‘Weird touching’ & ‘invasive’ texts: Report details complaints against former UK coach
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- UK found patterns of late-night contact, unwanted touch and sexual comments by coach
- Investigation dismissed after Hakon DeVries left in August 2025, couldn’t be disciplined
- UK investigator urged that DeVries be considered ineligible for rehiring in future
A University of Kentucky coach made several female student-athletes uncomfortable with late-night visits, overly physical hugs, personal comments about their bodies, frequent texts and direct messages, gifts and conversations about sex, according to a Nov. 21, 2025, investigative report the school produced.
Hakon DeVries, assistant cross-country and track coach, left his job last year during an investigation into his conduct by the school’s Office of Equal Opportunity after complaints were filed against him by three women who ran distance for UK.
The women alleged sexual harassment by DeVries and, in one case, stalking.
Until now, no details about their allegations have been made public.
DeVries has not responded to repeated interview requests from the Herald-Leader.
The names of the three women and others involved in the case, apart from DeVries, were redacted in documents released to the Herald-Leader under the Kentucky Open Records Act.
UK initially denied the newspaper’s request for public records from its 2025 investigation. It complied after the Herald-Leader appealed the school’s denial to the attorney general’s office in January.
Beyond the typical conversations between a coach and student-athletes, the women said in their March 2025 complaints, DeVries often texted them and sent direct messages, sometimes late into the night, to share his personal thoughts. He grew frustrated if they didn’t respond or let him follow their social media, they said.
“I feel like I had 1000 dreams with you in them last night. You ever have that? Same person keeps being in them,” DeVries texted to one of the women in 2024.
When she didn’t reply, he texted to her again: “Did you really not want to talk to or text to me?” And then: “What did I do?” And then: “At least put your read receipts on so I know.”
Another woman wrote in an account included in UK’s investigative report: “He told me I looked beautiful and also told me that he had made it a goal for himself to tell me I looked beautiful at least once a day, every day.”
Still another woman wrote that DeVries ended a private meeting about her career with an unexpected hug that lifted her off the floor and put “his face very close to my face (as) he stares at me for multiple seconds.”
A different time, she said, DeVries asked her for a hug and then reached “under my cropped sweatshirt and touches my bare skin and stomach. I felt his cold hand on my bare skin near my breast. He held this hug for a while before I walked away and felt very anxious.”
In his response to the allegations, DeVries acknowledged that he hugged student-athletes but said he did so to show when he was proud of their athletic performance or to console runners with their personal problems.
He said he probably did tell a woman she was beautiful, but he intended it as positive reinforcement, and she didn’t complain. DeVries said he could not recall what his dreams were about in the 2024 text he sent.
DeVries’ actions “were objectively offensive behavior,” the office wrote in a letter it sent to him on Feb. 13. The office “concluded that there was a preponderance of evidence to support that the alleged conduct occurred. The alleged conduct met the severity, pervasiveness or persistence required to constitute a policy violation.”
However, the case was dismissed Dec. 17, 2025, because DeVries doesn’t work at UK anymore, and so there was no penalty that could be issued against him, school officials said.
The Office of Equal Opportunity recommended that DeVries be considered ineligible for rehiring in the future.
DeVries’ employment contract ended Aug. 30, 2025, and was not renewed, UK spokesman Jay Blanton said.
DeVries denied harassing anyone
The Herald-Leader first reported last June that DeVries was suspended from his $112,000-a-year coaching job pending an investigation into his conduct.
Neither UK nor DeVries would offer further explanation at that time.
DeVries, 40, joined UK’s coaching staff in 2012. He married one of his star runners, Allison Peare, after she graduated in 2014.
DeVries was previously suspended for two days in 2023 when UK determined that he made unwelcome and inappropriate comments about the bodies of student-athletes on the cross-country team.
According to the 2025 investigative report, the new complaints were filed against DeVries in March 2025.
The Office of Equal Opportunity interviewed at least 20 people over the next four months, including DeVries, who said he never harassed anyone. He said he believed he had good relationships with his accusers until they filed complaints against him.
“I would never want anyone to feel harmed by my actions, which is why these allegations are so difficult to process,” DeVries wrote in an undated letter that was included with the report.
“However, I ask that this investigation weigh not just current interpretations of past moments but also the context, intent and the genuine relationships that were maintained over years,” he wrote.
Some members of the cross-country team told UK investigator Ellen Kilgore they liked working with DeVries as a coach, according to her report. Others told Kilgore they found him to be “weird,” “touchy,” “creepy” or “bullying,” and that he sometimes picked certain women on the team as his “favorites,” giving special attention to them.
The three women who filed complaints against DeVries said they were among those considered his favorites, although they didn’t wish for that distinction.
The coach gave them little gifts, they said, such as bringing coffee drinks for them to team events but not for their teammates.
In one case, he left cans of Gatorade in a runner’s UGG shoes inside her bag with apologetic handwritten notes after she stopped replying to his texts because she found them ”invasive with their frequency,” according to the report.
In another instance, he offered to buy one of the women a watch for Christmas. The woman told him that someone else already was buying her a watch, in order to discourage him.
Asking for hugs
Among other allegations made by the women, they said DeVries showed up at their door late at night, either at their homes in Lexington or at hotel rooms when the UK cross-country team traveled to competitions.
He told them he wanted to talk and asked them for hugs, they said, while they kept him at the doorway and tried to end the encounters as soon as they could.
One night, one of the women said, DeVries came to her hotel room door, complained about how hard his day had been, asked her for multiple comfort hugs, and then stared past her into her room, which she perceived as him wanting her to invite him in.
When she did not invite him into the room, she said, he leaned his back against her door and kept talking.
“In the moment, (the woman) was thinking about what she would have to do if (DeVries) entered her room,” the investigator wrote in her report. “She did think she may have to protect herself in some way, like punching him if he tried to come into her room.”
In his response, DeVries said he went to the woman’s hotel room and thanked and hugged her for her help earlier that day with team-related travel problems. But he did not try to enter her room, he said, and “the whole interaction was less than 60 seconds.”
A witness told Kilgore that DeVries had always been “touchy” with one of the women who filed a complaint, keeping his hand on her back and poking her and asking her for hugs.
A second witness described “weird touching” by DeVries, where he gave the same woman full-frontal hugs or side-hugs with his hands ending up on her hips or shoulders. A third witness said it was odd how often DeVries hugged that particular woman given that he “is not a nice person,” according to the report.
Talking about sex
The coach also said things the three women found discomforting, they told the investigator.
According to the women’s complaints, DeVries remarked on finding one of them attractive in her bikini by the poolside; referred to another as a “nympho” after reading some of her social media; and told the third that she needed to shave her legs because he thought they were too “furry.”
Those comments were all taken out of context, DeVries told Kilgore.
DeVries talked to one of the women about her boyfriend and asked if “all you do when you see each other is have a bunch of sex,” the woman told Kilgore. The woman said “her eyes and jaw were wide open because she was shocked,” Kilgore wrote.
In his response, DeVries said he believed the woman was asking him for advice about her relationship, and he indicated her boyfriend was “selfish.”
In 2025, DeVries saw one of the women use a small massage gun on her legs and hips and said she shouldn’t have it out because it looked like it was her vibrator, according to the report. That account was given to Kilgore by the woman and supported by two witnesses.
DeVries told the investigator he remembered saying something about “the massage gun looking wrong,” but he could not recall using the word “vibrator.”
In 2024, DeVries started a conversation with one of the women about the porn website OnlyFans and asked her if certain people they knew would pay for the site or would be popular attractions on it, the runner said. The woman said the conversation was “weird.” She became quiet to signal her growing displeasure.
DeVries told the investigator he believed the OnlyFans conversation happened in 2025, not in 2024. He asked the runner questions about someone he heard had made $30 million performing on the website, not intending to discuss porn with her in an offensive way, he said.
“He did not sense that Complainant 2 was uncomfortable and was surprised that Complainant 2 could remember exact quotes as written in the complaint,” the investigator wrote in her report.
