A year after he was banned from the sport for life, former Olympic equestrian George Morris has been saddled with two lawsuits accusing him of raping the plaintiffs when they were teenagers.

The lawsuits were filed Aug. 5 in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan by two of the people who reported Morris to the United States Center for SafeSport, which led to the investigation that led to his lifetime ban, the New York Times reported. They also name the U.S. Equestrian Federation as a defendant and accuse the organization of negligence, the Times reported.

Morris, a silver medalist in the 1960 summer games in Rome, has denied the accusations against him.

Equestrian Federation Hears Allegations

After his own show jumping career was largely over, Morris turned to coaching. He was the coach of the U.S. Olympic Show Jumping Team during the 2008 games in Beijing and 2012 games in London, then went on to coach the Brazilian show jumping team for the 2016 Rio games.

In 2012, one of the plaintiffs went to the U.S. Equestrian Federation and told them Morris had sexually assaulted him when he was 17 years old, but later recanted the accusations. The federation says it investigated the claims, but no action was taken against Morris.

Years later, SafeSport, the agency created in 2017 to address abuse in sports on behalf of the U.S. Olympic Committee, received similar complaints about Morris and began investigating. SafeSport banned Morris for life in a ruling issued in August 2019. He was 81 years old at the time.

Morris appealed the decision, but SafeSport upheld its decision in November 2019.

Alleged Victims Tell of Abuse Through Lawsuits

The plaintiff who reported Morris to the equestrian federation says in his civil suit that the coach raped him in the early 1970s, when he was 17 and Morris was in his 30s. The attack happened at a hotel near the Devon Horse Show in the Philadelphia suburbs. The two met at the show and Morris told the teen to visit his room later. When he did, he says, Morris sodomized him, according to reporting by the equestrian publication The Chronicle of the Horse.

That was the beginning of a several years relationship between the plaintiff and Morris, who was his coach and mentor and later his boss, the suit says. Morris regularly solicited sex from the plaintiff, who began telling close friends about the situation in the early 2000s, the Chronicle reported. In 2006, the plaintiff’s brother reported the abuse to the New York District Attorney’s Office, but officials could not act on the allegations because the statue of limitations had expired, the Chronicle article said.

The plaintiff then reported the original attack to the equestrian federation, recanted, and eventually re-reported.

The other plaintiff, identified in legal papers as AG1 Doe, says in his lawsuit that Morris raped him in 1978 after a horse show in the Hamptons. The two had known each other since AG1 Doe was 13 years old and the teen had been training under Morris for about a year before the attack. After the show at the Topping Riding Club in Sagaponack, New York, Morris raped the then 17-year-old AG1 Doe in a hotel room, he says.

The Topping Riding Club is also named a defendant in that suit.

Both lawsuits against Morris and the Equestrian Federation are possible so many decades after the alleged rapes because of New York’s Child Victims Act. The law was enacted in 2019 and, in addition to extending the statute of limitations for future survivors of child sexual abuse to bring civil lawsuits against their attackers, it created a one year “look back” period for victims who suffered abuse in the past.

Because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the state legislature extended the look back deadline, to Aug. 14, 2021.

This article is not legal advice. It is presented
for informational purposes only.