Tennis star opens up on years of sexual abuse in damning testimony
Former tennis star Angelique Cauchy has testified intimately about how she was sexually abused by her coach, Andrew Geddes, while rising up. In 2021, he was sentenced to 18 years in jail for raping and sexually assaulting 4 younger females aged between 12 and 17.
In July, it was dominated {that a} fee of inquiry was being launched to establish the ‘shortcomings within sports federations, the sport movement and sports governance bodies’. Therefore, Cauchy testified to the Palais Bourbon final week to supply thorough particulars about her relationship with the Geddes after they started working collectively in 1999, when she was aged 12.
“It happened in not even two or three months,” Cauchy started. “I told him: ‘No, you shouldn’t, it’s not right, I don’t want to’ and he replied to me: ‘You know it happens sometimes in relationships between coach and student, we spend a lot of time together, it’s normal.”
The 36-year-old then defined that she was raped greater than as soon as a day when she travelled to a 15-day coaching camp in La Baule. Cauchy continued: “I lived the worst two weeks of my life. I thought many times about committing suicide.
“He raped me three times a day. The first night he asked me to go to his room and I didn’t do it, then he came into mine.
“It was worse. I was in prison, I couldn’t get out when I wanted and afterwards, I had to stay in the place where it had happened. The evenings after, it seems crazy, but I went there on my own, and I took those thirteen steps that separated me from his room.”
Cauchy then defined that she was blackmailed into considering that she had contracted AIDS from the coach and that the tennis membership president was conscious of Geddes’ conduct however continued to work with him because of how he was a proficient tennis coach.
She continued: “It was identified within the tennis world that his behaviour with younger women was not appropriate. When a lady complained to the membership president that he had behaved inappropriately in the direction of younger folks with verbal and bodily violence, the reply was ‘Yes, however he brings us titles’.
“I’m not talking about me because I didn’t know. But, for the others, there were always those who said ‘Yes, he’s with…, he’s dating…’. But at 38, you don’t go out with a girl of 15, let alone when you’re training her.”