Former gymnastics coach sentenced to 90 years for hidden bathroom camera

A federal judge in Mississippi sentenced a former youth gymnastics coach to 90 years in prison on Wednesday for secretly recording girls in a gym bathroom, closing out a prosecution that began after investigators stumbled onto years-old videos while looking into separate abuse allegations against the same man in Iowa.

U.S. District Judge Kristi Johnson imposed the maximum sentence on Sean Gardner, 39, in federal court in the Southern District of Mississippi, according to court records and CBS News, which was in the courtroom. Gardner pleaded guilty earlier this year to three counts of production of child sexual abuse material, each carrying a 30-year term, after federal prosecutors said he hid a camera in the restroom of a gym where he coached, a plea reported at the time by an Iowa television station covering the case.

The sentence and the evidence

Gardner was convicted over conduct at Jump'In Gymnastics and Tumbling in Purvis, Mississippi, where prosecutors say he placed a hidden camera between December 2017 and April 2018 to record students undressing and using the toilet. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Mississippi said he used his position of trust as a coach to carry out the scheme. Investigators have identified at least 10 minors depicted in the material.

The case was built on evidence seized from Gardner's home in West Des Moines, Iowa, in 2025: roughly 50 video files and 400 photographs, according to court filings cited by CBS News, including footage that shows Gardner entering the bathroom and switching the camera off. The docket for the case, United States v. Gardner, shows the matter proceeded in the Hattiesburg division before Judge Johnson after a 2025 arrest and a 2026 guilty plea to three of what had grown into a 12-count indictment.

Each of the three counts carried a statutory maximum of 30 years; the 90-year total means the terms run consecutively, a sentence CBS News described as likely amounting to life in prison for Gardner.

A coaching career across three states

Gardner's coaching career ran through gyms in three states over roughly two decades, and investigators have said the bathroom-camera scheme was not confined to Mississippi. According to FBI accounts relayed by local television stations in Mississippi and Louisiana, Gardner worked at Athletes in Motion in Prairieville, Louisiana, before moving to the Purvis gym and then to Chow's Gymnastics and Dance Institute in West Des Moines, Iowa, where he coached from 2018 until he was fired in 2022. The Mississippi charges he was sentenced on Wednesday cover only the Purvis conduct; he has not been charged over allegations in Iowa or Louisiana.

The Mississippi case surfaced only because of a separate inquiry. West Des Moines police opened an investigation in 2024 after a former Chow's gymnast, by then 18, told officers Gardner had sexually abused her beginning when she was 11 or 12, and the FBI arrested him in August 2025 on a federal child pornography charge. A search of his home turned up the older videos from Purvis, which were referred to federal prosecutors in Mississippi and became the basis for the charges he pleaded guilty to this year.

Warnings that went unanswered for years

Court records and news accounts describe a paper trail of complaints that preceded Gardner's arrest by years. His former employer in Mississippi has said she reported his "grooming behavior" to USA Gymnastics in January 2018. In Iowa, a gymnast reported inappropriate touching to the U.S. Center for SafeSport, the federally designated body that investigates abuse in Olympic sports, in March 2022; the center provisionally suspended Gardner that July, and Chow's fired him. A second athlete reported sexual contact weeks later. West Des Moines police opened and then suspended an investigation that year after a parent said her daughter did not want to pursue charges.

Gardner's SafeSport case remained unresolved through his 2025 arrest, and he went on to work as a surgical technologist at an Iowa hospital in 2024 before police reopened the investigation. USA Gymnastics president Li Li Leung has said the center's process for closing such cases is "really tough, difficult to navigate," while Steve Silvey, an attorney who has represented gymnasts in other SafeSport disputes, has said the system's coordination with law enforcement fails "on a daily basis."

The gap between the first complaint and Gardner's arrest — more than three years — has drawn comparisons to the Center for SafeSport's handling of the Larry Nassar case, in which hundreds of gymnasts were abused by a team doctor over decades despite earlier warnings to USA Gymnastics and the FBI. SafeSport, created in 2017 in the wake of that scandal, was meant to give Olympic-affiliated sports a single body responsible for investigating abuse reports and barring offenders from coaching. Critics, including Silvey, say the center still lacks the authority or staffing to act quickly once law enforcement is involved, leaving suspended coaches like Gardner able to keep working with children for years on a provisional status rather than a permanent ban.

Former gymnasts who trained under Gardner described a culture in which his behavior went unquestioned. Finley Weldon, who trained under him in Iowa, told CBS News he struck her as "weird" from the start.

"I knew something was not really right about him," Weldon said.

Liberty Raines, who joined the Purvis gym at age 11, told CBS News that students lined up for hugs from Gardner, who kissed their foreheads and patted them on the buttocks — behavior she said was "so normalized" at the time that no one around her questioned it.

What happens next

Gardner's sentencing closes the federal case in Mississippi but leaves open questions elsewhere. Police in Iowa have said they will decide how to proceed on the allegations there once the Mississippi matter was resolved, which happened Wednesday; no charges have been filed over the Chow's allegations. Gardner's SafeSport disciplinary case, logged in the center's public database since his 2022 suspension, is expected to move toward a permanent ban now that he has been convicted. Separately, civil lawsuits filed in Iowa allege USA Gymnastics and SafeSport were warned about Gardner as early as 2017 and failed to remove him from coaching for years; those cases are pending.