New York ? Attorneys for the French judge embroiled in the Olympic skating scandal Monday released a 24-page letter to the International Skating Union attacking its “hasty, knee-jerk decision” to suspend her and award a second gold to the Canadian pairs team.

A week before a hearing on Marie-Reine Le Gougne at ISU headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, her attorneys in Salt Lake City outlined their arguments in the letter, including claims that:

l Le Gougne was suspended without conclusive evidence of misconduct;

l The ISU broke precedent by throwing out all the judges’ votes, not just Le Gougne’s, in awarding a second gold to Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier;

l Combined results of all the judges, even with Le Gougne’s marks canceled, still would have made the Russians, Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, gold-medal winners, suggesting the ISU’s actions were “hypocritical, inconsistent and discriminatory;”

l The ISU denied Le Gougne due process by failing to provide her a chance to cross-examine witnesses during the investigation and by not requiring all the judges to appear at the ISU council hearing next Monday and Tuesday;

l ISU investigators conducted “biased” interviews in which they “grilled” Le Gougne, “attempting to trap her in a confession, but permitted her accusers to make outrageous, unsubstantiated and speculative accusations without any follow-up questions;”

l The ISU refused to provide “potentially exculpatory evidence” concerning the financial motives of the ISU figure skating technical committee and its chairwoman, Sally Stapleford, to pressure Le Gougne to accuse French federation president Didier Gailhaguet of influencing her vote;

l By refusing to hear allegations of misconduct against Stapleford, referee Ron Pfenning and Canadian judge Benoit Lavoie, the ISU acted in a “discriminatory manner, and is selectively prosecuting only those individuals that the ISU feels public pressure to prosecute.”

Le Gougne’s attorneys, Maxwell A. Miller and Erik A. Christiansen, insisted in the letter that “there is no credible, consistent and uncoerced evidence of any misconduct” on her part in voting for the Russian pair.

“The ISU made a political decision under pressure from the IOC and the North American media to ignore its own rules, to invalidate the marks of all of its judges, and then to single out one judge to take the blame for all of the judges involved in the event,” the attorneys said. “This hearing is thus unfair, discriminatory, inconsistent with the ISU’s own actions, and designed solely to manufacture a scapegoat to justify in the public’s eyes the ISU’s political decision to ignore its own rules and to award a second gold medal.”

They claimed the only credible evidence of misconduct is that of Stapleford “in lobbying judges to vote for the Canadians and in retaliating against Ms. Le Gougne and the French federation when Ms. Le Gougne did not obey Ms. Stapleford.”

Stapleford, a Canadian-born British official whose father was on the Canadian Olympic team, told ISU investigators in Salt Lake City that she witnessed an outburst by Le Gougne after the pairs event in which Le Gougne said she was pressured by Gailhaguet into voting for the Russian couple.