Whistleblower: US Coast Guard lied to hide sexual assault victims from Congress

An official at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy resigned this week ahead of a congressional hearing for Coast Guard leaders, alleging that she was instructed to lie to former victims of sexual assault at the academy in order to prevent Congress from learning about their experiences.

“The Coast Guard tricked me into violating a tenet of my profession, which is to never lie to victims,” ​​Shannon Norenberg, who has served as sexual assault response coordinator at the Coast Guard Academy since 2013, wrote in a blog post announcing her resignation on Sunday.

Norenberg said she hopes to right a wrong and publicly apologize to victims she says she misled after she was called in 2018 to assist with the Coast Guard’s Operation Fouled Anchor investigation, which secretly examined and documented years of harassment and abuse within the military.

“The whole thing was a cruel cover-up at the expense of the victims, with the sole goal of preserving the Coast Guard’s image and avoiding scandal,” Norenberg wrote. “And the Coast Guard used me as part of their plan.”

Fouled Anchor’s final report reached a similar conclusion, saying Coast Guard leadership placed greater importance on protecting the academy’s reputation than on the well-being of victims. As it turns out, most perpetrators in dozens of cases of alleged sexual assault or harassment at the Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut over nearly two decades were not prosecuted.

U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Fagan answered questions before Congress on Tuesday about Norenberg and Operation Fouled Anchor, which was first presented to the public by CNN last summer.

Fagan, who will take over as Coast Guard chief in June 2022, said she had not read Norenberg’s statements but said they would be included in an investigation by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general. Fagan also praised Norenberg for making an “incredible difference” with her work at the academy.

In her blog post, Norenberg, who became the academy’s first full-time sexual assault response coordinator after she was hired, said she was called to assist with the investigation under what she now believes were false pretenses.

She was told that she would help former victims of sexual violence whose cases “may have been mishandled by command” and that she would work to improve the academy’s handling of future allegations of sexual violence.

“My job was to reassure the victims that we were doing things differently now and that there was some good that came out of what they had endured during the investigation,” she wrote.

Norenberg said she was instructed to offer to meet past victims in person as part of a sort of “apology tour” and to enter their case information into the Defense Sexual Assault Incident Database, a military-wide case management system for sexual assault. She would also give victims an official form called CG-6095 to report sexual assault.

Completing the form, she said, would provide proof that the assault was reported to the Coast Guard and would make it easier for survivors of military sexual trauma (MST) to receive recovery assistance from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

If the forms were signed and returned to her, she would be legally required to enter the cases into DSAID for 2019, the year the victims were interviewed. For this reason, she believes, she was ultimately told not to share the forms, as an influx of cases would likely have attracted the attention of Congress and led to the discovery of Operation Fouled Anchor.

“To prevent Operation Fouled Anchor from being discovered by Congress, Coast Guard leaders intentionally denied the survivors we sent to meetings benefits and services provided to victims of sexual trauma in the military,” she wrote. “Worse, we offered them absolutely nothing to replace those lost benefits and services. We simply left the victims to fend for themselves.”

Norenberg also said she received printed instructions to falsely pretend to victims that the Coast Guard had notified the Department of Homeland Security and Congress of its investigation and expected the results to be made public.

A Coast Guard spokesperson told HuffPost that those instructions do not accurately reflect how the interview with victims should be conducted. Another former Coast Guard official who attended all of the meetings said the issue of notifying Congress was never raised.

“In addition, the Coast Guard is not aware of anyone who told members of this team to lie about any aspect of Operation Fouled Anchor,” the spokesman said in an email.

Norenberg told CNN that while she could not recall all the details of her instructions or her exact conversations with the victims she met, if she had learned that Congress was unaware of what was happening, she would have informed lawmakers immediately.

“Why should anyone believe anything the Coast Guard has to say about Operation Fouled Anchor at this point?” she said.

A representative of the Coast Guard Academy did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday on Norenberg’s allegations and his resignation.

Need help? Visit RAINN’s National online hotline for sexual assault cases or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center website.