The official in charge of sexual assault response at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy resigned last weekend ahead of a Senate oversight committee hearing Tuesday on a sexual assault scandal at the 148-year old school, saying the service betrayed her, “betrayed victims and betrayed the system” by failing to hold perpetrators accountable.
Shannon Norenberg, who had served as the sexual assault response coordinator at the Coast Guard Academy since 2013, detailed the reasons for her resignation in a blog post that described the process for investigating sexual assaults at the school that occurred decades earlier, and Coast Guard leadership’s subsequent efforts to hide the incidents and the investigation from Congress.
Norenberg, an Army veteran who previously worked as a sexual assault response coordinator for the Marine Corps, said Coast Guard leaders gave her scripts to interview victims, which she said made her believe she was helping not only the investigation but the victims in receiving benefits.
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Instead, she said, the effort was designed to mislead them.
“The Coast Guard lied to me. Worse than that, they used me to lie to victims, used me to silence victims and used me in a coordinated effort to discourage victims of sexual assault at the academy from speaking to Congress,” Norenberg wrote in her post Sunday.
The Coast Guard is a year into a…
