Elite gymnast Kara Eaker announces retirement, alleges abuse while training at Utah

Gymnast Kara Eaker announced Friday on Instagram her retirement from the University of Utah women’s gymnastics team and withdrawal as a student, citing verbal and emotional abuse from a coach and lack of support from the administration.

“For two years, while training with the Utah Gymnastics team, I was a victim of verbal and emotional abuse,” Eaker wrote in a post. “As a result, my physical, mental and emotional health has rapidly declined. I had been seeing a university athletics psychologist for a year and a half and I’m now seeing a new provider twice a week because of suicidal and self-harm ideation and being unable to care for myself properly. I have recently been diagnosed with severe anxiety and depression, anxiety induced insomnia, and I suffer from panic attacks, PTSD and night terrors. …

“I have now reached a turning point and I’m speaking out for all of the women who can’t because they are mentally debilitated and paralyzed by fear.”

Eaker, 20, is an elite American gymnast who was part of U.S. gold-medal teams at the 2018 and 2019 world championships. She was named an alternate at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 and was a member of Utah’s teams that finished third at the NCAA championships in 2022 and 2023. Utah is one of the top programs in women’s college gymnastics.

USA TODAY Sports has reached out to the University of Utah for comment.

“I was a promised a ‘family’ within this program and a ‘sisterhood’ with my teammates, who would accept me, care for me, and support,” Eaker wrote. “But instead, as I entered as a freshman, I was heartbroken to find the opposite in that I was training in an unhealthy, unsafe and toxic environment."

She alleged “loud and angry outbursts” that involved cursing from a coach.

Eaker said the abuse “often happened in individual coach-athlete meetings. I would be isolated in an office with an overpowering coach, door closed, sitting quietly, hardly able to speak because of the condescending, sarcastic and manipulative tactics."

When Eaker went to university officials with her allegations, she wrote, "One administrator denied there was any abuse and said, 'You two are like oil and water, you just don't get along.' To say I was shocked would be an understatement and this is a prime example of gaslighting. So therein lies the problem − the surrounding people and system are complicit."

Eaker does not name any coach in her post. Tom Farden has been coaching at Utah since 2011, a co-head coach from 2016-2019 and sole head coach from 2020. Last month, an investigation into Farden by Husch Blackwell concluded Farden, “did not engage in any severe, pervasive or egregious acts of emotional or verbal abuse of student-athletes” and “did not engage in any acts of physical abuse, emotional abuse or harassment as defined by SafeSport Code.”

However, the investigation found Farden “made a derogatory comment to a student-athlete that if she was not at the University she would be a ‘nobody working at a gas station’ in her hometown” and “a few student-athletes alleged that Coach Farden made comments to student-athletes that, if corroborated, would have likely resulted in a finding that they violated the Athletics’ Well Being Policy’s prohibition on degrading language. The comments as alleged were isolated occurrences that could not be independently corroborated and were denied by Coach Farden.”

In her Instagram post, Eaker called the investigation “incomplete at best, and I disagree with their findings. I don’t believe it has credibility because the report omits crucial evidence and information and the few descriptions used are inaccurate.”