Simone Biles and US gymnasts are still speaking truth to the powers that failed them

Simone Biles, McKayla Maroney, Maggie Nichols, and Aly Raisman are still speaking to the systems of power that failed them, calling for change.

It is true that the climate around believing women who come forward about enduring sexual abuse and sexual harassment has changed, for the better, since 2015. The #MeToo movement has largely altered the public tenor of discourse around the topic of sexual abuse allegations.

It is also true that we have a very long way to go, still, before women alleging abuse, even very publicly, can say they were believed, especially when men stand between them and justice. This is even more true when the allegations come from girls, or from women who were girls when their abuse began.

Perhaps no keener illustration of the gap in how men say they want to treat abused women and how men actually treat them when they allege abuse exists than in the testimony delivered Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee by four current and former elite gymnasts. In the end, the committee — which is 75 percent male — had more questions for the women than answers about what happened to them and how it can be prevented in the future.

Simone Biles, McKayla Maroney, Maggie Nichols, and Aly Raisman testified about massive institutional failures — by USA Gymnastics, by the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, by the FBI, by Michigan State University, by local and state governments, and even by Congress itself — that failed to protect them when they spoke up about being abused as teenagers and young women by former national gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar. At every level, within every organization, the gymnasts’ stories were held hostage by powerful men. Steve Penny at USAG. Alan Ashley and Scott Blackmun at the USOPC. The FBI agents who conducted initial interviews with Maroney and Raisman. William Strampel, Nassar’s boss at MSU.

Simone Biles and her fellow gymnasts were failed by the systems that were supposed to protect them

“To be clear,” Biles, the two-time Olympian who made news most recently during the Tokyo Games for withdrawing from most of the competition to deal with mental health issues, said, through tears, in her testimony. “I blame Larry Nassar. And I blame an entire system that enabled and perpetrated his abuse.” She continued: “I believe without a doubt that the circumstances that led to my abuse are directly the result of the fact that the organizations created by Congress to oversee and protect me as an athlete … failed to do their jobs.”

“It was like serving up children to a pedophile on a silver platter,” Raisman, a member of both the 2012 and 2016 Olympic teams, said in her testimony.

2015 was the year then-elite gymnast Maggie Nichols spoke with her fellow athletes at a training camp about feeling uncomfortable with Larry Nassar’s treatments. Nichols’ coach, Sarah Jantzi, overheard Nichols and her friends and reported the details of their conversation to USA Gymnastics, headed at the time by Penny. (Penny was forced to resign as USA Gymnastics’ CEO in 2017 after the scope of Nassar’s abuse became public. He was arrested in 2018 and charged with tampering with evidence related to Nassar’s interactions with elite gymnasts. He pleaded not guilty; the case is pending). A private investigation followed, with Nichols and Aly Raisman both interviewed about Nassar, but USA Gymnastics would say in 2018 that they did not have “a reasonable suspicion that sexual abuse had occurred” after those interviews.

In her Senate testimony, Nichols, who was a star for the University of Oklahoma’s gymnastics team, said that “the survivors of Larry Nassar have a right to know why their well-being was placed in jeopardy by these individuals who chose not to do their jobs.”

2015 was also the year that Maroney, a member of the 2012 Olympic team who had by then retired from the sport, told that FBI agent that she, too, had been abused by Nassar. USA Gymnastics did not even contact the FBI until Maroney, too, alleged abuse after both Nichols and Raisman had been interviewed, five weeks after Nichols first voiced her concerns about Nassar.

That agent, Michael Langeman, was fired last week after an investigative report showed that he never filed a report after speaking with Maroney, then lied about their conversation in the report he did file 17 months later.

Maroney, recounting her conversation with Langeman during her testimony, said that she shared details of her abuse with him that she had not told anyone else only to be met with the response, “Is that all?”

“[That] was one of the worst moments of this entire process for me,” Maroney said. “To have my abuse be minimized and disregarded by the people who are supposed to protect me, just to feel like my abuse was not enough.” Raisman also spoke of the FBI “diminishing” her account of abuse.

There were women, to be sure, involved in the Nassar investigation who did impede justice for his victims. Kathie Klages, the former head coach of the women’s gymnastics team at Michigan State University who discouraged two of the first women to allege abuse by Nassar in the late 1990s from filing sexual assault complaints against him, is one. Lou Anna Simon, the former president of MSU who resigned in 2018 over the handling of the Nassar case at the university, is another.

But by and large, if it were not for a few good women, the stories of women like Biles, Maroney, Nichols, and Raisman, and of the more than 150 women who spoke out against Nassar at his two Michigan sentencing hearings in 2018 following his convictions on sexual assault charges, would still remain the property of men who did nothing to help them.

Jantzi, Nichols’ coach, is widely recognized as the catalyst for the end of Nassar’s tenure at USA Gymnastics. Jantzi herself was stymied by a USAG rule at the time that stipulated that she report alleged abuse to USAG, not to law enforcement, despite being a mandated reporter. But she did believe her athlete, Nichols, and Nichols’ teammates, enough to take their allegations in 2015 to the level where she believed they would be formally dealt with. And what she said was enough to cause Nassar’s retirement from USAG, albeit silently and with no public explanation.

Detective Lieutenant Andrea Munford of the MSU Police Department got a phone call in August 2016 from a woman named Rachael Denhollander, asking to report a sexual assault by an MSU sports medicine doctor: Larry Nassar. From there, Munford was able to build a case against Nassar in partnership with prosecutor Angela Povilatis of the Michigan Attorney General’s office. They focused their investigation on believing Nassar’s victims and letting their voices be heard. Two years later, the case landed Nassar in prison effectively for life.

Denhollander, a month after speaking to Munford and feeling heard, gave an interview to the Indy Star that blew the Nassar case wide open. She had read a previous investigation by the paper detailing how USAG buried reports of sexual abuse. The article connected the dots between Nassar’s abuse of elite gymnasts and his abuse of many other girls and women through his work at MSU. Denhollander became one of the most prominent and vocal survivors throughout the case against Nassar, and Biles quoted her in her Senate testimony. “How much is a little girl worth?” Biles asked the senators — a question posed by Denhollander in her victim impact statement at Nassar’s first sentencing hearing three years ago, and the title of a children’s book she published in 2019 (she also wrote a memoir about the case called “How Much Is a Girl Worth?” that same year).

Judge Rosemarie Aquilina, who presided over Nassar’s first sentencing hearing in Lansing, and who opened her courtroom to the survivors who confronted him, called Denhollander “the bravest person I have ever had in my courtroom.” Aquilina emerged from the seven-day hearing a hero to survivors as they and their relatives spoke about the most painful moments of their lives. It was Aquilina who told Nassar, “I just signed your death warrant” as she sentenced him to 40 to 175 years in prison, and she who told him she “wouldn’t send my dogs to you” when he protested about the parade of survivors confronting him, angrily and often tearfully.

As important as these women are to the survivors of Larry Nassar, though, and despite their collective efforts in seeing justice brought to the survivors, they do not have the power to keep history from repeating itself. And that’s why Biles, Maroney, Nichols, and Raisman spoke Tuesday, and why they asked, again and again, to be heard and believed by the (mostly) men who do have that power. Will they listen?