you because I was afraid that Kathie was going to tell you about my concerns,” she said.
And unfortunately, I was right. I felt ashamed, embarrassed, and overwhelmed that I had talked to Kathie about this. I vividly remember when you walked into that room, closed the door behind you, pulled up your stool and sat down in front of me, and said, “So, I talked to Kathie.” As soon as I heard those words, my heart sank. My confidence had been betrayed. I wanted to crawl into the deepest, darkest hole and hide.
Over the course of Nassar’s career as a sexual predator, there were as many as fourteen occasions in which people in positions of authority were warned that something was amiss with him: parents, coaches, officials. Nothing happened. In September 2016 the Indianapolis Star published a devastating account of Nassar’s record, supported by Denhollander’s accusations. Many people close to Nassar backed him even after this. Nassar’s boss, the Dean of Osteopathic Medicine at Michigan State, allegedly told students, “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 had the gymnasts on her team sign a card for Nassar: “Thinking of you.”
It took the discovery of Nassar’s computer hard drive, with its trove of appalling images, to finally change people’s minds.
When scandals like this break, one of our first inclinations is to accuse those in charge of covering for the criminal—of protecting him, or deliberately turning a blind eye, or putting their institutional or financial interests ahead of the truth. We look for a conspiracy behind the silence. But the Nassar case reminds us how inadequate that interpretation is. Many of Nassar’s chief defenders were the parents of his patients. They weren’t engaged in some kind of conspiracy of silence to protect larger institutional or financial interests. These were their children.
Here is one gymnast’s mother—a medical doctor herself, incidentally—in an interview for Believed, a brilliant podcast about the Nassar scandal. The woman was in the room while Nassar treated her daughter, sitting a few feet away.
And I remember out of the corner of my eye seeing what looked to be potentially an erection. And I just remember thinking, “That’s weird. That’s really weird. Poor guy.” Thinking, like, that would be very strange for a physician to get an erection in a patient’s room while giving her an exam…
But at the time, when you’re in the room, and he’s doing this procedure, you just think he’s being a good doctor and doing his best for your child. He was that slick. He was that smooth.
In another instance, a young girl goes to see Nassar with her father. Nassar puts his fingers inside her, with her dad sitting in the room. Later that day, the gymnast tells her mother. Here is the mother looking back on the moment:
I remember it like it was five seconds ago. I’m in the driver’s seat, she’s in the passenger seat, and she said, “Larry did something to me today that made me feel uncomfortable.”
And I said, “Well, what do you mean?”
“Well, he…touched me.”
And I said, “Well, touched you where?”
And she said, “Down there.” And the whole time you know what she’s saying but you’re trying to rationalize that it can’t be that.
She called her husband and asked him if he had left the room at any time during the appointment? He said he hadn’t.
And…God forgive me, I dropped it. I filed it back in the parenting filing cabinet until 2016.
After a while, the stories all start to sound the same. Here’s another parent:
And she’s sitting in the car very quiet and depressed and saying, “Dad, he’s not helping my back pain. Let’s not go anymore.” But this is Larry. This is the gymnastics doctor. If he can’t cure her, nobody will cure her. Only God has more skills than Larry. “Be patient, honey. It’s gonna take time. Good things take time.” That’s what we always taught our kids. So, I would say, “OK. We’re gonna go again next week. We’re gonna go again the following week. And then you will start seeing the progress.”
She said, “OK, Dad. You know. I trust your judgment.”
The fact that Nassar was doing something monstrous is exactly what makes the parents’ position so difficult. If Nassar had been rude to their daughters, they would have spoken up immediately. If their daughters had said to them on the way home that