Even now she was sitting in court with the others. Seven weeks ago, Simon Biles was doing gymnastics at the Olympic Games in Tokyo, winning bronze on the balance beam, and it was a tough comeback. The 24-year-old was psychologically stressed, but Biles wanted to do gymnastics again, she was afraid of losing her voice in the process that has been with her for years. They call themselves “survivors” who were systematically abused by Larry Nassar, the former doctor of the US association. “I thought that if none of the survivors are still in the sport, they will just brush it aside,” Biles once told NBC about her decision to compete again at the Olympics. After all, pushing aside had a system, at the Gymnastics Federation (USAG), the Olympic and Paralympic Federation (USOPC) – and even the FBI.
One of her heaviest appearances: Simone Biles, McKayla Maroney, Aly Raisman and Maggie Nichols (from left) at the hearing in Washington.
(Photo: Saul Loeb / AP)
At a hearing in Washington on Wednesday, they supported each other, shook hands again before testifying before the Senate: Biles, the four-time Olympic champion, and McKaley Maroney, Aly Raisman and Maggie Nichols, they all have for the U.S. team exercised and carried away beneath Nassar’s wounds. The now 58-year-old was sentenced to 60 years imprisonment in July 2017 for possession of child pornography, and then to another 40 to 175 years in the abuse trial in January 2018. The process of coming to terms with a culture of pushing aside that does not suddenly change just because a perpetrator is in prison is still in progress.
If the FBI doesn’t help, who should you turn to?
“We have been abandoned and we deserve answers,” said Biles on Wednesday: “We have suffered and are still suffering because no one in the FBI, the USAG or the USOPC did what it took to protect us . ” And above all, the question was: Who else can you turn to if the FBI doesn’t help?
Larry Nassar at the 2018 verdict when a court sentenced him to 40 to 175 years in prison for sexual abuse.
(Photo: Rena Laverty / AFP)
On 109 pages, Michael Horowitz, Inspector General of the US Department of Justice, described in a report in July which failures the FBI had piled up in the investigation of the allegations against Nassar and how the delay made a multitude of other abuses possible. 17 months passed between July 2015, when the first incidents were reported to the FBI, and December 2016, when Nassar was arrested. 17 months in which at least 70 athletes were abused again or for the first time by him, as evidenced by documents from a civil court. A shocking circumstance that continues to burden the athletes themselves to this day. “I am haunted by the fact that even after reporting my abuse, so many women and girls have suffered at the hands of Larry Nassar,” said Maggie Nichols on Wednesday. “USA Gymnastics and USOPC have me and all of them were abused by Larry Nassar, betrayed. “
The gymnast described specific abuse – the employee asked: “Is that all?”
Her former teammate Maroney gave a particularly impressive description of how her statements were dealt with. On the phone with an FBI agent, she said Larry Nassar had told her to put on shorts without underwear, “because that would make it easier for him to treat me and in minutes he had his fingers in my vagina.” He also gave her a sleeping pill and when she woke up later he was lying on top of her and abused her for hours. The only reaction on the other end of the line: “Is that all?” Words that, according to Maroney, were one of the worst moments in the entire process, “that my abuse was minimized and ignored by the people who were supposed to be protecting me.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray was also present at the hearing and apologized to Maroney and the other athletes. “I’m sorry for what you and your families went through. I’m sorry for failing so many different people over and over again,” Wray said. In particular, he regretted that there were people at the FBI “who had the chance to stop this monster in 2015 and failed”.
Whereby failure presupposes activity and that was only sparse. The necessary “seriousness and urgency” was lacking even in senior staff, the report noted in July, information was not passed on as prescribed, and there was talk of lying by the employees when it was passed on. An FBI agent who, according to Inspector General Horowitz’s report, had not adequately documented statements, has since been dismissed. Another, who was charged in the report, dropped out as early as 2018. But here, too, the processing is far from over, there will be a separate hearing with FBI boss Wray and Horowitz before the Senate.
“I’m a strong person and I will persevere, but I should never have been left alone to suffer Larry Nassar’s abuse,” said Simone Biles. She wants to keep fighting, despite all the wounds and tears that still come to her when she talks about the worst hours in her sport.