Noteworthy not just because Raisman is an Olympic celebrity but because, amid a galaxy of Weinsteins and Tobacks and Halperins and other prominent accused degenerates, the man she’s accusing may be the very worst of all. She says it was Larry Nassar, the doctor for Team USA, who victimized her.
Who’s Larry Nassar? Glad you asked. From an NBC story filed last December:
| Dr. Larry Nassar, who was a doctor for USA Gymnastics for almost 20 years, was arrested last week on federal child pornography charges. He had previously been charged with sexually abusing a young girl at his home and is named in more than 60 police complaints and three lawsuits… More than 37,000 images and videos of child pornography, some featuring girls as young as six, were seized from his home… A Go Pro contained video of Nassar allegedly molesting girls in a pool. |
Nassar later pleaded guilty to the child porn charges. If his name rings a bell, there’s a reason. Another celebrated Olympian, McKayla Maroney, claimed in October that she was routinely abused by Nassar while a member of Team USA too:
| On her verified Twitter account, Maroney made the allegation under the “#MeToo” hashtag, saying that Nassar abused her under the guise of providing “medically necessary treatment.” That “treatment” began when she was 13, continued during her stellar performance at the 2012 London Olympics and only ended when she left the sport in 2016, Maroney said… Maroney wrote that the scariest night of her life occurred with Nassar when she was 15 years old. “I had flown all day and night with the team to get to Tokyo. He’d given me a sleeping pill for the flight, and the next thing I know, I was all alone with him in his hotel room getting a ‘treatment.’ I thought I was going to die that night,” she wrote. |
Raisman doesn’t say in this short clip what sort of “treatment” she was subjected to but this is merely a sneak preview of a longer interview that’s set to air on Sunday night. Currently there are — no typo — more than 140 women and girls suing Nassar. Meanwhile he’s facing 22 separate counts in Michigan of criminal sexual conduct for allegedly digitally penetrating his patients for his own sexual pleasure. He joined Team USA as a trainer more than 30 years ago and became the team doctor in the mid 1990s, where he remained until leaving quietly in 2015 after complaints about him began to surface. Given the sheer volume of complaints against him, it’s not crazy to suspect that he may have assaulted literally every member of Team USA women’s gymnastics over the past 20 years.
Two obvious questions. One: What else did Nassar do to them besides penetrating them manually under the guise of giving them an exam? It sounds like whatever happened to Maroney in that hotel room went way beyond “treatment.” And needless to say, Nassar wouldn’t be giving “treatments” to girls in a pool.
Two: What did Team USA know and when did they know it? Over nearly 30 years, *no one* in the organization heard anything about Nassar whether from the gymnasts themselves, athletes he treated at Michigan State, or patients in his private practice? Apparently a police complaint was filed against Nassar as far back as 2004 but he never informed Michigan State (or, presumably, Team USA) of it. At least one athlete had complained about him before then, though: A softball player at Michigan State claims that she was molested by Nassar 10 times starting as far back as 1998. When she told a supervisor about it, she was supposedly warned, “He’s a world-renowned doctor. He treats elite athletes, athletes just like yourself… It was basically — you need to be grateful you are getting this treatment. She made me feel like I was crazy.” When Nassar finally did resign from Team USA in 2015 over questions about his “treatments,” the organization neglected to warn Michigan State — where he went on treating patients until late 2016.
Nineteen years as team doctor, multiple gymnasts now on the record, an apparently gigantic number of victims across his various practices — and no one at Team USA heard anything until two years ago? Better hope that’s true or this is going to be a blockbuster lawsuit. Exit question: If it turns out Team USA *was* warned repeatedly about Nassar and did nothing, should it be a defense that they had no duty to dismiss him because he’d never be found guilty in a court of law? If not, if they should have bounced him on credible suspicion, why is that a defense for, say, Roy Moore staying in the race?
