“Have you ever had a nightmare where you're in a crowd of people and someone is after you but you can't scream or run? That is what it felt like for me serving in the Coast Guard after my assaults,” testified Meghan Klement before a Senate panel on Thursday.

Klement, who served from 2012 to 2015, said that a bystander witnessed the harassment against her and reported it, but Coast Guard leaders then tried to intimidate her into silence and minimized her experiences.

After she made a video recounting what happened to her, multiple women reached out who said they were assaulted by the same individual, which is when Klement realized that she was not the first individual to report him.

“The command repeatedly allowed his behavior to slide and, in turn, left me to get assaulted by him,” she said.

Klement was one of five individuals, each of whom was sexually assaulted or harassed while in the Coast Guard, who spoke at Thursday’s hearing in New London, Conn., where the military branch’s academy is located.

Congressional scrutiny of sexual misconduct in the Coast Guard began with a 2023 CNN report that the military service in 2014 launched an investigation called Operation Fouled Anchor into alleged sexual assaults at the academy from the late 1980s to 2006. That investigation, which it kept secret from Congress, “found that school leaders routinely failed to report serious allegations to law enforcement, intentionally avoiding the criminal justice system.”

“The culture of cover...

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