Yale mother alleges faculty coerced swimmers to remain silent on trans athletes

EXCLUSIVE: The mom of three former Yale swimmers has come ahead with alleged particulars of her youngsters’s expertise on the faculty to Fox News Digital, after the Ivy League large’s athletic division noticed a pair of unflattering doc leaks in current days. 

Kim Jones, the mom of two former Yale girls’s swimmers and one former males’s swimmer, stated she needed to witness her daughter and her son be pressured to compete with transgender athletes of the other beginning intercourse whereas at Yale. 

Fox News Digital will not be naming her youngsters at her request, however has verified they competed at Yale throughout her supplied timeframes. 

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Her older daughter, who went to Yale from 2018-23, competed in opposition to notorious UPenn trans swimmer Lia Thomas throughout Thomas’ reign in 2021-22, each within the common season and within the Ivy League championship. Then she needed to watch her son, who went to Yale from 2020-25, share a group and locker room with a organic feminine trans swimmer, Iszac Henig, who transitioned from the college’s girls’s group to the lads’s within the 2022-23 season.

“I would say it felt like North Korea,” Jones stated of her youngsters’s expertise on the time. 

“I would say that the athletic department as a whole was a terrible place to be.” 

The expertise of watching her older daughter face Thomas, and Yale’s dealing with of these competitions in opposition to Thomas, triggered inside strife and trauma for her household.

“They terrorized the girls … they pulled them into mandatory meetings. They intimidated, coerced, threatened, and emotionally blackmailed them,” Jones alleged. 

“They were told that they were going to be, that they were to be held accountable for any harm that came to folks in their communities that identified as transgender.” 

Jones stated she would not consider the ladies impacted have even “realized” what they went by way of.

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“I think it’s going to take even more time than what has passed for many of those young women to look back on this and realize just how coerced and abused they were during this,” she stated. 

Jones stated her daughter by no means needed to share a locker room with Thomas. But her son did must share one with Henig. 

“It ruins the camaraderie. Of course, you’re going to change the way you speak, you’re going to change the way you act when you’re in a different environment with people of the opposite sex. The boys didn’t feel like they could go to the athletic department and say ’this is uncomfortable, we don’t want a woman in our locker rooms,'” Jones stated.

Still, Jones stated her son maintained all the identical friendships with the opposite males on his group. 

But the mom stated the worst a part of her son’s alleged therapy from Yale was that it allegedly prevented him from standing up for the ladies who needed to compete in opposition to Thomas. 

“It is emasculating, it takes away their convictions to stand up for what’s right in front of their eyes, to speak up when they’re uncomfortable,”

“You can’t stand up for women. You can’t stand up for what’s right, right in front of your eyes. And then an athletic director is coming down and squashing all, any and all dissension wanting to put anything under the rug.” 

The Jones household nonetheless despatched its youthful daughter to start school at Yale in 2024, however she transferred only one 12 months later in 2025. 

Jones is at present the co-founder of the ladies’s rights group the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS), recognized for financing Riley Gaines’ lawsuit in opposition to the NCAA over the inclusion of Thomas and different trans athletes in girls’s sports activities. 

Her son’s alleged quarantine expertise turned him into “a skeleton”

Jones’ son started his school profession through the faculty’s quarantine interval amid the COVID-19 pandemic. 

And as a mom, Jones nonetheless has the picture in her head when he got here house after his first semester. 

“He looked like a skeleton, he had lost so much weight,” Jones stated. 

She known as the college’s alleged handing of COVID “disastrous.”

“He was a freshman and at the campus, he was confined to his dorm,” Jones stated. “They were delivering their food to them. There was no, the athletic department was not looking at their student athletes and saying ‘oh my gosh, you’re a bigger person, you need food.’ Like, my son is 6’4.”

Jones additionally lamented the college’s vaccine necessities and alleged requirement for fixed [nasal] swab COVID assessments. 

“It was incredibly oppressive,” she stated. “The oversight on mask-wearing and mandatory vaccines and constant getting tested, it was way worse than anything that was going on in the outside word.”

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During the autumn 2020 semester, Yale University carried out stringent COVID-19 protocols to permit for a partial campus return, which included a phased, three-step, month-long quarantine course of for college students upon arrival, per The Yale Daily News.

Undergraduate college students in residence and graduate/skilled college students in high-density housing had been required to bear twice-weekly asymptomatic testing. Strict social distancing measures had been enforced, together with limiting gatherings to 10 folks and mandating face coverings.

“An environment that, like I said, resembles North Korea”

Jones alleged that sooner or later throughout Thomas’ reign at UPenn, her older daughter got here to her to warn her in opposition to a social media remark. 

“I had written, ‘women deserve to be able to celebrate their incomparable physical limits’ or something like that,” Jones stated. 

“My daughter said, ‘take that down. People are noticing, we are not supposed to say anything.’ And I said ‘I thought that was a pretty benign comment,’ you know? And she said to me like, ‘We were told our first priority above ourselves, above anything else, needs to be, to basically uphold… the position that the school and the league are taking.’”

Jones will not be the primary individual beforehand linked to Yale to have spoken out concerning the athletic division’s alleged intent to “silence dissent.”

A letter signed by former Yale hockey coach Keith Allain addressed to Yale President Maurine McInnis, alleged that present Yale Athletic Director Victoria Chun has created a “toxic environment” for the college’s sports activities groups. Fox News Digital printed the letter on Monday after confirming with Allain that he despatched the letter to McInnis through electronic mail in October, shortly after his retirement. 

“My name is Keith Allain, I have just retired after 19 years as Mens Hockey Coach and I am writing to you at the urging of several head coaches in our Athletic Department. They told me that you were soliciting feedback from a few coaches regarding extending the contract of our athletic director, and are concerned, that with the culture of fear that permeates the athletic department, you will not receive candid feedback,” the letter started. 

The letter later wrote, “Vicky’s singular talent is self promotion and has created a toxic environment within the department where she is insulated by a cadre of administrators whose main task seems to be silencing any dissent,” the letter continued.”

On Tuesday, Fox News Digital reported on emails that show a former Yale University administrator telling a lawyer of former Yale strength and conditioning coach Thomas Newman that he was recorded during a meeting. 

“A former worker recorded a portion of a gathering along with your consumer, with out the college’s information,” reads part of an email sent to Newman’s attorney, Alan Granovsky, from a Yale deputy general counsel, who now no longer works at the university.

The counsel’s email was sent in response to an Aug. 13, 2025, letter with the subject line “Ongoing Reputational Harm and Misstatements Regarding Thomas Newman.”

The counsel’s email also included the lines, “The college has not made any defamatory statements to anybody relating to your consumer,” and “The college didn’t disclose any medical info inappropriately, the college has not stated that your consumer left the college involuntarily or is topic to an investigation.”

Newman’s attorneys at Granovsky & Sundaresh Employment law sent multiple emails to Yale regarding the issue and Newman’s ultimate departure from the university in 2021, which were provided by a source to Fox News Digital.

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Newman confirmed to Fox News Digital that the emails were exchanged by the university and his attorneys, but declined further comment. 

An Oct. 10 email from Granovsky to the counsel includes the following allegations: 

“You now concede {that a} former worker recorded a portion of a gathering with Mr. Newman,” part of the email wrote, later stating, “Despite understanding the recording was unauthorized, the events concerned— particularly [Executive Deputy Director/Chief Operating Officer of Athletics] Ann-Marie Guglieri and [Athletic Director] Vicky Chun—tried to make use of the recording for disciplinary functions. 

Under Connecticut General Statutes § 52-570d, it’s illegal for any particular person to report a non-public dialog with out informing and acquiring the consent of all events concerned.

No present or former Yale worker has been incriminated in any criminal activity. 

Fox News Digital has reached out to Yale’s president’s workplace and athletic division for remark, however has not obtained a response. 

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