Four women to testify at Senate hearing about sexual harassment and assault at Coast Guard Academy

Four women who attended the US Coast Guard Academy, including a current cadet, are expected to appear at a congressional hearing Tuesday and testify that the agency’s leaders failed to protect them from sexual harassment and assault.

The hearing before the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was sparked by CNN’s reporting on how agency leaders buried the results of a secret investigation — dubbed Operation Fouled Anchor — that substantiated dozens of sexual assaults at the Coast Guard Academy.

Senators requested a litany of documents from the agency, including all documents from the Fouled Anchor investigation and all investigations into sexual assault at the academy from 2006 to present.

The Senate inquiry is one of several ongoing government probes announced in the wake of CNN’s reporting, and Tuesday’s hearing comes less than a week after the Coast Guard’s own acknowledgment of past failures in a rare and highly critical internal report that ordered a series of changes to how the agency handles sexual assault.

In that report, Coast Guard leaders acknowledged they had “failed to keep our people safe.”

After spending 90 days speaking with hundreds of service members, the internal review team said it had heard a resounding message from the workforce that “these failures and lack of accountability are entirely unacceptable” and that leaders “must do something about it.”

“Too many Coast Guard members are not experiencing the safe, empowering workplace they expect and deserve (and) trust in Coast Guard leadership is eroding,” the authors wrote in the roughly 100-page report.

Despite the scathing nature of the report, several congressional lawmakers and assault survivors have said they were not satisfied with the Coast Guard’s accounting, saying the agency still needs to hold past perpetrators and the leaders who covered up their dangerous and criminal behavior accountable – rather than only looking to the future.

The women testifying Tuesday attended the academy at different times — from the 1980s to today.

Lisa Banks, an attorney who represents three women scheduled to testify, said in a statement that for decades the Coast Guard “has covered up an abhorrent culture of rape, sexual assault and misconduct at its service academy, often at the expense of the physical and mental health of its cadets and service members.

“It has also failed to discipline many of the alleged perpetrators, with some rising to top roles at the Coast Guard and other military agencies,” Banks said. “While the Coast Guard claims it has routinely implemented various changes and reforms to address this broken system, the testimony of my clients, spanning a period of almost 50 years, will prove otherwise.”

In addition to the Senate hearing, the House Oversight Committee announced last week that it had launched an investigation into the US Coast Guard’s “mishandling of serious misconduct” — including sexual assault, racism and hazing.