SAN JOSE – Touching the breasts and nipples of former San Jose State female athletes while treating shoulder injuries was “completely inappropriate” and had no legitimate medical purpose, an expert witness testified Monday in the trial of the school’s former head athletic trainer.
Over and over, as a federal prosecutor recounted last week’s testimony of former female athletes, Dr. Cindy Chang said there wasn’t any medical justification for Scott Shaw to cup the buttocks of a soccer player for back pain, connect groin to groin with a softball player during a hamstring stretch or massage her groin area for a hematoma on her shin. Chang, the former chief medical officer for UC Berkeley’s athletic program, agreed with prosecutors that Shaw crossed the line when he never never asked the young women for permission to touch sensitive areas, never offered a chaperone to be present, failed to document the treatment and rarely explained why he was touching them that way.
“It alarms me for the student athlete who is vulnerable,” and might not understand the purpose of the treatment, what their rights are and whether they should speak up, testified Chang, who works now as chief medical officer for the National Women’s Soccer League and has worked with Olympians.
In particular, Shaw’s massage that started at the softball player’s groin to treat the hematoma on her shin, Chang said, was “not only bad practice, it’s sexual misconduct or abuse without having documentation about why this was being performed in this way.”
Monday marked the fifth full day of the federal trial, where Shaw is facing federal civil rights charges for sexually assaulting female athletes under the guise of treatment. The scandal that erupted in 2020 led to the resignations of the university president and athletic director.
Under cross examination, defense lawyers suggested that Shaw was treating underlying pectoral muscles when he touched women’s breasts. The big question, defense lawyer Jeremy Blank asked, is “where does breast tissue start on a female?”
“It depends on the female,” Chang said.
Prosecutor Michael Pitman countered later, however, that women know the distinction on their own bodies.
Shaw, 56, resigned from San Jose State in 2020, a decade after allegations against him first surfaced. He sat intently at the defendant’s table throughout the day, reading glasses perched on his nose and taking numerous notes on a legal pad. He has pleaded not guilty to six federal charges of violating the constitutional right to “bodily integrity” of four former athletes whose complaints involved experiences with Shaw since 2017, within the 5-year statute of limitations.
More than a decade earlier, 17 Spartan swimmers had come forward with similar allegations of sexual abuse, but an in-house investigation by a school human resources officer quickly determined Shaw was using legitimate “trigger point” therapy. That investigation was widely criticized in 2021 by the U.S. Justice Department as “wholly inadequate.”
Although so-called “trigger point” or “pressure point” therapy can be used properly to relieve pain, Chang said there are no “trigger points in breast tissue.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office is expected to conclude presenting its case on Tuesday and the defense expects to wrap up by Friday. If closing arguments don’t begin sometime Friday morning they will likely spill into Monday, U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman said.
Monday’s testimony by Chang in front of an 8-woman, 5-man jury was the first clear refutation in a court of law of that early investigation of Shaw’s treatment.
Kirsten Trammell, one of the swimmers whose concerns were discounted in 2009, sat in the courtroom next to swim coach Sage Hopkins, who took their allegations to university leaders back then. Chang’s testimony, she said, provided the validation she and her teammates failed to get for years.
“It’s reaffirming that what we thought was a problem before is coming full circle – and knowing that has been helpful for a lot of us,” Trammell said. “Back then, they were just saying that that was normal treatment, that there wasn’t anything wrong. It’s good that we’re having actual experts and professionals speaking up and saying the right thing.”