Penn State’s head fencing coach, who was put on paid leave in September amid allegations, has now retired

Penn State placed Wes Glon on paid leave in September after learning that USA Fencing — the sport’s amateur governing body — had taken measures to protect its athletes after allegations were raised.

Wes Glon, head coach of Penn State's fencing team, will retire, the school said. He had been on paid leave since September.Read morePenn State

by Susan Snyder

Published April 28, 2023, 5:02 p.m. ET

Pennsylvania State University’s head fencing coach, who was placed on paid leave in September, has retired, the university announced this week.

Penn State placed Wes Glon on paid leave last year after learning that USA Fencing — the sport’s amateur governing body — had taken certain measures to protect its athletes after allegations were raised about him. At the time, neither Penn State nor USA Fencing would describe the measures taken or the nature of the allegations.

USA Fencing said in a statement Friday: “The matter is still under investigation with the U.S. Center for SafeSport, so we have no additional details available at this time.”

Glon, who had been a head coach for nine years and at Penn State for 37, had also faced allegations in two lawsuits that he had abused a former fencer and failed to act on reports that one of his assistant coaches had grabbed and sexually assaulted a North Carolina fencing coach.

A Penn State spokesperson said Friday that Glon had not returned from paid leave and that a national search for his replacement was underway. Glon’s retirement is effective immediately. Jeffrey A. Lutsky, Glon’s lawyer, declined to comment on his retirement.

The September move to place Glon on leave came five months after a former Penn State fencer alleged in a federal lawsuit that Glon abused her with gibes about her weight and fencing talent and even dismissed her fear that she had suffered a concussion. The fencer, Zara Moss, once an Olympic hopeful from Pittsburgh, said Glon, a coach at Penn State since 1985, injured her by forcing her to spar against him without protective equipment when she was a freshman and repeatedly disparaged her as too heavy, telling her she was “better when she was skinny,” according to the suit that was filed in the Middle District of Pennsylvania.

Neither Moss nor her lawyer could be reached for comment Friday.

USA Fencing said in September that the investigation into the unidentified allegations was being conducted by the U.S. Center for SafeSport, the nonprofit that monitors abuse in Olympic sport. SafeSport declined to comment Friday on where that investigation stands.

When Glon was placed on paid leave, it marked the second time that he had been out of his Penn State coaching job after allegations surfaced. He was placed on interim suspension in 2021 after SafeSport suspended him for three years following a complaint by a North Carolina coach that he suppressed her sexual-misconduct complaint against one of his assistants.

But Penn State reinstated him to the position in November 2021 after an arbitrator overturned the three-year suspension and instead imposed a six-month term of probation.

Jennifer Oldham, the North Carolina fencing coach whose case sparked the first SafeSport review of Glon, also had filed a lawsuit against Penn State, but it was dismissed last May by a U.S. District Court judge. Oldham and her lawyer are awaiting a decision on their appeal.

Oldham, head coach of the Mid-South Fencers’ Club in Durham, N.C., alleged that Glon had failed to act on her complaint that one of his assistants, George “Gia” Abashidze, grabbed and sexually harassed her on a plane when she was returning in 2017 from a competition with a group of fencing coaches. Penn State ultimately fired Abashidze but left Glon in place.

“The sport of fencing can only move forward in reducing sexual harassment when the coaches who refuse to acknowledge it as a problem are gone,” Oldham’s lawyer, Kerstin Walker Sutton, said in a statement Friday.