Ashley Wagner accuses late John Coughlin of sexual assault

Ashley Wagner accuses late John Coughlin of sexual assault

More than two months after Bridget Namiotka accused late John Coughlin of sexually abusing her, Olympic figure skating medalist Ashley Wagner has come forward with similar allegations against the champion who committed suicide in January.

Ashley Wagner is the fourth woman to level allegations of sexual assault against John Coughlin.

Sharing her story in a USA Today essay, she said the assault took place in 2008 when she and the then 22-year-old Coughlin were in Colorado Springs.

She accused him of groping and kissing her while was asleep in bed after a part.

“It was the middle of the night when I felt him crawl into my bed. I had been sleeping and didn’t move because I didn’t understand what it meant. I thought he just wanted a place to sleep. But then he started kissing my neck. I pretended to be deep asleep, hoping he would stop. He didn’t. When his hands started to wander, when he started touching me, groping my body, I tried to shift around so that he would think I was waking up and would stop. He didn’t.”

When he continued to wander further over my body, I started to get scared because he was so much bigger than I was, and I didn’t know if I could push him off,” she wrote in her first person essay for US Today.

Ashley Wagner Wagner said she started to cry, opened her eyes and pulled Coughlin’s hand away, telling him to stop.

“He looked at me for a few seconds, quietly got up and left the room. All of this happened over the period of about five minutes. That is such a small amount of time, but it’s haunted me ever since,” she wrote.

33-year-old Coughlin had killed himself a month after US Center for SafeSport placed him on restricted eligibility.

He had hanged himself at his father’s Kansas City home a day after being suspended.