Inquirer: Ladies, please stay out of the men’s locker room

With all the baring of issues at the Columbus Aquatic Center lately, there apparently are some you haven’t been exposed to, unless you’re among a certain small handful of female patrons of the facility.

Allegedly, as we say.

A local attorney says four times in the last two years, women have barged into the men’s locker room unannounced, some accompanying their young sons, apparently to supervise their changing.

On at least one occasion, this attorney had already, uh, filed his briefs, so to speak, so he was concerned that these women may have been, well, seeking discovery without legal standing to do so.

“Having finishing up my laps I went into the men’s locker room to shower and change back to street clothes. Just after I wrapped a towel around myself a young woman (30ish) came in looking for her son (8ish), eating a bag of chips and holding a cell phone,” the lawyer wrote on Facebook. “I suggested she leave … well… suggested might be the wrong word. But whatever I did, she didn’t and she told me she wouldn’t. She stayed a good five minutes talking to her son and eating chips. A couple of teen-age boys who were just about to drop trousers to put on suits looked on slack-jawed.”

The lawyer said he appealed to the center’s management, but was told that it was just something that happens sometimes.

Personally, I wonder what would happen if a man walked into the women’s locker room, with or without a young daughter with him. I assume he would be hauled off in handcuffs, prosecuted as a pervert and possibly registered as a sex offender. And the kid might end up in DFACS custody.

But the lawyer’s not worried about that. He’s worried about being accused of being a flasher, even though that’s what one by necessity does in a locker room. He’s been a lawyer for 39 years, and he says he’s seen crazier things happen.

“The risk of incident is for me too great and I must either limit my time to when families are not swimming or I must abandon the pool and go back to the Y, where this is not a problem,” he said in a Facebook post. “Hard choice for me to make given that my taxes help pay for it and it is such a fine facility.”

Holli Browder, assistant director of Parks and Recreation who is also helping run the center, denied that there is policy in place to allow such behavior.

“No. That is not true,” Browder said. “Both locker rooms are clearly marked and there is no such policy, official or unofficial.”

Browder also said there are, in fact, four family locker rooms at the aquatic center into which parents can accompany their kids, without danger of being exposed to things they are not supposed to see.

Not that we’ve exposed this issue here, we’ll keep an ear, but not an eye, out for further developments.

Stay tuned.

This story was originally published March 21, 2016 at 7:50 AM with the headline "Inquirer: Ladies, please stay out of the men’s locker room."