'Cheer' Season 2, Episode 5 Recap — Jerry Harris Sexual Misconduct - TVLine

I felt like someone had just, like, died.”.

Jerry’s good friend James Thomas was also “blindsided” and feels like he “could have helped stop [him] or guided him somewhere else” if Jerry had ever said anything to him, while La’Darius Marshall, who found out via Twitter, has some choice words: “If I ever would have known about any of this stuff, I feel like it would have been worse than him going to jail.

I felt like I couldn’t breathe,” the coach shares.

Charlie explains that he sent the photo because he was “blindsided by [Jerry’s] notoriety.” Charlie also describes Jerry cornering him into a bathroom stall and “begging” him to have sex at a cheerleading competition.

Sam then also started to receive messages from Jerry, leaving the brothers to feel like they were alone in their struggle.

Not wanting to lose their cheer friends, who all loved Jerry, Charlie and Sam chose not to speak out, even after their mother Kristen learned about the harassment (which also included a private Snapchat video that Jerry sent to Charlie of himself masturbating).

The revelations also took a toll on Coach Monica, who describes crying herself to sleep and feeling emotionally torn because she loved Jerry like her own child.

(Lawyer/advocate Sarah Klein says she has no sympathy for the coach, who should have said, “I stand with those children.”) Asked how the Jerry situation affected Monica, James surmises that it probably broke her heart, too, “but honestly, I have no idea because she wasn’t here with us,” he says pointedly.

While we don’t hear directly from Jerry, Monica reveals that he wrote her a letter, which caught her off guard with its optimism and, perhaps most shocking of all, Jerry’s hope to one day be a… motivational speaker?

Cheer viewers, how did you feel about the way the show handled the Jerry situation