As people living in the 21st century, most of us go about our daily lives without worrying too much about our own safety. We do this by trusting, at least on some level, that our laws and institutions are capable of protecting us from threats both big and small without us doing much to directly oversee them. That’s why we rarely stop to wonder if the bottle of coke we just pulled from the shelf contains traces of raw sewage, even though we’ve never personally inspected the bottling plant ourselves. It’s also why most of us don’t lie awake in bed at night worrying that the nearby dam might be about to burst and provide us with a complementary indoor swimming pool.
Yes, we know deep down that mishaps do happen because things can and do go wrong from time to time—humans are only human, after all—but we certainly don’t like to dwell on the possibility. Instead, we choose to place trust in people in positions of power within our society and assume that, when things do go off the rails, those people will step up, take charge, and fix the problem, ideally in a way that prevents it from happening again.
Unfortunately, however, every now and then, news of an institutional failure so shocking reaches us that it shakes our faith in everything and everyone around us, makes us wonder whether those in charge are all corrupt or just asleep at the wheel. After all, how could a person, a doctor, get away with crimes so brazen against victims so vulnerable for such a long period of time if the safeguards were all working as intended?
On today’s episode of The Casual Criminalist, we’ll be discussing the crimes of a sexual predator disguised as a celebrity physician who victimized over 250 teenagers and young girls under the guise of legitimate healthcare. As we do, we’ll also talk about those who knew of and ignored those crimes for years, including his supervisors at the hospital where he practiced medicine, his colleagues who worked alongside him at the Olympics, and even the law enforcement agencies charged with investigating him—including a rogue FBI agent. Because, while today’s episode does revolve around the crimes of single monster, that monster’s orbit was large, and the impact he and those like him left on the entire sports industry is still being felt around the world to this day.
This is the story of disgraced doctor Larry Nassar—and those who failed to stop him.
That’s Larry… He’s here Every Day
Laurance Gerard Nassar was born into a family of Lebanese Americans in Farmington Hills, Michigan, on August 16th, 1963, and although his adult years have been thoroughly documented and analyzed, there is surprisingly very little info available online about his childhood. What is known—based solely on testimony given by his former friends and family—is that he seemed to have experienced a relatively normal upbringing in the home of his father and mother, Fred and Mary. Alongside them, he had four siblings growing up: Nancy, Lin, Mike, and Fred Jr, all of whom were raised to be devout Catholics; their entire clan attended the St.
Fabian Church near their home. And that is basically all we know. However, by Nassar’s teenage years, we start to get a clearer picture of who he was, and more importantly, who he wanted to someday be.
At North Farmington High, Nassar was reportedly heavily interested in sports, which drove him to become a student athletic trainer alongside his older brother, Mike, at only 15. Working in this role, he was responsible for upkeep of the gym’s athletic equipment, assisting the coaches and other trainers, and providing basic first aid to student athletes in the event of an injury. Overall, it was a solid start for someone wanting to become a professional athletic trainer, which is exactly what young Nassar originally planned to do.
Upon graduating in 1981, he continued his education at the University of Michigan, where he would go on to earn a bachelor’s degree in Kinesiology, the study of human movement. He then also involved himself in various college athletic programs as a volunteer, specifically the University’s football and track field teams. When this was done, he then enrolled in a master’s degree program at Wayne State University; however, his ambitions began to change around 1986, when he first got a job working for the USA Gymnastics’ National Team.
USA Gymnastics, an organization we’ll be covering in much greater detail in a later section because of their role in covering up various sex crimes throughout the years, was and still is the governing body of men and women’s Gymnastics in the United States. They are also the organization responsible for selecting and training athletes to represent the United States at the Olympic Games every four years.
As you can imagine, getting a job working with USAG was a pretty sweet gig for Nassar because it allowed him to get a foot in the door at an organization with ample upward mobility. However, it was while working there that he also changed his mind about the whole “athletic trainer” career path. Now, he instead decided he wanted to become a doctor for USAG. Thus, in 1988, he dropped out of Wayne State to return to his old stomping grounds, where he enrolled at MSU’s College of Osteopathic Medicine.
He studied there for another 5 years, eventually graduating with a sports medicine degree in 1993.
Now, seeing as little Larry has officially become Dr Nassar, we need to take a brief pause to introduce another man who will become very important throughout the rest of this chapter. His name is Coach John Geddert, and he is one of the many people who will turn a blind eye to Nassar’s innumerous abuses over the coming years.
Nassar had first met Coach Geddert, who was approximately six years older than him, when he was still an undergraduate at MSU in 1984. At that time, Geddert was the head coach at the Great Lakes Gymnastics Club in Lansing Michigan, where he was in the process of making a name for himself. Throughout his twelve years with the gym, Geddert would go on to coach winners of over 50 state championships, 11 individual championships, and 5 all-around national championships. If you couldn’t guess, this was extremely impressive, leading him to win awards for Male Coach of the Year for the United States Gymnastic Federation in 1988 and Regional Coach of the Year in both 1990 and 1991.
Because the pair got along so well, Nassar and Geddert had started working together while Nassar was still in college in 1988, and they continued their professional relationship once he became a doctor in 1993. They also became very close personal friends, and together, with Geddert training and Nassar treating injuries and performing physical therapy, they would make a very effective team. Yet, despite this, many of Geddert’s students would regard their time training under him as a never-ending nightmare.
Lindsey Lemke, one of Geddert’s former students, would put it mildly when she said: “He was abusive…”
Geddert, who was known for being extremely demanding, would reportedly scream and berate his girls at Great Lakes, calling them names, insulting both their performances and their bodies. In pursuit of near perfection, he placed all his athletes on a strict diet enforced by the threat of both physical punishment and public humiliation. If he thought someone wasn’t losing weight as fast as they should, he would make them run laps while fat shaming them in front of the rest of the girls.
This would destroy their sense of self-esteem, making them feel less than worthless. And, if that wasn’t bad enough, girls who gained weight had it even worse; he would force them to scrub the gym’s bathroom tile with their toothbrushes.
It should be noted that many of these girls were between the ages of 14 and 17, although some were around 10 years old. Many have since reported suffering lifelong eating disorders since training under Geddert, yet this by no means the worst of his treatment.
When Geddert felt like he wasn’t being respected or like his girls were goofing off and not working hard enough, he would become physically abusive as well. He was known to walk up and stomp toes to get attention, and if that didn’t work—or if he was simply having an unusually bad day—he would sometimes pick up and throw gym equipment, oftentimes at the girls themselves.
Makayla Thrush, another of Geddert’s former trainees, stated she was a frequent target of his verbal and physical abuse for years, until Geddert’s anger boiled over one afternoon. That day, he permanently ended Makayla’s athletic career once and for all by pushing her onto a piece of gym equipment, severely injuring her; her body reportedly hit so hard she ruptured the lymph nodes in her back and tore several muscles in her stomach.
When Makalya confronted coach Geddert later on, explaining that his actions had forced her to retire from gymnastics, Geddert told Makayla to go kill herself. She then tried to do exactly that not long after their conversation.
This was the type of person and coach Geddert was, and nearly all his trainees were terrified of him. When he would watch his girls perform from the sidelines, some would become so anxious they would throw up right on the gym floor. Geddert would then press their faces into it before making them mop it up. He was a monster of almost fictional proportions.
Unfortunately for Makalya, and other girls like her, one of the people who would have been responsible for reporting this type of abuse was their gym doctor, yet Nassar had no interest in drawing eyes toward Geddert, or himself, for reasons we’re about to get into. Indeed, within just a few months of graduating from medical school, Nassar had already begun to prey on young girls behind Geddert’s back—although it is strongly suspected Geddert found out about the abuse along the way and chose not to report it for the same reason Nassar did not report him: neither wanted the cops sniffing around for any reason. In this way, both were able to protect one another, but if you thought Nassar presented himself in a similar manner as Geddert, you would be very wrong.
According to his future victims, the pairs’ demeanors could not have been more different, and this was intentional. While Geddert sought respect through fear, Nassar had no interest in respect. He wanted his patients to trust him, to believe wholeheartedly that he was on their side. He wanted them to see him as a friend, so he never yelled, never threw things, and never fat shamed anyone.
Instead, he spoke softly as he reassured the girls, said they had potential, and badmouthed Geddert’s more egregious actions behind his back. He also snuck candy and food into his office, giving it to his patients with a smile. In this way, he became the “good cop” to Geddert’s “bad cop.” However, Nassar was only pretending in order to help hide his own abuse of a different kind.
Sarah Klein, one of Nassar’s victims, explained the pair’s process very eloquently when she said: “John would beat us up and break us down both mentally and physically and then send us to Larry, who would give us a tissue to dry our tears and sexually abuse us. Then he’d send us back to John, often on broken bones and pulled muscles, so the cycle could start all over again.”
Inside his private office, Nassar followed a very specific pattern of sexual abuse throughout most of his criminal career: while examining an athlete’s injuries, he would have them strip down before running his hands across their bodies, sometimes fondling their breasts and genitals, claiming that everything he was doing was normal procedure. Then, once he made his diagnosis, he would prescribe a treatment plan that usually consisted of some sort of physical therapy he was able to perform. One of his more common therapies was known as an “intervaginal adjustment,” which involved inserting his finger inside the girl to massage a “pressure point” that supposedly offered pain relief.
Once he had established this “therapy” as a legitimate form of treatment in the girls’ minds, Nassar would then meet with them on a regular basis for weeks, months, or even years, until they either no longer needed physical therapy or moved on to another physician. Many girls reported Nassar did not wear gloves during these sessions because doing so was “too restrictive” on his fingers, or so he claimed.
Obviously, these “adjustments” were not legitimate treatments for pain or anything else, and Nassar knew it. But because he worked so hard to earn the girls’ trust—and because he spoke so confidently—many simply did not realize they were being abused. Most knew the sessions made them feel very uncomfortable, but few understood why; they thought being uncomfortable was just part of being an athlete.
Keep in mind, a lot of these victims were teenagers or young girls, some as young as 7 or 8, so it took them quite a while to grow up and realize bad things had been done to them. And even then, some never realized it—not until the allegations from other women made them think back decades later.
Of course, Nassar and Geddert’s abuse did not go completely unnoticed; Geddert was actually fired from Great Lakes in 1996 by the club’s co-owners, who gave the following justification for his termination: “We started this club 18 years ago with the idea of providing a positive gymnastics environment for everybody. Under John, we found ourselves moving farther and farther away from that idea.”
Sadly, this setback did little to stop either him or Nassar because, a short time after being fired, Geddert and his wife, Kathryn, founded their own gym, Twistars USA Gymnastics Club, in Dimondale, Michigan. Larry followed Geddert there, where their unofficial arrangement continued. Nassar was reportedly such a fixture at this new gym that an athlete once introduced him by saying: “…that’s Larry, he’s here every day.”
Little Girls on Balance Beams
One important thing to note about John Geddert’s treatment of gymnasts in the previous section is that his angry style of coaching was by no means unique, nor were the injuries and harassment the girls at his gym sustained unusual. For a long time, that type of “tough love” training was largely seen as normal by both athletes and their coaches because it was so prevalent across the entire industry. From what I’ve read, it was basically an open secret that almost everyone involved in the sport was aware of to some extent.
They either participated in it, tried and failed to fight against it, or—most often—simply ignored it. There were, of course, many good coaches who didn’t carry on like raving lunatics, but the effective ones, the ones who took girls from small towns to the world stage, almost always did. Thus, the abuse was oftentimes seen as necessary.
I say that as a precursor to this: abuse and gymnastics went hand-in-hand for many years, and that abuse was one of the main reasons that little girls were chosen to compete in the Olympics in the first place.
Starting in 1928—the year women’s gymnastics first premiered at the modern Olympic games—and all the way up until the 1960s, female gymnasts were typically adult women; however, as competition between countries, notably the United States and the Soviet Union, heated up, many coaches began seeking any competitive edge available. This led some to realize focusing their efforts on younger girls was a better use of their time for a number of practical reasons.
For one, because raw strength is not nearly as important in women’s gymnastics as it is in men’s, smaller bodies are preferred as they experience fewer “moments of inertia” while competing.
The following is an excerpt from shortform.com, discussing the book The Sports Gene by David Epstein:
“Smaller athletes have smaller moments of inertia than larger athletes. This means that it takes less force for them to get their bodies moving into a flip, rotation, or spin than it would take a larger athlete. Larger gymnasts have to generate more force to complete the same movements. Larger athletes also have more mass farther away from their axis of rotation, which means that any rotation will require more force to initiate and will slow down faster (This is why figure skaters spin faster when they pull their arms into their bodies).”
When it comes to injuries, younger girls also heal much quicker, which is a huge advantage in a sport where sprained ankles and torn ligaments are as common as foam fingers at a baseball stadium.
For all of these reasons, stating around the 1970s, many coaches began regarding the “peak age” for female gymnasts to be between 14 and 19. That meant to someday compete at an elite level, most needed to begin training when they were around 4 years old. Advanced training usually began when they were 7.
Now, to be clear, there is some debate to this day about whether this preference for “smaller, boyish bodies” is truly more optimal for women’s gymnastics, but that argument is irrelevant to what we’re discussing. What matters to us today is the other reasons, the non-physical reasons, that coaches back then preferred girls over women: the social and psychological advantages.
Unlike fully grown women, young girls and teens had no work or family obligations, were not expected to get married or have children, and could easily spend 20-30 hours per week, every week, training in gyms with their coaches, which still is the norm for aspiring elite-level gymnasts. However, even more important was the fact that young girls are also easier to control than adults, especially when coaches assume an authoritative role in their lives before they enter kindergarten. In this way, girls could be taught to never question their coach, never disrespect them, and never speak out about anything negative they experienced behind closed doors. This allowed coaches to push girls the way Geddert did almost without consequence, all the way up to the Olympic level.
With this power dynamic in place, it’s easy to see how verbal abuse, mental abuse, physical abuse, and—in some cases—sexual abuse all became a daily part of these girls’ lives. And many never came forward because compliance had been drilled into them. In fact, speaking out was known to be one of the fastest ways to end your career.
I apologize if this brief history lesson has caused Simon’s eyes to gloss over, but I wanted to provide a bit of context about the sport itself and the mindset of many of the coaches involved before introducing one of our next big names: Coach Béla Károlyi, the man who has been credited by some as being largely responsible for shaping modern women’s gymnastics. At one point in his career, that was considered a compliment, but his legacy has now been overshadowed by abuse allegations and his longtime association with Larry Nassar.
In his youth, Béla was a champion boxer in Romania, his home country, as well a competitive hammer thrower. He also attended Romania’s College of Physical Education, where he studied and practiced gymnastics. While there, he met his future wife and coaching partner, Márta Erőss. They married in the early 1960s, when Béla was just beginning his professional coaching career.
Over the next 15 or so years, Béla then gained fame while coaching at several boarding schools in Romanian towns with names so long I won’t even make Simon attempt to pronounce them.
…okay, I lied, here’s one: Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.
Anyway, by the 1970s, Béla’s coaching methods were turning girls as young as 14 into elite-level gymnasts, earning him the position of head coach for the Romanian team in 1974. However, two years later, an event occurred that cemented him as a coaching legend, as well as changed the sport of gymnastics forever: Béla’s protégé, whom he had been training since she was 6 years old, Nadia Comăneci, received the world’s first perfect score in gymnastics at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. She was only 14 years old at the time.
Nadia, who many at the time described as having “very serious eyes” for a child, was a prodigy who showed the world how impressive teenage girls could be at the sport. She inspired many to follow in her footsteps while also causing many coaches to double down on their efforts to recruit and train younger and younger girls, including US coaches, who desperately wanted to compete with Romania. Yet, they never could; Béla’s girls were simply better by every measure.
Alongside Nadia’s perfect score, Romania’s Artistic Gymnastics team brought home a total of 8 medals that year: 3 gold, 2 silver, and 3 bronze. This left the United States feeling very upstaged and many coaches bitter. They needed to find a way to replicate Béla’s success, and they got their chance when Béla decided to swap teams.
In 1981, while on an international gymnastics tour, both Béla and Márta defected to the United States, listing political asylum as their reason for fleeing. Once their asylum was granted, they then moved to Texas, where Béla’s reputation as “Nadia’s coach” led to many parents personally seeking him out. They all wanted him to train their daughters, to make them Olympians, and this led to Béla and Márta purchasing a 2000-acre property just north of Houston, which they named Károlyi Ranch. Someday, this ranch would become the National Team Training Center for USA Gymnastics (there’s that name again).
In the following years, Károlyi’s fame and wealth continued to grow as he attracted more and more girls to his ranch. By 1984, the year of the Los Angeles Olympics, there were over 1400 girls enrolled. That same year, McDonalds would even pay to have their logo, the golden arches, sewn onto the girls’ competition outfits. This was ironic in a very horrible way considering Károlyi’s girls were never allowed to eat anything as calorie rich as McDonalds.
Yes, just like John Geddert, Béla and Márta Károlyi, who ran the ranch as a team, were famously strict about what their girls could eat. They forced them to adhere to a diet consisting mostly of soups and restricted them to a mere 900 calories per day, which is just 300 above literal starvation. Likewise, they were also just as physically demanding as Geddert and ran their ranch more like a bootcamp than a training center; they housed the girls overnight in dormitories with a strict schedule: up at the crack of dawn to run laps, train all day, lights out at dark. The girls were even expected to be dressed in “competition ready” outfits during training, including a face full of makeup, every single day.
This rigidity and lack of downtime, Béla and Márta believed, kept the girls focused solely on their training and out of trouble. It also deliberately isolated them from any other authority figures besides the ones the Károlyi’s approved of; parents were not allowed to visit either the dormitories or the training center, especially during the leadup to the Olympics.
All of these methods undoubtedly produced results as, between Nadia’s perfect score in 1976 and the pair’s retirement from coaching in the late 2010s, they trained 28 Olympians, 15 world champions, 12 European champions, and 6 US national Champions. Yet their methods also allowed Larry Nassar to find another avenue to abuse gymnasts, and this time, those girls were basically captives of the ranch with absolutely nobody looking out for them.
Rising to Fame and Glory
1996 was undoubtably a very busy year for Larry Nassar. At the same time that John Geddert was starting his new gym in Dimondale, he was finishing his residency at St. Laurence Hospital in Lansing. He also married his wife, Stephanie, that year and was promoted to the position of National Medical Coordinator for USA Gymnastics. This is when he became acquainted with Béla and Márta, who were then acting as a coaching team at Károlyi Ranch.
Thanks to that last achievement, 1996 was also the year Nassar’s meteoric rise to fame began as he was seen on live TV at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. This was when the US’s team, The Magnificent Seven, coached by Márta, made history by being the first US team to ever win the team gold medal. Nassar himself was featured in a closeup shot as he helped carry injured gymnast Kerri Strug off the mat after she had just deliberately competed on an injured ankle, giving her team enough points to win.
Very quickly, Kerri was made a hero in the public’s eye for her sacrifice, and Nassar received his fair share of praises as well. Once returning to Michigan after the games, he began volunteering as a motivational speaker for student athletes at high schools and gyms around the Lancing area. This made his already packed schedule that year even more hectic; yet 1997 was arguably just as busy for him.
After completing his medicine fellowship, Nassar was then hired as an assistant professor at MSU and began acting as the team physician for both the college itself and nearby Holt High School. Of course, this was in addition to his continued work at Twistars and Károlyi ranch, where he abused in secret.
Like at Twistars, Larry was a fixture at Károlyi Ranch during the Olympics, where parents and coaches, including Béla and Márta, trusted him wholeheartedly. He was allowed to treat girls completely unsupervised both in his office and in the girls’ private dorm rooms whenever he saw fit, even after the lights went out. He was even the person who girls were told to contact if they had any problems during their stay; each received a notification when they first arrived at the ranch, which stated the following:
“If you or anyone in your room has a problem at night (or any time), please call Dr. Larry Nassar, Debbie Van Horn or a USA Gymnastics staff person. Please do not call your personal coach.”
Lindsey Lemke, who we discussed very briefly in an earlier chapter, claims she alone was abused over 600 times by Nassar over the course of her athletic career. This abuse occurred twice per day and largely followed the modus operandi we have already discussed.
To be clear, unlike Geddert, there is little direct evidence to suggest either Béla or Márta were aware of Nassar’s sexual abuse at the ranch, yet it’s obvious the environment they created, which many girls have called “prison-like,” helped drive victims directly into his arms; he was still continuing to play good cop to everyone else’s bad cop, which allowed him to fly under everyone’s radar, including his victims, most of whom still had no clue they were being sexually abused.
Horrifically, one anonymous girl would later recall a time when an underage athlete jokingly told her: “Larry was the first guy to ever finger me.” She simply had no idea what she was saying.
Yet as bad as all this was, it still wasn’t enough for Nassar, who began looking for new ways to abuse, ways that would allow him to have even more private time with his victims. For this, he turned to his patients at MSU, who he sometimes lured to the home he and his wife shared.
This new method worked like this: by relying on his well-known status around the Lancing area, Nassar would tell his patients and their parents that he was conducting a medical study in which he measured the efficacy of submerging a tense person’s body in water before providing them with a new type of therapeutic massage. He would say he was conducting these experiments out of his home office, where girls who wished to participate would be dropped off for several hours. Because it would take so long, many parents did not sit around and wait, never once suspecting Nassar would try anything inappropriate.
Once alone with a girl, however, Nassar would then lead her to his bathroom where a hot bath was waiting. He would then request she strip off her clothes and climb into the tub to soak alone.
Based on information that would later be released, we know there were likely cameras in that bathroom, but no specifics about who Nassar recorded have been made public. After they had soaked, he would then lead them to his in-home examination room to abuse in his standard way, usually uninterrupted for hours at a time.
The Neighbors
So far, I have deliberately refrained from diving too deeply into individual accounts of abuse because, to be completely honest, I don’t like writing about them. I also don’t think Simon would enjoy reading them, nor do I think many of you would enjoy hearing them.
Another reason is there would also be a lot of repetition as the majority of Nassar’s abuse followed the same pattern we’ve discussed. However, there is one unique account I do want to discuss in detail because it reveals several important things about Nassar himself, including the depths of his depravity, how trustworthy he seemed to those around him, and how manipulative he could be. This account was provided by Kyle Stephens (Kai-lee), a girl who is thought to be Nassar’s only non-medical victim.
According to Kyle, she was only six years old when her mother and father, who we’ll call Jim and Laura, introduced her and her brother, who we’ll call Billy, to Nassar in 1999. At that time, their families were neighbors, but they were also much more. Larry, Stephanie, Jim, and Laura all worked in healthcare, had similar interests, and got along well. Over time, this led them to become very close friends, and before long, the Stephenses and the Nassars were spending holidays together, going to sports games together, and having Sunday dinner together every weekend.
These dinners were almost always held in Larry and Stephanie’s home, which is where Kyle would spend years being abused right under her parents’ noses. It happened like this:
On Sunday afternoons, while Luara and Stephanie busied themselves in the kitchen, Larry and Jim would usually take a seat in the living room to watch football on television. To keep Kyle and Billy out of the way, Jim usually sent them downstairs to Larry’s furnished basement, where a TV and VCR were set up for them to watch Disney movies. Kyle and Billy spent many afternoons down there cuddled up under blankets together, but when Kyle was 6 or 7 years old, Larry began to slip downstairs with them after dinner.
At first, Larry would only periodically check on things. Since he and Stephanie didn’t have children of their own yet, he said he didn’t mind. He made it seem like he was doing Jim and Laura a favor by taking the kids off their shoulders for a while, which I’m sure most parents can relate to. But at some point, he began staying down there for a few minutes longer than necessary.
Then those few minutes turned into 10 or 15 minutes. Eventually, he began taking a seat between them, saying he wanted to watch whatever they were watching.
One of the things Kyle remembers most about her abuse, she now says, is the smell of the lotion Nassar used. He kept bottles of it placed strategically around the basement, so they were always within arm’s reach wherever he was. As he sat between them, he would reach over and pump some of this lotion into his hand, and then he would stealthily masturbate underneath the blankets. After a while, he would reach over, grab Kyle’s feet, and place them on his penis as he continued.
Sometimes, when Kyle wasn’t interested in watching movies, Nassar would suggest they play hide and seek. When they agreed, he would have both Kyle and Billy hide, then he would always find Kyle first. He would roughhouse by playfully throwing a blanket over the two of them. But underneath that blanket, he would unzip his pants and reach for a nearby bottle of lotion.
One day, while Billy was upstairs, Nassar brought Kyle into the nearby boiler room, claiming he wanted to show her something. He then closed the door and unzipped his pants, exposing himself, and said: “You can see it whenever you want to, you know that?”
Kyle didn’t understand why she would want to see it, nor did she understand that what was happening to her inside Larry’s basement every weekend was abuse because, as a reminder, she was barely 6 years old at the start of it. Her biggest concern back then, she would someday say while testifying against Nassar at trial, was what Clifford the Big Red Dog was up to, not if someone she trusted was taking advantage of her. And because Jim and Laura never suspected a thing either, the abuse continued unabated every Sunday for the next six years, until Kyle grew up enough to begin asking questions.
According to an interview Kyle gave to NPR in 2018, there was a moment when everything clicked for her. It was 2004. She was in sixth grade, riding the school bus on a class field trip, when one of her friends leaned over and suggested they share their “deepest, darkest secret” with one another.
Kyle said she thought about it for a moment but couldn’t come up with a good answer. In her mind, she had no real secrets, so her friend told her about how her cousin had gotten in trouble for sexually abusing her. Her friend then began providing more details about the abuse, and those details sent a chill down Kyle’s spine; she realized in that moment her neighbor, who she and her parents basically thought of as family at this point, had been doing very similar things to her for as long as she could remember.
In an instant, a mental switch was flipped, and Kyle’s whole world got a lot darker.
After the trip was over, Kyle then went home and told Jim and Laura absolutely nothing about the conversation for several days. She wasn’t sure how to approach the subject, how everyone would react, what the fallout would be, or if Larry would go to jail. She was worried because the Nassars now had children of their own, whom Kyle herself was friends with. She was also worried that she might somehow be blamed for what had transpired in Larry’s basement, or that she wouldn’t be believed at all.
Unfortunately, she was right about that last one.
After days of miserable anguish, when Kyle felt she couldn’t hold her emotions in any longer, she called her mother into her bedroom and blurted out: “Mom, when Larry massages my feet, he uses his penis.”
After this single sentence was uttered, Kyle says her mother was shocked into silence. Then she abruptly told Kyle to get out of bed and immediately go tell her father exactly what she had just said. Embarrassed, Kyle did as she was asked, but her father did not react the way she was hoping:
“My dad immediately just started questioning me… I don’t remember the questions, but I remember feeling, like, interrogated. I felt like—like I was in trouble, you know? So, I didn’t say anything else. So, they were like, ‘OK, OK, OK, go to bed,’ and sent me back to bed.”
The next morning, after an unrestful night, Kyle’s father made it abundantly clear he did not believe her. He told Kyle that making up stories about people was very bad because those stories could derail a person’s life, especially someone who worked with children like Larry did. By this point, Nassar had worked as the team doctor at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and was preparing to attend the 2004 Olympics in Athens, further cementing his status as a celebrity doctor around town. He was also in the process of writing a guide about his unique physical therapy techniques, so there was a lot at stake.
Unsurprisingly, Kyle was very upset by their reaction and couldn’t bring herself to speak to either Jim or Laura for several days. She essentially had a mental breakdown, she believes, and when she finally did speak to them, all she could talk about was Larry’s abuse. She brought it up during every conversation, and this drove a wedge between her and her parents, especially her father, who continued to wishfully believe she was lying about everything.
After several weeks of this tension, her parents became so frustrated they booked an appointment for Kyle to see a child psychologist, but Kyle didn’t want to speak to a psychologist, especially the one her parents chose for her, Gary Stollak.
Of Stollak, Kyle would later say: “…his office was in his house [and it had] a brown couch with brown carpet, with brown walls. And he’s drinking Constant Comment. And it’s this old dude. And I’m like, I don’t want to be here, let alone talk about penises with this man, you know? And they’re trying to get me to disclose more, and I wouldn’t talk.”
Kyle’s refusal to participate in therapy thoroughly frustrated her parents, but they forced her to stick with it, and after several sessions, she finally opened up—just a little bit.
Hesitantly, she gave Stollak a few more smaller details about her abuse, which should have been enough to force him to report her case to law enforcement—as was required of him by law—but Kyle claims Stollak was extremely unresponsive. Like with her parents, Kyle knew her concerns were being ignored. What she didn’t know, however, was that Stollak and Nassar worked together at MSU.
To this day, it’s not clear if Nassar and Stollak knew one another personally, but what is clear is that Stollak failed to protect Kyle, and he would eventually be stripped of his medical license because of it. Although that would not happen for another 14 years…
The only action that Stollak did take back in 2004 was he suggested that he, Kyle’s parents, and Larry all have a sit down together in his home office without Kyle present. Unsure of what else to do, Jim and Laura agreed and told Larry about the allegations. Larry then agreed to the sit down, and Kyle was left home alone while her parents and her abuser drove off to go speak with her therapists without her present. When they all returned, it was obvious whose side everyone was on: not hers.
That afternoon, Jim and Laura invited Larry inside, and they all sat together with Kyle inside the living room. Kyle pointed to Nassar and accused him of abusing her, but her parents took Larry’s side. They made her sit in silence as all of them took turns lecturing her, including Larry, who said: “No one should ever do that, and if they do, you should tell somebody.”
After this traumatizing meeting concluded, Kyle’s family did not visit the Nassars for over a year, and Kyle said it was obvious her father blamed her for the rift between him and Larry. In that year, he tried to force Kyle to admit she had lied multiple times, but each time she refused, continuing to assert that everything she had told Stollak was the truth.
Today, years after the fact, Kyle states she believes her father was in denial and couldn’t accept that such horrible abuse had been happening under his nose for so long without he and Laura having a clue. To accept something so unthinkable would have been life changing; like losing his religion, it would have shaken his entire worldview. So, he simply refused to believe it, no matter what she said. That choice permanently poisoned their relationship—as did what Jim did next.
One day, after over a year of fighting, Jim got truly fed up and cornered Kyle:
“I was sitting on the floor in my living room in front of the TV, and my dad looked down at me and said, ‘if you don’t tell the truth, I’m going to make your life a living hell.’ And I believed him. I saw his face, and I knew he meant it. And if I was not already in a living hell, I was underprepared to endure one. And he saw me break. Just in my face, he must’ve seen it because he said, ‘are you ready to tell the truth?’ And I said, ‘yep.’ And he said, ‘so you were lying?’ And I said, ‘yep.’”
As stated earlier, that quote, along with the majority of the information in this section, comes directly from Kyle’s interview with NPR. I want to make that crystal clear because, while I normally try to pull from as many sources as possible, this is one of the most detailed accounts of her experience that I was able to find online. The reason we’re calling her parents “Jim” and “Laura” and her brother “Billy” is because their names have been left out of many articles, likely at Kyle’s request.
I also want to say that Kyle takes the time in this interview to mention that her father was not well during this interaction. He had slipped eight discs in his back, couldn’t work, and was in constant terrible pain. Their family was also struggling financially, and he was very depressed. None of that is an excuse for how Kyle was treated, but I thought it was worth mentioning since Kyle herself brought it up in the interview.
Following the forced admission that she had lied, Kyle was then made to apologize to Larry, after which time both families made peace with one another. Soon, the Sunday trips to the Nassars’ home resumed, and from this point on, there was no more abuse.
When Kyle was in high school, she babysat Nassar’s three children occasionally but did her best to stay away from Larry as much as she possibly could. Larry pretended that nothing had ever happened.
Kyle’s father committed suicide in 2016 after learning that Kyle had been telling the truth all along.
The IndyStar
Now, with that horribly depressing section out of the way, let’s change course a little bit and finally talk about the organization I’ve been teasing since the first chapter: USA Gymnastics. To do that, we’ll also need to jump ahead a few years, to 2016, the year Nassar was finally exposed for being the predator he was from the very beginning.
The first domino in Nassar’s undoing came tumbling down when a newspaper in Indianapolis, Indiana, The Indianapolis Star, released an exposé titled “A Blind Eye to Sex Abuse: How USA Gymnastics Failed to Report Cases.” It was part of a series called “Out of Balance” and opened with the following line:
“Top executives at one of America’s most prominent Olympic organizations failed to alert authorities to many allegations of sexual abuse by coaches — relying on a policy that enabled predators to abuse gymnasts long after USA Gymnastics had received warnings.”
As a reminder, USA Gymnastics—USAG for short—was and still is the organization responsible for overseeing men and women’s gymnastics in the United States. It is also in charge of many, many other smaller, albeit very important, tasks—like vetting its coaches in order to ensure the safety of its members.
At the time this exposé was released, USAG had approximately 121,000 members and oversaw a staggering 3,000 gyms across the United States. It was also headed by a man named Stephen Penny Jr, who served as its president and CEO. Besides Nassar himself, Penny may be the biggest villain in today’s episode.
Penny had joined USAG as its vice-president in 1999 with the stated goal of increasing the organization’s marketability, and in that, he had certainly succeeded. By 2003, USAG had garnered multiple big-name corporate sponsorships, organized several new events that drew in large crowds, and began slapping their logo onto anything and everything they could, thus turning USAG into a household name for athletic hopefuls. This earned Penny his spot at the top, and he was made president in 2005; however, it was while serving in this role that his actions would bring shame—as well as eventual bankruptcy—to USAG.
Essentially, the IndyStar’s exposé revealed that, under Penny, USAG had adhered to a policy that made it very difficult for victims of sexual abuse to come forward and did not alert authorities of suspected abuse unless absolutely forced to. Specifically, the policy stated USAG would only report complaints of sexual abuse when those reports were both in writing and signed by either the alleged victim themselves or the victim’s parents. Anything less—and I want to strongly emphasize the word anything—was treated as “unsubstantiated hearsay” and disregarded in order to protect the reputation of USAG and its staff.
For context, this was, and still is, blatantly illegal because all organizations that work with children are required by law to forward any complaints and suspicions of sexual abuse to the authorities without delay, regardless of whether or not someone attaches their name to it. This is done, obviously, because many victims are not comfortable coming forward, especially in an abusive environment like the one we’ve spent most of this episode discussing.
What this all meant was that USAG had effectively been sweeping sexual abuse allegations under the rug for years for its own benefit, allowing those accused of horrendous sex crimes to continue coaching and abusing in the organization’s gyms well after they had been reported. And the IndyStar wasn’t just speculating about hypothetical situations; they were able to list four examples of cases where exactly that had happened. These included Coach Marvin Sharp, Coach Mark Schiefelbein, Coach James Bell, and Coach William McCabe, all of whom had been reported to and ignored by USAG officials before their crimes were later exposed.
The circumstances surrounding that last person, William McCabe, were particularly egregious as court documents from his trial showed USAG had received no fewer than 4 separate complaints regarding his conduct between 1998 and 2006, including one with 3 full pages of allegations. Yet, still, neither Penny nor his predecessor had taken any action, deliberately.
Horrifically, one of those reports came from a gym owner in Cape Coral, Florida, named Dan Dickey who had fired McCabe in 1999 after learning he had bragged to another employee about sexually abusing a 15-year-old girl at his previous job. As stated, Dickey had wasted no time firing McCabe, but he also wrote a letter directly to USAG’s main office after learning McCabe had been rehired by another USAG-affiliated gym just months after his termination. This letter outlined the suspected abuse very clearly for USAG and ended with the following warning:
“To allow this scum bag to continue working within the gymnastics community would be a terrible insult to all of the gym owners and coaches who have worked so hard to build up the reputation of gymnastics. This guy is the exact reason why parents of young girls come into our facilities and request a female coach or teacher. In my opinion, this person has no right to work with children and should be locked in a cage before someone is raped.”
In my opinion, it doesn’t get much clearer than that, yet Penny’s response was to ignore Dickey’s warning entirely, thus allowing McCabe to continue abusing for another six full years. And even then, he was only caught after an abused athlete’s mother circumvented USAG by taking her complaint directly to the authorities herself.
As you can imagine, these allegations published by the IndyStar caused quite a stir both locally in Indiana, where the paper and USAG were headquartered, and around the United States. USAG’s PR team was then sent into overdrive, and Penny was forced to release a public statement denying everything. According to him, USAG had always put the safety of its members first and foremost; however, these efforts to curtail the fallout were wholly ineffective. People, especially the family members and friends of those 120,000 members, were rightfully pissed off.
Notably, Larry Nassar’s name (don’t forget this episode is still about him) was not included anywhere in this first list of abusers; however, the IndyStar’s investigation into USAG had an unintended effect: it inspired one very brave woman to step forward, and she was the true beginning of Nassar’s never-ending nightmare.
Rachel Denhollander, a 30-year-old lawyer from Louisville, Kentucky, emailed the IndyStar the very morning their exposé was published. She had been waiting for the right opportunity to tell her story for years and felt this was finally it.
It read:
“I recently read the article titled ‘Out of Balance’ published by the IndyStar. My experience may not be relevant to your investigation, but I am emailing to report an incident that may be. I was not molested by my coach, but I was molested by Dr. Larry Nassar, the team doctor for USAG. I was fifteen years old, and it was under the guise of medical treatment for my back.”
Understandably, this email was of great interest because, if Rachel’s claims could be verified, the IndyStar might have just stumbled into one of the biggest stories of the decade. Yes, breaking USAG’s reporting policy would turn out to be huge for them considering they were a small newspaper when compared to the others around Indianapolis, but Larry Nassar’s name carried considerable weight. At this time, he was even in the process of running in the local Michigan election for a seat on Holt High School’s school board, where he had worked and abused for almost two decades by this point.
Seeking to do their due diligence, a reporter and a photographer set out to interview Rachel, both to get her full story and to ensure she wasn’t just some lunatic looking for her 15 minutes. As we now know for certain, she was not.
Upon walking into Rachel’s home in Louisville, the pair were met with a calm, level-headed woman who sat them down, offered them a drink, and then told her story from start to finish: 15 years earlier, in 2001, she had been a homeschooled girl suffering from severe back pains after an athletic injury left her unable to compete. This was when her mother had taken her to see Dr Nassar at his office at MSU, after a close family friend had recommended him. While there, Nassar had abused Rachel in his usual fashion, by touching her breasts and genitals, before sending her on her way. Like so many others, Rachel wasn’t aware she had been abused and returned for five more sessions with Nassar, during which his abuse continued to escalate.
Unbelievably, Nassar had been bold enough to penetrate Rachel with his finger as her mother sat in the room with them. He had placed himself between them so that she could not see what was being done to her daughter and kept a light conversation flowing between them in order to prevent suspicion.
Because Nassar had been so brazen, it took Rachel several years to accept that she had been abused. It wasn’t until she described her experiences to a nurse practitioner while in college that she began to fully understand. However, even then, she did not speak out; it had been so long, and as far as she knew, no one else had stepped forward. So, she feared standing alone just as much as she feared being called a liar.
To prove her story was true, Rachel then presented the IndyStar reporter with 110 carefully labelled pages of medical records that showed the exact dates and times the abuse had occurred, as well as other notes she had made about the experience throughout the years.
Little Girls Don’t Stay Little Forever
On September 12, 2016, Rachel Denhollander’s allegations were published alongside those of a second woman who initially wished to remain anonymous, although she has since revealed herself to be Olympian Jamie Dantzscher, another person victimized under USAG’s watch. That same day, Rachel also filed a formal complaint against Nassar with the Ingham County police, which kicked off a formal investigation. Jamie filed a federal lawsuit against USA Gymnastics at the same time.
For Stephen Penny Jr, this second article and the lawsuit were just two more logs on the fire that had been steadily growing over the prior few weeks, despite his best efforts to quash the story. However, Nassar himself felt surprisingly very little heat from the coverage—at least at first.
For starters, he had already “voluntarily” retired from USA Gymnastics approximately one year earlier for reasons we’ll discuss in the next section, so the only real threat the story and the investigation posed to him—or so he thought—was possibly costing him the school board election.
Yes, like he had done with Kyle Stephens’ parents years earlier, Nassar felt confident in his ability to beat the allegations and walk away a free man. As such, he didn’t even withdraw his name from the election, instead choosing to simply release a statement with the help of his attorney, in which he asserted total innocence and agreed to cooperate with the Ingham County investigation. He also agreed to have a sit-down interview with reporters from the IndyStar to clear his name. Both of these decisions turned out to be major mistakes that would sink his chances of emerging unscathed.
While sitting with officers, Nassar denied ever performing any type of intervaginal therapy on any of his patients, primarily because he knew such treatments offered no real medical benefit and had only been a means to abuse. There would be no way to justify them. His explanation was that Rachel was either misremembering facts or was simply lying for attention. He and his attorneys then told the IndyStar essentially the same thing, but when the public learned of this outright denial, many, many phone calls began pouring in.
As it turns out, Nassar had effectively kicked the hornet’s nest by lying about his use of intervaginal therapy, causing all the women whom Nassar had abused throughout the years in this manner to begin coming forward to back up Rachel’s claims. First, there were a dozen. Then there were two dozen. By the end of the month, there were over fifty, and all of them were out for blood.
Aly Raisman, Jessica Howard, Jeanette Antolin, Gabby Douglas, and Kaylee Lorincz were just a few notable names who stepped forward alongside many others who wished to remain anonymous. Sixteen of those fifty then quickly filed formal complaints with the local authorities as well.
Now, faced with such an overwhelming surge of allegations, Ingham County police had no choice but to arrest Nassar; he was charged with three counts of first-degree criminal sexual misconduct, one of which was with a girl under the age of 13. This charge stemmed from his abuse of Kyle Stephens, who was now a woman in her 20s.
After this, Nassar began to realize he was well and truly screwed; there would be no talking his way out of this one. In court, he pled not guilty and was allowed to return home after posting a $1M bond; however, that home was empty. Stephanie had taken the children and left, justifiably abandoning him to the wolves. He soon also lost his election after receiving around 20% of the vote and was forced to resign from his position at MSU. And things only kept going downhill for him after this.
In a public statement after Nassar’s release, law enforcement assured the public that, while the doctor had been released on bond, they did not believe he would be free for long. More charges would be filed in the coming days as complaints were still flooding in; the prosecutor’s office just needed time to sift through everything.
Now, sitting at home alone and watching his life fall apart, Nassar then a made another critical error: afraid his home was about to be raided, he attempted to hastily dispose of several hard drives by placing them in a garbage bin outside his home to be collected. As it turns out, he was right about the raid, and officers had been assigned to surveil him in order to watch for any signs of evidence dumping. These officers were able to move in and recover those hard drives before they were hauled away and lost.
When searched, the drives initially appeared empty, but forensic investigators were eventually able to recover over 37,000 images and videos of child pornography, some of which was homemade. In one video, Nassar could be seen molesting a girl in a swimming pool. He was then re-arrested and new charges were filed in federal court for both the images and for tampering with evidence.
Now, at this point, we’re going to start speeding up because a lot happens in the next year, 2017. First, after finally sifting through all the reports and evidence, police filed charges for 22 new counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct with a minor: 15 in Ingham County and 7 in nearby Eaton County. This meant that Nassar would be facing trials in three separate courts, two local and one federal. In January, while he was awaiting those trials, Staphanie filed for divorce.
Three months later, in April, his medical license was suspended, and in June, his parental rights were terminated. After this, it seems Nassar saw the writing on the wall and fully gave up.
On July 11th, 2017, he pled guilty to three federal charges related to the creation of child pornography. Then, on November 22nd, while awaiting sentencing from Judge Janet T. Neff, he then accepted a plea deal for seven counts of first-degree sexual assault in Ingham County. Seven days later, he then accepted another plea deal for 3 additional counts in Eaton County.
As part of these plea deals, prosecutors agreed to not bring forth any new charges against Nassar for two reasons: firstly, it was assumed his sentence would be more than enough to see him locked away for life, and secondly, because women were still coming forward. By the start of 2018, there were over 135 victims, including one who stated Nassar had sexually assaulted her all the way back when he was a medical student at MSU. Police knew they didn’t have the resources to investigate all the claims—and, as suspected, it made little difference in the end.
At his sentencing in December, Nassar received three consecutive 20-year prison sentences. Early the following year, he was then given an additional 175 years in Ingham County as well as up to 125 years in Eaton County, thus all but assuring he would someday die in prison.
These harsh sentences were handed down after Nassar’s victims were finally given a chance to confront him in court, to say what many of them had wanted to say since they were girls. In total, 159 women gave separate victim impact statements at his sentencing. This process took 7 grueling days, during which time most of them told heartbreaking specifics about their experiences. They also took the chance to revel in the fact that Nassar was finally facing real justice.
One anonymous woman, who Nassar had lured to his home in 1996 under the guise of participating in a medical study, said: “I knew when I left there that something had happened. I didn’t know I was sexually abused. I just knew that I felt really uncomfortable and that something had gone on, but I didn’t know what.”
Another, who also wished to remain anonymous, asked: “Who was that first girl? Am I her? Do you even remember? Do you even remember what we will never forget? Can you even remember, Larry, when it all began?”
However, by far one of the most powerful quotes of the day came from Kyle Stephens, whose father had taken his own life by this point:
“Perhaps you have figured it out by now, but little girls don’t stay little forever. They grow into strong women who return to destroy your world.”
Penny and the FBI
Now, with Nassar behind bars for the remainder of his miserable life and his victims having finally received closure, I wish it were time to write the wrap-up for this episode; however, I can’t do that just yet because there is still quite a bit more to discuss…
Remember a couple sections ago when I said that Stephen Penny Jr was possibly the biggest villain in this story besides Nassar? Well, we haven’t even gotten into the worst of his actions—nor have we discussed why Nassar “voluntarily resigned” from USAG in 2015. We also haven’t talked about the FBI’s failure that I teased in the intro, but that’s okay because these three things are all interconnected.
So, if you’ll bear with me for just a moment, we’ll slow down and back up to early 2015—to over 18 months before Rachel Denhollander stepped forward—and talk about how Stephen Penny Jr successfully conspired with a rogue FBI agent to cover up Nassar’s crimes. This section revolves around the abuse of three women, one of whom was Olympian McKayla Maroney.
In the early spring of 2015, gold-medalist Makayla Maroney, who was 20 years old at the time, told her parents that Larry Nassar had abused her at Károlyi Ranch from the time she was 13 until she was 16. She didn’t go into specifics with them, but her vague admission prompted them to reach out and file a complaint with USA Gymnastics anyway, specifically with CEO Stephen Penny. They hoped, as any sensible person would, action would be taken swiftly, yet they didn’t hear back from him for several months, despite following up several times.
It wasn’t until they threatened to take their complaint to the authorities that McKayla was told the FBI’s local field office in Indianapolis, Indianna would like to speak with her. The FBI then scheduled a phone interview with her several days later, where McKayla bravely told them as much as she could while sitting alone on the floor of her bedroom.
During that call, Mckayla revealed the full, horrific details of her abuse, right down to the smallest minutia, much of which she had never disclosed to anyone before. She told the agent how she had first met Nassar at Károlyi Ranch after an injury and how his abuse had started within minutes of them being introduced. She told them how mortified she had felt during and after the abuse, how that feeling had stuck with her, and how merely thinking about everything would trigger a days-long bout of PTSD.
She told them how Nassar had continued to abuse her as she competed all around the world, how he would deliberately pull strings so that she would be his last patient of the day so they could spend hours together in his office. She told them how he had molested her the day she won her gold medal at the London Olympics in 2012, permanently tainting that memory, and so many others, for the rest of her life.
After this, McKayla then went on to give details about one specific night inside a hotel in Tokyo in 2011, when she was then traveling to compete in the Gymnastics World Championships. At some point during that trip, Nassar had drugged her with sleeping pills, and she had awoken in the middle of the night inside his hotel room, naked, and being abused. Deathly afraid, she had laid as still and as quiet as possible, all but certain he was going to kill her once he was finished, but he did not. He had allowed her to walk away from his hotel room, and she had spent the remainder of the night wandering the halls, alone in a foreign city at only 16, unsure of what to do with herself.
After McKayla was finished telling this and more to the agent, she claimed to have heard nothing but silence for at a least a minute before a disinterested voice on the other end of the line coldly asked: “…is that all?”
At this point, McKayla felt her heart sink as she immediately knew from his annoyed tone that he was not going to help her in any way. Despite pouring her heart out, she believed nothing would happen to Nassar—and she was right. Nassar was allowed to “retire” from USA Gymnastics without Penny or the FBI ever releasing any information about his crimes or her statements. She also did not receive a follow up from the FBI until after Nassar had been arrested in 2016, approximately 13 months later.
He basically got to walk away scot-free.
When the media started reporting on McKayla’s story after Nassar’s arrest, as well as similar accounts from multiple other girls, the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) stepped forward to say they would be opening an investigation into the FBI to determine why complaints had been ignored. And when the results of that investigation were released, the public was both shocked and horrified. Behind the scenes, serious corruption was happening inside the FBI, leading some to call Nassar’s botched investigation one of the FBI’s “greatest failures of the past several decades.”
You see, what McKayla and her parents were not aware of was that Steven Penny had tried his hardest to bury the allegations against Nassar the way he buried allegations against many other USAG employees: by stonewalling the victims and hoping the complainants would go away. Most of the time, this strategy worked; however, McKayla and her family were relentless in their pursuit of justice and stayed on Penny’s ass, creating a massive headache for him and the entire USAG staff. After several months of complaints, Penny was forced to act, yet he wasn’t done pulling strings to protect USAG.
When Penny reached out to the FBI on McKayla’s behalf, he spoke with a special agent named Jay Abbot, who was acting as the Special Agent in Charge of the Indianapolis field office. Penny told Abbot he was worried about USAG’s reputation and concerned he may face criminal liability himself if Nassar’s crimes were to be exposed. Following this conversation, the two then met up privately at a nearby bar to discuss a job opportunity for Abbott as the head of security for the US Olympic Committee. Penny claimed to be able to put in a good work for Abbott at the USOC, and it was implied that his recommendation would only be given if Abbott helped him sweep McKayla’s allegations under the rug.
For some reason, the OIG’s report found, Abbott and his men then did a very, very poor job of investigating the claims against Nassar. In total, only about 8 small pages of handwritten notes were taken by all the agents during McKayla’s statement, most of which were just basic information and did not include specifics about her abuse. There was no mention of drugging, no mention of Tokyo, no mention of anything that would warrant a follow up. There were also no notes at all from two other girls who Penny had been forced to file reports about because those two had not even been interviewed.
Furthermore, only 45 emails and text messages relating to the investigation were exchanged among all the agents at the field office, after which Abbott decided not to forward anything to his bosses at the FBI’s Lansing Resident Agency.
Obviously, it was clear to anyone who looked that catching Nassar was by no means Abbott’s top priority. He wanted the job working for the USOC, which paid considerably more than his current job.
In the OIG’s executive summary, they stated:
“Despite the extraordinarily serious nature of the allegations and the possibility that Nassar’s conduct could be continuing, senior officials in the FBI Indianapolis Field Office failed to respond to the Nassar allegations with the utmost seriousness and urgency that they deserved and required, made numerous and fundamental errors when they did respond to them, and violated multiple FBI policies…”
However, that’s still not all Abbott did. The report also found that, in an attempt to cover his own ass, Abbot had falsified internal memos related to the investigation, lied to OIG investigators while giving his own statement regarding Mckayla’s statement, and released false information to the media to make it seem his office had not dropped the ball. All of this had been done as a direct response to Nassar’s story gaining traction in the media.
In the end, it was clear that agent Abbott’s actions had resulted in Nassar going free and abusing girls for at least 13 more months after McKayla gave her statement; however, to this day neither he nor anyone else from the FBI has ever been criminally charged for their failures. In 2022, federal prosecutors claimed there was simply not enough direct evidence for a successful prosecution, despite the findings of the OIG.
Abbott retired from the FBI in January of 2018 and does not respond to media inquiries.
Penny was never held accountable for orchestrating this coverup either—nor was he held accountable for the other crimes he allegedly committed: after the Nassar scandal broke, Penny allegedly attempted to orchestrate a coverup of his own on behalf of USAG by ordering all medical records bearing Nassar’s name be removed from Károlyi Ranch and hand delivered to him in Indianapolis. He did this after learning Texas police were planning a raid on the ranch. Those records have never been recovered to this day.
For this, Penny was indicted on September 28, 2018, which is how we know about his alleged actions. However, those charges were eventually dropped four years later when federal authorities announced: “There is now insufficient evidence to prosecute according to current law and facts present in the case.”
Like Agent Abbot, this allowed Penny to walk away without ever spending a single day in prison.
Ongoing Fallout
The last thing we need to discuss today is what became of the other people in our story, people like John Geddert, the Károlyis, Gary Stollak, as well as the organizations they worked for, because you’d better believe there were many, many civil lawsuits in the wake of this scandal.
USA Gymnastics, along with the United States Olympic Committee, were ordered to pay $380M to Nassar’s victims. Penny was also forced to step down shortly before USAG declared bankruptcy. The organization has now reopened with a new board of directors and a government-mandated oversight committee.
As for Károlyi Ranch, it was shuttered in 2017 amid the allegations. No charges were ever filed against either Béla or Márta because it could never be proven they had knowledge of any particular abuse. They are both now fully retired.
John Geddert, on the other hand, was charged on February 25, 2021. He was accused of 20 counts of human trafficking and forced labor, one count of sexual assault, one count of second-degree sexual assault, one count of racketeering, and one count of lying to a police officer. For these, he was facing up to 24 years in prison; however, he would never face trial. After seeing how Nassar’s life had been thoroughly destroyed, he decided to end his own life at a rest area along interstate 96 just hours after the charges were filed.
He was 63 years old.
Sarah Klien, one of his accusers, said the following: “His suicide is an admission of guilt that the entire world can now see…”
As for people in hot water at MSU, we’ve already mentioned that Gary Stollak was stripped of his medical license in 2018, but Nassar’s victims claim at least 11 other people from MSU had knowingly ignored Nassars crimes for years, despite laws that necessitate they come forward. These were people who had been warned or witnessed something that should have caused them to file a police report, yet none of them did. Among those named were MSU President Lou Anna Simon, Dr Brooke Lemmen, Psychiatrist Lionel Rosen, Supervisor Rebecca Cass, Coach Kathie Klages, Coach Kelli Bert, and five athletic trainers. Of those, President Lou Anna Simon and Coach Kathie Klages were the two who got the most coverage; however, even they avoided jail.
Lou Anna Simon was charged with 2 felonies and 2 misdemeanors after authorities announced she had lied about her knowledge of Nassar’s crimes in an official police interview. Prosecutors stated she had been aware of an incident of assault in 2014, 2 years prior to the IndyStar’s article; however, a judge eventually dismissed the charges in 2020.
Similarly, Kathie Klages was charged with two counts of lying to police, and she was eventually found guilty and sentenced to 90 days in jail and 18 months of probation. However, that conviction was overturned in 2020 after the Michigan Court of Appeals determined her false statements had been “inconsequential, rather than material.” The charges were then fully dismissed in November of 2022.
In the end, MSU was ordered to pay over $500M in settlements to athletes and fines for violating mandatory reporting laws. Likewise, for Agent Abbot’s failure’s, the FBI was forced to pay out $138.7M to his victim in April of this year, 2024, making it clear this story is still very much ongoing. Victims are also still coming forward; the current estimate is now between 250 and 300.
As of today, Nassar himself is still imprisoned, and his time there has reportedly been brutal. In 2023, he was stabbed six times by a gang of inmates who targeted him for being a pedophile. From this, he nearly died. He now states he lives in constant fear for his life… OH NO!
Key Takeaways
- Larry Nassar sexually abused over 250 young gymnasts under the guise of legitimate medical treatment for decades.
- USA Gymnastics, Michigan State University, and the FBI actively covered up or ignored reports of Nassar’s abuse for years.
- Coach John Geddert’s physically and verbally abusive environment helped isolate victims and enabled Nassar’s predatory behavior.
- The Indianapolis Star’s 2016 exposé on USA Gymnastics finally triggered the investigation that led to Nassar’s arrest and conviction.
- Despite massive civil settlements, most institutional enablers including Stephen Penny and FBI agent Jay Abbott faced no criminal consequences.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many victims have been identified in the Larry Nassar case?
The current estimate is between 250 and 300 victims. Over 250 teenagers and young girls were victimized under the guise of legitimate healthcare, and by the start of 2018, there were over 135 victims who had come forward.
What was Larry Nassar’s educational and career background before becoming a doctor?
Nassar earned a bachelor’s degree in Kinesiology from the University of Michigan, then enrolled in a master’s degree program at Wayne State University. In 1988, he dropped out to attend MSU’s College of Osteopathic Medicine, graduating with a sports medicine degree in 1993. He originally planned to become an athletic trainer, having worked as a student athletic trainer at age 15.
What was the ‘intervaginal adjustment’ that Nassar claimed to perform?
The ‘intervaginal adjustment’ was one of Nassar’s common fake therapies that involved inserting his finger inside girls to massage a supposed ‘pressure point’ that allegedly offered pain relief. Many girls reported Nassar did not wear gloves during these sessions, claiming gloves were ‘too restrictive’ on his fingers. These adjustments were not legitimate medical treatments.
How did the Indianapolis Star’s 2016 exposé contribute to Nassar’s downfall?
The Indianapolis Star published an exposé titled ‘A Blind Eye to Sex Abuse: How USA Gymnastics Failed to Report Cases,’ revealing USAG’s policy of only reporting sexual abuse complaints when they were in writing and signed by the victim or parents. While Nassar was not named in this first article, the investigation inspired Rachel Denhollander to email the newspaper the same day, reporting her abuse by Nassar and becoming the first to publicly accuse him.
What role did FBI agent Jay Abbott play in covering up Nassar’s crimes?
Jay Abbott, Special Agent in Charge of the Indianapolis FBI field office, conspired with USAG CEO Stephen Penny to bury McKayla Maroney’s 2015 allegations. Abbott met with Penny at a bar where Penny implied he could recommend Abbott for a head of security job at the US Olympic Committee in exchange for helping cover up the allegations. Abbott’s office took only about 8 pages of handwritten notes during Maroney’s detailed statement, failed to interview two other victims, did not forward information to FBI superiors, and later falsified internal memos and lied to investigators.
What were the legal consequences for Nassar?
Nassar received three consecutive 20-year prison sentences in federal court for child pornography charges, plus an additional 175 years in Ingham County and up to 125 years in Eaton County for sexual assault. He pled guilty to three federal charges related to child pornography creation in July 2017, and to seven counts of first-degree sexual assault in Ingham County in November 2017, plus three additional counts in Eaton County.
What happened to John Geddert after charges were filed against him?
John Geddert was charged on February 25, 2021 with 20 counts of human trafficking and forced labor, one count of sexual assault, one count of second-degree sexual assault, one count of racketeering, and one count of lying to a police officer. He faced up to 24 years in prison but committed suicide at a rest area along interstate 96 just hours after the charges were filed. He was 63 years old.
How much were USA Gymnastics and the US Olympic Committee ordered to pay in settlements?
USA Gymnastics, along with the United States Olympic Committee, were ordered to pay $380 million to Nassar’s victims. Additionally, MSU was ordered to pay over $500 million in settlements to athletes and fines for violating mandatory reporting laws, and the FBI was forced to pay out $138.7 million to victims in April 2024.
What was Kyle Stephens’ experience when she first reported Nassar’s abuse to her parents?
When Kyle Stephens told her mother at age 12 that ‘when Larry massages my feet, he uses his penis,’ her father interrogated her and didn’t believe her. Her parents later had a meeting with Nassar and her therapist Gary Stollak without her present, then made her apologize to Nassar after her father threatened to ‘make your life a living hell’ if she didn’t recant. Kyle’s father committed suicide in 2016 after learning she had been telling the truth all along.
What was the environment like at Károlyi Ranch that enabled Nassar’s abuse?
Károlyi Ranch was run by Béla and Márta Károlyi like a bootcamp with strict schedules, isolation from parents, and controlled diets of only 900 calories per day. Girls were housed in dormitories with no parental visits allowed, especially during Olympic leadups. Nassar was allowed to treat girls completely unsupervised in his office and in their private dorm rooms, even after lights went out. Girls were explicitly told to contact Nassar if they had problems rather than their personal coaches.
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: Larry Nassar: The Olympics’ Most Prolific Predator
- Hero image source by Canmenwalker / openverse, by.
