Warning; When One Conviction Exposes a Global Crisis
Equitas on the Connolly Case and What Comes Next:
Content warning: This article contains detailed discussion of sexual assault, rape, child sexual abuse, grooming and domestic violence in equestrian settings, including references to specific court cases and victim impact statements. Readers may find this distressing.
If you need support, please consider contacting a specialist service in your jurisdiction (for example, Rape Crisis centres or domestic violence helplines).
We planned to publish a straight piece on the court case on Friday. We wanted to cover what happened, explain why it matters, and then step back.
Instead, we did what journalists and women in this industry always end up doing. We went away to look at the bigger picture. We pulled case after case of sexual assault and abuse against girls and women in equestrian sport starting with Ireland, then the UK, then the United States, Australia and the other big horse countries.
Paralysis is the only honest word for what happened next. Not because the problem is vague... sadly because the scale and pattern of it are so brutally clear. Heartbreaking, stomach turning and the unwavering rage....
Page after page, court record after court record, you see the same story: girls and young women who loved horses, men in powerful positions who controlled access to those horses, and a system that made it easier to stay quiet than to speak.
It has taken us a couple of days to get our bearings. We are not going to pretend that a single article can do justice to the hundreds and hundreds of pages of research and documentation now sitting on our desks. We are also not going to pretend this is “just” about one Irish court case, or one country, or one federation.
So let us be crystal clear. Equitas will be coming out swinging on this across the next year. We now have a significant body of information and survivor testimony gathered from around the world, and we will be vocal about it. As we refine our plan in the days and weeks ahead, this piece is the start of a longer line: a commitment to track, document and challenge how this industry treats girls and women, and how often it fails to protect them from men in positions of power.
Friday in Cork: what the Connolly conviction really shows
On Friday, the Central Criminal Court in Cork sentenced equestrian coach William Connolly to nine years in prison for a series of sexual offences against a 14‑year‑old girl. He was convicted of three counts of rape, one count of oral rape, two counts of sexual assault and one count of exploitation of a child for sexual activity, all committed over a four‑month period between August and December 2019.
This was not a stranger‑in‑a‑dark‑alley case. Connolly was her riding coach. He groomed her with alcohol and equestrian clothing and used her love of horses, and her desire to do well in competition, to ensure her compliance. Her mother only discovered what was happening when she found two text messages on her daughter’s phone. One of them read: “If you are my baby you get everything. Only one catch. I want to own that vagina of yours. Agree and you get everything.” Another said: “I want to poke – that is the deal.”
In her victim impact statement, the young woman described how, at 14, she did not initially recognise what was happening as abuse. She said Connolly “groomed me and sexually assaulted me for a long time. I never saw it like that. I accepted that it was just the situation I was in.” She explained that she believed he was a good man and felt overwhelming guilt for “telling his secret”, even as she later came to see him as “a rapist and a man who abused me because he knew he had power over me.”
Ms Justice Eileen Lankford did not mince her words. In sentencing, she said Connolly “clearly took advantage of her love of horse riding and her desire to do well in competitions”, and that he had exploited that passion to groom and sexually abuse a child. She pointed to the age difference and the position of trust, describing the offending as a gross breach of trust that caused significant, ongoing trauma.
Those are the facts. They are on the public record, reported in Irish court coverage and documented in full in the evidence dossiers now compiled for Equitas.
This is not one “bad apple”: the pattern you cannot unsee
If this was the only story, we would still be writing this. It is not the only story. It is part of a pattern that repeats, with sickening consistency, across jurisdictions and decades.
Between January 2025 and mid‑February 2026 alone, there were at least five court‑verified convictions for sexual offences by people in equestrian roles in Ireland and the UK: Connolly in Cork, a jockey convicted of defilement of a minor, a riding school owner jailed for 17 years in Buckinghamshire, a riding instructor in Kent sentenced to three years and four months, and an equestrian couple in Wales convicted over sexual activity with an underage girl. Every single one of these offenders was male. Every single case involved a minor victim.
Zoom out further and the pattern becomes impossible to rationalise away. In the United States, the U.S. Center for SafeSport recorded 1,458 sexual misconduct allegations in 2024 across Olympic sports, with equestrian repeatedly appearing in sanction lists and criminal convictions. Olympic Showjumper Rich Fellers was sentenced to 50 months in federal prison for travelling across state lines to have sex with a 17‑year‑old student he had coached since she was 14. Legendary trainers like Jimmy Williams and George Morris were exposed or banned after decades of abuse, with victims describing how access to good horses and career‑making opportunities were conditioned on sexual compliance.
In Sweden and Norway, a 2025 peer‑reviewed study of 653 equestrians found that 54.9 per cent of respondents had experienced sexual harassment or abuse in equine environments. More than one in four reported contact sexual abuse, and the researchers concluded bluntly that the stable is a high‑risk environment for women and girls, not the safe haven many imagine.
In the UK workforce, the British Grooms Association reported that 43 per cent of grooms experience bullying and 8 per cent report sexual harassment, in a context where 64 per cent have no formal contract and many live in tied accommodation. The British Horseracing Authority’s own safeguarding unit logged 350 human welfare concerns since 2018, with around 26 per cent relating to sexual misconduct and 41 per cent of those involving rape or attempted rape.
In Australia, trainers have been jailed for raping and impregnating a 13‑year‑old girl, grooming a 16‑year‑old stable worker, and sexually assaulting young women connected to their yards. In Spain, a riding instructor in Navarra was sentenced to more than ten years in prison for continuous sexual abuse with penetration of a student aged 13 to 15.
Different courts. Different countries. The same structure. Perpetrators are overwhelmingly men in positions of authority; coaches, trainers, riding instructors, yard owners, senior riders often decades older than their victims. Victims are overwhelmingly girls and young women whose access to horses, coaching, competition entries and even housing is controlled by those same men.
The horse is the weapon. That is the phrase that emerges from your own research and from survivor testimony: access to the horse confers power, authority and control. If a girl resists, the threat is not always overt physical violence. The threat is losing the horse, losing her place at the yard, losing her future in the sport that defines her life.
Evidence now on the public record shows that credible concerns were raised repeatedly across jurisdictions over many years.
(Court records across multiple jurisdictions confirm that convicted rapists and child sex offenders operated within equestrian settings for years before being exposed.).
These are people, girls and women suffering at the hands of men in positions of perceived power!!!!!!!!
Our dossiers on institutional apologies and admissions are brutal reading. They show that in jurisdiction after jurisdiction, federations and governing bodies only moved when they were forced: when a criminal conviction, an investigative journalist, or a peer‑reviewed study made silence impossible.
In 2018, German Olympic legend Ludger Beerbaum admitted “we’ve closed our eyes for too long” after national‑team abuse allegations were exposed in Der Spiegel. In 2020, the German Olympic Sports Federation formally apologised after survivors like former rider Gitta Schwarz testified that they had been abused for months by respected coaches while clubs and families looked away.
In British racing, the BHA’s 2023 apology came only after internal data showed 350 safeguarding cases and Dr Eleanor Boden’s five‑year study demonstrated a culture where women “kept their heads down and suffered in silence”. The BHA chair apologised “unreservedly” and called it a watershed moment, an implicit admission that for years – possibly decades – the system had failed women and girls.
Contrast that with the non‑responses. Horse Sport Ireland has multiple safeguarding statements and policies on its website, including a Child Safeguarding Statement and codes of ethics. To date, we have not identified any publicly reported formal apology from HSI to survivors of sexual abuse in Irish equestrian sport.
In media coverage of the Michael Murphy case, the victim said she was disgusted to learn that Horse Sport Ireland had provided a letter to the court on his behalf, even though he was later convicted of defilement of a minor.
She said she rang the HSI office around five times in 2021 seeking support and revealing she was the victim of sexual assault. She said that she was told HSI would call her back, but that never happened. "In the end, I gave up and went racing, I just couldn't deal with HSI,” she said.
HSI has publicly disputed elements of that account.
The French equestrian federation responded to a major Mediapart investigation by denying it had turned a blind eye, despite survivors describing “decades of silence” and behaviour everyone in the community knew about. USEF has issued statements that “abuse has no place in our sport” without ever fully acknowledging the decades in which men like Williams and Morris operated as untouchable kingmakers.
Across our dossiers the pattern is painfully clear: warning signs were present; complaints were raised; and meaningful institutional action frequently came only after public exposure made silence impossible. Institutions FAILED!
What happens next: Equitas is not going to look away
So where does that leave us, a women’s media brand built inside this industry, in the week an Irish coach is sentenced to nine years for raping a 14‑year‑old girl he met in the arena?
First, it leaves us with a duty of clarity. We are not going to talk about “isolated incidents”. We are going to call this what your research shows it to be: a structural, global pattern of sexual abuse, harassment and exploitation in equestrian sport, enabled by power imbalances, economic precarity, and a culture of silence.
Second, it leaves us with work to do. Over the next twelve months, Equitas will be running a sustained line of reporting and analysis on sexual abuse, sexual assault and sexual exploitation of girls and women in equestrian sport. That will include:
- Articles anchored in court‑verified cases and federation data, not rumour or anonymous allegation.
- Pieces that centre survivor testimony already on the public record, so that women and girls do not have to keep re‑telling their trauma to prove this is real.
- Deep dive explainers on concepts like “equine‑centred power”, the horse as hostage in domestic violence, and why tied accommodation and apprenticeship models make grooms and working pupils uniquely vulnerable.
- Analysis of what federations, clubs and yards are actually doing or not doing about safeguarding, including where apologies have been made, where protocols exist only on paper, and where there has been outright denial.
Third, it means we will not be neutral on this. We have no interest in playing the “both sides” game where a man in his fifties or sixties is framed as a tragic figure whose career has been ruined, while the girl he abused at 14 is reduced to a paragraph. Girls and women do not deserve this. They never did.
We are still finalising the exact formats and partnerships. That is the honest part: we are working through hundreds of pages of material, legal constraints, analysing survivor‑led initiatives like WeRideTogether, and the realities of publishing from Ireland into a global, highly litigious sport. But the direction is not in doubt.
The Connolly conviction in Cork is not “the story”. It is a line in a much bigger story of how this industry has treated its girls and women for decades, and how often those in power chose reputational management over protection.
This time, we are not going to look away.
Equitas will stay with this until the industry changes in measurable ways because when repeated warnings are ignored and protection fails, the outcome is indistinguishable from sacrificing girls and women to preserve reputations.
Until Next Time,
Shane
