Jakobs oldest brother Kristoffer opens up about Gjerts abuse in podcast and article

Narcissists and psychopaths only get in a relationship with people they can fully control. The kids have never had a chance.

You have no clue of how cruel mothers can be as bystanders. My mom was sevrely absued by her parents as a kid. When her dad tried to literally kill her her mom took the two other siblings and fled. She was the bad child and left to fight on her own against the abuser.

Its beyond any of our wildest imagination. Thank god she got out of there and never looked back. Never even met the assholes and so glad about that. I hope they rot in hell.

Can't there be a multi page LR thread without a darn psychopath posting? Sheesh.

I certainly hope you do not have kids.

I wonder how many people commenting after born after say 2000, vs born before 2000 is there a different view.

i was hit with hand and wooden spoon, confined to my room and made to eat last night dinner.

I assume from most post I was an abused child, far from it. No doubt these events occurred but the degree they were done is children vs dad and burden of evidence is limited to he said / she said.

1990 and got the belt as a child, but it's also to note that corporal punishment of children was made illegal in Norway in 1987 (Norway supreme court allowed light spanking in 2005 lol but that was outlawed again in 2010) so this is as much a personal child rearing discussion as it is legal.

You're literally proving my point.

There’s another thread where the article is translated into English. link to it here:

As an old guy I was treated much worse than this by my father. I said all along that Gjert decided very early on that he wanted a family of great athletes and he was going to be the wonder coach that created that. This isn't anything new at all in the realm of parenting - especially for any kid that excels when young at sports (or music or drama or many other areas) and their father or mother are their coach or manager. These parents lament their own shortcomings in life and use their children to remedy that.

Gjert says right in the article that he made the mistake of being the kids' coach and not their father. That was crystal clear to me from the first episode I watched of the family's TV series. You can't be both. A coach is tough, uncompromising and driven to succeed, a (good) father is somewhat similar but adds love and encouragement and the permission to fail that makes children into quality adults. Coaches only care about winning.

Everyone loves Jakob's (and his brothers') success but they would be nothing and nobodies if they had not been driven the way they were by Gjert. Office workers nobody ever heard of like Kristoffer. And don't get me wrong, that is a good life, but it isn't being immensely successful, famous and skilled. There is a COST to be paid to be great at something.
Around the same age Kristoffer is now, I forgave my father, mostly because one day we had an intense very long conversation and he apologized to me repeatedly - enumerating all the mistakes he made as a father towards me. He was very young when I was a baby and came from an extremely dysfunctional family himself - he was treated much worse than I was ever was treated, and I also have learned that my grandfather who was responsible for my father's childhood had an even more horrific childhood than my father's. So this crap rolls downhill, generation after generation. I can say that the worst I ever did to my kids was thump them on the ear with one finger when they absolutely refused to behave. I of course refused to beat them after what I went thru. The cycle winds down.

I think most of the posters have some kind of deluded idea that all forms of corporal punishment are unnecessary or evil. You all think guys like Jakob just magically appear from 'normal' families. They don't. Jakob is Jakob because he accepted what Gjert dished out and used it to become great. Gjert was a poor excuse as a father, but he succeeded wildly as a coach with 3 of the 5 boys. No one died. No one was permanently injured and now they have finally stood up to their father and are trying to get him to take responsibility and apologize for the mistakes he made in raising them.
They are right to do that. And I think Gjert clearly knows he screwed up too. But now that the lawyers are involved and it's become a giant public drama - there is no room for him to come clean because he goes to jail if he does.

It's unfortunate from all sides - family dramas are like that. No winners and lots of losers. But posters here don't understand any of that. All they want to do is find a bad guy to blame so that their own egos get assuaged because 'something was done'.

It's stupid, foolish and simplistic.

Just so we don't have to point to the older thread, I'm reposting what I wrote there (and yes, there are incidents, like Gjert stepping/standing on Henrik's head that I forgot):

This is my best effort at summing up some of the paywalled section of the article - note that it goes much more in-depth than this, and there is an accompanying podcast, where the first episode was released at the same time:
* Being forcibly fed (I assume if they didn't finish their meal), until they regurgitated the food.
* Forcibly giving a 2-3 year old Ingrid cold showers to "cure" her night terrors.
* Being hit in the face during a long run/half marathon with his dad, because he had an attack (assumed anxiety).
* When Kristoffer spoke up on another run, saying he didn't want to be a top/elite athlete, he was hit in a fashion that landed him on a road with traffic, rather than sidewalk/walkway.
* He further describes an episode where Henrik was making a ruckus was sent (or went, the article is unclear) to his room. Gjert followed, and Henrik immediately stopped making noise. When Kristoffer went up to the room, he found an apathetic Henrik, with a nosebleed, arms down, and Gjert going to get paper towels.
* In an episode where Kristoffer was 15-16, he said "no" to helping during the first of May. At this time, Gjert took a strangle hold on him, lifting him up. When screaming for his mum to stop him, she said "Not so hard, Gjert". After this, Gjert carried him to the living room, and threw him across the room.
The final episode he describes is the 2022 episode (where Gjert allegedly hit/whipped Ingrid with a towel) - where he got a call from Henrik saying that his father had lost it, and that he had to do something - Ingrid was alone at home with Gjert, and he had, according to the conversation hit her with a towel. Kristoffer brought a baseball bat over to their house (but left it at the door), where he shoved Gjert in the chest, and told him "Enough is enough. This will have consequences for you". After this episode, Ingrid moved to Kristoffer's house, and lived there for a while.

He wasn't Henrik's coach when Henrik was a 2-3 year old toddler, when he decided that standing on his head and decided this was an appropriate way to treat a toddler.

Neither was he Ingrid's coach, when he decided that she, as a 2-3 year old toddler needed ice water torture for curing her toddler night terrors.

Nor has this type of behavior been accepted in Norwegian society for any person who became a parent in the late 80's Kristoffer is born around 1988. Corporal punishment of any kind was outlawed in Norway in 1987. Henrik was born in 1991, so the law would have been 6-7 years old when the standing on head occured. For Ingrid, the same law forbidding corporal punishment would be around 21 years old.

Those incidents isn't from someone trying to be anyone's coach rather than someone's father.

I was born in the 70s in a (then known as) 3rd world country. I got spanked with stuff and belted. The only head related stuff was pinching. It stopped when I was 12 when my Mom was lashing away, and I was so used to it, that it didn't hurt at all and gave her a smirk. Since there was great warmth in my family, it never registered as abusive, as my parents were very supporting with most things. The corporal punishment memories felt like touching a hot stove or my sticking my finger in a 240v outlet. Don't do dumb things, and you won't get hurt. I did end up absolutely destroying everyone in that Red/Slap hands game as a kid/teen, even against much much bigger kids.

The stuff Gjert did that I've heard imho was way way over the line.

Yeah. In 1960s at least 10% of dads (and moms) would physically abuse their children.

And when you read biographies of people who had their childhoods in the early 1900s it was even more intense.

It is also interesting to consider what it has been like in different cultures through human history. For example the Greek city states, Mongols, Germanic tribes in early middle ages etc.

Anyone defending this behavior needs to get their mental health examined.

I'm basically the same age as the older son and so much of what he describes sounds very familiar to me. My father would snap and hit my brothers and I. Some examples: once, when I was 10, I was carrying paint for my pine wood derby car and I tripped on the carpet, spilling a small amount of paint onto the carpet. My dad picked me up by my neck slammed me against the wall, while screaming at me. I had bruises on my back for weeks, my mom asked about them but I just made up a story. Other things along those lines, getting my head slammed into my brother's head, then into the wall, kicked in the stomach after being thrown on the floor, smacked hard across the face, punched in the stomach and of course screamed out more times than I could possibly count over the most insane things (I was helping him build something, I was at most 8, and sawdust got into my eye) etc. I was not a troublemaker as a kid, I was very quiet. All of these things occurred when my Mother wasn't home. And we (one of my brothers and I) have only recently told her about it, as well as my wife. Much earlier reports of this story actually lead me to talk about some of it with my wife.

The verbal abuse as a child is why I stopped doing team sports and started running cross country, because out in the trails there were really no spectators, no place for him to be yelling at me. I tried running with him once in middle school (he was a star track athlete in high school, but extremely out of shape by then) and he just made fun of me (I was among the fastest on the team and placed in the top 30 at the state meet). During soccer and basketball games he would yell like a maniac at me and my brothers, even when we were objectively playing very well. There's absolutely no excuse for any of it.

It's especially weird because now I see him these days treat my nephews and nieces, extremely kind and patient, it's a person I never saw growing up.

I suppose it's valuable for public figures to talk about this type of behavior, to show to those that need to hear it, it's not okay and it's not acceptable. And for those who have experienced it to know it's probably helpful to talk someone in your life about it.

Please don't have children if you can't control your temper.

it is a truly misguided idea that great people come out of horrible abuse, but one that frequently arises (e.g. people said things like that about Michael Jackson for some reason, until that backfired pretty hard). if anything, Gjert's behavior may have scared away or ruined potentially great runners in Kristoffer and Ingrid.

furthermore, people always explain this as some grand theory by the abuser as a means to an end, but don't acknowledge that greatness exists without this behavior. why don't we round up Hocker, Kerr, and Nuguse and ask them if their parents abused them to their greatness? I'm thinking probably not. Gjert wasn't being a coach when the kids were 2 or 3 years old -- he was abusing them.

born in 1991, same age as Henrik

LRC always has a way of reminding us that people like you exist… “Offset by plenty of affectionate and caring times” may as well be lifted out of the child abuse handbook.

You don’t agree with them speaking out against abuse? Fine, nobody knows what you’ve been through to have that opinion, but going out of your way to tell people they’re wrong for their opinion on this is sick. Get help.

I think you are right about a few things. It is unlikely that Jakob and his brothers would have ended up where they ended up as athletes without Gjert's coaching. But I think the main but that you are missing here is the fact that the brothers has given Gjert a long time to make this right without loosing to much face.

Remember that it took like a year from they ended the coaching arrangement until any of the brothers went public about this. I remember Henrik being interviewed and asked about it early on and he stated something along the lines of "nothing dramatic here , just a change of direction, but we've heard the craziest rumours". Sadly the rumours were all true. As a person who lives close by it only took a few weeks after the first break that I heard rumours about Gjert abusing his family.

He have had so many chances to come clean and apologize in private (more than a year), before the brothers came out to the public with this because the external pressure has been immense.

In your case your father apologized to you, and I do believe that can make a world of difference in how these unacceptable actions are viewed in hindsight. That times has passed for Gert and the only person he can thank for that is himself. If he valued the happiness of his kids over his own coaching career this would have been written of as an internal family matter and he could have had a normal life afterwards. This will haunt him publicly and make him a persona non grata