LOS ANGELES – Former NFL player Shareece Wright has decided to go public with the allegation that he was sexually assaulted by a former Colton High School athletic trainer.
“The less it’s kept a secret, the harder it is for it to continue to happen,” Wright, 36, told ESPN’s Outside the Lines.
Wright is among six former Colton H.S. football players who sued the Colton Joint Unified School District and the former trainer in 2022. Colton is a city in San Bernardino County, east of Los Angeles.
The female trainer, whom KTLA is not naming, was suspended by the district in 2022. She has denied the allegations and has never faced criminal charges.
Wright told ESPN that he first got to know the trainer in 2002 when he was a freshman.
“It started off normal. She helped me with what I needed to be helped with,” Wright said. “The more and more I was around her, things started changing. [It] got a little bit more and more flirtatious. It just kept getting worse and worse.”
In his junior year, when Wright was 17, he says he had multiple sexual encounters with the trainer in the training room, locker room, and weight room and during several team dinners at head coach Harold Strauss’s home.
Strauss died in 2019.
Wright said it was his mother’s reaction and concerns about his own sons, ages 9 and 2, that prompted him to go public.
“Being a dad and having kids and having nieces and nephews that are going to public schools, it just hit home,” Wright told ESPN. “I just want to make the conversation comfortable for people to speak up about.”
A district spokesperson declined to comment on the internal investigation that led to the trainer’s dismissal.
“You’ve got football … you’ve got a permissive school environment where it’s allowed to happen,” attorney Morgan Stewart, who represents Wright and eight other plaintiffs, told ESPN. “I mean, you’ve got sort of a perfect storm of sexual abuse that could be covered up easily.”
Wright was drafted by the San Diego Chargers and played for six NFL teams from 2011 until 2018.