Larry Nassar: Why Didn’t The Parents Catch Him?
After Rachael’s story came out in September 2016, police started getting more complaints about Larry.
Within two weeks, another 16 women and girls had come forward.
By November, Larry was charged with sexually abusing a child under the age of 13.
Even then, many wondered: How could the parents of these girls have been in the room while Larry abused their child – and not know it was happening?
For their part, the parents are asking themselves the same question.
They’ve seen all the comments online: how the parents are to blame; how they must have been so obsessed with their kids’ gymnastics careers that they just looked the other way.
And the moment Rachael Denhollander spoke out publicly about her abuse, their lives changed, too. Suzanne Thomashow remembers showing her daughter, Jessica, the IndyStar article. Suzanne remembers Jessica reading it and then saying, “Mom, that’s what he did to me.”
Suzanne says, “That was when we figured it out. That was when she figured out that she’d been assaulted.”