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Last week, the FBI arrested Gymnastics coach, Sean Gardner, 38, for a federal position of child pornography. The arrest occurs more than three years after he was suspended from training at Chow’s Gymnastics and Dance Institute in West Des Moines, Iowa, for alleged sexual abuse.
The judicial records obtained by the Associated Press Gardner program were accused of sexually abusing at least three young gymnasts in Chow’s and secretly registering others who vanished in a gym bath in their previous place of employment in Jump’in Gymnastics & Twling in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
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This reserve photo provided by the DES MOINES, IowA, the polk county sheriff office shows Sean Gardner on Thursday, August 14, 2025. (Polk County Sheriff Office through AP)
Chow’s is the gym where the EE Gymnast stars. Uu. Shawn Johnson and Gabby Douglas trained before becoming gold medalists at the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games.
Gardner told the ABC Woi-TV affiliate in 2019 that his position in Chow’s was the work he “always wanted.”
“This is the work I have always wanted. Chow is really someone I have admired since I have been training,” Gardner told the station. “And you can know when you step on the gym, even to train the girls, the culture it has built. It is incredible. It is beautiful.”
A year later, Gardner was promoted to Chow’s Winter Classic director, an annual meeting that attracts more than 1,000 gymnasts to Iowa. He also trained a team of Junior Olympics during his four -year term in Chow’s.
Several of his students obtained scholarships from university gymnastics, but Gardner said he had larger objectives.
“You want to leave a digital footprint in your life, so when they go to school, to larger and better things, remember Chow’s as a family,” Gardner said in a 2020 interview with WOI-TV.
Pak Gazette Digital has communicated with the Chow Gymnastics and Dance Institute for comments.
A girl informed Safesport in March 2022 that Gardner used “inappropriate spots techniques” in which he would put his hands between his legs, said the affidavit.
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Archive: Gabby Douglas makes his routine on the floor while competing at the American Classic Gymnastics Meet, on Saturday, April 27, 2024, in Katy, Texas. (Photo AP/David J. Phillip)
He said he claimed that Gardner would ask girls if they were sexually active and called them “idiots, whores and whores.” She said this behavior began after hiring in 2018 and continued until she left the gym in 2020. He provided the names of six other potential victims.
In April 2024, another of Chow’s old athletes went ahead of the West Des Moines Police Department to inform accusations of abuse, according to an affidavit now sealed signed by the police detective Jeff Lyon.
Gardner is now being arrested in the Polk County prison in Des Moines and will be transported to Mississippi to face the position there, said a spokesman for the US Sheriff Service. UU.
Among the tests seized by the researchers at the end of May was a cell phone, a laptop and a desktop along with handwritten notes between Gardner and their former students, according to the dated documents sealed.
They found images of girls, approximately 6 to 14 years old, who were naked, using the toilet or changing in leotards, as those documents show. These images seem to come from a hidden camera in a bathroom.
The Chow’s Institute of Gymnastics and Dance is seen on August 4, 2025 in West Des Moines, Iowa. (Photo AP/Scott McFetridge)
They also discovered 50 video files and 400 photos, including some that seemed to be child pornography, according to the sworn statement of the FBI. A video supposedly shows Gardner entering the bathroom and turning off the camera.
The researchers also found images of an adult woman filmed in secret entering and leaving a bathtub, and identified her as Gardner’s ex -girlfriend. That woman, as well as the owner of the gym, Candi Workman, told researchers that the images seemed to come from Jump’in Gymnastics facilities in Purvis, Mississippi.
Gardner appeared in a Chamber of the Des Moines court on Friday for the position of producing visual representations of minors who participate in a sexually explicit behavior, which can take up to 30 years in prison.
