USA Track & Field president Stephanie Hightower recently appointed Robin Brown-Beamon to serve on USATF’s influential Law & Legislation Committee fewer than seven months after Brown-Beamon was suspended indefinitely by the Amateur Athletic Union for a series of financial improprieties and rules violations, according to documents obtained by The Orange County Register.
LRC Note: We started another thread on this without seeing this post by polevault power. Our post is here:
Scott Reid had of the OC Register has the story.
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/beamon-694449-brown-usatf.htmlThe USATF national office has hired as a youth consultant and Stephanie Hightower, the USATF President, has also appointed to the USATF Law and Legislative Committee a woman, Robin Brown Beamon (ex wife of former LJ world record holder Bob Beamon), who was suspended this past srping from the AAU after being convicted by an AAU board of a host of charges surrounding financial mismanagement including "Respondent engaged in a pattern of extravagant and unreasonable expenditures of Athletics Committee funds for the benefit of herself and her close associates, and which have collectively created a deficit of the Athletics Sport Fund. "
Amongst the things Brown-Beamon was found guilty of doing was spending $3000 of AAU money to pay an appearance fee to Stephanie Hightower (the document says appearance fees were not supposed to be over $1000). Brown-Beamon also was found to have "collectively corrupted the representative structure of the AAU governance" by not holding the proper elections and manipulating "the proceedings to permit herself to direct the selection of delegates, thereby promoting her own interests in Congress."
Brown-Beamon was brought on as a consultant by USATF after the charges were filed against her by the AAU (they are not criminal charges) but before the ruling was issued. Since the ruling was issued she was appointed by Stephanie Hightower to the L&L Committee and also selected to serve in some official capacity with the USATF Delegation to World Youths in Colombia. There assistant coach Thaddeus Sligh was so upset with her behavior he wrote a USATF board member saying, "We did have a problem with Robin Beamon. She was totally disrespectful to everyone. She was demeaning to the kids and to everyone around including the wait staff at restaurants and the hotel." Amongst the other things he said were "Robin hoarded everything from the team uniforms, the communication wifi devices to the snacks and even the kids’ per diem. She even threatened to not give anyone per diem because we didn’t deserve it. She said she could have found something else to do with that money.â€
Brown-Beamon denies all the charges saying of Sligh's letter "It's lies. It's (expletive)."
As for the AAU charges she "portrayed herself as a victim of a campaign against her by AAU officials for raising concerns about Rick Butler, a nationally renowned volleyball coach who was charged with having sexual contact with underage players years earlier."
Worth a read from Scott:
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/beamon-694449-brown-usatf.html