Teammates and coaches, however, witnessed her angry outbreaks during practices. A teacher noticed her distress and sent the girl to the school counselor, according to court documents.
At first, she refused to detail her problem. Then she said a friend of hers had been molested. Finally, after several meetings, she told the counselor that she had been molested by her mother's boss but didn't want it reported, she testified.
The counselor, as required by state law, told police anyway.
When the mother arrived home to find her daughter speaking to police, she telephoned the family's most-trusted advisor: French Anderson.
At first, the girl told officers there was no molestation. The counselor was wrong. Eventually, she confided the abuse.
By this time, the girl had cut off personal contact with Anderson. He sent her e-mails begging to see her. She didn't have to talk to him or even acknowledge him, he wrote, he could just watch her at a soccer game.
"I would park in the back on Meridian, arrive just at the start, go up into the stands on the far right and sit by myself, never approach the field or make any contact, and leave right away at the end without talking to anybody," he pleaded in e-mails presented during the trial.
She testified that she sent him e-mails asking him why he had abused her and insisting that he admit what he had done.
Anderson, also testifying in court, said his e-mail replies addressed emotional, not sexual, abuse. In one e-mail, he wrote he was considering suicide:
"If I saw you and your whole family destroyed, and my whole career down the tubes, and all the thousands of people abandoned who would have been helped by cures your mother and I are developing, then I can understand what would drive a person to suicide.... For me, a powerful 9-millimeter bullet through the side of the head would be the way to go."
Directed by Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies, who were given the case because of Anderson's connections to the San Marino police force, the girl demanded the library meeting the Thursday before the Fourth of July weekend in 2004.
Anderson testified in his trial that his statements at the library were not sincere, that he was trying to tell the girl what she wanted to hear so he could get away. Afterward, French and Kathryn Anderson signed a joint letter to the San Marino department, whose chief had sent his two young children to the Anderson home for karate lessons.
The 3 1/2 -page, single-spaced letter speculated that the girl might be preparing to extort them: "If she has also descended into street drug use, then she may need money.... How do we protect ourselves from an extortion attempt? What should we do?"
Four weeks later, Anderson was arrested and released on bail, then arrested six months later, when a Maryland man claimed that Anderson had molested him 20 years earlier. Anderson was charged then with abusing the boy, but Maryland prosecutors eventually dropped the case.
A Los Angeles Superior Court jury on July 19 found Anderson guilty of four counts of continuous sex abuse and lewd acts toward a child under 14.
Anderson is undergoing psychological tests in prison in preparation for his Nov. 17 sentencing. Kathryn Anderson no longer lives in the house she had shared with her husband of 45 years. It was sold in May.
Anderson faces up to 22 years in prison, perhaps a life sentence for a man now 69 years old.
The girl says that her abuse could pain her forever. But the injury has also strengthened her sense of purpose. Powerfully built, she tells her story confidently. She is a soccer star at a prestigious college.
She says she wants to tell other victims to fight back, even against powerful people whom they may have cared for. "A lot of things were shattered," she said in her interview. She had to accept that "a person I had trusted my whole life was not a good person."
But she also found "so many people came to my side; they helped me realize the world's a good place."
Others should know, she says, "you do not have to be a victim forever."
