Victim Impact Statement

Your Honor, Twenty one months ago I told a secret I thought I would never tell. When I was 14 years old, my coach, Tom Incantalupo, started abusing me. The week of my 18th Birthday, Tom got this plea deal and finally admitted to a very small piece of what he did to me. I’m here today to tell you about his mental and sexual abuse, and the impact it’s had on me. As a young skater, I had the hopes and dreams that many others have, to be an amazing figure skater and one day go to the Olympics. At the young age of nine, I started working with Coach Tom. He had coached other skaters to Nationals and International competitions. I spent countless hours training, trying to achieve my goals. I believed in myself. I did my best to follow Tom’s schedule and rules, even when it meant sacrificing a lot. He scheduled my training many hours a day, 5-6 days a week, all year round. There was never a break. Figure skating is a tough sport. You have to fall hundreds of times to learn a new jump. And no matter how bad it hurts, or how bad you want to quit, you have to get up and keep going. I respected my Coach, and I believed he was helping me reach my dreams. But Tom had different plans for me and after I spent years training, Tom turned my dreams into a nightmare. I was 14 years old when Tom took my innocence. He took what wasn’t his to take. He robbed years of my childhood and I will never get those years back. People ask “why didn’t you tell” or “why didn’t you quit skating”? The answer really is quite complicated. It wasn’t just sexual abuse, it was also mental abuse. Tom had so many people that loved him, and looked up to him. Tom acted like he cared about all of us, and by the time he started abusing me, he knew everything about me. I really believed he cared about me, and I cared about him too, Tom was like another parent to me. But then, he began tearing me down. Even before Tom sexually assaulted me, he started crossing my boundaries and invading my privacy. He would take my phone and look through my messages. He was harassing me about social media. He would yell at me until I cried. By the time he started sexually abusing me, he already had control of me. And, he was like part of our family by that point. But after he started sexually abusing me, it got much worse. He demanded my silence and he also told me I was a disappointment to my parents and family. And after being sexually abused by Tom, I believed what he was telling me. Because being sexually abused made me hate myself. During the years of his abuse, Tom told me he had close family and friends that were police and fire men, and they could “take care” of any situation. He knew who I was sitting with at school lunch, and I still have no idea how he knew. He told me he knew where my friend lived, and that he drove by my friend’s apartment. He followed and messaged my friends on social media. He told me he started a fake instagram account, as a teenage boy, then started a group chat with kids from my school saying horrible things about me and I tried to tell, but Tom just lied about it. When I had plans but didn’t tell Tom who it was with, he would send me pictures of their social media. He knew everything I did, even when I wasn’t with him. There was no escaping Tom. He never approved of my friends, telling me that my best friend was a “piece of shit”, and all of my other friends were “white trash”. He told me HE was the only one who truly cared about me. Yet, there were countless days that he would tell me I was fat and needed to lose 10-15 pounds in order to be a good skater. He would yell at me until I cried. But there were also days where I would come into the rink and he would completely ignore me, but he would be in a good mood with everyone else. Sometimes he wouldn’t give me lessons, and refused to let me compete. Sometimes he threw water on me when he didn’t like the way I was skating. I knew he was talking bad about me and my family to people. I have many memories of having to get off the ice because I was having a panic attack. Memories of crying in the bathroom because of the things he would say to me, or the way he would treat me. Trying to hide all my feelings so no one would see my pain. His words burned into my head. I had to think through everything I said to Tom, starting from the moment I woke up every morning. I learned that if I didn’t try to make him happy, I would pay for it. I have some very vivid memories of things Tom said to me. I remember the morning after the first time he assaulted me, I was fourteen. I was upstairs at Steve and Svetlana’s house, sitting in a chair waiting to leave to go to the ice arena. Tom walked upstairs, and came over to me. He looked down at me, kissed me and said “good, I thought last night was a dream. I’m so happy it wasn’t”. And all I could do is scream inside. He had told me I couldn’t tell anyone and I didn’t think anyone would believe me. I wondered if it was my fault, even though I was pretending to be asleep - hoping he would go away. It was easier to pretend it didn’t happen. Then I got really sick with mono and hepatitis, they were watching me for liver failure and I had to have liver biopsy. Through those five months of being sick, Tom was extra nice to me, and I thought he must have felt bad. That he knew it was wrong and it wouldn’t happen again. More months had gone by and I was still working hard to get my skills back after being sick. We had travelled and he was still treating me nice. I was excited about my invitation to Argentina, and I felt safe going. I was wrong. The country of Argentina is beautiful, and the people were amazing and so kind to me. But behind closed doors, no one knew the hell he was putting me through. This is where things got horrific and never stopped. I was still 14. Crying and saying no didn’t stop him. I was thousands of miles away from home and everyone in Argentina loved Tom. I had to shut it out to survive, but this was the beginning of the nightmares and anxiety, the headaches and the stomach pain. After I got home, I said I wanted to quit skating. My parents thought I was traumatized by a bad car accident we had been in. They thought I would regret giving up all my years of hard work and then told Tom I wanted to quit. I was scared and I felt trapped… nobody would believe what he did to me, and what would he do if I told? My parents knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t find the words to tell them. They made me go to therapy, but Tom knew. He told me I couldn’t say anything, and I didn’t. I learned to split my life in two. Tom started taking me to hotels when I was fifteen. He would lie to my mom about my schedule and also lied to other skaters, parents, and coaches. I started cutting myself because it was easier to deal with that pain then what he was putting me through. His hands would graze over the cuts, my body completely exposed, and he wouldn’t care. I was getting migraines to the point where I would be curled up in the dark. I had stomach cramps so bad I would be sobbing on the ice because it hurt to move. I started hating the sport I once loved because I knew that every day I went, there was a possibility that he would take me to a hotel and do unexplainable things to me. The few times I felt brave enough to challenge Tom were in public, couldn’t people see something was wrong? I felt like no one cared about me, but now I know it was his abuse that isolated me. Tom knew every move I made, and wanted me to believe that he was the only person I could trust, the only person who cared about me. When he wasn’t being horribly mean to me, he was saying he loved me… and I felt like I was crazy. There is another specific time I would like to speak about, and that is the last Argentina trip we went on. Tom told me and my parents that he was working with the Federation so I could skate for them. He told me I would get a Junior or Senior Grand Prix assignment. He told us the Federation was paying for me and they had paid for my other trips too.

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