Belated crusade

Sexually abused as child, Hoelzer out to aid other victims

One in an occasional series on courageous athletes.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Margaret Hoelzer set a world record in the 200-meter backstroke at the US trials for the Beijing Olympics. At the Games this summer, she won three medals (two silvers and a bronze). She is a champion swimmer, but she has struggled for a long time with dark secrets swirling just below the surface. Secrets more than 20 years old. Secrets about child sexual abuse. And now she's reliving her past to help other children.

The process is painful. Hoelzer, 25, couldn't live by herself until last year, her childhood robbed by a playmate's father who gained her trust when she was just 5 years old. The ripples created by the trauma haunt her to this day. But after returning from China, she decided to tell her story.

Advocates are grateful for her support. Researchers say 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 7 boys will be a victim of sexual abuse before their 18th birthday, according to the US Department of Veteran Affairs, National Center for Posttraumatic Stress.

"Margaret is so unbelievable; what she's doing screams of courage," said Catherine Hereford, the director of development for the National Child Advocacy Center, a nonprofit agency for which Hoelzer is a spokeswoman. Hoelzer wants to devote her life to the prevention of child sexual abuse.

Hereford calls her "amazing."

"It's extremely difficult to talk about something like that," said Hereford. "A lot of people that have gone through it feel shame and guilt. She had an opportunity to share her story to make a difference, and that outweighed any hesitation she had about public humiliation or embarrassing herself."

Hoelzer, tall and personable, pulls out a photograph of herself when she was 6: a blue-eyed girl in a sky-blue bathing suit, with a beaming smile. Everything looked picture-perfect.

But something horrible was going on. And her parents never knew.

Today when she talks about her playmate's father, she shrugs.

"I thought this was the coolest dad of all my friends' parents," she said. "And the reason was that he played with us. He would play hide-and-seek with us. We'd build forts and he'd help us build them.

"Five-year-olds are extremely trusting. You're taught to respect a parent and what they say. You are taught not to trust strangers. But this isn't a stranger to begin with. It would never occur to me that an adult could do something wrong."

Painful details recalled

As she speaks in detail, Hoelzer's eyes well up, but she composes herself and never cries.

"I remember one time he told me he caught a frog under the house," she said, recalling a memory of her life in a middle-class neighborhood in Huntsville, Ala. "So I go happily with this man into the crawl space under the house to look for this frog, because I'm 5 years old and I think frogs are the greatest things on the planet.

"It was dark and it was damp and it had a dirt floor and there was a door - like a trap door - and he kept leading me away from the light into the darkness. I didn't like the darkness . . ."

Her voice trails off.

"Of course, he told me, 'Don't tell anybody - this is our secret,' so I didn't," she said. "When an adult tells you not to tell something, you don't."

For Hoelzer, establishing trust became more difficult than setting a world record. She has never had a boyfriend, her relationships confined to the pages of romantic novels she devours.

"Every time someone tries to get close to me, I back away," she said.

Even as a trusting little girl, she instinctively protected herself. At a sleepover at her friend's house, the pedophile gave her her own bedroom. Hoelzer remembers hearing the door creak open in the middle of the night, and seeing the silhouette of a man creeping toward her. He was naked. It is an image that still troubles her.

He climbed into bed and started fondling her.

"I remember making up some excuse to get out of bed, that I had to go to the bathroom," she said. "I didn't have to go at all. You don't consciously realize what they are doing is wrong - but subconsciously, you are not comfortable with it.

"I just paced around the bathroom for like half an hour because I didn't know what to do. I guess he was freaked out enough that he eventually left."

Hoelzer was never raped, but psychologists told her she was definitely being groomed for rape.

"So many kids had it much worse, " she said.

Hoelzer believes the abuse may have lasted two years, until the pedophile moved away when she was in third grade. But it remained a secret until she was 11.

"I never once connected the dots that I was being molested," she said. "When I thought about it, I wanted to think of something else."

In fifth grade, when girl talk became boy talk, she finally blurted out her secret to her best friend.

"I told her, and she said, 'Oh my God, you were molested,' and that's the first time I consciously put the two together," said Hoelzer. "Her first response was, 'You've got to tell your mom.' "

Hoelzer went home to help her mother do chores, and the details came seeping out.

"She was very quiet and calm, but she kept me talking for two hours," said Hoelzer. "She was so afraid I was going to clam up."

Her father's reaction was the opposite.

"My dad just wanted to find him and beat the ever-loving daylights out of him," said Hoelzer. "My mom said, 'If you go to jail, that's not going to help Margaret.

"We've got to do this the right way."

Refuge in the pool

Police arrested the pedophile, who denied the charges but refused to take a lie detector test. Hoelzer received counseling at the National Children's Advocacy Center, which included her marking anatomically correct diagrams. She told the district attorney she would be brave enough to testify. A grand jury was convened, but charges were dropped because of a lack of evidence.

"I was hysterical the night I found out that it went to the grand jury and got thrown out," she said. "I didn't understand; my concept of the legal system was if you do something wrong, you get punished."

The fear remained with her.

"For some reason after I told everything, I was terrified to be alone," she said. "I couldn't be alone at all. I would go hide in my closet, behind my clothes. I was petrified.

"I am somewhat of an introverted person because I am afraid to trust people. I think the biggest thing in sexual abuse is you feel like you have no control in the world."

Swimming saved her life.

"Water is tranquility, happiness, and oneness," she said. "It gives me confidence. I never liked team sports. I never liked judging sports. There's a clock in swimming; nobody is deciding your fate, it's totally individual."

Even swimming in the Olympics, she was never nervous.

"It's just a swim meet," she said. "Swimming was the one thing I could control. There is a peacefulness of being face-down and going forward. Swimming cleared my mind."

She was an eight-time state champion in high school, and at Auburn University, she studied psychology and criminology. All the papers she wrote were on child sexual abuse.

In college, she roomed with Kirsty Coventry of Zimbabwe, another record-setting swimmer. Coventry set a world mark in the 200-meter backstroke in winning Olympic gold in Beijing, and won three silver medals. Hoelzer was satisfied with her two silvers and a bronze.

"Of course I wanted to win," said Hoelzer, "but if I couldn't win, I'm glad somebody I'm friends with won."

Now 25, she is considered "old" for a swimmer, but Hoelzer isn't quitting.

"I'm going to keep swimming because I haven't reached my potential and I'm having fun," she said. "I'm going to go back for more."

She has even taken some criticism for talking to the media - instead of just a therapist - about child sexual abuse. That doesn't bother her one bit.

"I'm not trying to be a celebrity," she said. "I'm just trying to put a face on this to help change things. I think I'm in a position to make a difference.

"This happened to me, and I went to the Olympics. If I can help just one child, it's worth talking about. Maybe some 8-year-old kid will read this and say, 'Yeah, I can get over this. I see light at the end of the tunnel.' "

Stan Grossfeld can be reached at grossfeld@globe.com.