Coast Guard Academy official resigns, says she was directed to lie to Congress as part of ‘cruel’ sexual assault coverup

A US Coast Guard Academy official says leaders directed her to lie to sexual assault victims and Congress, making her an unwitting accomplice in a coverup of abuse.

A US Coast Guard Academy official says top leaders directed her to lie to sexual assault victims and Congress, making her an unwitting accomplice in a coverup of decades of abuse. As a result, Shannon Norenberg says she’s resigning from her role as the academy’s head of sexual assault prevention and issuing a public apology to survivors, saying she is no longer willing to stay silent. “The Coast Guard lied to me,” she wrote in a public statement posted online Sunday. “I can no longer in good conscience be part of an organization that would betray me, betray victims of sexual assault, and betray the system I helped set up to hold perpetrators at the academy accountable.” Norenberg’s explosive allegations were made in advance of a congressional hearing this week at which the Coast Guard’s first female commandant, Adm. Linda Fagan, is slated to testify about the agency’s sexual misconduct scandal. In an exclusive interview with CNN, Norenberg said she had made it her mission to help sexual assault survivors at the Coast Guard Academy for more than a decade. She said she was devastated when she recently discovered old records showing how leaders had used her as part of the cover-up of Operation Fouled Anchor, a secret internal probe into a history of sexual assault coverups that CNN exposed last summer. She wrote in her public posting that she was sent on an “apology tour” in 2019 to brief dozens of assault victims about their cases, which had previously been mishandled by academy leadership. The list of talking points she was given at the time shows she was directed to tell victims that Congress was already fully aware of the operation, which she now knows was not the case. She believes this was intended to “dissuade the victims from contacting their Members of Congress.”