop, taekwondo stands out. For one thing, the two men who have been accused of serial predation were at the top of the sport: Steven Lopez has been called “taekwondo’s Michael Jordan” and Jean Lopez was the Olympic coach. The five women who sued the Lopezes—Mandy Meloon, Heidi Gilbert, Kay Poe, Gabriela Joslin, and Amber Means—were some of the most promising American female martial arts athletes of their generation. They argue they were squeezed out of the sport after being victimized by Jean or Steven or—in the case of Meloon, Gilbert, and Joslin—both men.

“The conditions under which they could compete were to submit to the Lopez brothers’ sexual demands,” says Jon Little, one of the women’s attorneys. “It was pay-to-play, pure and simple. Except in this case paying meant having sex with Steven or Jean Lopez—or both of them.”

It was pay-to-play, pure and simple. Except in this case paying meant having sex with Steven or Jean Lopez—or both of them.
— Jon Little, attorney for the Lopezes’ accusers

In at least two cases, the abuse allegedly went beyond being sexually violated by one of the Lopez brothers. LeBlanc is not the only person who alleges Steven Lopez subjected her to a gang rape: Amber Means, a former member of the junior USA Taekwondo team who met LeBlanc during her trip to Dallas, said in the athletes’ lawsuit and in an interview with The Daily Beast that he did the same to her in 2008, just before the summer Olympics. Means had known Steven since she joined the Lopezes’ training studio, Elite Taekwondo, as a 13-year-old. She was 18 the summer she says she accepted Steven’s invitation to a get-together at his friend’s condo. She said that after she took a few sips from a drink he gave her, she blacked out.

“It wasn’t an, ‘Ooh, I feel queasy feeling,” Means said. “I was lucid and then it all went dark.” Means said she questioned Steven about what had happened the following day but he waved away her questions. But later, she said, he told her they’d had sexual intercourse and then he left, returning to find the owner of the condo having sex with her. Means said she protested that was in effect a gang rape, because she had been unconscious. Lopez, she alleged, told her she “looked all right to him.” She said she didn’t report Steven at the time because she believed it would be futile: “The rules didn’t apply to the Lopezes. Steven was the star.”

And Steven Lopez was a star. As he writes in Family Power, a book he co-authored with his siblings in 2009, the U.S. Olympic Committee was paying him $6,500 a month, one of the most generous stipends to a summer athlete in 2008. The Committee was also running USA Taekwondo when Jean Lopez was installed as one of two national team coaches in 2006. This is highly unusual: Generally, the organization has an arm’s length relationship to the 50 sports it oversees. It doles out money and resources and delegates the logistics of choosing Olympic teams to national governing bodies, like USA Swimming and USA Racquetball. In the mid aughts, though, USA Taekwondo went bankrupt and the Committee took over its governance. When the sport was coming out of probation, the USOC continued covering the salary for Jean Lopez and the other national team coach.

From a purely financial perspective, backing the Lopezes made sense. Historically, winning—especially at the Olympic Games—has been the metric by which the committee measured success. The committee’s former chief executive, Scott Blackmun, put it succinctly in a speech he gave at the National Press Club in 2014, four years before he stepped down under pressure for how he handled the Nassar scandal: “For us, it’s all about medals. How do we help American athletes get medals put around their necks at the Olympic and Paralympic games?”




Scott Blackmun resigned as head of the U.S. Olympic Committee in 2018 amid criticism over mishandling of a gymnastics sex abuse scandal.

Maxx Wolfson/Getty

Since the explosion of sexual abuse scandals over the past two years, the committee has made athletes’ safety more of a priority. “We’ve taken action to affirmatively place athlete well-being and strong, smart governance on an equal footing with sustained competitive excellence,” said spokesman Mark Jones in a statement. “That unified commitment is central to our mission as an organization and will ensure the success and safety of Team USA athletes for years to come.”


To be sure, every nation wants to maximize their medal count at the Games. The Olympic movement in the United States, however, is arguably under greater financial pressure to do so than in countries such as the United Kingdom or Australia, where the federal government helps fund the national teams. In 1978, the U.S. Congress gave the U.S. Olympic Committee what is arguably a more valuable commodity: a monopoly over the Olympic trademark. This intellectual property has been interpreted to include everything from the image of the intertwined five rings and the world “Olympian” to phrases including “Going for the gold” and “Let the Games Begin.” The marketability of those properties are strengthened by Team USA’s dominance of the podium and the expertly engineered montages about 4 a.m. training wakeups and mothers working three jobs to pay for skating lessons. At the 2016 Games, Team USA brought home 121 medals—nearly twice as many as the runner-up, China. That haul, and the stories behind them, helped the Olympic Committee pull in $340 million that year, mostly from broadcast rights and sponsorships.

The Lopezes collectively have produced five medals, and they have a compelling personal story. Their parents emigrated from Honduras in the early 1970s, and the siblings played up their American Dream cred in interviews, describing how they practiced martial arts kicks in the basement of their childhood home in Texas.


Steven Lopez, Jean Lopez, Diana Lopez and Mark Lopez at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.   Kristian Dowling/Getty

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