They got him. This is Mike Spiller, the gymnastics coach who sexually abused me when I was 10. It took 39 years, but tonight there’s ONE LESS ABUSER out there getting away with it.
Thanks so much to the people who shared, retweeted, looked up old photos, etc. It took your help to turn up enough of my fellow victims/warriors to get here.
If you had interaction with Mike Spiller that in any way connects to his 40-year career as a gymnastics coach, camp leader, and pedophile, please get in touch with me and/or call the Crimestoppers number in the photo.
It’s never too late to tell the truth. We may not change the facts, we we sure can change the story!!
(Yeah, I said it! Should! I am telling you what to do, and I don’t even care if it’s polite. I’m right here. Go look. Seriously.)
They’re pictures of as far away as anyone has ever been able to see, and for that reason, they’re also pictures of as far back as anyone has ever been able to see. (Because light emitted far away has taken a long time to reach Webb to be photographed. Ask your science teacher!)
They’re beautiful. So, to me, is their unfathomability. I want the universe to be deep and unknowable just as strongly as I want to know it deeply. But what what I most love about the Webb images is how they not only depict things we knew about in more detail, they also show many, many things we didn’t even know to look for. (Literally, many of the major scientific findings so far from Webb have been simply background stuff, small things off to the side of or behind something more dramatically centered in the image.)
That’s the attitude I am trying to take as I experience a similar look at my own past. It’s one thing to deal with my own feelings about having been sexually abused by gymnastics coach/clown/camp games teacher Mike Spiller, which I have had close to 40 years to work on, along with professional help. I’m good! But it’s something new to look at those same memories and feelings, this time with my adult lens and with a completely different set of resources and allies, and see things i hadn’t even known were there. Through these new eyes at this new time, with the help of others looking into Mike Spiller’s past (where it intersects with my own but also beyond that), I see so much more. I see how much bigger the context was. How it fit in to a culture in gymnastics, in Houston, in 1983. How many others were around who had to have known and looked away. The other girls, maybe now grown-ass, pissed-off women like me, who thought we were alone, were believed and/or doubted and/or helped or not. It’s all bigger and broader than it felt when it was a private story. Like looking at your kindergarten class picture, and remembering this kid on the playground and that kid in math class, but also knowing for the first time what each kid was thinking, what was going on at home, how the teacher felt and what all of it showed about that time and place.
That’s what it feels like to be involved, however marginally, in current investigations of the man who sexually abused me when I was a kid. Lots of discoveries, big and small, some answering questions I hadn’t even known to ask. These are accidental discoveries, and some of them are not easy ones. Yet it’s as Dr. Kirkpatrick says: “We’re going to have to figure that out.”
You can have that open-minded feeling of acceptance and curiosity, like she seems to have about the outer space she’s scrutinized for her whole career and like I mostly do about the inner space I have scrutinized just as ardently. I can’t help wanting to hug Dr. Kirkpatrick, or maybe send her a stiff drink. The Nature piece ends:
In 1983 and for a while after, the gymnastics center in Northwest Houston that I attended held sleepovers. These were fun extras, like the lock-ins a church youth group might have. But, beyond the normal kid fun of a sleepover my friends, something else happened. My coach, Mike Spiller, whom I adored and whose attention and approval I craved, sexually abused me.
And while I have many, many stories about that in my own life, THIS short post is really a LONG story about how almost 40 years later, he is still immersed in working with youth at camps and gyms. Finally, after almost 40 years, he is under investigation and is temporarily restricted from any contact with/in/via any USA Gymnastics-affiliated entity, as shown on the public database of USA Center for SafeSport.
In fact, I know I am not alone, since I am not the only complainant in the investigation.
Mike Spiller has most recently been working in Boerne, TX and the San Antonio area. He began his career at a University of Texas gymnast and then as a coach beginning in Houston, TX; since then he has worked all over Texas as well as New Mexico and outside the USA. If you remember him abusing you or someone else, or even had suspicion of such, please contact SafeSport, which you can do online with or without anonymity. Or, contact me using any of the means on this site.
Please consider sharing with every Texan, gymnast, journalist, or human being that you know!
Ironic? Now serving as Safety Monitor for a USA Swimming event.
Do you have a to-be-read list? Or shelf or pile or bags full, like my kids and I do? Are you such a cool reader kid you call it a TBR? There’s an art to the TBR, and I don’t have it. Take for example my friend and colleague Rob, who one magical year actually accomplished the impossible of actually reading all the books on his TBR shelf before buying more. Not me; it’s just piles everywhere and then I grab whatever, or I end up ordering from the library/internet anyway.
I have a TBW list. I think many of us do, whether we know it or not: these are the stories that may matter most but also can be hardest to tell. What Glennon Doyle calls your “truthiest truth.” And I don’t know about you, but these years since the pandemic began, or maybe it’s since Trump, or wait maybe it’s since… all the wrong and sad and overwhelming things ever… These years have showed me some TRUTH. And the more I know what is true, the more I have to write about it.
And it’s super scary.
What if it hurts their feelings what if they don’t believe me what if it doesn’t count what if I am wrong what if I can’t what if it’s stupid what if nobody reads it what if I’m crazy what if i regret it what if I show too much real me what if what if what if kind of scary.
Here’s the list of things To Be Written in the coming days and weeks. Hold me to it.
How Mike Spiller, my first gymnastics coach in Texas, fondled my crotch while “massaging” me in a tent of gym mats at a lock-in in the early 80s
How Mike Spiller is still active in gymnastics and other youth camp settings, to my horror and stupid surprise
How I didn’t realize what Mike Spiller did was bad at first, so starving I was for affection and approval
How I did tell what Mike Spiller did, but not right away and not firmly enough, maybe
How I lived out a life for the almost forty years since then, in all the messy and fucked up ways people live lives, but with the additional mess that Mike Spiller left behind for my head
How I work at Penn State and did not re-report Mike Spiller even when child sexual abuse was all anyone talked about
How I watched the trial of Larry Nassar and did not re-report Mike Spiller
How I recently reported Mike Spiller to USA Center for SafeSport
How it appears that I am not the only one who has something to say Mike Spiller
How now I am doing everything I can to encourage others who may have similar experiences with Texas gymnastics coach Mike Spiller to contact me
And whatever happens from there.
Thanks to the many people who have tried to love me at some point since 1982 and have recently answered questions when investigators have gotten in touch. I’m diving into the big scary TBW.
