Defense: ‘Team chemistry’ fanned runaway sex abuse allegations against ‘good and dedicated’ San Jose State trainer

SAN JOSE – The former sports trainer accused of sexually assaulting more than two dozen female athletes over more than a decade is no “sociopath, predator or charlatan,” his lawyer told a federal jury Tuesday on the opening day of a long-awaited criminal trial into allegations at the center of scandal that rocked San Jose State University.

Instead, Scott Shaw is “a good and dedicated trainer” whose legitimate treatment was misunderstood by mostly teenage girls, his lawyer said. The allegations against Shaw were fanned by “team chemistry” among female athletes primed to support each other, he said, along with explosive media stories, and FBI agents setting out to prove Shaw was guilty.

“Once this fire got started, Scott Shaw’s career burst into flames and no one was interested in the job of putting it out,” defense lawyer Dave Callaway told the jury of 8 women and 4 men.

The opening statements in San Jose’s federal court – just two blocks from the university campus – marked the first time the public has heard the embattled trainer’s side of the story since he resigned as the scandal broke nearly four years ago.

In 2010, the original allegations from 17 swimmers against Shaw had been dismissed after an in-house investigation determined Shaw’s “trigger-point therapy” was legitimate treatment. Shaw was allowed to continue treating athletes for another 11 years, until Spartan swim coach Sage Hopkins blew the whistle on the university’s handling of the case, and new investigations began.

Now, as many as eight former athletes from the water polo, softball, soccer and swim teams are expected to testify over the course of the three-week trial that follows a Department of Justice investigation into the school, more than $5 million in legal settlements and the resignation of the university’s president and athletic director. The case has drawn comparisons to the trial of Michigan State sports medicine doctor Larry Nassar, who was accused of sexually assaulting more than 150 young gymnasts under the guise of medical treatment and is now serving life in prison.

Shaw wore a dark suit and sported a neatly trimmed gray beard as he listened intently at the defense table. Before the jury walked in, he briefly used his knuckles to massage the back of one of his defense lawyers and appeared to discuss a neck treatment.

Shaw faces six federal civil rights charges for “willfully depriving four female student-athletes of their Constitutional fundamental right to bodily integrity when he sexually assaulted them.”

In their opening statements, federal prosecutors said the charges are about a man “who betrayed young women who trusted him to keep them safe and healthy.”

“He used that access to grope female athletes, fondle their breasts and nipples, reaching under their underwear,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Pitman said. “He did all that without warning them, without getting permission and we think the evidence will show he did it without any legitimate purpose at all.”

Pitman said the federal government will prove that Shaw violated the women’s constitutional rights to bodily integrity, that he was acting in his official capacity as a state employee, and that he intentionally touched the women sexually.

Pitman outlined each of the six charges against Shaw, flashing on courtroom screens a photo of each of the four victims, all smiling, some wearing their Spartan jerseys.

Each allegation was similar, the prosecutor said, describing one woman’s claims. “He began massaging her neck, then massaging her shoulder, then without warning, put his hand into her bra,” Pitman said. “She was shocked.”

But Shaw’s lawyers insisted that their client was just doing his job, practicing a legitimate form of treatment.

“A middle-aged man with his hands on young women in sports bras and swimsuits and shorts – here in an antiseptic federal courthouse away from the hustle and bustle of a training room, that might sound a little suspicious,” Callaway told the jurors. “That’s OK,” he said, but “the evidence will show you that that was his job, that was the job that California taxpayers hired this man to do, the job he trained for.”

He also suggested that as rumors swirled about Shaw’s treatment, other young athletes piled on.

Many of them “talked every day, lived together, traveled to out-of-town sports together,” Callaway said. “Their primary goal was to achieve team chemistry without which teams do not bond and do not win.”

Imagine, he told the jurors, that “word gets around that this man is creepy, that some people say he looks at them in a way that makes them uncomfortable.” Then add the swim coach who “takes it upon himself that what this person is doing is inappropriate and starts agitating against this athletic trainer saying ‘I don’t want him touching my athletes’.”

Put on all those factors together “in a pot,” he said, “and let them bubble for a decade.”

Hopkins, who kept up a decade-long crusade against Shaw after members of his swim team first complained about the alleged abuse in 2009, sat quietly in the courtroom Tuesday as the trial began.

When the media picked up on the story and the university called for an investigation in 2020, there was a sense of “wonder and outrage that there’s been a predator in our midst all along,” Callaway said. “Suddenly new athletes are coming forward (saying) that happened to me, too. Now that you mention it, I was uncomfortable too.”

Callaway told jurors that if anything, Shaw is guilty of poor communication. If he had explained why he was touching them in private areas,  that might have “prevented this whole traumatic mess from happening.”

Before court ended for the day, one witness took the stand, former San Jose State athletic trainer Stephanie Conrad. She said that whenever she needed to work close to an intimate area of an athlete, she would also ask permission throughout the session.

“I would always get consent to do their treatment, especially if it was in a more private area,” Conrad said.

The trial will resume on Thursday. The U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman will be out Wednesday, she told the jurors. She has jury duty herself.

Staff Writer Carolyn Stein contributed to this report.