The Calling
SafeSport’s new CEO helped Congress find the Center’s failures. Now she explains them away.
When Benita Fitzgerald Mosley took over the U.S. Center for SafeSport in February 2026, she described the job as something more than a job.
“I brought with me a deep belief that sport has the power to change lives, and an equally deep conviction that sport must be safe for everyone who participates,” she wrote in the Center’s new strategic plan. “I know firsthand that sport can change the trajectory of someone’s life. I also know how much is at stake when the environment fails to protect. That is why this work matters so much to me personally.”
A conviction. A calling.
People who arrive with a calling usually arrive with convictions about what must change. Mosley arrived with more than convictions. She arrived with findings — because two years earlier, she sat on the body that produced them.
She was in the room
Mosley says so herself. Explaining, at the Center’s June 2026 public forum, how she came to understand SafeSport’s caseload problem, she told the audience she had “been part of the US Congressional Commission on the US Olympic and Paralympic movement back in 2023 and 2024. And so I had seen all the data and the volume of reports.”
Benita Fitzgerald Mosley is listed as a commissioner of the Commission on the State of U.S. Olympics & Paralympics, the body Congress created in 2020 to examine the Olympic movement — including SafeSport. Two of the sixteen originally appointed commissioners resigned before the work began and are footnoted as having “took no part.” Mosley is not among them.
She was not a passenger. At the Commission’s public hearing, she questioned SafeSport’s then-CEO, Ju’Riese Colón, directly — about the Centralized Disciplinary Database, about how the Center handles a caseload of seven thousand, about whether it triages. She questioned USA Hockey’s representative about narrowing SafeSport’s scope, and pushed back when the answer pointed toward handing cases to the governing bodies:
“I think Professor Hamilton said that the instinct is always to protect the institution and the perpetrator, and not the victim, so I’m wondering — do you see how that might cause, taking the clock back a little bit and putting some of these cases in the hands of the NGBs, might not work out so well for the victims.”
She asked Colón why victims aren’t able to share the findings related to their own cases, and whether that could change.
That is a commissioner protecting victims from institutional self-interest. Those are the right questions. They are, in fact, the questions this entire piece is about.
What the Commission found
In March 2024, the Commission delivered its 277-page final report to Congress. The findings on SafeSport are not subtle:
“SafeSport has lost the trust of athletes and other movement participants as a result of a growing case backlog, cases remaining unresolved for long periods, and a policy of closing many cases administratively.”
And in the paragraph that follows:
“In 2017, Congress authorized SafeSport and gave it a clear mission: protect athletes from harm and enable them to feel safe. In its first seven years, SafeSport has failed on both accounts. The process for resolving cases and removing those found responsible for abuse and misconduct is not operating as Congress intended, and, as a result, more than half of athletes do not trust SafeSport.”
The Commission quantified the problem. Ninety-seven percent of high-performance athletes it surveyed agreed that maintaining an abuse-free environment was important. Only 44% believed SafeSport was succeeding at it. Athletes who had actually been through a SafeSport process rated it 3.7 out of ten.
On administrative closures specifically, the Commission described “SafeSport’s practice of relying on administrative closures in an effort to clear its caseload backlog,” and concluded that the practice “contributed to a lack of trust in the system by athletes, coaches, and governing-body officials alike.”
The report reproduces a June 2023 letter from a SafeSport official to a national governing body. In one sentence, the Center accepts jurisdiction over an athlete’s claim. In the next sentence — the very next sentence — it closes the case administratively.
The recommendation
Then the Commission told Congress what to do about it. Recommendation #3 is titled “Reforms to SafeSport Practices.” Inside it is this:
“SafeSport should, additionally, be prohibited from closing cases administratively just because a victim chooses not to participate in the investigative process. The burden of determining whether an abusive or malign individual has been allowed access to athletes should not fall to victims; rather, it must be SafeSport’s responsibility to investigate all claims that have merit until a determination can be made concerning a subject’s possible sanctioning or removal. When a victim chooses not to risk re-traumatization by engaging with SafeSport’s process, that fact alone cannot justify an administrative closure without a proper investigation.”
Read that again: “that fact alone cannot justify an administrative closure without a proper investigation.“
The Commission on which Benita Fitzgerald Mosley served asked Congress to prohibit SafeSport from closing a case because a victim didn’t participate.
What she says now
On June 23, 2026, at the Center’s annual State of SafeSport address, Mosley was asked directly about administrative holds and closures. This is her answer:
“We have to have evidence to move forward with a case beyond an initial report. And given the Center’s lack of subpoena power, we can’t force, we can’t compel someone to participate in our process like maybe law enforcement or the court system can do. People volunteer to participate.”
That is the defense. Cases close because victims don’t participate, and the Center cannot make them.
I wrote about that defense when she offered it — that every HR department, licensing board, and Title IX office in the country investigates without subpoena power, and that the Center has never asked Congress for the authority it says it lacks. What I didn’t connect then was that the person offering the defense had sat on a commission that told Congress victim non-participation “alone cannot justify an administrative closure without a proper investigation.”
It is the precise practice her Commission recommended Congress prohibit — now offered from the other side of the table as an explanation by one of the people who recommended prohibiting it.
The gap
Mosley cites the Commission as the source of her knowledge. She says she saw all the data. She questioned SafeSport’s chief executive about its database, its caseload, and why victims cannot share the findings in their own cases. She warned a witness that institutions protect themselves and their perpetrators rather than the people they harm.
And in her first public accounting as chief executive, she named none of that.
She spoke instead of moving the needle. Of building “a stronger, steadier, and more hopeful national sport safeguarding system.” Of the Center becoming “a model of operational excellence,” of setting “the gold standard for safeguarding and culture change in sport.” The 2025 annual report she released that morning is titled A Year of Progress and Purpose.
There is a version of this story in which a new chief executive simply doesn’t yet know what’s broken. That version is not available here. Mosley is not an outsider learning the terrain. She is one of the small number of people Congress asked to find out exactly what was wrong with this organization.
She asked the questions. She heard the answers. The Commission wrote the findings.
Yet when asked publicly about administrative closures, she did not mention them.
That is not a knowledge problem. It’s a choice.
The calling
The word Mosley uses for this work is personal. Conviction. Urgency. Integrity. That is why this work matters so much to me personally.
Perhaps. But a calling to protect athletes and a calling to defend an institution are not the same calling, and only one of them requires you to stay quiet about what you already know.
In 2023, she warned that the instinct is always to protect the institution and the perpetrator, and not the victim.
She was appointed to find the faults. The Commission found them and put them in writing.
Now she runs the place, and the faults her Commission named are nowhere in her telling.
I report independently on the U.S. Center for SafeSport. If you have information or an experience you’d like to share, you can reach me confidentially at the.safesport.illusion@proton.me — share only what you’re comfortable sharing.