When Amanda Thomashow was a graduate student at Michigan State University in 2014, an old cheerleading injury started to flare up. Amanda’s mom Suzanne is a pediatrician, so she recommended a doctor she’s known since medical school: Dr. Larry Nassar.
Amanda frantically called her mom after the appointment to tell her what happened.
“I think my words were, that’s disgusting. It was repulsive,” recalls Suzanne. “I could not fathom what had just happened and what she was telling me. It was like, ‘what? He did what to you?’ And she repeated it to me a couple of times that I said, ‘well, that’s just not okay. It’s not okay.'”
After she talked to her mom, Amanda decided to make a formal complaint about Larry, which triggered two investigations.
Chapter 1: The Police Interview
After Amanda’s complaint about Larry, Michigan State University police detective Valerie O’Brien asked him to come in for a chat.
We got the tape of this police interview through a public information request.
It’s dated May 29th, 2014. The full interview lasted two and a half hours. We edited it down to a 20-minute version, which you can see below. (Note: Contains content that will be disturbing to many readers.)
Larry’s genius in this police interview is that he flips the script.
Instead of denying anything, he admits it; he says he did touch her breasts and vagina, but says it wasn’t sexual. It was medical.
This is Larry’s playbook. He hammers his credentials and bombards the investigator with complicated medical terms about his techniques.
In the video, you hear Larry describe his version of what happened at his appointment with Amanda. We also have Amanda’s version, as she told it to us.We want to play Larry and Amanda’s stories side by side so you can hear for yourself how Larry got people to believe him, not Amanda. How he constructed an alternate reality, one where he’s not abusing these girls…he’s healing them.
Toward the end of the interview, Detective O’Brien starts reassuring Larry.
She tells him, “You should take a polygraph to prove your innocence.”
He never does; the test operator tells the detective that a polygraph wouldn’t work in this kind of case.
What he does do is send police several follow-up emails, with PowerPoints about his techniques. (Just like the PowerPoints he gave Meridian Township police in 2004. Note: These contain images that will be disturbing to many readers.)
When the interview’s over, Detective O’Brien thanks Larry for coming in so fast. They shake hands and she walks him out.
The MSU police chief denied our requests for an interview with O’Brien, saying the report has to speak for itself. O’Brien still works for MSU Police, and has since been promoted to Assistant Chief.
So now, Larry had talked his way out of two different police investigations. Once in 2004. And now, again, in 2014.
But with Amanda’s case, it wasn’t just police who let Larry go.
Chapter 2: Title IX
Since Larry was a university employee in 2014, Amanda’s report triggered a federally mandated Title IX investigation.Title IX investigations look into whether somebody broke a school rule — in this case, Michigan State University’s sexual misconduct policy.
These investigations are done by school staff, not by police.
Two months after she reported Larry, Amanda remembers a school official called her in for a meeting. They wanted to show her the results of the Title IX investigation.
Amanda Thomashow around the time of her abuse.
Courtesy of Amanda Thomashow
She says, “I mean, I was really nervous, but I thought that there was going to be some sort of trial or something like that. That’s what the information was that I was going to get, was that like, ‘okay, we realize that this was sexual assault. Like, these are your options going forward.'”Amanda meets with a woman named Kristine Moore. She’s the Title IX investigator.
And as Amanda remembers it, Moore sat her down and pulled out a sheet of paper. She put it on the table, pointed to a simple diagram of a human body, and explained why Larry’s treatment was medically sound. Amanda says Moore told her they interviewed four female experts about Larry’s technique.
There’s something you should know about these four women Kristine Moore interviewed: they’re not patients of Larry’s, they’re all doctors or athletic trainers. And they all worked with him at MSU. One was even a close friend of Larry’s.
Amanda explains, “But she had phrased it as she went to, you know, she talked to four female experts in the field and they all said that what he did, while it wasn’t what they would do it, it wasn’t sexual and that I had not been sexually assaulted. That it was medically sound.”
Then, Amanda says, Kristine Moore handed her an information packet on sexual assault and told Amanda about a support group on campus for sexual assault victims.
And then Amanda remembers Moore apologizing, profusely.
“‘I’m so sorry. There’s nothing more I can do.’ And I told her, ‘don’t apologize to me. You’re not sorry.’ And I slammed the door and I walked out.”
What Amanda didn’t know in 2014 is that MSU didn’t give her the full report.
Kristine Moore kept one of her findings out of Amanda’s copy.
Sources shared that confidential section with us this year. In it, Moore sounds some major alarms.
Moore said the treatments were “medically sound” but what Nassar was doing could get the school sued.
Of course in hindsight, we know MSU did get sued. This summer, the school settled for half a billion dollars. In that lawsuit, about 500 people said they were abused by Larry Nassar, and that MSU could have stopped him sooner.
But back in 2014, with Amanda’s case, the Title IX investigator simply said that Larry is exposing patients to “unnecessary trauma.”
Moore’s report concludes the university must address the fact that one of the school’s doctors is not getting patient consent, and patients may mistake his practice for “inappropriate sexual misconduct.”
We asked to talk with Kristine Moore, but she declined our request. Since the 2014 investigation, she’s been promoted to a position as one of the university’s top lawyers.
After less than three months on leave from his job at Michigan State University, Larry was allowed back to work. With conditions. He’d have to follow basic medical guidelines: wear gloves, get consent, have a chaperone in the room. In other words, really basic things that any doctor working with minors in their private areas should do.
But nobody at MSU ever actually checked to see if Larry’s doing any of those things.
That means young girls and women kept streaming into Larry’s treatment rooms…not just at MSU, but at USA Gymnastics and local gyms, and a nearby high school. Even at his home, where Larry “treated” patients on a massage table in his basement.
Some 70 survivors say they were abused by Larry after MSU cleared him to go back to work.
It would be two years until another MSU police detective would bring Larry in again. This time, he wasn’t getting away.
The Sidney Awards, Part I
“The more online shame cycles you observe,” Andrews writes, “the more obvious the pattern becomes: Everyone comes up with a principled-sounding pretext that serves as a barrier against admitting to themselves that, in fact, all they have really done is joined a mob. Once that barrier is erected, all rules of decency go out the window.”
Most of us have certain stereotypes about the European far right — that it’s just a bunch of blood-and-soil racists. But in an essay in The New York Review of Books, “Two Roads for the New French Right,”Mark Lilla shows that there’s a lot more going on. He found a group of Catholic conservative intellectuals who argue that social conservatism is the only viable alternative to neoliberal cosmopolitanism and who are all fans of Bernie Sanders.
They believe that both the European superstate and global capitalism undermine the cultural-religious foundations of European civilization. They are strongly environmentalist, feel that economic growth should be subordinated to social needs, believe in strong social support for the poor and limited immigration. As Lilla notes, they have a very coherent, communitarian worldview. I found the essay uplifting because it shows that in times of political transition, ideas get shuffled and reassembled in new and impressive ways.
.. In a post called “How This All Happened” for the Collaborative Fund blog, Morgan Housel walks us through 73 years of American economic history. He shows us how many economic phases there have been. And how each phase led to something unexpected.
.. In “How Did Larry Nassar Deceive So Many for So Long?” in The Cut, Kerry Howley blows up the conventional telling of the American gymnastics sex abuse scandal. The story is generally told as a large group of victims finding their voice and “breaking their silence.” But Howley shows that they were telling their stories all along, to every relevant authority. It’s because the abuser, Nassar, had built up an edifice of trust that people couldn’t see the monstrosity that was taking place literally in front of their eyes. Nassar abused many of these young girls while their parents were in the room. He just told them he was doing a medical procedure he called a “sacrotuberous-ligament release.” He might still be doing it today if a police officer hadn’t discovered his hard drives, with 37,000 child porn images on them. It was the hard drives that finally persuaded the world, not the women and their repeated warnings.
Andrew Sullivan has forced me to do something I really don’t want to do — award two separate Sidney awards to the same writer in the same year. But his work for New York magazine this year has really defined the era. His two masterpieces are “The Poison We Pick,” on the opioid crisis, and “America’s New Religions,” on political fundamentalism. If you want to understand America in 2018, those essays are a good place to start.
The sin of silence
Rachael Denhollander’s college-aged abuser began grooming her when she was 7. Each week, as Denhollander left Sunday school at Westwood Baptist Church in Kalamazoo, Mich., he was there to walk her to her parents’ Bible-study classroom on the other side of the building. He brought Denhollander gifts and asked her parents for her clothing size so he could buy her dresses. He was always a little too eager with a hug. The Denhollanders led one of the church’s ministries out of their home, which meant the man would visit their house regularly, often encouraging Rachael to sit on his lap, they recalled.
The man’s behavior caught the attention of a fellow congregant, who informed Sandy Burdick, a licensed counselor who led the church’s sexual-abuse support group. Burdick says she warned Denhollander’s parents that the man was showing classic signs of grooming behavior.
.. And so when Larry Nassar used his prestige as a doctor for the USA Gymnastics program to sexually assault Denhollander, she held to her vow. She wouldn’t put her family through something like that again. Her church had made it clear: No one believes victims.
.. Tchividjian says sexual abuse in evangelicalism rivals the Catholic Church scandal of the early 2000s.
.. The sex advice columnist and LGBT rights advocate Dan Savage, tired of what he called the hypocrisy of conservatives who believe that gays molest children, compiled his own list that documents more than 100 instances of youth pastors around the country who, between 2008 and 2016, were accused of, arrested for or convicted of sexually abusing minors in a religious setting.
.. Over 2016 and 2017, Mullen found 192 instances of a leader from an influential church or evangelical institution being publicly charged with sexual crimes involving a minor, including rape, molestation, battery and child pornography. (This data did not include sexual crimes against an adult or crimes committed by someone other than a leader.)
.. a 2014 GRACE report on Bob Jones University ..
56 percent of the 381 respondents who reported having knowledge of the school’s handling of abuse (a group that included current and former students, as well as employees) believed that BJU conveyed a “blaming and disparaging” attitude toward victims.
.. half said school officials had actively discouraged them from going to the police. According to one anonymous respondent, after he finally told the police about years of sexual abuse by his grandfather, a BJU official admonished him that “[you] tore your family apart, and that’s your fault,” and “you love yourself more than you love God.”
.. she was told that her husband “was not attracted to his 11-year-old daughter but rather to the ‘woman’ she ‘was becoming.’ ”
.. Franklin Graham, CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said President Trump’s “grab them by the p—y” comments and other crude language didn’t matter because “all of us are sinners.”
.. 39 percent of evangelicals were more likely to vote for Moore after multiple accusations that he’d initiated sexual contact with teenagers when he was in his 30s. “It comes down to a question [of] who is more credible in the eyes of the voters — the candidate or the accuser,” Jerry Falwell Jr., president of the evangelical Liberty University, said at the time. “. . . And I believe [Moore] is telling the truth.”
.. It was the same message 7-year-old Denhollander heard: Stay silent, because the church won’t believe you.
.. Why are so many evangelicals (who also devote resources to fighting sex trafficking or funding shelters for battered women) so dismissive of the women in their own pews?
.. many worshipers he encountered felt persecuted by the secular culture around them — and disinclined to reach out to their persecutors for help in solving problems. This is the same dynamic that drove a cover-up culture among ultra-Orthodox communities in New York, where rabbis insisted on dealing with child abusers internally
.. 41 percent of Americans believe that the end times will occur before 2050.
.. In some evangelical teachings, a severe moral decay among unbelievers precedes the rapture of the faithful. Because of this, many evangelicals see the outside world as both a place in need of God’s love and a corrupt, fallen place at odds with the church.
.. “His interest was in protecting the church and its reputation more than protecting his daughter.”
.. forced to reconcile a cognitive dissonance: How can the church — often called “the hope of the world” in evangelical circles — also be an incubator for such evil?
.. SGC president C.J. Mahaney’s return to ministry. Mahaney had been asked to step down from his role in 2011 because of “various expressions of pride, unentreatability, deceit, sinful judgment and hypocrisy.” In 2012, a class-action lawsuit held that eight SGC pastors, including Mahaney, had covered up sexual abuse in the church. Mahaney and the SGC claimed vindication when a judge dismissed the lawsuit for eclipsing the statute of limitations.
.. Denhollander says she told her church’s leaders this was inappropriate, as Mahaney had never acknowledged a failure to properly handle allegations of sexual abuse under his leadership.
.. when Denhollander went public with accusations against Larry Nassar in the Indianapolis Star, a pastor accused her of projecting her story onto Mahaney’s. When she persisted, he told her she should consider finding a new church.
.. in 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 1 in 4 women (women make upapproximately 55 percent of evangelicals) and 1 in 9 men have been sexually abused.
.. Denhollander was there; she spoke at length in the courtroom, reminding Nassar that the Christian concept of forgiveness comes from “repentance, which requires facing and acknowledging the truth about what you have done in all of its utter depravity and horror, without mitigation, without excuse, without acting as if good deeds can erase” it.
The Price I Paid for Taking On Larry Nassar
But on Aug. 29, 2016, when I filed the first police complaint against Larry Nassar for sexually abusing me when I was a 15-year-old girl and chose to release a very public story detailing what he had done, it felt like a shot in the dark. I came as prepared as possible: I brought medical journals showing what real pelvic floor technique looks like; my medical records, which showed that Larry had never mentioned that he used such techniques even though he had penetrated me; the names of three pelvic floor experts ready to testify to police that Larry’s treatment was not medical; other records from a nurse practitioner documenting my disclosure of abuse in 2004; my journals from that time; and a letter from a neighboring district attorney vouching for my character. I worried that any less meant I would not be believed — a concern I later learned was merited.
.. I lost my church. I lost my closest friends as a result of advocating for survivors who had been victimized by similar institutional failures in my own community.
I lost every shred of privacy.
.. When a new friend searched my name online or added me as a friend on Facebook, the most intimate details of my life became available long before we had even exchanged phone numbers. I avoided the grocery stores on some days, to make sure my children didn’t see my face on the newspaper or a magazine. I was asked questions about things no one should know when I least wanted to talk.
.. And the effort it took to move this case forward — especially as some called me an “ambulance chaser” just “looking for a payday” — often felt crushing.
.. These were the very cultural dynamics that had allowed Larry Nassar to remain in power.
.. Some were abused when they were as young as 6 years old.
Some were victimized nearly three decades ago, others only days before my report was filed. Far worse, victims began to come forward who had tried to sound the alarm years before
.. they were suffering deep wounds from having been silenced, blamed and often even sent back for continued abuse.
.. More than 200 women have now alleged abuse by Larry Nassar... at least 14 coaches, trainers, psychologists or colleagues had been warned of his abuse... a vast majority of those victims were abused after his conduct was first reported by two teenagers to M.S.U.’s head gymnastics coach as far back as 1997... Because most pedophiles present a wholesome persona, they are able to ingratiate themselves into communities... Research shows that pedophiles are also reported at least seven times on average before adults take the reports of abuse seriously and act on them.
.. a symptom of a much deeper cultural problem — the unwillingness to speak the truth against one’s own community.
.. The result of putting reputation and popularity ahead of girls and young women?
.. extending or removing the statute of limitations on criminal and civil charges related to sexual assault, and strengthening mandatory reporting laws
.. Predators rely on community protection to silence victims and keep them in power. Far too often, our commitment to our political party, our religious group, our sport, our college or a prominent member of our community causes us to choose to disbelieve or to turn away from the victim.
.. Fear of jeopardizing some overarching political, religious, financial or other ideology — or even just losing friends or status — leads to willful ignorance of what is right in front of our own eyes, in the shape and form of innocent and vulnerable children.