By the time Libby Hall was 15 she was a junior world champion.
It was 2005. She'd competed on TV as part of the X-Games and had been invited to China to exhibit her exciting sport: rock climbing.
Videos of her from back then show a smiling, vivacious young girl dangling on the end of ropes in the Blue Mountains, or scrambling up indoor rock-climbing walls. She's in her element.
In the early 2000s, rock climbing was evolving from an outdoor pastime to a fully fledged indoor sport attracting elite athletic talent.
Hall was the prototype – she was young, strong, flexible and a former gymnast.
"I just loved it," she says.
Hall is 31 now. If things had gone differently, she might have become an Olympian when rock climbing made its debut at last year's Tokyo Games.
There's no question she's made a success of her life: she has just been head-hunted for a new job, has built a house, and sailed around the world with her husband.
Yet, there's a part of her that is buried in darkness.
She's taken no joy in her former sport making it to the Olympic stage.
"I don't get to look back at climbing and see the success that I had.
Warning: This story contains details of child sexual abuse which may disturb some readers.
Conditioned to abuse, conditioned not to tell
Hall was one of many young girls who were scarred by their experiences in elite gymnastics.
An Australian Human Rights Commission review into gymnastics found the sport had enabled a culture of abuse, predominantly against young women.
These children were vulnerable when they left the sport. They had been conditioned to abuse; conditioned to adults touching them; conditioned not to tell.
Some of these children were given a chance to move on from the physical and emotional trauma they had suffered in gymnastics to excel in a new sport.
Hall, Sophie Vivian and Jessie Orrell became champions in rock climbing.
Then, while still young girls, they allege they faced horrors worse than the ones they encountered in their old sport.
And it happened at the hands of the man they trusted most.
His name is Stephen Mitchell.
Yesterday, ACT Policing officers arrested Mitchell, 55, and charged him with six offences relating to alleged grooming, trafficking and sexual activity with children and teenagers.
He was arrested in Canberra, following an investigation codenamed Operation Pyrite, by the sexual assault and child abuse team with ACT Policing.
The charges are four counts of acts of indecency up on a young person involving three victims, and two counts of sexual conduct involving a child under 16 against one victim overseas.
'He was a good talker'
Sophie Vivian started training as a gymnast at the AIS as a seven-year-old in the early 1990s.
By 10 she had quit after enduring years of what she described as "a lot of humiliation, a lot of yelling", and painful physical exercises and injuries.
"It completely broke any love I had of the sport."
In 1997, two years after leaving the AIS, Vivian discovered rock climbing.
"We had a climbing wall in school, and there was an inter-school competition, and I just threw my hat in the ring, and had a go at it, and actually won that competition," she says.
About the same time, Vivian started hanging out at the Belconnen Youth Centre.
It was there she met Mitchell, who said he was a rock-climbing coach. Vivian believes he'd spotted her at the inter-school competition she'd just won.
They started talking. He seemed to know a lot about gymnastics and rock climbing.
"He offered to start training me and brought me under his wing," she says.
He told her he'd worked at the Australian Institute of Sport where he'd spent a lot of time with gymnasts, and had subsequently been training ex-gymnasts in rock-climbing.
ABC Sport has seen a business card of Mitchell's which gives his title as Junior Sports Consultant, Policy and International at the Institute of Sport.
Mitchell's CV from 2002 lists that he was employed at the AIS as a Sport Experience Program Instructor from 1996 to 2002. The ABC understands he had a series of casual jobs at the Institute during that time.
And yet, he'd had access to the AIS even earlier.
A former gymnast, who we're calling Gymnast A, met Mitchell when she was 11 and living in the AIS residences in 1994.
"He was around those halls of residence all the time," Gymnast A says.
She says he sometimes took school groups on tours of the AIS but would also "frequently hang out with the gymnasts in the residence's recreation hall."
Mitchell regularly wrote her letters, which included gifts like stickers and personalised mementos, such as a necklace engraved with the nickname he'd given her.
Gymnast A says he frequently watched her training at the Institute's gym.
"I used to interact with him on the balcony because I used to wave to him," she says.
That was until an AIS gymnastics coach confronted the gymnast and asked her about her relationship with "the man on the balcony".
"(The coach) effectively told him, 'You're not allowed to come into the gym again'," she says.
ABC Sport understands the AIS closed the viewing gallery to the public in late 1994.
In any case, Mitchell was back at the AIS by 1996.
The former gymnast said her younger sister – who also trained at the AIS – remembers Mitchell driving the AIS bus, which took athletes between the institute and local schools.
The ABC asked the AIS a series of questions about Mitchell’s employment history at the Institute, but the organisation said it could not comment.
'He worked his way into our lives'
It was about this time that Mitchell allegedly began another relationship with Sophie Vivian. He was her coach, but also a friend and a confidant.
She would phone him from school, and he would pick her up and take her to training. Afterwards, they would sit in the car and talk, sometimes for hours.
About the same time, Mitchell also started training Jessie Orrell, who was four years younger than Vivian.
Mitchell met Orrell and her two sisters while volunteering as a youth worker at the Canberra Police Citizens Youth Club (as the PCYC was then known) in southern Canberra.
It's not easy for Orrell to talk about her experiences as a young girl.
Her sentences are short and quietly spoken. The words come out haltingly. She plays with her hands nervously as she talks about what happened to her as a child.
Like Vivian, she was a gifted junior gymnast.
She didn't quite make the AIS, although not through any lack of skill or effort.
She reached the highest levels of junior gymnastics, winning the ACT championship seven years in a row, as well as claiming medals at the NSW and National championships.
Her goal was to compete for Australia at the Olympics and Commonwealth Games.
She'd started at four and by the time she was eight, she was training 38 hours a week at the Southern Canberra Gymnastics Club.
Also like Vivian, she claims she suffered injuries and psychological trauma at the hands of overbearing coaches.
Through the club, Orrell and her family were introduced to a masseur called Les Williamson.
Orrell remembers he was tall with white hair.
She took his card back to her parents and began getting massages from Williamson, in his house, to help with pain caused by a serious back injury she'd suffered at training.
Her two sisters also went to Williamson for massages.
Initially Orrell's parents stayed in the room while he was with their daughters, but after a period he said they could wait outside.
The sexual assaults began in 1998 and continued until early 2000.
Orrell was naked and alone in a room with an older man, who was touching her inappropriately and exposing himself.
It happened every week.
Even though she hated it and said she didn't want to go, she couldn't bring herself to tell her parents why.
It was two years before Orrell and one of her sisters confided in each other and realised that they were both being sexually assaulted. They told their parents.
Leonie Riley cries when she recounts that time.
Riley said the first person she contacted upon discovering her daughters had been sexually assaulted was Stephen Mitchell.
The family had met Mitchell through his youth work at the PCYC. He took the kids on camping trips, and did activities with them in the afternoons and on weekends.
"He said he had two best friends who were detectives," Riley recalls.
"And he said, 'let me contact my friends and I'll let you know'. He rang us straight back and said, 'Oh, you need to go to the sexual assault unit — contact them in Belconnen'."
The family reported the assaults to the police and Williamson was subsequently tried and found guilty of five counts of sexual assault and three counts of indecency.
He spent two-and-a-half-years in jail.
Orrell quit gymnastics, but soon took up rock climbing with Mitchell.
"He just used to talk to us when we'd go and pick the girls up.
"Eventually he just said 'look, I'll bring the girls home.' That's what he was doing and then he would just stay.
Sophie Vivian remembers Mitchell as being like "the Candyman, the Pied Piper."
"He let us eat, he took us to KFC and always had lolly snakes for us, which was so different to gymnastics where food was restricted," she says.
He drove the kids from school to training and back again. He took them to competitions in Canberra, interstate, and even overseas. He took them on camping trips to go rock climbing outdoors.
"So, as a little girl to go from that (gymnastic) environment to someone who was just so lovely, it was a big contrast," Vivian says.
Now, she has a different word for that behaviour.
'There was a level of inappropriate touching'
In the late 90s, Mitchell began to form a team of climbers in Canberra that over time grew to around 10 – mostly girls.
"It was like one big family, all the kids bounced off us and hugged us", says one member of the team.
Mitchell also looked official.
"In the beginning he wore AIS polo shirts with the logo," Vivian says.
"They had the logo for the AFP — the Australian Federal Police — the PCYC logo and various other sort of official looking logos on shirts that he made for himself and for us."
Mitchell helped form the Australian Climbing Gyms Association and sat on its board. Exactly how professional the organisation was is questionable.
There were no working with children checks carried out.
Outwardly, at least, the fledgling sport was gaining credibility. Mitchell became the de-facto Australian coach and manager when he chaperoned competitors to international competitions.
And his charges were excelling.
By the age of 12, Vivian was the Australian junior rock-climbing champion – a title she held for three consecutive years.
But she said there was a terrible price to pay, and it was confusing.
Stephen Mitchell — the fun coach who bought her KFC and jelly snakes — was allegedly sexually assaulting her.
Vivian remembers he encouraged her to sit on his lap and alleges she could sometimes feel his erect penis.
"It would occur multiple times in his car, at his house."
But the uniforms, associations, the competitions, the contacts, and the titles gave his whole operation an air of legitimacy.
"He seemed to know everybody — particularly at the AIS," Vivian says.
"He seemed to walk in and out of there as he pleased."
Vivian says Mitchell took her and others to the saunas and hot and cold pools at the AIS – areas reserved exclusively for athletes and not open to the public. When they were there, Vivian alleges he would sometimes push his erect penis against her.
It's only now, after decades of trauma, that she's found the strength and courage to speak up.
Vivian's not one for crying, but re-living the alleged assaults at the hands of Mitchell is harrowing. She breaks down as she describes how he'd allegedly take advantage of his position.
"He would be sleeping in the same room as the children –we'd often be sleeping at the climbing gym with him – we'd all have sleeping bags," she says.
"Or (be) sleeping in his car with him."
She alleges that when he thought she was asleep he would sexually assault her.
She alleges he would massage her in a way he found sexually gratifying.
"It would happen pretty much every time we went away together. We would be going away to competitions every few weekends, so it was very frequent," she says.
Vivian was 14 and at the peak of her climbing powers when she was chosen to represent Australia at a competition in the United States.
It should have been one of the highlights of her career.
"The next morning, I was really unwell — I threw up before the competition which is not like me.
"And I'd been competing really well I'd been winning almost everything up until that point.
"And that day in the competition I just completely bombed, I couldn't read the climb, I stuffed up in the first heat and got booted out of the competition, basically."
But the gymnastics training held: don't tell.
"I was very scared of losing the opportunities that he was presenting. He was driving us around for free, taking us to all these competitions," she says.
"And at the time, I really didn't think I understood what was happening, I don't think I knew how to express that to anyone."
By the time she was 15, Vivian says Mitchell began to lose interest in her.
And at the same time her mental health was suffering.
"I became increasingly withdrawn. I was getting into trouble at school. He pulled us out of school, so I wasn't going to school, very often," she says.
"His attentions just became more and more on to the younger girls and, and I was sort of left to do my own thing.
"And then I left home at 15 to get away."
As for her trophies, and her memories of winning national championships and competing for Australia on the world stage: "I threw all of my trophies and medals that I won in climbing into Lake Burley Griffin, when I was 15," she says.
The alleged physical and psychological abuse she said she suffered at the AIS and at the hands of Mitchell has had a profound effect on her life.
In the past few years Vivian has done a Master's degree in neurology and wrote a thesis on the effects of trauma on gymnasts.
She thinks it's no fluke that she and other ex-gymnasts were targeted by Mitchell.
"Gymnastics just makes you so incredibly vulnerable to sexual abuse," she says.
"You're used to not speaking up to holding it all in and you're just groomed to stay silent and put up with it.
"So, the coach is a god, and you can't say anything wrong against the coach. And he knew that. That's why he preyed on gymnasts."
At the time, Vivian thought she was the only one.
"I felt like his favourite — he made you feel like you were his favourite. So, I think in my mind I thought it was only happening to me," she says.
It wasn't, according to the two other climbers.
The ABC has decided not to disclose the nature of the alleged assaults, but the three women’s descriptions of how they were allegedly assaulted are similar.
Orrell alleges that in the early 2000s she stayed at Mitchell's house the night before a climbing competition and slept in a sleeping bag on the floor next to his bed.
During the night, Orrell says Mitchell moved her to see if she was awake, but terrified, she pretended to be asleep.
"And he assaulted me," she says through tears.
She spent the rest of the night awake and afraid.
It was the second time she had been allegedly sexually assaulted by an older man who she says had violated her trust, her youth, her innocence, and her powerlessness.
In the following months, Leonie Riley saw her daughter changing.
"Her behaviour was out of control. She used to just sneak out at night. She did lots of drinking, smoking. She just didn't care what happened to her," Riley says.
Orrell says the experience had a huge impact on her life.
"It's affected me a lot, my whole life. I've struggled with depression and anxiety," she says.
Orrell attempted suicide in her early teens, self-harmed numerous times, and spent time in hospitals and psychiatric institutions.
When she eventually told her mother what Mitchell had allegedly done, Riley says she immediately rang the police.
They interviewed Orrell and took away the sleeping bag she had used on the night of the alleged assault. The police said they couldn't find any of Mitchell's DNA on it because it had since been washed.
'He took away the one thing I loved'
By 1999, Libby Hall had joined Mitchell's squad and according to all three women, she quickly became the focus of his attention.
Like Vivian and Orrell, Hall was a former gymnast who had quit the sport in dismay at the physical and mental stress it was causing her.
"One of the reasons why I actually left the AIS was I did a grade three tear in my ankle," she says.
"And at that point, I turned around to my mum and said I don't want to do this anymore."
She and her mother, Lee de Percy, met Mitchell at a rock-climbing come-and-try day at a local recreation centre.
De Percy said Mitchell soon became a part of their lives.
"He was going to make things as easy as possible for me so that I could give equal time to my children," de Percy says.
"That was grooming."
Hall says she quickly showed an aptitude for climbing.
"I started out just doing local competitions and then in 2002, I got selected to represent Australia at the junior X Games in Malaysia," she says.
"It was my first international competition, and I won bouldering, came second in speed and took out first place overall."
Hall became close friends with Orrell. The tedium of gymnastics was replaced by a fun, social sport with a group of girls who were all aiming for the top.
"Oh, I loved every moment of it: the travelling, the competing. I was already built to be a solo athlete," Hall says.
She achieved her ambition in 2005, winning the speed category at the world junior championships in Beijing.
She was 15, appearing on TV and attracting the attention of sponsors.
But, like Vivian and Orrell, she alleges she was being sexually assaulted during this time by Mitchell.
Hall says it happened at least 10 times, from when she was aged 12 through to 15.
"It was really hard because I was torn, you know, I was built up to be this incredible rock climber by my coach, who I trusted. I wouldn't have been the climber that I was without him."
Like Vivian, she found the power imbalance and the gymnast's credo of "don't tell" a bridge she simply couldn't cross.
"I honestly thought I would get in trouble. I thought he was the adult, and you know, I trusted him," she says.
"And it took to get to the age of 16, where I had to say enough was enough. But I still didn't speak to anyone about it, I just stopped.
But again, there was a terrible price to pay. Her mother said the psychological damage her daughter experienced manifested in self-harming.
"I've had like this perfect child, to a child who 12 months later tried to kill herself," de Percy says.
"She just went completely off the rails. I thought I was gonna lose her."
When she was 15, Hall took an overdose of pills and was rushed to hospital.
"I was burning myself as well," she says.
The self-harming was a means of expressing something she couldn't voice with words.
"It was the age when I realised what was happening and I felt an incredible amount of shame and I couldn't talk to anyone about it because of the shame," she says.
"I look back and it's, you know, it's dark and it's traumatic and it hurts. And, you know, that was taken away from me."
Three young girls. Multiple allegations of sexual assault. Lives changed forever.
An investigation and a note
How was it allowed to happen?
It wasn't like flags weren't raised – they were, on several different occasions.
In 2002 Mitchell successfully applied for a job at the Canberra PCYC as a sport and recreation officer. The position was funded by the Australian Federal Police, which ran the organisation at the time through its ACT Policing arm.
Mitchell was employed as a non-commissioned employee of the AFP.
But just a few years later he resigned from the job.
"All the staff got called into a meeting at the AFP office in Civic," a former staff member recalls.
They were told he had been provisionally suspended.
The reasons weren't explained, but the former staff member says that Mitchell later said Jessie Orrell had made allegations of "sexual assault or harassment" against him.
Freedom of Information documents from January 2004 state that Mitchell's case was handed to the AFP's Professional Standards Body after a referral by the Sexual Assault and child Abuse Team.
But there the trail goes cold.
The ABC asked the AFP a series of questions about Mitchell's involvement with the PCYC and the referral to the Professional Standards body, given ACT Policing was running the PCYC at the time.
In a statement the AFP said it wasn't able to comment on professional standards investigations or Mitchell's involvement with the PCYC – because a legal proceeding was underway.
The PCYC in Canberra has been run independently as a not-for-profit entity since 2006. The current board has released a statement saying the allegations against Mitchell relate to the period before it took over.
The statement says: "We are committed to the welfare and protection of young people."
Orrell says she's tried without luck to get a copy of the police report she made about Mitchell in the early 2000s.
In 2004, Hall's mother found a crumpled note in the bottom of her daughter's training bag.
Hall was 14 at the time and still training with Mitchell.
The note was addressed to Mitchell. It had clearly been written by a young child, but the subject matter was chilling.
It read:
To Mitch
get your self a cort (sic) person because I know what you do to girls or quit your job as a coach
p.s you (sic) going down and your (sic) in trouble
When she pressed her daughter about the note, she told her nothing.
"It was out of fear," Hall says.
The note was signed by a name de Percy didn't recognise, but her daughter now says it was written by a casual climber in Mitchell's group – not one of the elite athletes who travelled and competed with Mitchell's Canberra squad.
De Percy scanned the letter and contacted the police.
She said two policemen came to her house, but nothing came of it.
The police never mentioned the complaint Leonie Riley had made about Mitchell.
The investigation went nowhere and she was never contacted by them again.
In 2005, Sport Climbing Australia (SCA) was formed. It remains climbing's governing body.
SCA amalgamated two previous organisations, which both had claims to be the embryonic sport's governing body, including the Australian Climbing Gyms Association that Mitchell had been part of.
Mitchell was appointed as the SCA's co-ordinator of sport development.
ABC Sport has spoken to another former junior climber who represented Australia at the X Games in Malaysia and competed at national competitions in the early 2000s.
As a Queenslander, she wasn't part of Mitchell's Canberra squad, although Mitchell did sometimes coach her when he took teams away to interstate and international competitions.
The climber says that Mitchell always had a "princess" and described Libby Hall – the rising star of the sport – as his "princess" at that time.
Her memory is consistent with the experiences of both Vivian and Orrell, who say they had both been favourites of Mitchell at various times in the preceding years.
She remembers Mitchell giving people massages "a lot", but says "he'd always made me feel uncomfortable."
At a tournament in Sydney in 2007, the climber says she saw Mitchell giving a younger girl a shoulder massage at a Sydney climbing gym in a way that she thought was inappropriate because of the position of his body, which she said was too close to the athlete.
By 2007, the new President of SCA, Steve Smith, had heard concerns about Mitchell from parents and other coaches.
"I kept hearing these stories from one source or another," Smith tells ABC Sport.
He said there were at least "half a dozen."
Smith asked the climber, who by that point was 18, whether she'd seen anything.
"He just told me 'I've heard some allegations about Mitch'," she says.
The question came just moments after she'd seen Mitchell with the younger gymnast.
"I said 'he's just been massaging super-inappropriately'," she says.
Smith says he had preliminary discussions with NSW Police about how to proceed and asked Mitchell to resign from his position with SCA.
The current chair of SCA, Romain Thevenot, has confirmed Mitchell didn't have any further involvement with the organisation after 2007.
By then Libby Hall, Jessie Orrell and Sophie Vivian had all left the sport.
The three women are now in their early to mid-30s and have reconnected.
It's taken the best part of two decades, and years of suffering in silence, but they are now all in a place where they can think about gaining some justice for what they allege happened to them as children.
All are in stable relationships. Vivian and Orrell have children of their own.
Last year, the women began legal action against, variously: the Australian Institute of Sport, the Canberra PCYC and the AFP, which ran the PCYC at the time.
Their lawyer, Jacqueline Townsend from Donaldson Law, says the legal action related to the institutions "failure to protect the children in their care" and "a failure to have a proper system in place, (instead of one) that allows these children to be open to prey and to harm and abuse".
"They gave him a level of legitimacy and I'd like to know why he was allowed to do that."
The women have different motivations, but there is a common thread.
She has the backing of her family and a fierce determination to ensure what happened to her never happens again.
"So there's more protection for children in these industries," Orrell says.
After her experiences as a gymnast and climber, Vivian has recently helped set up a new independent advocacy group, Athletes Rights Australia, which aims to give athletes support if they have grievances against sporting organisations.
She's concerned that Sport Climbing Australia is still not able to deal with complaints about child abuse.
She says the organisation doesn't have a complaints system or a coaching accreditation system.
In a statement, SCA's chair Romian Thevenot said: "SCA has complaints and member protection policies in place.
"Like most other National Sporting Organisations we are reviewing these policies under the guidance and direction of Sport Integrity Australia.
"We are determined to ensure our members are safe and seek in particular to be extremely vigilant towards child protection."
It's taken more than 20 years, but Sophie Vivian now wants to tell her story.
"I think it's incredibly important for all trauma survivors, to be able to tell their stories, and to have them heard by their communities," she says.
Of the three women, Vivian is the only one who has returned to climbing and found some peace in her sport.
"It took me two decades after the abuse to find a way to do climbing that was right for me," she says.
"I don't push myself in climbing anymore, I do it because I love it."
But that's not the case for Libby Hall.
"I wish nothing more that, you know, I could have been in a situation where I could still love my sport and still be playing my sport," she says.
Do you have more information about this story? Contact mark.david@abc.net.au
