The call came into Cambridge Police headquarters on Independence Day weekend in 2019. A three-time Olympian, the caller said, had filed a complaint with the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, alleging sexual abuse by her coach, including assaults in Cambridge, when she was a girl.

The officer on duty, Sergeant Darlene Beckford Pearson, took the call from a committee official and asked for the Olympian’s name.

Lynn Jennings, she was told.

Pearson trembled. She and Jennings, one of the greatest middle-distance runners in American history, had been fast friends in the 1970s as teen stars of Greater Boston’s renowned Liberty Athletic Club. In all the years since, Pearson had guarded her own haunting secret: She too had been sexually molested as a youth by her coach.

Her hand quivering, Pearson then logged the name of Jennings’s alleged abuser: John M. Babington. A former US Olympic and