He warned UK about its new swim coach 12 years before a sex abuse lawsuit went public

University of Kentucky athletics officials first heard warnings about Lars Jorgensen the day after they hired him as associate head coach of swimming and diving, 12 years before he was accused of sexual assault and harassment in an April 12 federal lawsuit.

On June 21, 2012, a college swimming veteran named Mark Howard sent an email to Gary Conelly, UK’s head swim coach at the time, and Mitch Barnhart, UK’s athletics director. In the email, Howard referenced Jorgensen’s time as head swim coach at the University of Toledo from 2004 to 2010.

Based on his predatory actions in Toledo, Jorgensen shouldn’t be trusted around young women, Howard wrote, according to copies of emails that Howard provided to the Herald-Leader this week.

“I coached at Toledo for a year then had to run away as fast as I could,” Howard told the UK officials.

“While there, a former Toledo swimmer made it known to me about a sexual relationship she had with Lars before she had graduated,” he wrote. “I confronted Lars about it and made it very clear that he stay away from any Toledo swimmers for as long as he was alive. Had I known he was interviewing with Kentucky I certainly would have called.”

“I wish you the best and hope he does not bring down your University. This is no joke at all and I cannot stomach the fact that he will be coaching women again,” Howard wrote.

Barnhart never responded, Howard said.

But Conelly did.

In his reply to Howard less than an hour after receiving it, Conelly said: “This is a disturbing allegation. I appreciate you bring(ing) it to my attention. We are starting to look into this and I’m hoping you can give me a little more information.”

Howard replied with his phone number and urged Conelly to call him.

That was the last he heard from anyone in Lexington, Howard said in an interview with the Herald-Leader this week.

“I would have loved to have seen some kind of investigation where they returned my phone calls, asked me about details, dates, what true knowledge I had, even invited me to campus to ask me questions in front of investigators there,” Howard said.

“I just wanted to see somebody give a damn, honestly,” he said.

Nearly a year later, on April 17, 2013, Howard tried again. He emailed Derek Perkins, a UK assistant swim coach.

At that time, UK was preparing to promote Jorgensen to head swim coach, replacing Conelly, who was retiring.

Jorgensen shouldn’t be trusted, Howard warned Perkins

“Sad thing is that he was banging (a former Toledo swimmer, later an assistant swim coach) while she was an athlete. I warned Gary that Lars had issues keeping his hands off girls,” Howard wrote to Perkins in an email.

No reply came, Howard said this week.

UK promoted Jorgensen to the top coaching job, as planned, on May 28, 2013.

“We believe he’ll do an outstanding job in his new role,” Barnhart said in a news release announcing the promotion.

UK responds 12 years later

After leaving Toledo, Howard traveled the world as a representative of athletics gear manufacturers before settling down in Bowling Green, Ohio, to start his own business rebuilding cars, trucks and motorcycles.

In the federal lawsuit that was filed April 12 against UK, Barnhart, Conelly and Jorgensen, two former UK swimmers and assistant swim coaches say Jorgensen sexually groomed, groped and raped them and a third UK swimmer who is not part of the suit.

They say Jorgensen created a “toxic, sexually hostile environment” for years inside UK’s swim program.

UK issued a formal response to the lawsuit saying it has referred the allegations to law enforcement.

“We are distressed to hear the disturbing allegations of sexual assault and criminal behavior by a former University of Kentucky employee,” UK said. “No one should be subject to the kind of abuse described in the civil lawsuit.”

Hearing UK respond after all these years, Howard said he was sickened by the expression of “distress.”

As the lawsuit explains, he and others warned university officials about Jorgensen for years, but they looked the other way, Howard said.

“Mitch (Barnhart) is — in all of this, it really stops with him,” Howard said.

“It’s really disgusting that he gets warned in 2012, he doesn’t respond, and here we are 12 years later with at least three victims that are destroyed,” Howard said. “That’s on his head.”

Jorgensen’s attorney, Greg Anderson, did not respond this week to a request for comment on Howard’s account of events in Toledo.

In previous interviews, Anderson said his client did not rape or harass anyone, but he had consensual dating relationships with his two accusers while they were on his coaching staff at the University of Kentucky.

What did UK know?

So far, UK has declined to say why it did not interview Mark Howard in 2012 or 2013 after he emailed several of its athletics officials with warnings about Jorgensen.

Conelly, the retired head swim coach who now lives in Bradenton, Fla., did not respond to a request for comment.

In a prepared statement this week, UK spokeswoman Kristi Willett said the school did contact the University of Toledo.

“When Director Barnhart received the email in 2012, and per the institution’s policies and the department’s protocols, it was turned over to the officer who worked on Title IX issues,” Willett said.

Title IX is the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education.

“The University of Kentucky reached out to the University of Toledo about Jorgenson,” Willett said. “Jorgenson had left Toledo and was subsequently at another institution, the University of Tennessee. The University of Toledo relayed to UK that they had no allegations with respect to what was raised in the email.”

However, others at Toledo were talking about Jorgensen.

A Title IX lawsuit against the University of Toledo in 2014 by Tarrah Beyster, head softball coach, publicly identified Jorgensen as having “a long-term romantic relationship with a player,” a disclosure that received news coverage at that time.

Beyster’s suit, which was settled, accused Toledo of accommodating the bad behavior of Jorgensen and other male coaches while discriminating against her as a female coach. Jorgensen was not named as a party to the suit.

Willett declined to say if anyone at UK knew about the allegations against Jorgensen contained in Beyster’s lawsuit 10 years ago or in subsequent news stories about that suit.

According to the April 12 sexual abuse lawsuit, UK also was warned about Jorgensen’s behavior in either 2015 or 2016 by a member of its own athletics staff reporting a groping incident, and again in 2019 by the San Jose State University Title IX office in California, which forwarded a tip it received about a sexual assault.

“The allegations were not fully investigated, permitting Jorgensen to continue to have unfettered access to young women,” the April 12 suit alleges.

‘I was just in shock’

Mark Howard and Lars Jorgensen weren’t friends, but they kept crossing paths over the years.

They both competitively swam as teenagers in California in the 1980s, occasionally meeting at events. Years later, they both ended up in Ohio, with Howard an assistant swim coach at Bowling Green State University and Jorgensen just 25 miles away at the University of Toledo.

Jorgensen left Toledo in 2010 for two seasons at the University of Tennessee. Not long afterward, Howard went to Toledo to become an assistant swim coach.

One of Howard’s new duties at Toledo was filming swim meets so they could be reviewed later.

“So I’m digging through the assistant coach’s office, trying to find a fresh DVD to record stuff,” Howard said in the Herald-Leader interview this week. “I’m just rifling through these mini-disks, and that’s when I pushed play on one of these to see if it was recordable, and there was — that’s when I noticed the behavior of Lars and the gal who — uh, yeah.”

The video showed Jorgensen having sex with a woman who swam for Toledo as a student and later joined the coaching staff, Howard said. There did not appear to be a timestamp on the video, Howard added, so he couldn’t know when it was filmed or whether the woman was a student-athlete or an assistant coach at the time.

The woman is no longer with Toledo’s swim program. She did not respond this week to a request for comment by the Herald-Leader, which is not identifying her.

“That was kind of the start of, ‘What did I walk into?’” Howard said.

“I don’t think I acted upon that for quite a while. I was just in shock. I didn’t know what to do,” he said.

Howard said that once he recovered his wits, he sat down with Jorgensen at a Starbucks and pressed him about the relationship.

“It was a manipulation of sorts, but I think I had to do it. I had to play the role where I was on his side on a very friendly level,” Howard said. “I got him to absolutely admit the relationship her senior year — face-to-face — he confessed it. He absolutely admitted it.”

Howard said he burned the video because he was embarrassed for the woman involved, whom he knows, an act he regrets now that accusations against Jorgensen are making national headlines.

But when he heard that Jorgensen was coming to UK, where the head swim coach likely would retire soon after more than 20 seasons, he said he felt obliged to warn people in Lexington.

Coaches never should pursue sexual relationships with student-athletes they coached, Howard said.

“It’s disgusting,” Howard said. “They’re children. I mean, I don’t care if they’re 22 and they’ve graduated and they’re gonna get a six-figure job and they’re so mature, they’re still children at that level. You are a father figure, an uncle figure, an older brother figure.”

“So yeah, it turns my stomach to this day,” he said.

Former UK swim coach Lars Jorgensen denies rape claims; his lawyer blames ‘woke NCAA’ 

Former UK swim coach says he dated his young accusers. If so, was that ethical?