GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — The former Detroit Tiger and New York Yankee found guilty of sexually assaulting four girls at Lakewood High School will pay one of his victims $1.8 million.
The victim and her father were questioned in Grand Rapids Federal Court Thursday by Chad Curtis, who appeared via video from his jail cell.
The now 22-year-old woman had to endure questioning from the man she once considered a role model in athletics and morality, who instead betrayed her trust by sexually assaulting her in a dark room off Lakewood High School’s weight room when she was 16.
But as traumatic as the assault was, the treatment she suffered from her peers and the Lakewood community left just as many scars.
“Our friends, her friends, completely abandoned her,” the victim’s father testified. “She’s never been the same.”
Curtis, who went from the major leagues to working as a part-time high school weight trainer, is in the fourth year of a 7- to 15-year sentence after he was found guilty of assaulting the teen girls between the summer of 2011 and the fall of 2012.
In his 2013 trial, the main witness against him was a girl he had been coaching for three years.
The girl and Curtis shared their faith and she became best friends with Curtis’ daughter, who was the same age and she said she also loved his infant son.
She said in court today that it was her love of his family, and her assailant’s claim that he was sorry and would never do it again she said made her decide to keep quiet for eight months.
That changed when other girls came forward saying they had also suffered abuse at his hands.
That led the girl who was a star athlete with colleges looking at her for scholarships to come forward.
Curtis would not admit his guilt but would call the victim’s liars. Even in court Thursday, Curtis maintained that his victim was committing perjury and fraud.
But she would tell Judge Janet Neff that her life has been shattered by her treatment by Curtis and the people she considered her friends.
She was stigmatized, isolated, the subject of personal attacks in person and on social media that led to her changing her phone number and even schools in her senior year.