Still haunted by the alleged abuse, Conner filed a report with the Topsfield police last year. A six-month investigation by the Globe’s Bob Hohler found three other women coached by Hewitt who say they were abused or harassed.
Back in South Africa, Hewitt’s pattern of allegedly preying on girls he coached seems to have been an open secret. “We were all praying and hoping he would get his comeuppance, but he never did,’’ Raymond Moore, one of Hewitt’s Davis Cup teammates, told Hohler. Tennis authorities, allegedly worried about putting young girls on the stand, didn’t alert South African law enforcement, but Hewitt was quietly barred from coaching girls in the 1980s.
There is no indication that professional tennis authorities in the United States knew about Hewitt’s alleged abuse. There is also no indication that anyone really wanted to know. Hewitt was a marquee name, at a time when tennis basked in record television ratings. Even the mother of one of the other alleged victims discouraged her from complaining.
The passage of time means that Hewitt may never see the inside of a courtroom. There’s no statute of limitations for statutory rape in Massachusetts, but winning a criminal conviction on 35-year-old allegations would be difficult. But that shouldn’t stop organized tennis from taking the initiative, in the same way that Major League Baseball and the baseball Hall of Fame have worked to preemptively keep players tainted by steroid use or gambling off the field - and out of Cooperstown. Hewitt’s alleged crimes were not off-the-court transgressions unrelated to the game. They were inseparable from, and apparently enabled by, his status as a tennis star, which is why organized tennis now has a special obligation to help provide a measure of justice for his alleged victims.
