“I just don’t think they’re true,” Gabbard, 70, said. “I’m just baffled.”
It all started when 1992 Waynesville High School graduate Twila Morse saw a social media post that Gabbard, who retired in 2021, was running for a seat on the Wayne Local School District Board of Education.
“I was in shock he was running for school board,” she said. “It just infuriated me.”
Amid comments lauding Gabbard and supporting his candidacy was one from Morse asking if he remembered the time she was 14 and looked down her shirt and laughed, telling her “just seeing what you got.”
Morse said she was wearing her volleyball uniform at the payphone outside the office sometime before a match when Gabbard allegedly pulled her shirt out at the neck. Morse said she immediately grabbed her shirt to her chest and practically shouted “what in the f*** are you doing?”
Her initial comment was taken down but it sparked a flurry of posts on other online platforms that caught the attention of Cincinnati attorney Marianne Jones Ford, a 1995 Waynesville High grad with a child-centered law firm. She volunteered to help anyone willing to speak about any inappropriate behavior. She has since been contacted by two men and eight women who graduated between 1989 and 2015.
“There was nothing hidden about his behaviors,” she said.
The allegations reported to her include alleged hazing and inappropriate touching.
“My purpose really is trying to keep future children safe and to get Gabbard out of any role in which he is decision-making for children, or hopefully, that he can’t continue to take coaching jobs or substitute teaching jobs,” Jones Ford said. “He should not be around children and he should not have the decision-making ability with children.”
Another woman who came forward was Kristenne Robison, a 1992 Waynesville grad who played basketball for four years with Gabbard as coach. After seeing Morse come forward, Robison said she did, too, to encourage others.
She described feeling uncomfortable around Gabbard for what she observed as “way too much attention to high school girls” and said she allegedly had seen girls on his lap in his office.
One day, Robison said Gabbard allegedly “ran his groin into my back while I was up against a fence watching a game, and he did it in front of another coach, and they walked off laughing about it,” she said.
Robison said she elbowed him and told him to never touch her again, but did not report it because she worried about possible retaliation.
“Gabbard was, at one point, the football coach, the basketball coach, a teacher and the athletic director. He wielded a lot of power,” she said.
Jones Ford said it was widely known that Gabbard allegedly would sometimes come into the girls locker room while girls were changing, something Robison said she experienced.
However, Gabbard insisted that never happened.
“I always made sure I yelled ‘is everybody dressed,’ I always yelled it three times. I always waited until somebody answered,” he said.
Gabbard said he decided to run for school board because he was part of the district for 46 years and wanted to still help out in some way. Since the allegations surfaced, he said “tons of people” have reached out in support.
“I don’t know what will happen Tuesday, I don’t know at all,” he said of the general election.
No police charges have been filed against Gabbard.
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