Four top-tier gymnasts appeared on Capitol Hill Wednesday morning to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, all detailing the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s badly mishandled investigation of abuse allegations against former USA Gymnastics (USAG) physician Larry Nassar and the resulting trauma felt by his victims.
Simone Biles, Aly Raisman, Maggie Nichols and McKayla Maroney offered — in often grueling and heartbreaking detail — how they felt ignored and taken advantage of by the FBI agents who were supposed to be helping them after they revealed Nassar had sexually abused them, sometimes over the course of multiple years.
Maroney first spoke to the FBI in 2015 about Nassar’s abuse, a painful experience that she said she knew would “give me PTSD for days.”
“I remember sitting on my bedroom floor for nearly three hours as I told them what happened to me,” she said. “I hadn’t even told my own mother about these facts. But I thought as uncomfortable and as hard as it was to tell my story, I was going to make a difference, and hopefully protect others from the same abuse.”
“I disclosed all of my molestations I had endured by Nassar to them in extreme detail,” she said. Maroney detailed to the senators that the abuse started at age 13. She told the FBI how she traveled with him to compete for Team USA in Tokyo just two years later; how he gave her a sleeping pill for the plane, and later, abused her for hours.
Maroney, a member of the gold-medal winning U.S. Olympic gymnastics team in 2012, recounted to senators a night when, at age 15, she found the doctor on top of her while she was naked, one of many times she was abused.
“I thought I was going to die that night,” Maroney said of the incident. “I thought there was no way he was going to let me go. But he did.”
“I began crying at the memory over the phone,” she said Wednesday, her voice breaking for the first time as she recounted telling her story to FBI agents.
But on the other end of the line, Maroney said, “there was just dead silence.”
“After that minute of silence he asked, ‘Is that all?’” Maroney continued. “Those words in itself [were] one of the worst moments of this entire process for me, to have my abuse be minimized and disregarded by the people who were supposed to protect me. Just to feel like my abuse was not enough. But the truth is my abuse was enough. And they wanted to cover it up.”
According to a since-deleted press release from the Indianapolis Field Office, Abbott retired from his position in January 2018.
“The FBI made me feel like my abuse didn't count and it wasn't a big deal,” Raisman also emphasized during her testimony. “And I remember sitting there with the FBI agent and him, trying to convince me that it wasn't that bad.”
“I personally don't think that people realize how much experiencing a type of abuse is not something that one just suffers in the moment, it carries on with them, sometimes for the rest of their lives,” Raisman later added. “For example, being here today is taking everything I have. My main concern is, I hope I have the energy even to just walk out of here.”
Wednesday’s hearing comes in the wake of a recent report by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG) that found senior officials in the FBI made “fundamental errors” when they investigated allegations of sexual abuse against Nassar.
Nichols, now 24, was in 2018 revealed as “Athlete A” — the first gymnast whose coach reported Nassar’s sexual abuse to USA Gymnastics in 2015. Nassar began abusing Nichols when she was 15, and while USA Gymnastics did hire a private investigator to look into the allegations, the organization did not contact the FBI regarding complaints until nearly five weeks later, when Raisman and Maroney confirmed the accusations, along with more of their own.
Biles revealed she was also victimized by Nassar in a lengthy and emotional statement released to social media in early 2018.
Nassar, a physician who was renowned for treating athletes at the sport’s highest levels, was found to have sexually assaulted hundreds of victims and had thousands of images of child pornography in his possession. Nassar was ultimately charged in 2016 with federal child pornography offenses and sexual abuse charges in Michigan.
In 2017, Nassar was sentenced to 60 years in federal prison; he was sentenced to serve an additional 40 to 125 years in a Michigan state court in 2018.
According to the DOJ report, USA Gymnastics contacted the FBI about allegations against Nassar as early as July 2015, but it took months before the agency opened a formal investigation.
Each gymnast, in turn, said they blamed not just any one individual for the years of abuse and subsequent investigations, but a system at large that was not designed to protect its athletes.
“To be clear: I blame Larry Nassar, but I blame an entire system that enabled and perpetrated his abuse,” Biles, who recently competed at the Tokyo Olympics, said Wednesday.
Biles told Congress on Wednesday that the FBI and gymnastics officials turned a “blind eye” to Nassar's abuses, and said that USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee "knew that I was abused by their official team doctor long before I was ever made aware of their knowledge."
Biles is the only one of the witnesses who competed in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but removed herself from the team finals to focus on her mental health. She returned to earn a bronze medal on beam but told the committee the lingering trauma from her abuse at the hands of Nassar played a factor in her decision to opt out of several competitions.
Biles said a message needs to be sent: “If you allow a predator to harm children, the consequences will be swift and severe. Enough is enough."
“The records established that [former USAG president] Steve Penny, FBI agent Jay Abbott and their subordinates worked to conceal Nassar's crimes,” Raisman said Wednesday. “My reports of abuse were not only buried by USAG [and] USOPC, but they were also mishandled by federal law enforcement officers who failed to follow their most basic duties. The FBI ... knew that Nassar molested children and did nothing to restrict his access.”
Instead, she said, “they quietly allowed Nassar to slip out the side door,” where he was hired at MSU and kept board positions. In that time, Raisman said, “Nassar found more than 100 new victims to molest.”
“It was like serving innocent children up to a pedophile on a silver platter,” she said.
Ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee largely agreed with the gymnasts’ searing indictment of the FBI’s failures — calling it a dereliction of duty that lawmakers argued went beyond the actions of one or two agents. Rather, senators asserted, the agency as a whole failed to do its job and later attempted to cover its tracks.
The agents involved “made material false statements and deceptive omissions referred to the Inspector General for criminal prosecution,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said. “Those referrals were deferred without explanation, and without any explanation at all.”
“There is nothing we can do to reverse the pain and grief that Larry Nassar caused you,” Blumenthal added. “But we can take action against the law enforcers who became enablers. Those institutions became enablers, and so did the FBI.”
“The FBI had two separate opportunities to do its job, and it failed,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said in his opening remarks. “We must demand real change and real accountability and will not be satisfied by platitudes and vague promises about improved performance,” he continued.
Asked Wednesday what they believe the appropriate remedy should be for the FBI’s gross misconduct in addressing the Nassar allegations, several gymnasts said they are still seeking full accountability for all those who ignored the allegations against Nassar — both within the FBI and USA Gymnastics.
“Obviously, this should have never happened,” Raisman said in part. “One time being abused is too many. One child being abused is too many. But I think a complete and full independent investigation of the FBI, USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee. And then from there, then we will know the answers of who should be held accountable.”
“We also want to see them at least be federally prosecuted to the fullest extent, because they need to be held accountable,” Biles added, seemingly in reference to the former FBI agents and USAG officials who ignored gymnasts’ repeated complaints.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.,a former federal prosecutor and current chair of the Senate Judiciary committee, said he agreed with Biles’ assessment.
“I call on the Department of Justice to pursue action,” Sen. Blumenthal also agreed. “Not just administrative action, but criminal prosecution where appropriate.”
“This investigation was mishandled from coast to coast — from Indianapolis to Los Angeles,” he continued. “And it has to leave us wondering whether the FBI is capable of [conducting] these kinds of sexual abuse investigations.”
Inspector General Michael Horowitz and FBI director Christopher Wray testified in front of the committee in a subsequent hearing on Wednesday, where Wray offered his sincere apologies to each gymnast present.
Wray, who took the helm of the FBI in 2017, also delivered a blistering condemnation of his own agency’s handling of the case, which occurred largely before his tenure.
“I'm sorry that so many different people let you down over and over again,” Wray said to Biles, Maroney, Nichols and Raisman. “And I'm especially sorry that there were people at the FBI who had their own chance to stop this monster back in 2015, but failed. And that is inexcusable. It never should have happened. And we're doing everything in our power to make sure it never happens again.”
Wray went on to say that the actions — and inactions — of FBI agents detailed in the OIG report are “totally unacceptable,” adding that at least one of the agents involved has been fired from the agency.
But, without naming the agent, Wray said one person involved in the mishandled investigation retired before the OIG review began, and that the FBI is “left with little disciplinary recourse when people retire before their cases can be adjudicated.”
Still, Wray promised that his agency is working to implement all recommendations detailed in the OIG report, including strengthening the policies and procedures associated with reporting sexual abuse and increasing training for agents who might be confront with such cases.
“It's my commitment to you that I and my entire senior leadership team are going to make damn sure everybody at the FBI remembers what happened here, in heartbreaking detail,” Wray said in part. “We need to remember the pain that occurred when our folks failed to do their jobs. We need to study it. We need to learn from it.”
“That is the best way I know to make sure that this devastating tragedy is never repeated,” he concluded.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.