A Honolulu youth basketball coach who groomed, threatened, harassed and raped underage female players over nearly two decades was sentenced Thursday to more than 33 years in federal prison.
Senior U.S. District Court Judge J. Michael Seabright sentenced Dwayne Yuen, 52, who coached thousands of girls and boys over a 17-year career, to spend 405 months behind bars, followed by a lifetime of supervised release, and he must register as a sex offender.
Seabright delivered a scathing account of Yuen’s crimes and makeup as a
pedophile who “caused lost youth all done in the pursuit of power and sex.”
A visibly disgusted Seabright told the court
how Yuen offered one of his victims a “menu” of ways that he would kill her if she stopped succumbing to his sex assaults.
Yuen threatened to run over and rape the girl or “concrete boots” or “beaten,” “u choose,” Seabright said.
Despite restraining orders secured by victims’ parents, civil lawsuits, trespassing complaints, and dozens of coaches and people in the basketball community who knew Yuen was a pedophile, he continued his abuse until he was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2023.
Seabright said he understood more than 33 years in prison for a 52-year-old man was a “life sentence. But it is the right sentence.”
“This has been a societal failure, this whole story. That you (Yuen) can go on doing this for so many years when so many knew, including institutions,” Seabright said. “If there was ever a defendant who was ever here before me, that I have less trust in, I don’t know who that would be.”
Seabright said he believed Yuen would start preying on children if he were freed from custody.
In federal court, a packed gallery including victims and their family members, coaches and former players gathered to hear Yuen’s fate. They listened to letters from Yuen’s victims that detailed how he bought their trust with money, shoes, rides, promises of playing time and help getting into college programs.
That trust was used by Yuen to force his victims into unwanted sexual relationships.
Assistant U.S. Attorney
Rebecca A. Perlmutter told the court that during “two decades of predation,” Yuen lied about his past victims to his more recent victims. Yuen’s youngest prey were not born when he started raping players and there is more than 500 pages of graphic sexual messaging and threats
directed at his victims.
Letters from Yuen’s victims, who were 14, 15, 16 at the time they were raped, were read aloud in court. People in the gallery cried and wiped away tears.
Shawna-Lei Kuehu, 35, who was “minor victim 1” in federal court documents charging Yuen with his crimes, shared her ordeal with Seabright’s court Thursday.
Kuehu, who met Yuen at Punahou when she was 14, told Seabright that Yuen is a “f—-ing monster,” the kind that “lurks in plain sight.”
Yuen knew she was on a full scholarship to Punahou and used her family’s financial situation to his advantage, she said.
A “seductive manipulator,” Yuen took what Kuehu thought would be the most exciting times of her young life at Punahou and turned them into her “darkest, frightening and soul altering” times of her life.
Yuen played off the dreams Kuehu’s family had for her basketball career and charmed his way into their lives.
“He learned about all the things that mattered to me and held me hostage with it,” she said.
Kuehu said the grooming started with gifts of basketball gear. Then homemade desserts for her family. And money so Kuehu could help provide food for her family, including her parents and grandparents.
There were clothes and mobile phones to ensure Kuehu could communicate with him. Yuen gave Kuehu computers and rides to and from venues to gain her parents’ trust.
Yuen would give life advice to Kuehu and her
parents, advice that was welcome for a family navigating high-profile high school athletics, she said.
“As my popularity grew, so did his interests. ‘All free’ he claimed, as if he was doing something from the kindness of his heart. Free? Not for me,” Kuehu said. “I would be the one to pay for this debt.”
Yuen would guilt Kuehu into listening to stories of Yuen’s late, abusive father, who died when Yuen was a teenager.
“He demanded time for his kind deeds. Through threats, hundreds of phone calls and text messages daily … I was followed and stalked,” she said. “This became my new reality.”
Kuehu described Yuen groping her in his car while she sat in the passenger seat.
While Yuen sexually assaulted her, he would graphically describe how he raped Kuehu’s teammate on the Punahou girls basketball team.
Kuehu told Seabright’s courtroom that Yuen’s mother would greet them at the door to Yuen’s house.
“While she stayed silent downstairs in her room, Dwayne Yuen would be
upstairs molesting me. Locked room doors. Cold AC (air conditioning). Porn on the big screen,” Kuehu said. “The scars have never truly healed. He was strategic in the way he masked his repulsiveness with his words and charm.”
Yuen bought her silence with threats of destroying her life and crushing her dreams to play Division 1 college
basketball. Yuen got more confident, taking Kuehu and her sister and sister’s boyfriends for hotel stays, telling Kuehu that it would keep her sister occupied.
“I never saw a way out of this hell. Those nights were filled with new clothes to wear, dinners, trips that he had planned and then back to the room for nights you don’t want to remember,” said Kuehu, who played four years for the University of Hawaii Rainbow Wahine. “No means no, right? Not to Dwayne Yuen. It was like a challenge to him. No meant he got to have more.”
As she finished her statement to Seabright, Kuehu turned to her left to face Yuen, who was seated next to his attorney, Alen M.K. Kaneshiro.
“F—- you, Dwayne Yuen,” she said, before returning to her seat in the front row of the courtroom gallery that was reserved for Yuen’s
victims.
Kaneshiro told Seabright that Yuen accepted full “responsibility for all the harm that he caused” but his sex crimes do not “define his
entire life.”
Yuen gave basketball gear, shoes, rides and food to a lot of players, the vast majority of whom he did not victimize. Kaneshiro shared excerpts from Yuen’s psychological evaluation that noted he had the maturity
of an adolescent and suffered from developmental
disorders.
His relentless threats and texts and phone calls to the girls he victimized were the behavior of a “scorned” teenage boy, Kaneshiro told the court.
Yuen, standing up to address the court, said, “I take full responsibility for my actions and make no excuses. The choices I made were mine and mine alone.”
Staring at Seabright, Yuen said, “I want to extend my deepest and most sincere apologies to the victims, to the community, to the court. As a coach I was entrusted with a position of responsibility and influence, especially in the lives of young people. I misused my position and people were hurt as a result. I am deeply sorry for creating the trauma that I caused.”
Seabright made clear that coaching is “not mitigation.”
“He used coaching as a license to abuse and to prey. He was a predator with a whistle,” Seabright said. “I tend to want to see the best in people. I don’t see it for you.”
On Dec. 12, Yuen plead guilty to a dozen federal offenses related to sexually abusing underage girls.
Yuen plead guilty to sex trafficking Minor Victim 1 in 2005 and 2006; coercing and enticing Minor Victim 2 to engage in sexual activity in 2006; and producing, receiving and possessing child pornography involving Minor Victim 3 between 2020 and 2023.
Yuen also admitted to harassing victims identified as Victims 4 through 10 through anonymous and obscene communications from 2021 to 2023.
The victims were players on the basketball teams Yuen coached, with Victims 4 through 9 being around 18 years old at the time of the harassment and Victim 10 being 17 years old.
He was also sentenced on a Nov. 11 indictment charging him with five counts of harassing telephone communications and one count of making obscene and harassing telephone communications.
Speaking outside court, Kuehu said she and the other victims were relieved that justice was finally done.
To anyone trapped in a similar situation, Kuehu said “find your strength, find your village, find your voice and when you’re ready, come forward.”
