How CNN’s Coast Guard Academy cover-up investigation came together

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It was nearly a year ago that CNN first reported about a cover-up at the Coast Guard Academy.

That initial report about how the academy kept secret its own review of decades of sexual assault cover-ups continues to reverberate.

This week, the Coast Guard Academy official in charge of sexual assault prevention, Shannon Norenberg, resigned in protest and said the Coast Guard had made her an unwitting accomplice to a cover-up.

“I can no longer in good conscience be part of an organization that would betray me, betray victims of sexual assault, and betray the system I helped set up to hold perpetrators at the academy accountable,” Norenberg said in a statement. Watch her appearance on “Anderson Cooper 360°”.

Separately,the Coast Guard’s first female commandant, Adm. Linda Fagan, is scheduled to testify about the scandal on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, where she will face tough questioning about why current or former leaders have not been held accountable for covering up misconduct.

How does investigative reporting like this come to be? It took a team of journalists from CNN Investigates, including Melanie Hicken, Blake Ellis, Audrey Ash, Curt Devine and Pamela Brown. I emailed with Hicken and Ellis, reporters who have been working on this story since the beginning. Our conversation is below.

WOLF: You’ve been covering this Coast Guard story for some time. What was the first thread you pulled on it, and how has it unraveled?

HICKEN and ELLIS: Our Coast Guard reporting all started with a young woman named Hope Hicks who was a student at a different service academy, the US Merchant Marine Academy.