Former French tennis player Angélique Cauchy testified before a commission of inquiry and revealed that she was the victim of sexual assault by her coach, Andrew Gueddes, when she was just 12 years old. The coach has already been sentenced to 18 years in prison.
‘I was raped almost 400 times by my coach in two years’said Angélique Cauchy, recalling a 15-day internship in La Boule. “I lived the worst weeks of my life, he raped me three times a day. The first night he asked me to go to his room and I didn’t go. Then he came to mine. It was even worse. I was sitting trapped, I couldn’t leave when I wanted”he remembered.
“He started to attack me verbally. I tried to defend myself and asked him to stop, repeating day after day ‘don’t touch me, this is not okay, I don’t want to’. But he replied, “Don’t worry, this happens often between coaches and students.” But I didn’t want to, he was my mother’s age…” he continued as he remembered the fear he felt.
The former tennis player recalled that Andrew Gueddes told her he had AIDS. I created the belief in her that she too had the disease. “I lived between the ages of 13 and 18 and thought I had AIDS. I often thought about committing suicide, he raped me three times a day! I went through a nightmare that ruined my career.”
Angélique Cauchy also assured that the tennis people knew what was going on. “It was known in the tennis world that he was not right with girls. Sometimes they said to me ‘yes, he is with this one or he has gone out with that one’. But at 38 you don’t go out with a 15-year-old girl, never mind standing with guitar! A woman informed the club president, to which he replied ‘yes, but he brings us titles’.
Source: DN
