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EXCLUSIVE: Former U.S. Olympic fencing team head coach Andrey Geva has filed a lawsuit against USA Fencing Chair Damien Lehfeldt, alleging Lehfeldt made “false and misleading” statements to Congress in a May 7 congressional hearing on trans athletes.
Geva, a USA Fencing board member, filed the lawsuit alongside fellow member and former Egyptian Olympian Abdel Salem, against Lehfeldt and the other five at-large director members. The lawsuit seeks to have Lehfeldt removed as chair.
Geva has elaborated on those alleged false comments he claims Lehfeldt made in an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital.
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Members of the No. six world-ranked USA Women’s Epee team, from left to right, Kelley Hurley, Courtney Hurley, Katharine Holmes, Katarzyne Trzopek and coach Andrey Geva, pose for a group photo during the team women’s epee competition at the Pan-American Fencing Championships on June 24, 2016 at the Convention Center Vasco Nunez de Balboa in Panama City. (Devin Manky/Getty Images)
Geva pointed to a statement by Lehfeldt, when the chair said, “women more commonly exhibit other advantageous traits such as flexibility and agility. Ultimately, fencing is a sport of strategy and technique. Those elements will most frequently determine who prevails and, when it comes to strategy and technique, neither sex has any inherent advantage transgender status thus, doesn’t appear to confer any inherent advantage over a cisgender fencer cisgender women have beaten.”
As a former Olympic fencing coach, Geva believes this statement is untrue. Geva served as Team USA’s head fencing coach and managing director from 2013-21, leading the team through the 2016 Rio Olympics and Tokyo Olympics in 2021. The U.S. took six Olympic medals under Geva’s leadership, including gold in the women’s individual foil in Tokyo.
“This is simply not true, and this is what I told him many times, that I have an expertise as somebody who successfully coached both male and female fencers at the highest international level,” Geva said, later referring to how he trained his own male and female students.
“I trained them differently. I have a different approach to male and female fencers because they are different.”
Geva also argued that Lefheldt made a “misleading” statement when the chair referenced “mixed-gender competition where men and women have safely and fairly competed against each other for decades,” due to the fact that mixed-gender competitions are rare at the national level.
“It’s a misleading statement. Yes, at practice, men and women fence each other, no problem. Local tournament, not designated, not sanctioned tournaments sometimes will have mixed events. Sometimes when a female competition doesn’t have enough competition we will have mixed events,” Geva said.
“However, there is zero mixed events on the national level.”
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USA Fencing has official separate national events for men’s and women’s categories. The organization sanctions mixed-gender events at the local level, per the official policy page.
USA Fencing responded to Geva’s lawsuit in a statement provided to Fox News Digital, but the organization declined to address his recent comments.
“USA Fencing proudly serves its members — athletes, coaches, referees and clubs — across our community with absolute transparency and integrity. This derivative lawsuit misrepresents our organization, and we will vigorously defend the organization in court; any attempt to disparage them will be addressed appropriately,” the statement read.
“Because litigation is ongoing, we cannot discuss details. Our focus remains unwavering: advancing fencing nationwide, supporting every member’s success, and upholding the values of the Olympic and Paralympic movement.”
The lawsuit claims that Lehfeldt’s statements at the May 7 hearing now risk the organization being declassified as a national governing body and “have alienated thousands of members in the fencing community who have provided more than 90% of USFA’s revenues.”
Geva told Fox News Digital that he has communicated with several private clubs associated with USA Fencing that have left the organization in response to its current transgender legibility policy that allows biological males to compete in women’s competitions, and moved to the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU)’s Fencing League of America.
“Because of the USA Fencing policies, some of the clubs actually quit, small clubs, they quit USA Fencing membership and they moved to AAU,” Geva said, adding that the clubs quit for other reasons as well. “I know quite a few clubs that quit membership in USA Fencing.”
Geva declined to name the clubs he claimed had quit. An unnamed source within the USA Fencing organization argued that the organization has seen record growth in the past year.
“The season that is ending next month (2024-25) is a record year for USA Fencing with more than 43,000 members and nearly 750 clubs — both records. So that goes against any claims that we’ve ‘taken a hit’ from any news,” the source said.
Geva also said that the organization is growing, but “for different reasons.”
“Overall, our federation is growing, but this is mostly due to, like any organization, it’s natural growth. It’s very hard to judge if it’s growing because we’re doing excellent job, or just because more and more people discover that fencing is the niche and the way to get to college,” Geva said.
The organization has been under immense national scrutiny following a viral incident when women’s fencer Stephanie Turner kneeled to protest a transgender opponent and was subsequently punished by USA Fencing.
Lefheldt’s testimony at the May 7 hearing only intensified the criticism.
Lehfeldt, who was subpoenaed and did not come voluntarily, elevated the controversy ahead of the hearing with a series of Instagram stories that were later blown up and used against him on the committee floor. In one post, which went viral before the hearing, he responded to a question that asked whether he was “okay” with putting female fencers at a disadvantage with a simple, brash answer: “Yeah.”
Then, during the hearing, Lehfeldt admitted multiple times he regretted answering that way and admitted the question required a “more-nuanced” response.
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Kelley Hurley talks with coach Andrey Geva as she defeats Erika Kirpu in the women’s epee individual table of 32 during the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Summer Games at Makuhari Messe Hall B. (Yukihito Taguchi-USA TODAY Network)
At one point during the hearing, Lefheldt confessed to falsifying an email from a fictitious fencing mother, “Dorothy,” who disagreed with him and called those members with similar views of “Dorothy” “grand wizard” of the Ku Klux Klan.
Lehfeldt said the post “was a poor attempt at humor.”
Geva believes the post should be enough to prompt Lehfeldt’s resignation.
“This is more than enough, any decent person in my opinion, after this fiasco at this congressional hearing, should resign,” Geva said. “I believe under his leadership our federation is going just in the wrong direction.”
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