Prime Video’s Fifteen-Love Is Fiction, But The Tennis Abuse Scandal Is Real

Unlike Turner’s character in Fifteen-Love, Sanders pleaded guilty to all counts of his crimes, but his behaviour appears to have gone unchecked for many years. In 2012, the parent of a Wrexham Tennis Centre player raised concerns about Sanders’ aggressive and predatory behaviour and his sexualised conduct towards young female players, but he continued to coach at the centre. Sanders was found to have been controlling and manipulative, and to have groomed young female players, until his eventual arrest for engaging in sexual activity with an underage girl. 

In 2016, Leeds-based tennis coach Derek Munro, then aged 58, was charged with a string of historical sexual assault charges, including against minors. Munro pleaded not guilty to the assault charges, but admitted to having been in a “relationship” with one of his alleged victims when she was over the age of 16. 

In 2007, Claire Lyte  a coach at the Lawn Tennis Training Academy in Loughborough was sentenced to two years and nine months after being found guilty of multiple counts of sexual activity with a child she had been coaching. Lyte had competed at Wimbledon as a player but retired, like Fifteen-Love’s Justine character, due to a wrist injury. She denied the charges, claiming that the girl’s mother had invented the allegations in spite because of her daughter’s lack of professional prospects in the sport. 

“Relationship” or Abuse in a Position of Trust?

As dramatised in Fifteen-Love, what characterises many such instances of sexual activity between minors or young players and their much older coaches is the players’ belief at the time that they are not the victim of abuse, but in a loving relationship. Only years later does the trauma and inappropriate nature of these “relationships” between a trusted adult and the young person in their care emerge. That was the case with former professional tennis star turned broadcaster Pam Shriver, who wrote in 2022 in The Daily Telegraph that while she didn’t consider herself a victim of sexual abuse by her married 50-year-old coach Don Candy when they had a sexual relationship when she was 17 years old, it was traumatic, stunted her emotionally and had a negative effect on her professional game.

“I believe abusive coaching relationships are alarmingly common in sport as a whole,” says Shriver. “My particular expertise, though, is in tennis, where I have witnessed dozens of instances in my four-and-a-bit decades as a player and commentator. Every time I hear about a player who is dating their coach, or I see a male physio working on a female body in the gym, it sets my alarm bells ringing.”

Shriver was among many in the tennis world who sent her support to French-Belgian player Fiona Ferro in 2022, when Ferro’s former coach Pierre Bouteyre was accused of multiple counts of rape and sexual assault alleged to have taken place when Ferro was in Bouteyre’s care and aged between 15 and 18.