One incident with Dames is burned into Cnota’s memory.
She played for Dames for several years in the mid-1990s, both at Eclipse and at her high school, St. Viator, in the wealthy suburb of Arlington Heights. One day at practice, when she was around 15, she said Dames told his players to get on their knees for a drill. As she knelt alongside her teammates, she said he turned to her and remarked, “Cnota, I bet you know this position well.”
“I remember feeling uncomfortable, but what do you do? Because the way he portrayed himself to us was, you don’t want to do anything to piss him off because then you won’t play,” Cnota said. “He held soccer and us loving the game so much over our head, and he could do anything to us because we wanted to play so bad.”
There were other instances, Cnota said, when Dames targeted her with sexual jokes and comments, frequently bringing up her boyfriends and her sex life and making comments that “no adult should be making to a teenager.” She remembered a popular song called “Laid” that Dames would often say reminded him of her when it played on the radio, calling it “your song.”
As a teenager in the 1990s, Cnota said, she did not have the understanding or language to describe Dames’s treatment of her. But as an adult, she said she saw his behavior as sexual harassment.
Cnota was still at St. Viator when one of her teammates went to her former high school to report Dames. The girl told the school that Dames had touched her on the thigh and that he was “very verbally inappropriate,” according to a police report, which The Post obtained through a public records request and which has not been previously reported. She told the officer, the police report said, that she wanted only to “protect other players from [Dames’s] advances.”
The woman whose complaint triggered the investigation declined to comment, and The Post does not identify alleged victims of sexual misconduct without their consent.
In addition to the players who said Dames had pinched and punched them, according to the police report, another player told police that her teammate disclosed an “incident” involving Dames to her and felt the girl was “telling the truth.”
Tough love or verbal abuse? For coaches and parents, the new lines are hard to define.
The officer who investigated the allegation of unwanted touching in 1998 interviewed 150 of Dames’s current and former players, he wrote in his report. Many players, including some who described Dames’s sexual comments, said Dames had not made them feel uncomfortable, and many said they thought he was a good coach, the police report said.
But the report also documented multiple allegations of “degrading” and sexual comments by Dames, including an incident during practice when Dames told a player “she had a nice ‘a--’ and he wanted to sleep with her,” and one where he had joked that a girl should have taken off her shirt.
Multiple players also told police they were concerned with how frequently Dames spent time with girls outside of soccer, going with them to the movies or riding with them in his car. One girl alleged a teammate “was always going over to [Dames’s] apartment,” the police report said. A former player said she thought it was “strange” that Dames “did not want an assistant coach, rather he wanted to coach the team by himself.”
“Although she felt Dames was a good coach,” the report said of one player, “his manner of teaching totally shot her confidence and she felt his tactics were mind controlling.”
St. Viator High School in Arlington Heights, Ill., where Rory Dames once coached girls' soccer. (Google Maps/Google)
In interviews with The Post, five women who played for Dames at St. Viator and Eclipse in the 1990s and early 2000s recounted similar stories to those that girls told police in 1998, including that they were uncomfortable with the amount of time Dames spent with girls outside of soccer. Four women told The Post that they had heard Dames make explicitly sexual comments to them or their teammates. Most asked not to be named, saying they were concerned about their privacy.
“Looking back on it, you think, ‘What the hell is that guy doing hanging out with teenagers?’” Cnota said. “It was grooming behavior. It’s sickening.”
From the 1998 police report (Police report)
St. Viator suspended Dames from coaching as police investigated, according to the police report. But the girl who had first spoken up about Dames ultimately told police she did not want to pursue a complaint, the report said. An assistant state’s attorney assigned to the sex crimes unit declined to pursue the case, the police report said. The police officer, who is now retired, and the assistant state’s attorney, who is now a judge, did not return messages seeking comment.
Social services found “numerous situations involving verbal inappropriateness,” according to the police report. But a social worker determined the girl’s initial report of inappropriate touching was “unfounded,” the police report said, and did not receive any other allegations of physical touching. The report did not specify a reason for the social worker’s finding.
Bogart, Dames’s attorney, pointed to the decisions by the sex crimes prosecutor and the social worker as evidence that Dames had not acted abusively toward players in 1998. After the investigation, she said, there were no formal allegations of sexual misconduct “by three entities specifically charged with and uniquely trained to investigate such cases.”
In a statement to The Post, St. Viator said the school had “no specific information about the allegations” but that it would conduct an investigation. The principal and guidance counselor from the time could not be reached for comment, and the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services declined to release records from the investigation because they involved allegations of child abuse.
When the next soccer season arrived, St. Viator allowed Dames to return to coaching.
A former soccer player, who alleges Dames used his power over her as her coach to have sex with her, said Dames sought “ultimate control” over her life. (Allison V Smith/For The Washington Post)
A singular force
She was just getting started with Eclipse when she spoke to police in 1998, one player told The Post. She told them he was a good coach, and when her high school, St. Viator, brought him back the next year, she assumed it meant he had done nothing wrong, she said. She trusted him.
They grew close over the next several years, she told The Post, and Dames could be sweet to her, taking her to the movies and inviting her to his apartment. But he was also a forceful, sometimes brutal influence in her life, she said. He was prone to angry tirades and degrading insults when she failed to live up to his high standards, she said. And like Cnota, she said Dames was involved in their teenage social lives, asking about their boyfriends and personal drama.
With his power over her fate as a soccer player and knowledge of her life’s intimate details, she said, it felt as though Dames had “ultimate control.”
“He became very entrenched in all aspects of our lives,” she said, “and there was no part that was free of Rory.”
Then she turned 18. She went to Dames’s apartment one night not long after she had graduated, while she still played for him at Eclipse. She and Dames began playing a card game in his living room, and this time, she said, he told her to take off one item of clothing, and then another, as they played. She had been taught since she was 14 to obey his every command, she said, and had been punished with screams and sprints when she did not. She took off her clothes.
She didn’t think they would have sex, she said. But then, when they did, it felt almost expected.
Now in her 40s, the woman spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity, fearing personal and professional repercussions. Her sister and another former Eclipse teammate told The Post that the woman disclosed to them in the mid-2000s that she had had a sexual relationship with Dames.
The Post also reviewed emails between the player and Dames. In 2010, the woman emailed Dames, who by then had married another former youth player at Eclipse. She told him to ask his wife not to tell any of their mutual friends about “what happened between us.”
Dames replied: “Agreed! I will take care of it.”
The woman said she returned repeatedly to Dames’s apartment to have sex with him that summer in the early 2000s. She remembered how her therapist at the time told her that she “always had a choice” — that she could be at the door of Dames’s apartment and, even then, she could still turn away.
“But I always thought to myself, ‘This isn’t a choice for me,’ ” the player said. “If he says come over, then yes, in some other reality of life, maybe I could make the choice not to. But in my life, I felt like, there wasn’t that choice with him. If he [instant messaged] me, ‘Come over,’ it was, ‘Come over.’ ”
She hoped to forget about Dames that fall when she left for college, where she fulfilled her dream of playing Division I soccer. But when she returned the next summer to play for Dames at Eclipse, he invited her to his apartment, and she felt again, she said, that she did not have a choice.
She played for Dames for several years in the mid-1990s, both at Eclipse and at her high school, St. Viator, in the wealthy suburb of Arlington Heights. One day at practice, when she was around 15, she said Dames told his players to get on their knees for a drill. As she knelt alongside her teammates, she said he turned to her and remarked, “Cnota, I bet you know this position well.”
“I remember feeling uncomfortable, but what do you do? Because the way he portrayed himself to us was, you don’t want to do anything to piss him off because then you won’t play,” Cnota said. “He held soccer and us loving the game so much over our head, and he could do anything to us because we wanted to play so bad.”
There were other instances, Cnota said, when Dames targeted her with sexual jokes and comments, frequently bringing up her boyfriends and her sex life and making comments that “no adult should be making to a teenager.” She remembered a popular song called “Laid” that Dames would often say reminded him of her when it played on the radio, calling it “your song.”
As a teenager in the 1990s, Cnota said, she did not have the understanding or language to describe Dames’s treatment of her. But as an adult, she said she saw his behavior as sexual harassment.
Cnota was still at St. Viator when one of her teammates went to her former high school to report Dames. The girl told the school that Dames had touched her on the thigh and that he was “very verbally inappropriate,” according to a police report, which The Post obtained through a public records request and which has not been previously reported. She told the officer, the police report said, that she wanted only to “protect other players from [Dames’s] advances.”
The woman whose complaint triggered the investigation declined to comment, and The Post does not identify alleged victims of sexual misconduct without their consent.
In addition to the players who said Dames had pinched and punched them, according to the police report, another player told police that her teammate disclosed an “incident” involving Dames to her and felt the girl was “telling the truth.”
Tough love or verbal abuse? For coaches and parents, the new lines are hard to define.
The officer who investigated the allegation of unwanted touching in 1998 interviewed 150 of Dames’s current and former players, he wrote in his report. Many players, including some who described Dames’s sexual comments, said Dames had not made them feel uncomfortable, and many said they thought he was a good coach, the police report said.
But the report also documented multiple allegations of “degrading” and sexual comments by Dames, including an incident during practice when Dames told a player “she had a nice ‘a--’ and he wanted to sleep with her,” and one where he had joked that a girl should have taken off her shirt.
Multiple players also told police they were concerned with how frequently Dames spent time with girls outside of soccer, going with them to the movies or riding with them in his car. One girl alleged a teammate “was always going over to [Dames’s] apartment,” the police report said. A former player said she thought it was “strange” that Dames “did not want an assistant coach, rather he wanted to coach the team by himself.”
“Although she felt Dames was a good coach,” the report said of one player, “his manner of teaching totally shot her confidence and she felt his tactics were mind controlling.”
St. Viator High School in Arlington Heights, Ill., where Rory Dames once coached girls' soccer. (Google Maps/Google)
In interviews with The Post, five women who played for Dames at St. Viator and Eclipse in the 1990s and early 2000s recounted similar stories to those that girls told police in 1998, including that they were uncomfortable with the amount of time Dames spent with girls outside of soccer. Four women told The Post that they had heard Dames make explicitly sexual comments to them or their teammates. Most asked not to be named, saying they were concerned about their privacy.
“Looking back on it, you think, ‘What the hell is that guy doing hanging out with teenagers?’” Cnota said. “It was grooming behavior. It’s sickening.”
From the 1998 police report (Police report)
St. Viator suspended Dames from coaching as police investigated, according to the police report. But the girl who had first spoken up about Dames ultimately told police she did not want to pursue a complaint, the report said. An assistant state’s attorney assigned to the sex crimes unit declined to pursue the case, the police report said. The police officer, who is now retired, and the assistant state’s attorney, who is now a judge, did not return messages seeking comment.
Social services found “numerous situations involving verbal inappropriateness,” according to the police report. But a social worker determined the girl’s initial report of inappropriate touching was “unfounded,” the police report said, and did not receive any other allegations of physical touching. The report did not specify a reason for the social worker’s finding.
Bogart, Dames’s attorney, pointed to the decisions by the sex crimes prosecutor and the social worker as evidence that Dames had not acted abusively toward players in 1998. After the investigation, she said, there were no formal allegations of sexual misconduct “by three entities specifically charged with and uniquely trained to investigate such cases.”
In a statement to The Post, St. Viator said the school had “no specific information about the allegations” but that it would conduct an investigation. The principal and guidance counselor from the time could not be reached for comment, and the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services declined to release records from the investigation because they involved allegations of child abuse.
When the next soccer season arrived, St. Viator allowed Dames to return to coaching.
A former soccer player, who alleges Dames used his power over her as her coach to have sex with her, said Dames sought “ultimate control” over her life. (Allison V Smith/For The Washington Post)
A singular force
She was just getting started with Eclipse when she spoke to police in 1998, one player told The Post. She told them he was a good coach, and when her high school, St. Viator, brought him back the next year, she assumed it meant he had done nothing wrong, she said. She trusted him.
They grew close over the next several years, she told The Post, and Dames could be sweet to her, taking her to the movies and inviting her to his apartment. But he was also a forceful, sometimes brutal influence in her life, she said. He was prone to angry tirades and degrading insults when she failed to live up to his high standards, she said. And like Cnota, she said Dames was involved in their teenage social lives, asking about their boyfriends and personal drama.
With his power over her fate as a soccer player and knowledge of her life’s intimate details, she said, it felt as though Dames had “ultimate control.”
“He became very entrenched in all aspects of our lives,” she said, “and there was no part that was free of Rory.”
Then she turned 18. She went to Dames’s apartment one night not long after she had graduated, while she still played for him at Eclipse. She and Dames began playing a card game in his living room, and this time, she said, he told her to take off one item of clothing, and then another, as they played. She had been taught since she was 14 to obey his every command, she said, and had been punished with screams and sprints when she did not. She took off her clothes.
She didn’t think they would have sex, she said. But then, when they did, it felt almost expected.
Now in her 40s, the woman spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity, fearing personal and professional repercussions. Her sister and another former Eclipse teammate told The Post that the woman disclosed to them in the mid-2000s that she had had a sexual relationship with Dames.
The Post also reviewed emails between the player and Dames. In 2010, the woman emailed Dames, who by then had married another former youth player at Eclipse. She told him to ask his wife not to tell any of their mutual friends about “what happened between us.”
Dames replied: “Agreed! I will take care of it.”
The woman said she returned repeatedly to Dames’s apartment to have sex with him that summer in the early 2000s. She remembered how her therapist at the time told her that she “always had a choice” — that she could be at the door of Dames’s apartment and, even then, she could still turn away.
“But I always thought to myself, ‘This isn’t a choice for me,’ ” the player said. “If he says come over, then yes, in some other reality of life, maybe I could make the choice not to. But in my life, I felt like, there wasn’t that choice with him. If he [instant messaged] me, ‘Come over,’ it was, ‘Come over.’ ”
She hoped to forget about Dames that fall when she left for college, where she fulfilled her dream of playing Division I soccer. But when she returned the next summer to play for Dames at Eclipse, he invited her to his apartment, and she felt again, she said, that she did not have a choice.