In the decades Larry Nassar spent as one of the most prolific sexual abusers in modern athletics, he abused at least 265 gymnasts. Nassar was convicted almost a year ago and has been sentenced to 175 years in prison, but one of the questions looming behind the astonishing scope of Nassar’s violence persists: How did he get away with his violence for so long?
As ThinkProgress’ Lindsay Gibbs has reported, “it took a village of enablers to allow his abuse to continue for so long, and to devastate the lives of so many victims and their families.” One of those enablers, it is becoming inescapably clear: The United States Olympic Committee.
According to court documents filed Wednesday in a California federal court, the USOC was made aware of sexual abuse in gymnastics more than 20 years before Nassar’s crimes exploded across the news.
As the New York Times reports:
Kathy Scanlan, the president of U.S.A. Gymnastics from 1994 to 1998, said in a sworn statement last month that she had notified the U.S.O.C. of the sexual abuse problem soon after she took charge of the organization. The U.S.O.C.’s response, she said, was to discourage her from using the federation’s established protocol for investigating and disciplining its professional members who were accused of sexual abuse. She said that she had gone ahead and pursued cases the accused anyway.
In her statement, Scanlan wrote that it was this obstruction by the USOC that “would have inhibited me from adequately protecting minor members.” Her statement was just one part of hundreds of pages of documents that were filed Wednesday in a lawsuit filed by two-time Olympian Aly Raisman — a Nassar survivor who has become one of gymnastics’ most high-profile advocates for reform within the sport and for all sexual assault survivors — against Nassar, the USOC, USAG, and others. Nassar was the national team doctor.
The federation and the USOC spent years arguing over the best practices for addressing sexual assault cases, Scanlon’s statement makes clear — until “at least 1999,” the Times reports, at which point “Scanlan’s successor, Bob Colarossi, confronted the USOC in a letter that was unsealed in 2017 as part of another sex abuse case in the sport.”
Colarossi wrote that the Olympic committee had demonstrated an “apparent indifference to the welfare of young children” and that committee members had repeatedly advised responding to reports of abuse by conducting “bare-bones telephonic hearings immediately upon receipt of a sexual abuse complaint.” Colarossi said that was not enough to protect young athletes.
After Colarossi’s departure, Steve Penny became president and chief executive. Penny, too, has faced criticism for his failure to act on behalf of young athletes who needed his protection from a serial sexual predator. After learning that gymnasts had complained about Nassar’s abuse, Penny waited five weeks to contact the FBI.
Penny, who resigned in March 2017, was arrested last month on a felony charge of evidence tampering in an investigation into Nassar in Texas. He allegedly ordered the removal of documents from the national team training center north of Houston, where Nassar regularly worked and the site of many of his assaults, according to his victims. When he was arrested, Texas prosecutors did not yet know where the documents are or if they were destroyed; USAG later said it found documents at its headquarters in Indianapolis that could be the ones in question.
CORRECTION: This article has been updated to reflect that it was the widespread culture of endemic sexual violence in USA Gymnastics that was known about for many years previously, not Larry Nassar’s specific crimes.