USWNT's Alex Morgan Addresses Former Thorns HC Paul Riley, NWSL Misconduct

United States women's national team star Alex Morgan believes former Portland Thorns teammate Mana Shim "was failed by the system" after being subjected to sexual misconduct by then-coach Paul Riley.

Morgan opened up about sexual and verbal abuse across the NWSL as a whole in an interview with ESPN:

"It was really difficult to see that the Thorns 'parted ways' with Paul Riley rather than firing him — I don't even know if it was released that they were letting him go, I think it was that they parted ways. And at that time it was really devastating because I had helped Mana do the right thing, which was reporting Paul to the league and hoping that they would take action and hold him accountable, and she went through all the right steps to report someone who was sexually harassing her, to stop what was being done that was incredibly wrong, and she was failed."

"She was failed by the system, and I think that was the hardest thing at the time was: What do we do now? Does Mana just move on? How do you move on from this? And Paul just soon after got picked up by ... Western New York as the head coach and at that point, like, is Mana supposed to continue to play against this coach in the league, and see this coach possibly do the same thing to players on a new team? It was devastating. We didn't know what to do."

The Athletic's Meg Linehan and Katie Strang first reported on the allegations against Riley last September.

Shim told The Athletic that one night in 2015 Riley took her and Thorns teammate Sinead Farrelly to his apartment and "pressured them to kiss each other as he watched." He also allegedly sent Shim a lurid picture unsolicited and invited her to a "film session" in his room and was wearing only his underwear when she arrived.

In addition to the allegations against Riley, how the necessary parties handled the allegations when alerted became part of the story as well.

The Thorns let Riley go in September 2015 but didn't disclose why. Fans were left to assume he was gone for reasons solely related to the team's performance.

The Western New York Flash, which later became the North Carolina Courage, then hired Riley ahead of the 2016 season. The Courage fired him last September amid the fallout from Linehan and Strang's reporting.

Morgan told ESPN seeing The Athletic's story get published brought a "sigh of relief" because it would expose a number of issues that went beyond Riley:

"So when this article was finally released and there's a sigh of relief on our side and just utter shock from the rest of the soccer community -- we had already known everything. We tried to give the league a chance and time again to do the right thing. I wanted so deeply for Lisa Baird to just stand up and say, 'I'm sorry. I didn't do enough. I didn't look into enough. I trusted our general counsel, Lisa Levine, too much. We were too understaffed. We didn't have enough people in the room to really make calculated decisions,' but she didn't. She said she was shocked and disgusted, and that was surprising because that was a lie."

In the wake of the scandal, the United States Soccer Federation launched an independent investigation helmed by former Acting U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates. Yates published her findings Monday.

"Our investigation has revealed a league in which abuse and misconduct—verbal and emotional abuse and sexual misconduct—had become systemic, spanning multiple teams, coaches, and victims," she wrote. "Abuse in the NWSL is rooted in a deeper culture in women’s soccer, beginning in youth leagues, that normalizes verbally abusive coaching and blurs boundaries between coaches and players."

Riley's conduct was one of the focus points of Yates' investigation.

"Paul Riley’s abuse was prolonged and wide-ranging," she wrote. "It spanned multiple leagues, teams, and players. It included emotional misconduct, abuse of power, and sexual misconduct."

U.S. Soccer has adopted multiple policies to remedy the problems that were exposed within the last year. Among them is the formation of a new Office of Participant Safety to enforce the association's conduct policies. It will also be publicly disclosed through SafeSport's Centralized Disciplinary Database when someone receives a formal punishment including a suspension or ban.