The Best American Sports Writing 2019

by Charles P. Pierce

  The prestige conferred on Nassar by his volunteer position at the Olympics, by both the parents of gymnasts and clinical sports medicine in general, is hard to overstate and hard, from the outside, to understand. That Nassar was an inexperienced physician who had just finished his residency in ’96 did not seem to matter, because in sports medicine the caliber of athlete one treats is taken to be correlated with curative power. Hospitals pay millions of dollars for the privilege of treating sports teams; UC–San Diego Health, for example, pays $1 million to treat the Padres.

  Nassar covered the walls of his office with signed pictures of Olympians and gave girls he favored Olympics patches, pins, and jackets. Parents interviewed for this article come from diverse backgrounds and have daughters at very different levels of gymnastics competition, but they all once shared an astonished gratitude that Nassar would even see their kids. The circular quality of this claim to competence became clear in the testimony of parents of actual Olympians; they too were told their kids were lucky to see Larry, who wouldn’t be in his position if he didn’t know what he was doing. Whether they believed this or not, they were required to leave their kids for weeks in Huntsville, Texas, at Karolyi Ranch, where the showers were moldy and the blankets stained and the food so bad the kids were always hungry; where there were no parents, and cell-phone service was spotty, and Nassar would knock on their doors at night, bearing candy, to treat them in their beds. If this was drift, it was drift straight into the least-monitored space full of young girls, into a position of authority requiring a decade of career building, in a specialty that allowed him particular latitude.

  V

  * * *

  The trick was to establish traditional medical credibility and then get weird. A mother we’ll call Jane began bringing her gymnast daughter, Kate, to Nassar when Kate was eight and suffering from back pain. Larry diagnosed her with spondylolisthesis, a spinal disorder. When a pediatric spine specialist confirmed the diagnosis, Jane, who has some medical training, was impressed that Larry, a generalist, had caught it. When he started using cupping—a practice in which suction is said to release muscles—she went with it. When he invited them over to his house to administer manipulations to Kate in his basement, she went with that too.

  William Sands, the scientist Larry idolized, was at Karolyi Ranch doing research when he walked in on Larry inserting acupuncture needles into a gymnast’s back. “I rolled my eyes and walked out,” he said. “This is such a crock of pseudoscientific bullshit that I don’t want anything to do with it. And cupping? Give me a freaking break.” Sands was so offended he cut off contact.

  Alternative treatments, along with frequent references to presentations given and conferences attended, lent Nassar a useful air of the creative scientist. Who knew what he would try next? But his best cover—the story that would get him out of police stations and back into exam rooms—was not in fact pseudoscientific bullshit. As his career progressed, he began to develop a research interest in the musculature of the pelvis: the sacrotuberous ligament in particular. He developed, for instance, two PowerPoint presentations called “Pelvic Floor: Where No Man Has Gone Before” and “Pelvic Floor: The Final Frontier.” He was associating himself with evidence that back and hip problems can be addressed through pelvic-floor physical therapy, which is, according to J. Welles Henderson, an OB/GYN and clinical professor specializing in pelvic disorders at University Hospitals in Cleveland, “mainstream medicine,” “a first-line treatment,” and “backed by 30 years of well-established research” on patients with weak or spastic pelvic floors. (Sands, for his part, still considers it a “crock of shit.”)

  There is, according to Rhonda Kotarinos, a pelvic-floor physical therapist and the author of several studies on the subject, a correlation between pelvic-floor dysfunction and strenuous exercise in young female athletes for reasons that remain speculative but may have something to do with the way developing the glutes over-recruits the pelvis, leading those muscles to shorten. Pelvic pain not uncommonly presents as lower-back pain. It would not be out of the ordinary for a trusted, almost always female specialist in pelvic disorders to enter the vagina, palpate the levator ani against the grain of the muscle fiber, and look for painful trigger points that suggest the muscle has lost the capacity to fully elongate or shorten. Opinions vary on whether PFPT is an appropriate treatment for young women, but unambiguously damning was the fact that Nassar hardly ever explained what he was doing, never gained consent, never used gloves, and found it necessary for ankle and knee injuries. He did not use the phrase “pelvic-floor physical therapy”; when he did explain himself, which was rare, he called it “myofascial release” or “intravaginal adjustment.”

  He didn’t call it anything when he molested Chloe Myers, another young woman who was suffering from debilitating back pain with a bent coccyx and facet-joint syndrome. He covered Chloe in a blanket and positioned himself between her and her chatty, outgoing mother, Kristen, a few feet away. It wasn’t until he stopped and washed his hands that Kristen wondered where his hands had been. It occurred to her that he wouldn’t have to wash his hands if he had merely been touching her daughter’s leg. It occurred to her that if he had done an internal exam, she would have expected him to wear gloves. In the car on the way home, Chloe said that his hands had been “way up in there” and that it had been uncomfortable. Kristen was alarmed. But Chloe also said she felt much better. She continued to feel better every time she went back.

  Like many women and many parents of female athletes, Kristen knew of treatments that involve vaginal penetration; Chloe’s chiropractor had mentioned something. “I did know there was a legitimate treatment that could help, internally, like an internal adjustment,” she says. “I was aware of it. And this was Larry. So it was no big surprise that he was trying some kind of alternative treatment.”

  Some women were surprised. Directly after Nassar touched her in 2004, 17-year-old Brianne Randall filed a complaint with Meridian Township police and had a rape kit administered at the local hospital. Detective Andrew McCready called Nassar and asked him to come in for questioning, which he did. Nassar told McCready that he had indeed touched Brianne’s perineum, that it was part of a treatment called “sacro-tuberous-ligament release,” and that the treatment was “published in medical journals and training tapes.” He also gave McCready his PowerPoint presentation on said ligament, in which he is pictured cupping a girl’s buttocks and pressing near a girl’s vulva. McCready then called Brianne’s mother to tell her the case would be closed and that “no crime was committed.”

  When, in 2014, cheerleader Amanda Thomashow reported an assault to one of MSU’s Title IX investigators and university police, the latter launched an investigation and referred the case to prosecutors for review. The office of Ingham County prosecutor Stuart Dunnings concluded that the prosecution “would not be able to sustain [its] burden at trial” and declined to prosecute. Dunnings was later charged, imprisoned, and disbarred for soliciting prostitutes.

  MSU Title IX investigator Kristine Moore launched her own investigation. She interviewed three osteopathic physicians and one athletic trainer. All four found Nassar’s conduct to be medically appropriate. All of them worked for MSU and knew Nassar personally. Dr. William Strampel, the dean of the College of Osteopathic Medicine at MSU, instructed Nassar to have a chaperone in the room and avoid skin-to-skin contact, though he never enforced these new rules and Nassar would not follow them. Strampel has since been arrested and charged with, among other things, sexually harassing and groping female medical students.

  Thomashow, concluded Moore, failed to understand the “nuanced difference” between osteopathic manipulative medicine and sexual massage. “Dr. Nassar has presented on this nationally and internationally,” reads the Title IX report, “has videos posted to the web that explain the procedure, and is widely known for this work . . . We cannot find that the conduct was medically inappropriate and thus cannot find it was sexual in nature.” That “vi
deos posted to the web,” presentations, and PowerPoints are distinct from peer-reviewed publications seems not to have occurred to MSU, the Ingham County prosecutor’s office, or Meridian Township detectives; nor does the idea that people Nassar has worked with, and in some cases mentored, are poor sources of objective testimony. This was not stellar police work, but it was the level of investigatory prowess available to the women of Michigan, and it was precisely the level of scrutiny Nassar’s cover was designed to weather, right up until the day a former gymnast named Rachael Denhollander emailed the Indianapolis Star.

  VI

  * * *

  When the Star broke the story, in September 2016, and all of elite gymnastics read it, not a single person interviewed for this piece believed that Denhollander and a second, anonymous accuser had been assaulted by Nassar. Dawn Homer asked Trinea Gonczar whether Larry could be capable of such a thing, and Trinea said, unreservedly, “No.” She waited patiently for medical experts to come forward and defend the practice.

  “They’re describing,” Chloe Myers told her parents, “the exact same treatment I was receiving.” It had helped her back pain, she reasoned, and thus was legitimate. “They weren’t remembering right,” Chloe’s father concluded. Nassar asked his colleague, fellow osteopathic physician Steven Karageanes, to lend him his support, and Karageanes said he would. Parents concluded that Nassar had, in his boundless generosity—all those extra appointments in his home, free of charge—“put himself in a bad position” and allowed his treatments to be “misconstrued.” William Sands thought it would all blow over. According to the Wall Street Journal, Dean William Strampel had this to say to students at a meeting at MSU: “This just goes to show that none of you learned the most basic lesson in medicine, Medicine 101: Don’t trust your patients. Patients lie to get doctors in trouble.” Kathie Klages asked her gymnasts to sign a card that read, THINKING OF YOU.

  Denhollander’s allegations were backed by a growing list of accusers; there were by February 2017 at least 50 complaints to the police. If Michigan was paying attention, it was hard to tell. Parents of gymnasts continued driving their girls from Twistars to his house for treatments. Larry ran for school board, pulled out, and still got 2,700 votes. Not even Larissa Boyce, who had accused him of molesting her in 1997 and been shut down by Klages, believed Denhollander’s account. “I had convinced myself,” she says, “that it was a medical treatment.”

  “No one was buying it yet,” says Karageanes. “There was no quote-unquote evidence. He had supporters lined up to defend him. It would have taken a monumental effort from the first people coming out to get the public on their side.”

  Although, much later, the only story line American media would be able to process was one of a “survivor” who had “found her voice” and was ready to “take on” her abuser in open court, it did not appear to be a woman at all who had persuaded those closest to this story, including most of the “survivors,” to come forward. It was, rather, a set of external hard drives—tossed to the curb in the trash in the days after Denhollander went public, on a day when the garbage crew was behind schedule, and recovered by the FBI. Had the crew been on time, had the agents been late, had the warrant come through a day after Nassar decided to dump his digital history on the street, he might still have the support of most of the people he abused.

  Healthy people tend not to distinguish between varieties of child pornography or think much about the habits of its consumption, but Nassar’s accumulation of more than 37,000 images suggests an unusual level of deviance even among pedophiles. According to a sentencing memorandum issued by federal prosecutors for the Western District of Michigan, these images form a particularly “graphic” and “hard-core” collection, including children as young as infants and images of children being raped by adults.

  Here was a fact that one simply could not integrate into the image of a dedicated doctor attacked by confused or malicious women. The story stopped making sense. Mothers struggled to find a way to ask their girls whether they’d been digitally penetrated at the gym. Parents awoke for the first time to the possibility that their daughters’ first sexual experience had taken place at the hands of Larry Nassar, often as said parent watched from a few feet away. “Did Larry do anything to you?” Michael Weiszbrod, an affable state administrator, asked his 13-year-old daughter, Ashleigh, a few times, and she shook her head no. He and his wife took this as authoritative until one day, months later, when Weiszbrod found himself watching Nassar’s sentencing hearing at work. He was thinking about another physician who worked at the gym, Brooke, whom Larry was training. When he got home, he put down his bag and turned directly to Ashleigh, who was hunched over her homework, legs crossed on the couch. “Did Larry touch you,” he asked, “different than Brooke touched you?” Ashleigh was very still, and then she was crying. She had seen Larry at Twistars once a week for three years.

  Jane asked Kate, 14 at the time, whether she thought Larry was guilty, and Kate said no. Jane left it alone for a while. Later, in the car, Jane’s husband asked their daughter whether she knew what Nassar had been accused of, and she said yes. He asked if Nassar had done treatments to her that “fell into this category,” and she said yes. He asked if there had been penetration, and she said, “Dad, this is hard to talk about.”

  In the light of day, parents thought about the choices they’d made, hearing them in a new and horrifying light. “All of a sudden, the stuff you think is normal coming out of somebody else’s mouth doesn’t sound normal,” says Jane.

  It did not sound normal, for instance, that every week after practice, Jane had driven her daughter to a white three-bedroom house with green shutters, next to many identical houses in a development on a quiet street in Holt, Michigan, and taken her to see a man in the basement of that house. It didn’t seem normal that he never billed for these visits or that he always had hot chocolate waiting.

  “I hear myself telling you this,” says Jane, “and I know it sounds crazy. It sounds crazy! But when I was pulling into his driveway, someone else would be pulling out.”

  A detective told Trinea Gonczar that there were images of little girls in his bathtub—the bathtub in which she had waited, alongside the egg timer—but the detective could not tell her whether she was among them. “That’s when I started to think back and go deep into the places I had been with him,” says Trinea. “How many times I had been to his house. How many times I had been to MSU. How many times I had seen him at the gym. Realizing that there was probably never a time I didn’t have this treatment.”

  VII

  * * *

  The goodwill Nassar built is so resilient that even now it cannot be wholly erased. Trinea’s husband asked her to revise her testimony because it was too kind—people might get the wrong idea. “I don’t hate Larry,” she says. “I don’t want him to be raped and beaten in prison. I feel like the parents of someone who shot up a school. You still love them today like you did yesterday.”

  “I’m still grateful to him,” says Chloe’s mother, and her father wonders aloud whether sometimes he really was just performing vaginal treatments in the interest of his daughter, who, after all, says she is “100 percent sure” the treatments she considers abusive helped her back pain every time. “I don’t know,” he says. “Is it 24/7? So every time he has someone in there? Are there times when he is just doing the treatment?” Says Dawn: “I really believe Larry at some point in his life thought it was the appropriate treatment. I don’t know when he went to the dark side and changed it.”

  Is this their naïveté, or is it ours? Nassar “groomed the entire community,” reads a Lansing State Journal piece from January on the town of Holt. At a certain level of psychological reduction, every friendly conversation, every accurate diagnosis, every accommodation was part of Larry Nassar’s strategy. Did he shovel the neighbors’ snow as part of a plan to gain access to ever more girls? Apart from being an implausibly simplistic picture of a single human mind, this would not ev
en seem to be the ideal psychology for a successful pedophile. A man who takes pleasure in going out of his way for people, who thrives on simple gratitude, who finds actual satisfaction in lifting the spirits of an injured gymnast, is one you risk letting into your life. One you call, as Trinea once did, family.

  “Larry,” she said on the fourth day of Nassar’s sentencing hearing, staring straight at him, voice deep with controlled fury. She had known how young the other accusers would be, but somehow it hadn’t struck her until she walked into that room full of them. They were little girls. Her rage was such that she spoke slowly and almost in a whisper: “What. Have. You. Done.” Between sobs she looked him straight in the eye, cocked her head, and raised her eyebrows, a look of profound disappointment and deep familiarity. Larry had sat emotionless, listening to other women he’d abused, for hours prior to this. Sometimes he shook his head, as if to deny their claims. During Trinea’s testimony, something changed. He started to shake, and then he started to cry.

  “I think his heart broke because my heart broke,” she tells me later. “I was worried the other girls would hate me because of his reaction to me.” There’s pride in her voice, the triumph of having been the one, out of the hundreds, who actually broke through. This may be her win, or it may be his. There are a lot of ways to make a person feel special, and Larry Nassar knows all of them.

  Beth Davies-Stofka

  Winning at the Cost of Silence

  from Baseball Prospectus

  A year ago, we learned that Luke Heimlich, a star pitcher for the Oregon State Beavers, was convicted of sexually molesting his six-year-old niece when he was a teenager. He confessed, was placed on probation, sent to counseling, and was required to register for five years as a sex offender. He did everything that the state of Washington required of him, and none of what it did not, including notifying his team of the crime, until the news was leaked through a bureaucratic error. Then early last month, he sat down for a series of interviews with the New York Times. Now 22, he wants to clear the air because he wants to play in the majors.