The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  “He had explanations [for leaving those schools], and they were viable. We thought we knew what we were getting as a person,” O’Mara said.

  However, the mother of a male Caledonia athlete told me that rumors of Curtis’s lecherousness were openly discussed among parents at the time. And a former Caledonia athlete told me that it was an acknowledged joke among his group of friends that Curtis took a disproportionate interest in attractive girls when supervising the weight room.

  “He would always be encouraging the girls to stay after,” the student said. “He would be like, ‘All athletes stay,’ and we’d all stay, but he’d pretty much just focus on the girls. He literally would spot girls [on weights] all the time. And looking back, that’s where we were like, ‘Holy shit, did we see this coming?’”

  Several years later, at Lakewood, a student named Kaleb Curry and his friends had a similar ongoing joke. Mr. Curtis, it seemed, had a thing for Jessica, then a 15-year-old sophomore. According to Curry’s testimony, Curtis would pull her out of gym class at least once a week for 20-minute periods to work with her in the trainer’s room. When Jessica broke her pinkie, Curtis did one-on-one resistance work with her in lieu of a barbell bench press, leaning over her with their hands together and having Jessica push up. Curry said that Curtis even remarked to him once that Jessica had a “nice athletic butt.”

  “I kinda feel like he paid more attention to Jessica . . . than any other person in there,” Curry testified. Of the 20-minute disappearances during class, he said, “It was kinda suspicious. It didn’t seem right.”

  One day, on a lark, Curry and a friend headed down to the trainer’s room to scope out what was happening. After seeing Jessica emerge from the room, they started teasing her. Soon after, according to Curry’s testimony, “Mr. Curtis approached me and Anthony and asked us if we were giving her a hard time about anything. And he said if you are, you need to stop.”

  What Curry didn’t know was that Curtis and Jessica had exchanged 115 text messages between late February and late April of 2012. Many of these concerned weight room scheduling, which is what Curtis told me and what the defense said at trial. But many concerned Jessica’s boyfriend and tensions in their relationship. Curtis would tell her that she was too good for her boyfriend’s immaturity, that she was a pretty girl.

  This made Jessica trust Curtis and feel flattered, and perhaps it also played to her awareness of her burgeoning sexual power. In the weight room one day, she once playfully asked Curtis to tell her boyfriend to stop staring at her. She also once texted him, “I would have a thing with you.” She was a kid playing with boundaries and roles. “Like I had a crush on him, but it wasn’t anything that I would ever take,” she testified.

  Curtis’s response to that text was, “I don’t want my kids to see me in jail,” according to Jessica. The next day, she said, “he told me he didn’t think that we should text anymore because he didn’t want his wife to be mad.”

  Most of the texts from that period were gone by the time detectives obtained a warrant for Curtis’s phone. Between February 21 and March 2, 85 consecutive texts between Curtis and Jessica had been deleted, investigators testified.

  The texts between Jessica and Curtis were actually sent after the incidents when Jessica said Curtis touched her inappropriately. The defense portrayed this as proof that the so-called incidents were harmless by-products of athletic training methods. The prosecution portrayed a predator who opportunistically capitalized on a teenager’s experimentation with boundaries and who couched his true motives in the guise of legitimate athletic massage.

  The first incident occurred in August 2011: Jessica reported a problem with her rib area and asked Curtis to wrap her with an Ace bandage. He began wrapping, with Jessica’s shirt up so that the bottom of her sports bra was exposed. Then he asked her to lift the bra up a little bit, exposing the bottom of her breast, so he could get the wrap underneath it: “Is this okay?” he asked, similarly to how he had asked Kayla.

  Jessica, like Kayla, didn’t say no. So Curtis lifted the bra up all the way, exposing her breasts. When Jessica instinctively covered herself up, Curtis didn’t flinch: he stared straight ahead and continued to wrap her rib, as if the whole thing was purely clinical. The man who couldn’t abide porn in the bathroom and cleavage on a female student was trying to convince both a teenager and himself that there was nothing wrong with what he was doing.

  He finished wrapping Jessica, then pulled her bra down. This forced Jessica to remove her hands momentarily and expose her chest again. Curtis stared directly at her the whole time.

  The wrapping thus completed, she went off to volleyball practice. She later told her mother that Curtis had wrapped her, and then texted Curtis that the wrap had solved her rib problem.

  In the ensuing months, Curtis regularly pulled her out of class to give her massages, which Jessica says progressed up her thighs to her underwear line. Curtis, in a statement he made after he was convicted but before he was sentenced, said Jessica would come to him with “fake-type injuries because she wanted to talk to me.”

  But Jessica says the opposite, and that the ostensible hip injury for which Curtis took Jessica to the trainer’s room one day in the winter of 2011–12 was a figment of his imagination.

  Jessica lay on her stomach, and Curtis peeled her sweatpants down, exposing her underwear. Then he moved her underwear to the side, exposing her bare rear end. Then he started massaging her there, continuing for several minutes.

  “I wasn’t so much scared. I was uncomfortable. But I trusted he was doing his job, so . . .”

  Jessica wasn’t the only person who reflexively believed Curtis was just doing his job. Just minutes after he was finished rubbing her bare rear end, the school’s principal, Brian Williams, came looking for Jessica on an unrelated matter and was told by the regular gym instructor—from whose class Curtis routinely pulled Jessica—that she was getting ice in the trainer’s room. Williams walked in to find exactly that: Jessica on the trainer’s table, clothed and with ice, and Curtis seated on a chair. It was not a suspicious sight.

  Williams testified at trial, “I’ve been asking myself, you know, since I found out all this going on, why I wasn’t alarmed. And the only thing I can come to is Mr. Carpenter [the weight room instructor] said, ‘They went to get ice.’ And she was there with ice.”

  The incident raised the obvious question of whether Lakewood was at all responsible for its female students being molested in the school building. O’Mara, the district superintendent, said that if he knew Curtis had been massaging girls even for the medical reasons Curtis purported, he likely would have fired him on the spot: “You can’t put yourself in that position,” he said. But Curtis called that assertion “baloney,” and claimed what he was doing was widely acknowledged. Curtis’s take on this seems to jibe with the fact that he often pulled students out of other teachers’ classes for the one-on-one sessions.

  A report by O’Mara, issued to the Lakewood School Board in early March, said, “Existing school policies and procedures were adhered to by school personnel.” Soon after the accusations broke, Lakewood installed a window on its training room.

  Curtis told me that he has heard grumblings through his lawyer about a lawsuit against both the school district and himself, but no suit has been filed as of yet.

  III. Alexis

  “I no longer enjoy going to school . . . I hear the gossip and I had to quit volleyball because [tryouts] were the same week as the trial, and the coaches didn’t show support for my decision.”

  Curtis tells me that the first accusation against him broke on his three-year-old’s birthday. The second came on his 11-year-old’s. He was arrested on the day of his 19-year-old’s graduation.

  “Now, is that coincidental? Or is that someone looking at your personal file and deciding to mess with you?” he says to me.

  Looked at one way, it’s a laughably grandiose delusion of a man whose persecution complex is in proportion t
o his Jesus complex. But in person, in real time, Curtis is more compelling than he is after the fact. Like any charismatic person, he pulls you in and makes you want to go along with what he’s saying. He has the convincingness of someone who has thoroughly convinced himself of his own innocence.

  This helps explain why, in the aftermath of the initial allegations, much of the local public outrage was directed at the accusers. The comments section of an early news report summed up this line of thought:

  “I bet you some girl tried to seduce him and he turned her down,” read one comment. “He’s a former MLB player with two world titles. There’s no teenage girl he would ever go after. Use common sense.”

  “I agree it has to be bogus!! All we can do is pray!” read another.

  Curtis had a list of some 40 character witnesses he wanted to call at trial, though only a handful of them got to testify. One said, “Chad’s integrity is the highest of any man I’ve ever met.” Another said, “He is flawless.”

  The defense also called a psychologist who cited the “post-event information effect,” when outside sources can cause someone to alter their interpretation of events, and who alluded to the day-care sex abuse hysteria cases of the 1980s. The defense’s other star witness was an athletic massage therapist who said the rear end is a repository for lactic acid buildup from all kinds of leg injuries.

  Even after his conviction, a sizable percentage of area residents still believe that Curtis got railroaded, either by trumped-up charges promulgated by overzealous investigators or by a Mean Girls gang-up against a deep-pocketed target. However, this notion seems to be undermined by the fact that the five girls who eventually accused Curtis were not friends with each other and ranged three and a half years in age. There’s also the fact that Curtis is currently being sued by the state of Michigan to pay for his own incarceration, and he told me he’s largely tapped out of money.

  Still, there are believers. Kelly Stein-Lloyd, a close friend of the Curtis family and the director of the Caledonia Chamber of Commerce, believes Curtis was doomed in court by his stone-faced expression in comparison to the girls’ outward emotion. “I’ve coached girls for 15 years. I know teenagers. And girls can be pretty convincing. They can be pretty conniving and pretty believable. And that played to their benefit this time,” she said.

  When word got around that Alexis, a 15-year-old freshman, had accused Mr. Curtis of molesting her, she became persona non grata at Lakewood.

  “I got really depressed because like everyone started treating me differently,” she testified. Her volleyball teammates “wouldn’t talk to me. I—I would always have to find my own partner.”

  She had come to Curtis’s attention after injuring her knee in the most childlike way imaginable: a sledding accident. Subsequently, Curtis, in the same persistent manner as he had solicited his teammates to attend chapel, asked her repeatedly if he could help her rehab it. She turned him down several times but eventually relented, “’cause I was sick of him asking me,” she testified.

  Soon enough, they were down in the trainer’s room, Curtis rubbing her knee, then her thigh, then her upper thigh, then her groin, up to her underwear. He flipped her over on her stomach and went through the same progression, ending with rubbing her rear end, with both hands, in a circular motion. All the while, he lectured Alexis, who was also very religious, about how to prove to an atheist that God exists. During his major league career, his sermons had often been met with exasperation and dismissal. In the Lakewood trainer’s room, he had a captive audience.

  After it was over, Alexis wondered: had she just been molested? She didn’t know. She described to her youth pastor that night what had happened and was told “to be careful.”

  The next day, Curtis took her down to the trainer’s room again, but she felt okay about it because another girl, Rachel, went down with them. But then Curtis told Rachel to take the medicine ball upstairs, and now it was just the two of them again, and he began to touch her in the same progression as the day before.

  His hands were on the side of her rear end, over her pants, when they both heard the jangling of keys in the door lock. It was another student, who had been sent by a teacher to fetch something. The student didn’t see anything notable, but Alexis caught a glimpse of Curtis’s face frozen in panic.

  “I was uncomfortable the whole time, but when I saw his reaction, that’s when I knew that something was wrong,” she said.

  The next day, a Thursday, she spoke to authorities, and she took off from school until Monday. Among the many things that would be different in her life when she returned was that Curtis was no longer at Lakewood, having been suspended immediately.

  Detective Jay Olejniczak spoke first with Alexis, and then to Rachel, the girl Curtis had taken to the trainer’s room with Alexis but then sent upstairs with the medicine ball. Olejniczak had sought out Rachel simply to investigate Alexis’s claims, but it turned out she had her own stories to tell.

  She was a family friend of the Curtises who, as an eighth-grader, had gone on vacation with them to babysit their younger kids. During this vacation, she said that Curtis rubbed suntan lotion on her and slid his hand underneath her bra. Also on that trip, she said that on one early morning, he lay in bed with her, over the covers, while his daughter slept in the next bed over. To his defenders, this was proof that the charges had been trumped up to implausible proportions. To those who believed the girls, it was evidence that Curtis had lost any sense of boundaries and judgment.

  Rachel was one of two accusers who took the stand but whose accusations were not prosecuted. The other was Brittany, a recently graduated Lakewood student who also babysat for the Curtis kids. She testified that one day at the Curtis house, after she had gotten a sunburn while sitting outside, Curtis had insisted on rubbing suntan lotion all over her body, including on the top of her breasts.

  Curtis was contrite afterward, Brittany said. “He said that it couldn’t happen again, that we couldn’t do it again,” she testified, remembering his conspiratorial use of “we,” just as Kayla had.

  He also told Brittany that “that was as close as he’s ever come to cheating on his wife.” Several months later, after penetrating Kayla with his finger, Curtis said it was the “most unfaithful he’s ever been to [his] wife.” The prosecution pointed to this progression—touching the top of Brittany’s breasts maybe wasn’t technically cheating, but penetrating Kayla definitely was—as evidence both of Curtis’s escalating behavior and the girls’ truthfulness. It was too specific, prosecutors said, to make up out of thin air.

  Much of Curtis’s MO involved creating the perception of a gray area between legitimate massage and molestation. Given this, it makes sense that when Olejniczak questioned him about touching Rachel in Curtis’s one and only interview with police, he said, “I don’t think she’s a liar, and I don’t think I’m a liar either.”

  What really tripped his mental wiring was a question about lotion. When Olejniczak mentioned the word “lotion,” Curtis announced that he was nauseous, got up out of his chair, and lay on the floor for close to two minutes.

  “It was a really awkward silence, didn’t really know what was going on,” was how Olejniczak described it.

  Curtis’s first words when he composed himself were, “I guess you can just say that I’m—I’m hurt and confused. I try to pour my time and energy into helping kids.”

  At the time Olejniczak interviewed Curtis, only Alexis and Rachel had accused him. In the 14 months between that interview and the trial, Kayla, Brittany, and Jessica would come forward.

  It was a trying period for the girls, and by all accounts still is. They were bullied in the hallways and on social media. Rachel said that after coming forward, “No one liked me. They were all against me ’cause he was a great guy and this would never happen, so we were all lying.”

  Some of the girls and their family members accused Curtis and his family of fomenting a campaign against them. Tensions got so bad that Curt
is’s oldest daughters—one of whom graduated, one of whom transferred—were barred from Lakewood functions.

  Kayla transferred her senior year too, and saw her close friendship with Curtis’s daughter severed. She had planned to go to college but had not done so as of the trial. “She’s not able to sleep by herself,” her father said in court. “This week she’s crawled in with her mother three or four times.”

  Alexis couldn’t play volleyball her senior year because tryouts conflicted with the trial. She said in court that “the coaches didn’t show support for my decision.”

  The toughest part was the trial itself. Curtis stood accused of criminal sexual conduct in both the third and second degree, the latter of which, the most serious charge, was for penetrating Kayla with his finger.

  Every day of the weeklong trial, the 131-person courtroom was packed, evenly split between supporters of Curtis and supporters of the girls. In front of all of those people, the girls recited the intimate details of how they were violated, and then reaffirmed those details under cross-examination.

  “These girls, they were rocks,” said Nakfoor-Pratt, the prosecutor. (Nakfoor-Pratt’s assistant prosecutor, Chris Elsworth, was the one who tried the case.) “Particularly when they have school, sports, family, everything. This was a long road for these young ladies to hang in there, and I was amazed by how strong they were.”

  Meanwhile, Curtis didn’t testify, on the advice of his lawyer. Now that Curtis is behind bars, he has a new lawyer. One of the grounds for his motion for a new trial is that he received incompetent counsel, he told me.

  The jury deliberated for around three hours and found Curtis guilty on all six counts. The victims and their families addressed him at sentencing.