FIFA invested in women and girls. Can it protect them?

One after another, they collapsed onto the field, touching their foreheads to the grass, lifting their arms in prayer.

The moment that Haiti qualified for its first women’s World Cup should have been a symbol of the bright future for women’s soccer across the globe: the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere fighting its way to the heights of the sport, with an electric, homegrown teenage star, Melchie Dumornay, scoring both of her country’s goals.

But there was a shadow over the game, and over Haitian soccer.

The program’s architect, former federation president Yves Jean-Bart, had for years been embroiled in a harrowing abuse scandal, accused of sexually assaulting underage players and overseeing a national training center that allegedly became a den of systematized abuse by other officials. Jean-Bart denied the allegations, calling them a plot orchestrated by his adversaries. But in 2020, FIFA, the sport’s global governing body, found that he had sexually harassed and abused multiple female players and banned him for life.

That ban, though, was short-lived: A few days before Haiti’s win over Chile in February sent it to the World Cup, a panel of arbitrators reversed the decision, ruling that FIFA had failed to prove its case. Jean-Bart vowed to return to the helm of Haitian soccer. FIFA, he declared, would not be able to stop him.

If Haiti’s place in the World Cup was a sign of FIFA’s progress, Jean-Bart’s victory exposed something else.

For years, the international soccer federation has led a push to bring more women and girls into the sport, culminating in a 2023 World Cup that features an expanded, 32-team field; eight first-time entrants; and dramatically increased prize money.

But FIFA has struggled to protect the wave of new players from exploitation and abuse, according to interviews with players and advocates and a Washington Post review of investigative and legal records. When players have gone public with allegations of misconduct, those records and interviews show, FIFA has repeatedly mishandled claims, sometimes with devastating consequences.

As other scandals in women’s sports, including in the National Women’s Soccer League, have spurred reckonings and a flood of new allegations, FIFA’s handling of abuse cases in recent years has done the opposite, The Post found: It has had a chilling effect on accusers, dissuading them from speaking up for fear that their identities might be revealed or that their alleged abusers may remain in power.

FIFA ultimately imposed its most severe sanctions against Jean-Bart. But by then, the federation had lost the trust of rights groups and alleged victims, The Post found, including one former player who told The Post that she was a victim of sexual harassment by Jean-Bart but that she did not trust FIFA enough to testify. Ultimately, FIFA brought just one of Jean-Bart’s accusers to testify in front of the appeals panel, which overturned the punishment.

The Haiti case also shone an uncomfortable spotlight on the Court of Arbitration for Sport, an opaque Swiss arbitration panel that wields ultimate power over FIFA’s disciplinary systems. An all-male panel of CAS arbitrators declared her allegation was not credible, citing minor discrepancies in her story. The ruling cleared a path for Jean-Bart to potentially return to his position of power.

In the wake of abuse scandals in Haiti and Afghanistan, FIFA promised to create an independent body to oversee cases of sexual abuse and harassment, just as the nonprofit U.S. Center for SafeSport functions in the United States. But in the nearly two years since, the federation has not made significant progress, according to two people close to the process, frustrating stakeholders. In response to questions from The Post, FIFA did not provide a timeline for when it would be completed.

In a statement, FIFA said the federation “takes any allegation of misconduct reported to it, including sexual abuse and harassment, extremely seriously and has a clear process in place for anyone in football who wants to report an incident of physical, mental or sexual abuse.” The federation said it applied “the strongest possible sanctions” in cases where it found sufficient evidence of abuse, such as in Haiti, and that it took a “proactive approach to education and prevention” of child abuse and sexual misconduct through the FIFA Guardians program, which was implemented in 2019.

The federation, a spokesperson said, provided an “extensive care and support package” that included counseling, shelter and legal aid to survivors of abuse that was designed to minimize trauma.

FIFA’s challenges extend beyond Haiti. The federation received allegations that the coach of the Zambian women’s national team, which is also playing in its first World Cup, had inappropriate relationships with players, The Guardian reported this month. The coach, Bruce Mwape, who has denied the allegations, has been allowed to continue in his role. The federation would not answer questions about the case or disclose whether it had policies about when to suspend coaches or officials accused of sexual misconduct.

And in Argentina last year, the federation’s all-male adjudicatory panel overruled the findings of its own female investigator and declared that it would not punish a prominent coach and FIFA mentor accused of mistreatment, including sexual harassment, by five players. FIFA promised the alleged victims anonymity but published information that made them publicly identifiable. It did not suspend the coach, Diego Guacci, as it investigated the allegations.

“In anti-doping cases, the standard athletes are held to is absurd. You have one trace of anything, and you’re automatically banned before there’s any investigation done,” said one Argentine player who alleged misconduct to FIFA, speaking to The Post on the condition of anonymity because she feared harassment. “But in this case, you’ve got a guy who’s still working in football, which is a privilege. He was at the helm of a group of minors, and FIFA didn’t even suspend him during the investigation.”

Guacci maintained that he was falsely accused by the women, who he said were trying to harm his career, and in his response to FIFA called the allegations “clearly discriminatory and abusive.”

FIFA has tried to block Jean-Bart’s return to power, even after its loss at the appeals tribunal. A spokesman said that the Haitian federation is, for now, controlled by a FIFA-appointed committee.

But Jean-Bart, who is living in the United States, has made clear his plans to return to the Haitian federation, even if it means another legal battle. His attorneys called FIFA’s investigation “bizarre,” emphasizing that the federation had not offered direct evidence to support some of its allegations against Jean-Bart, such as rape and forced abortion, and characterized sexual harassment allegations from multiple players as lies concocted by political adversaries of Jean-Bart.

They said the arbitration court’s ruling, as well as the willingness of many former players and others to testify in Jean-Bart’s favor, was proof of Jean-Bart’s innocence. FIFA appealed the arbitrator’s decision to a Swiss court on limited procedural grounds but lost the appeal in June.

Stanley Gaston, one of Jean-Bart’s attorneys, called The Post’s reporting part of “the same attempts to manipulate public opinion that Dr. Jean-Bart has endured over the past three years.”

FIFA and human rights groups “relaying these types of unsubstantiated accusations have had the opportunity to present alleged victims to the Haitian courts, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) and now the French courts, in order to submit their statements to a contradictory debate,” he said. “In truth, these people are acting in bad faith and stand in direct contrast to the thorough, years-long procedures and findings of multiple formal courts of law.”

After the first official women’s World Cup in 1991, it was decades before FIFA began to take significant steps toward investment in the women’s game. It eventually offered increased prize money and, in 2020, a grant program that the federation said distributed nearly $100 million among almost all of its 211 member countries.

Considering the vast wealth of the federation, which has reported $4 billion in reserves, the money remains paltry, with investment and prize money for the men’s game dwarfing those for women. But in poorer countries, especially, the funds have made a difference.

In Haiti, Yves Jean-Bart was a visionary of the women’s game. With funding entirely from FIFA, he led the construction in 2011 of a new headquarters that would train and house players. Critically, the players would not just be men and boys but women and girls as well. Officials traveled across Haiti, often into its poorest enclaves, to find girls as young as 12, offering them the chance at an education, housing, food - and soccer. The place would be named for FIFA’s then-president, Sepp Blatter: the FIFA Goal Center Joseph Blatter.

The children who lived there, though, called it the Ranch.

Sexual misconduct exists at all levels of soccer, including among male players and in wealthy soccer powers such as the United States and France. But experts say international women’s soccer creates environments that are particularly ripe for abuse. In federations and within teams, the ranks of power are almost entirely dominated by men. A FIFA report this year found that the average salary for female players was just $14,000 a year - a dynamic that leaves female players with less power and agency than their male counterparts.

And players at the highest levels of the game are historically younger than those on men’s international teams. Haiti has six teenagers on its World Cup roster and just a handful of players over 25.

In the early years of the Ranch, where the girls lived without their parents, there were few structures in place at FIFA to keep children safe. Policies for reporting and safeguarding varied from country to country, and the federation did not launch its child safeguarding program until 2019, in the wake of allegations of sexual abuse made by girls at the Afghan soccer federation. That program, called FIFA Guardians, is not mandatory, acting only as a “framework” to help countries protect young players - one that would have fallen to Jean-Bart and the Haitian federation to implement.

In 2020, the Guardian broke the story of abuse allegations against Jean-Bart and others in Haitian soccer. Human rights groups sprung to action, and FIFPro, the international players’ union, investigated, identifying more than 30 possible victims and 10 alleged perpetrators in what the union called a culture of systematized and sometimes brutal sexual abuse of players, most of them teenage girls. Fourteen “potential victims,” FIFPro said, may have been abused by Jean-Bart.

The union gave some of its findings to FIFA, but the federation’s own investigation did not get much further. The pandemic descended as the allegations first surfaced, hamstringing the probe, and human rights groups said they documented threats against whistleblowers and participants. After eight months, a FIFA committee compiled a report from just a handful of direct interviews. Former employees of the Ranch claimed that it was common knowledge that Jean-Bart had repeatedly sexually assaulted minor players. One former employee said he had walked into Jean-Bart’s hotel room to find him with a player “lying in bed in her dressing gown.”

According to the published decision, FIFA spoke directly with just one accuser, who said Jean-Bart had sexually harassed her when she was a girl, attempting multiple times to lure her into his hotel room. In his room, she told investigators, he offered her a packet of panties and pulled her toward him. Another former player made similar allegations in written testimony to FIFA.

“I feel that it is my whole life that Mr Jean-Bart has shattered,” that woman wrote.

In an interview with The Post, another former Haitian player said she wanted to speak out but didn’t trust FIFA with her story. The Post does not typically name alleged victims of sexual abuse unless they ask to be identified. The Haitian player agreed to be identified by a pseudonym, Baraya, which she previously created to refer to herself online.

Baraya was a spitfire of a player, passionate and talented on the ball even from her early days at the Ranch, where she was brought to live as a young teenager. She worked her way into the senior national team, where she took the field against giants of the women’s game in North America, including Americans Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan and Canada’s Christine Sinclair.

She was 15 years old, she said, when Jean-Bart repeatedly groped her on her breasts and inner thigh and once forcibly kissed her as they rode in the back of a car. His inappropriate touching and uncomfortable questions often occurred in front of other adults, she said, which to her meant no one else at the federation would stop him. She was 17 and 18, she said, when, in the space of a few months, four other Haitian football officials attempted to sexually assault her.

When she tried to leave the Ranch, Baraya said, she found herself trapped: scholarships and opportunities abroad, she said, were controlled by Jean-Bart, and she feared they would come with a cost. When she found a way to leave on her own, she said, she asked Jean-Bart for her passport, which was kept in the federation’s offices, but he refused.

Both of the women who participated in FIFA’s investigation also alleged that Jean-Bart refused to give them their passports when they wanted to leave. FIFA and human-rights advocates concluded that the confiscation of passports played a key role in the systematized abuse at the Ranch: By holding players’ passports, Jean-Bart had ultimate control, players said, not just over their national team careers but over whether they could play internationally or study or work abroad.

In a video posted to social media in 2020, four Haitian players sang a song they had written about life at the Ranch. The video was deleted, but a copy was obtained by The Post. In Creole, one player sings, “When we see airplanes / we want to leave / but our passports are confiscated,” and, later, “There is no security / Yes, Jean-Bart, we want to go.” By the end of the song, two players are crying on camera.

After the Guardian’s story, Baraya worked with Human Rights Watch and FIFPro to compile an account of her time at the Ranch, forming a key piece of their investigations. But she did not trust FIFA with her story, she told The Post. For years, she said, she had heard Jean-Bart brag about his connections to FIFA, and she had watched FIFA officials come in and out of the Ranch. She couldn’t forget the time she had watched newly elected FIFA president Giovanni Infantino shaking hands with Jean-Bart.

Then there was the fact that, before the allegations against Jean-Bart were made public, a FIFA official had told the Haitian federation about a possible investigation, the New York Times reported. FIFA later said the official had not been aware of the specifics of the allegations or that they should not be discussed.

Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch, said the notice gave Jean-Bart and other officials time to reach potential victims before investigators. “FIFA has gone about investigating the cases in the most irresponsible way from the first minute that the sexual abuse in Haiti was reported to them,” said Worden.

Baraya did initially give evidence to FIFA describing her alleged assault by a different Haitian official, she said, for her an excruciating process. But in a back-and-forth over how to use the testimony, Baraya said, FIFA refused to redact details of her alleged assault, which she feared would make her identifiable to the perpetrator. Again, she felt she had no choice: she and her attorneys told FIFA to destroy the testimony, she said. To Baraya, it was another chance at justice, gone.

“I don’t think I’ve gotten any support from FIFA,” Baraya said. “I had to give up everything, and they’ve given me nothing.”

Even without Baraya’s testimony, FIFA’s Ethics Committee banned Jean-Bart for life in November 2020, finding he had abused players and imposing a fine of 1 million Swiss francs, around $1.15 million. It also banned Rosnick Grant, the federation’s former vice president, and heavily sanctioned two female federation officials who were accused of facilitating the abuse.

But Jean-Bart vowed to fight, appealing the decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the Swiss panel that arbitrates disputes in global sports. A three-person panel, all men, heard the case in March 2022.

Jean-Bart brought statements from a staggering 66 people, 21 of whom testified directly. FIFA brought three witnesses: two former Ranch employees and just one woman who said she had been a victim of sexual harassment by Jean-Bart.

FIFA did not respond to questions about why the second accuser did not testify. But the process would have been arduous. The panel rejected FIFA’s requests for victims to respond in writing. Instead, CAS required witnesses who wanted to testify anonymously, with voice distortion, to travel to Switzerland, a practice it said was standard.

In its ruling, CAS dismissed the testimonies of the former employees, whom the panel called “indirect sources.” As for the accuser, the panel also zeroed in on “inconsistencies” in her account, including that she said the team stayed in a hotel when it had stayed in a school dormitory. She said Jean-Bart lured her into his hotel room at her first game with the under-15 team, in 2014, but Jean-Bart was not present for her first official match.

It was possible the victim had misremembered the year, the CAS panel acknowledged, intending to refer to a nonofficial match in 2013 where Jean-Bart was present and that better matched other details of her story. But CAS dismissed that possibility, even though experts say inconsistencies are typical for sexual assault victims, especially those who were abused as minors.

In a statement to The Post, Matthieu Reeb, CAS’s general director, said the accuser’s description of the game “cannot be attributed to stress or pressure.”

“The victim made the statements she wanted to make,” Reeb said. He noted that an all-male panel at CAS had recently upheld FIFA’s lifetime ban of Grant, the other Haitian federation official, and that FIFA had directly selected one of the arbitrators and could have chosen a woman.

In a statement, Claude Ramoni, an attorney for Jean-Bart, told The Post that the inconsistencies in the victim’s story “were not minor” but were part of a pattern of discrepancies in the testimony FIFA used to build its case. He arranged for several former players, some of dozens who had supported Jean-Bart in front of CAS, to speak with The Post, all on the condition of anonymity because they feared repercussions. They repeated that they had never experienced or even witnessed any inappropriate behavior from Jean-Bart - despite FIFA’s witnesses testifying that the abuse was widely known and frequently occurred in the open.

FIFA made “a big mistake” by removing Jean-Bart, one player said, saying he had pulled her from an impoverished part of Haiti and given her an opportunity to play soccer.

Throughout the case, witnesses on both sides said they feared for their lives, and CAS allowed nearly all of them to testify anonymously.

As they questioned the woman who said Jean-Bart had harassed her when she was a teenager, Jean-Bart’s attorneys submitted a list of four players and requested that the panel ask if she had played with them on the under-15 team. CAS instructed the player to respond with only a “yes” or “no,” but the fourth name on the list was the name of the woman herself. In her reply, the woman acknowledged that she was the fourth player named - inadvertently making her identity known to everyone in the room.

Just as the case against Jean-Bart was beginning to unfold, in 2020, a former player on Argentina’s women’s national team went to FIFA with allegations of her own.

In Argentina, where women’s soccer lags behind the storied, World Cup-winning men’s program, a coach named Diego Guacci had amassed significant power and influence - all with the help of FIFA.

For a decade, he was among FIFA’s soccer coaching experts in South America. He had served as coach of River Plate, one of a small number of professional teams that have dominated Argentina’s modest domestic women’s league. And he had served as technical director of two youth national teams, working with girls as young as 14.

But the national team player alleged to FIFA that Guacci had sexually harassed female players and acted abusively toward others, FIFA said, including that he threatened and made sexist and homophobic remarks in front of minor athletes.

FIFA launched a lengthy investigation - a test for what was, at the time, its new Child Safeguarding Office. Four more players came forward to FIFPro, including one who said Guacci had persistently sexually harassed her. Their allegations and other details of the investigation are contained in a 40-page decision published last year by FIFA.

Several players said Guacci had used abusive language, including threats of sexual assault. One player alleged that Guacci had screamed in the presence of minors, “If you ever play that badly again, I’ll put you in the showers and f--- you up the a--.” At 14 years old, another player testified, she had been terrified to hear Guacci shout a sexual threat on the field: “I was a little girl, and I wondered if we were in danger.”

Another said that when she was 15, he quizzed her about her sexuality and frequently commented on her appearance. “It was creepy and upsetting and made me feel very uncomfortable,” she told FIFA.

Another player told FIFA that Guacci had exposed himself to her during a video phone call and sent her a photo of himself in his boxers. “I felt disgusted, violated and incredibly awkward,” she said to investigators.

In its final report, the investigatory chamber ruled that Guacci had violated FIFA’s ethics codes around sexual harassment, including sending a player “unwanted and unsolicited images with pornographic content,” as well as mental abuse and “hostile acts.”

But the case had one final step: FIFA’s Adjudicatory Chamber, a three-person panel made up entirely of men. The panel sided with Guacci.

The committee discredited the story of the woman who said she had been sexually harassed by Guacci in 2014 in part because she had not saved the screenshots of lewd messages from him. “It would have been possible to record or take a screenshot, or at the very least, to keep the contentious messages,” the committee wrote.

And the four other players’ accounts of violent and sexual comments, the committee ruled, “have not been supported by any material evidence apart from the Players’ testimonies.” The alleged victims’ words themselves, the panel said, were not enough.

Player advocates derided the decision, saying it failed to take into account how abuse unfolds and how trauma affects victims. It makes little sense, for example, to expect a victim to save disturbing photographs from her alleged abuser for six years, said Alexandra Gómez Bruinewoud, a FIFPro attorney who worked on the case.

“It was 2014. She has changed phones since then,” Bruinewoud said. But most importantly, Bruinewoud said, “Why would she want to keep that on her phone?” Bruinewoud also noted that FIFA had done little of its own investigation, instead relying heavily on the players and their union, and that it failed to reach out to enough teammates, friends or relatives who the players might have told about the alleged incidents. That’s a typical step in sexual harassment investigations, she said, because perpetrators typically conduct their behavior in private.

“It should not be the players’ duty to look for evidence. They did enough by coming forward,” she said.

In an interview, one former Argentine national team player who spoke to FIFA said the ruling had “silenced” her and other players who had tried to come forward.

“The whole decision, it was completely not trauma-informed,” she said. “They say there wasn’t enough evidence, but what is enough evidence? You have five players coming forward, all telling similar stories.”

Reached for comment, Guacci referred The Post to FIFA’s written decision, which he characterized, in Spanish, as “the highest authority in the soccer world ... decreeing my proven innocence.” He declined to answer detailed questions about the case but said he had responded in detail to each allegation as part of FIFA’s investigation.

In a statement, FIFA said that while its adjudicatory panel found “insufficient evidence” to corroborate the players’ stories, it did not mean it had decided that the abuses had not occurred.

The decision not to punish Guacci devastated the players, the former Argentine national team player told The Post. But it also had another effect: in its ruling, FIFA effectively published the identities of several alleged victims that it had promised to keep anonymous.

In his defense, Guacci offered a list of the players he believed had spoken about him, identifying each by their initials and other details that made their identities clear. FIFA didn’t redact the information from its public report. With rosters made up of some 20 players, it was easy to tell which players had spoken.

FIFPro representatives, shocked, first assumed it was a mistake, Bruinewoud said. But Bruinewoud said FIFA refused to redact the identifying information, despite having assured the union that players would remain anonymous.

The consequences of the decision have been swift and serious, inside and outside of Argentina, players and advocates said. The Argentine national team player said she and other women who spoke up have experienced online harassment and career consequences from Guacci’s attempts to identify her. Bruinewoud said the union has had to change its tactics when it tries to convince players to come to FIFA with allegations of misconduct: no longer, she said, can FIFPro trust that FIFA will preserve players’ anonymity.

FIFA, the former Argentine national team player said, had failed her and her teammates at almost every step of the process, including in the investigation’s early days, when they had failed to even suspend Guacci as they investigated claims he had sexually harassed players.

In fact, FIFA promoted Guacci in the midst of the investigation. The first formal complaint about Guacci was submitted in January 2020. A year later, FIFA named him a mentor for women’s soccer coaches - one of its new initiatives to spread women’s football across the globe.

Baraya remembers watching the game in which Haiti qualified for the World Cup. She was no longer playing organized soccer, instead working long hours at a store and giving almost everything she earned to her family.

She knew as she watched the game, she said, that Jean-Bart had won his appeal, that he was mounting his return to the federation. The feelings she had in that moment, she said, watching the women wrap themselves in the Haitian flag, were hard to describe: joy for her country but also fear about what might happen to the players and to the girls who would come after. And grief, too. Baraya had once played alongside many of those women, dreaming, just like they did, of the day they would finally qualify.

“I was crying,” she said. “I was thinking, ‘Why did I even do all those things?’ "

“In the end,” she said, “FIFA doesn’t support us in anything.”

The former Argentine national team player represented her country at the 2019 World Cup. She stepped away from playing in the wake of the allegations and is not sure, she said, if she will ever play professionally again. She expected, she said, that it might affect her career to speak up about Guacci, but she said she mourns for younger teammates who spoke up alongside her - players who believed that, in part because FIFA had promised them anonymity, their careers in Argentina would be safe.

“Why,” she said, “would anyone try to come forward again?”

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The Washington Post’s Jeffrey Pierre contributed to this report.