A U.S. District Court judge sentenced former youth gymnastics coach Sean Gardner to 90 years in prison on Wednesday, the maximum penalty available, after he pleaded guilty to secretly recording young female students undressing and using the bathroom at a gym in Purvis, Mississippi.
U.S. District Judge Kristi Johnson ordered Gardner, 39, to serve 30 years for each of three federal child pornography production charges, to run consecutively.
Gardner was arrested by the FBI last summer. He admitted to placing a hidden camera in a bathroom at a Purvis gymnastics studio between December 2017 and April 2018 to record his students. Investigators say he produced videos containing close-up footage of at least 10 minors who were naked or undressing.
Those recordings were discovered on Gardner’s computers years later, during a separate investigation into claims that he had sexually abused gymnasts he coached in Iowa.
Some of Gardner’s former students at Chow’s Gymnastics and Dance Institute in West Des Moines, Iowa, have said in police reports and civil lawsuits that he used his coaching position to prey on them. Gardner has not been charged in connection with those allegations; authorities have said they were waiting for the outcome of the federal case before deciding how to proceed.
Gardner worked as a key coach for top youth gymnasts at the institute, which was founded by Liang “Chow” Qiao, a coach widely known for developing Olympic-level talent.
Some of the women involved in the federal case have alleged that USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Center for SafeSport were told of Gardner’s conduct in 2017 but failed to remove him from the sport for years afterward. Gardner was suspended in 2022 after a gymnast at Chow’s accused him of sexual abuse, and Chow subsequently fired him.
A SafeSport investigation at the time found that Chow and other coaches had been made aware of misconduct allegations against Gardner but failed to report them to SafeSport, as required by the organization’s policy.
Other lawsuits remain pending against Gardner, USA Gymnastics and Chow’s Gymnastics.
