I think I kind of had to pause for a minute
and say, “This is a huge deal.
Like, if this is true, this is a huge deal.”
Cheer
is behind bars this morning
as he is facing allegations of producing child pornography.
Cheer
The show was the most popular show on Netflix.
The athletes on the show were gracing red carpets,
on stage with Oprah.
Jerry Harris did the red carpet for
-You are Jerry. -Yeah.
Come on, Jerry.
You're awesome.
What everyone is seeing of Jerry Harris
from the outside view, from social media,
is a completely different person from when you actually know him.
Charlie and Sam told me that it had started when they were 13
and Jerry was 19
and continued for more than a year afterward.
It was really difficult for people to reconcile
the persona that Jerry Harris had as this gregarious,
kind, and exciting person from the show.
A new
uncovers nearly 180 individuals affiliated with cheerleading
who have faced charges involving misconduct with minors
but weren’t actually banned by the sport.
[INVESTIGATORS]
My name is Marisa Kwiatkowski,
and I’m an investigative reporter for
More than 160 women say Larry Nassar sexually abused them.
It’s one of the worst sexual abuse scandals in the history of sports.
In the wake of the reporting that my colleagues and I did
into USA Gymnastics and Dr. Larry Nassar,
I heard from someone who reached out and said,
“You really should look at what’s happening
in the world of cheerleading.”
My name is Tricia Nadolny,
and I’m an investigative reporter at
Cheerleading is a massive industry.
It spans five-year-olds cheering on the side of football games
to collegiate teams
to high pressure competitions going into adulthood.
The last estimates were more than 3.7 million people
involved in the sport of cheer.
I received a dump of documents that included information about
not only what was happening in the sport
but the structure of the sport.
One of the first things that we did was we pulled up the lists of people
who had been banned from participating in cheer.
And it was a very, very small list.
There were only 21 names on those two lists.
That really just kind of struck both of us as odd.
And so we started doing our own digging
to find out how many people connected to the sport
had been accused or convicted of misconduct involving minors.
We looked at news archives.
We started with Google
and found local stories all over the country
touching on this issue.
We searched sex offender registries
to compare the lists of individuals that we had
with the people who had been convicted.
We went deeper,
and some of the stories we were looking at were decades old.
Our investigation found more than 180 individuals
who had been accused of misconduct
who had been connected to cheerleading
but not banned by the sport.
And 74 of those people were actually convicted sex offenders.
There were high school cheerleading coaches who had been arrested
for having relationships with athletes on their teams.
There were choreographers,
people who owned gyms,
and music producers in the cheerleading world.
These were people who were not listed by the governing body
as being suspended or banned.
And so it made us wonder
could these people just walk into a gym today and get a job.
In the course of our investigation,
we continued to gather information about
the people accused of misconduct,
and we found a number of things relating to the governing bodies.
USASF had basically this loophole in their policies:
You could work at a cheerleading gym,
you could have contact with athletes every day
and not have to be a member of the U.S. All Star Federation
unless you wanted to accompany your team backstage.
The U.S. All Star Federation is a hugely powerful entity
in the world of cheerleading.
But we found that they didn’t really have super strict policies
when it came for how to handle sexual misconduct in their gyms.
They really were leaving a lot of it up to the gym owners.
So at the time that we were doing our investigation into
misconduct in cheerleading,
there was a lot of attention being paid to the sport,
in part because of the Netflix docuseries
that followed collegiate teams on their pathway to a competition.
Now, I had watched Cheer. Marisa had not.
I was a fan.
I binged it over a couple of weeks and really enjoyed the show.
Like most people, I really enjoyed watching Jerry Harris.
He was clearly the standout star.
So the fact that some people came over and talked to you
was a big deal because they love you.
Marisa says to me, “Someone from Cheer
has been accused of sexual misconduct.”
And I asked her, “Who?” And she said, “Jerry Harris.”
I think I kind of had to pause for a minute and say,
“This is a huge deal.
Like, if this is true, this is a huge deal.”
We very quickly started moving forward with telling that story.
And I connected with a mother and twin sons
who described a pattern of sexual misconduct by Jerry Harris
that spanned his time before appearing on the series
as well as continuing afterward.
Charlie and Sam told me that it had started when they were 13
and Jerry was 19
and continued for more than a year afterward.
My first indication that there was something going on was
I found a series of text messages on Charlie’s phone with Jerry Harris.
That caused me to sort of delve deeper with Charlie
and look in his Snapchat and things like that
and see that it was more than just text messages.
Jerry Harris was accused of soliciting nude photos
and sex from minors,
both Sam and Charlie,
as well as other minors who are connected to the sport.
Jerry would send me photos and videos of himself.
Jerry Harris was a huge star,
and his stardom was only growing at this point.
And what we heard from Sam and Charlie
was that Jerry had actually used that celebrity
to pressure them and coerce them into sending him inappropriate photos.
By the time that I interviewed Kristen and the boys,
they were incredibly frustrated.
One of the things that Kristen told us was that she had reported
these allegations to the U.S. All Star Federation.
She went to them first in May of 2020
and again in July of 2020
to say what Jerry had done to her sons.
But the U.S. All Star Federation did not act on that information.
I made the report about Jerry Harris, and that was in early May.
And I guess I just made the assumption that somebody with USASF
was doing something about the Jerry Harris stuff
because I did receive a confirmation
that they had received my report back in May,
but I didn't hear anything else from them until early July.
Jerry Harris had not yet been banned by the organization,
and so there was a lot of frustration.
They wanted to protect other people connected to the sport,
and they hoped by sharing their own stories,
they would be able to do so.
The U.S. All Star Federation has told us that
they made sure that the allegations had been reported to police,
which they had,
and they were waiting on law enforcement to act.
But we haven’t found any evidence that police were actually
looking into these allegations during that time.
There was nobody that had my back in this situation.
I was really the only person that was looking out for my kids.
And so in July, she reached out to the FBI
as well as local law enforcement,
in the hopes of sharing what had happened.
I would not be putting myself out there and doing all this stuff
and literally losing my friends about this for no reason.
When you’re asking someone to trust you with what basically
is the worst thing that’s ever happened to them,
there is a lot of responsibility that comes along with that.
Jerry Harris was ultimately only suspended
by the U.S. All Star Federation in September,
on the day that we published our investigation into him.
Jerry Harris was arrested
and criminally charged in September of 2020,
facing multiple counts relating to his conduct with minors.
He ultimately pled guilty in February of this year.
He admitted to receiving child pornography
as well as to crossing state lines
with the intent to have sexual relations with a minor.
At the time that we started our investigation,
just 21 people in total had been banned
by the sport’s two governing bodies.
Today, those lists have been combined,
and there are now more than 200 people
who have been banned by the organization.
You know, sadly, I think we find this in a lot of sports.
But at the end of the day,
it has to be a safe space for athletes.