Gjert Ingebrigtsen, the father of Jakob Ingebrigtsen, told a Norwegian court on Monday that he never hit his son and daughter and denied all charges of physical abuse.
Gjert, 59, repeatedly broke into tears during his testimony before five judges and said he was a protective father intent on supporting his children’s running careers. He is charged with seven counts of physical abuse and faces a six year prison sentence if convicted.
“I have never in my life hit another person, ever, and I have definitely never threatened to do so either,” Gjert said in his testimony. “Kicking one of my children is absolutely unthinkable.”
In the court room in the Sandnes, Gjert asserted that was against violence to a point that he was discharged from military duty and was particularly mindful to not allow any of his seven children to play with toys that had violent undertones.
Last week Jakob, 24, and sister Ingrid, 19, gave detailed testimony of claims of abuse the suffered at the hands of their father. Jacob told the court that he dealt with physical and emotional abuse for 14 years, while Ingrid said pressure from her father to follow her brothers on the track sometimes resulted in encounters with her father and she ultimately quit the sport in 2022.
Both siblings were present in the courtroom to hear their father give his testimony.
Jakob said that he and brothers Filip and Henrik decided to break their silence in 2022 about their father’s alleged abuse and would release a joint statement to Norwegian newspaper VG in 2023 in a detailed article about the claims. Their boiling point came in 2022 when Ingrid said Gjert struck her with a wet towel, leaving a mark on her skin after she refused to go on a training run.
When pressed on the alleged towel incident, Gjert gave his interpretation on the matter, explaining that he was pulling the towel from Ingrid rather than hitting her.
“Whipping and hitting with a towel are the wrong terms. It’s more of a pull,” he said. “I pull the towel towards her finger. And I don’t have a concrete idea whether I hit the finger. It’s a relatively small towel. We stand relatively far apart. The pull I do is done, I think, twice.”
He then said that a red mark on Ingrid’s was could have caused by a skin condition and not from being struck.
On Monday Gjert told the court that a red mark on Ingrid’s face in a photograph taken after the alleged incident may have been caused by a skin condition and not, as she alleges, by being hit.
“Ugly things were said in loud voices,” Gjert said. “There was a reaction from me that was not very good on my part, I can’t say anything more.”
The trial has drawn widespread attention throughout Norway and is a stark departure from the image the Ingebrigtsen family crafted in public beginning in 2016 with their Team Ingebrigtsen television series.
The show was a major hit on Norwegian television and documented brothers Jakob, Filip, 31 and Henrik, 34, as rising track talents being coached by Gjert. The elder Ingebrigtsen created the show as a way to get his sons sponsorship deals and exposure.
Jakob has emerged as a major star in track and field and won a pair of titles in the 1,500m and 3,000m at the World Athletics Indoor Championships in Nanjing days before the trial began on March 25.
Meanwhile, the court listened to large blocks of a nearly 90-minute conversation in which Gjert was heard accusing his sons of “character assassination” after they split with him as their coach. Henrik recorded his father, without his knowledge, displaying a side of Gjert that could be interpreted as angry.
“You have fired me as a coach,” Gjert was heard saying in the recording. “You have rejected us as parents and you are carrying out a perfect character assassination on top of that. What we have worked for, you erase with a stroke of a pen.”
Following an investigation in 2023, police filed charges in April 2024 pertaining to evidence relating to claims by Ingrid. Additional charges were added in October 2024 to include evidence about Jakob while five claims in the initial case were dropped.
The trial is expected to continue until May 16th.
