First of all, that hit us hard. I'd never seen anything like it. I've been involved in fencing for 40 years, and I wouldn't have suspected what you just read. When I learned that, my first reaction was to take it at face value and accept that the letter had been written in good faith. So it had to be accepted as true until proven otherwise.
The first thing we did was to write to all our members and ask them to file complaints if they had witnessed a situation of that kind and to tell them we were listening and that there was no reason to fear reprisals, since they would be impossible under the current management team. We encouraged people to use the complaint mechanism and reminded them that it was independent and anonymous. There was no mechanism 20 years ago, and people might not have trusted the mechanism 10 years ago. Today, however, we have a mechanism, and it produces results. That's the first step that we took.
We took several others, but the second most important one is the following. Since we're short of time, I'll go directly to what happened after Emily Mason appeared before you. We invited her to the next meeting of our board of directors.
We reached out to her because, to that point, we hadn't been able to put a name to even one of the 50 persons concerned, since their group was anonymous. Our athlete representative had tried to contact the group but hadn't received a reply. We also tried to contact them but didn't get a response either. When we saw Ms. Mason here, we were able to put a name and face on the group. So we invited her to an in camera meeting of our board of directors, and she accepted our invitation. She didn't want to provide any more information beyond what she had given your committee, saying that she was waiting for my testimony today to see if she or her organization would cooperate with us as part of the working group to get a clearer understanding of the situation.