In just a few short years, the combination of grueling training tactics and a demanding coaching style cloaked in charisma helped the Karolyis turn the United States from an irrelevant nation in the gymnastics world to a force to be reckoned with. America’s most ambitious coaches took note of the strict Karolyi philosophy, and a formidable list of imitators emerged.
As more clubs opened and eager students poured in, a small number of gyms and coveted coaches were developing reputations as champion factories that knew how to take the sport’s best prospects and push them toward the type of fame and financial windfall enjoyed by winners like Retton. The competition for those few coveted spots on the national team was fierce and constant. Families of promising young gymnasts drove for hours each day to bring their daughters to leading clubs in hopes that their talent might be recognized by an influential coach with national connections. Some families moved to new states or split up so daughters as young as seven or eight years old could train at an elite club. For many gymnasts from Michigan and other nearby states, the path to potential stardom passed through an old abandoned school on the corner of Cedar Street and Mt. Hope Avenue in Lansing.
By the early 1990s, John Geddert had turned Great Lakes Gymnastics Club into a juggernaut. His gymnasts struck fear into their peers at competitions, and in turn, Geddert struck fear into his gymnasts. He intimidated fellow coaches, parents, and their preteen daughters with his demanding style. He hurled clipboards at gymnasts who didn’t meet his standards. His voice boomed when he swore at gymnasts for making mistakes. One sharp yell could freeze everyone in the gym. And there was a lot of yelling.
His assistants warned the girls to keep a low profile on days when Geddert’s ire was particularly high. They divided the gymnasts by age and skill level, and each coach worked with the rotating groups on a specific skill or apparatus. His wife, Kathryn, taught by the balance beam. Kim and Jill Hartwick—daughters of the couple who first opened Great Lakes—worked on the floor exercise and the vault. Kathie Klages, a fellow Central Michigan graduate, joined the Gedderts after working as a high school coach in her hometown of Spring Lake, Michigan. The future head coach of Michigan State’s women’s team, Klages won the United States Gymnastics Federation “Coach of the Year” award in Michigan in 1988 for her work with the Great Lakes girls. A host of male assistants cycled through the staff as well. They pushed the girls hard, but none of the other coaches was as ruthless as Geddert, according to the gymnasts who trained there. The assistants largely stayed quiet when he rampaged in practice or pulled a girl into a side room for a tongue-lashing.
Geddert’s specialty was the uneven bars. Gymnasts say he would make his young athletes practice until their hands bled and their arms could no longer hold them in the air. When they lined up to stretch, Geddert leaned his weight on top of their small bodies and pulled their limbs to test the limits of their flexibility until they cried. He inspected their form during “crunchers,” an exercise where they lay on their backs and hoisted their arms and legs in the air in a hollow body hold to strengthen their abs. If he saw one of the girls wasn’t keeping her glutes tight in the position, he would step with his full body weight on the small bit of their backsides that wasn’t taut, pinching it against the floor.
“Looks like we’ve got a flat tire,” he was known to say.
The marks from his feet bruised their sides and stayed on their hips for days. Some gymnasts remember Geddert sitting beside them and slapping their legs hard enough to leave a handprint.
“I would literally have his handprints on the side of my leg, just because he could,” says Heather Berry, a former elite gymnast who went on to compete in college. Berry remembers being kicked out of practice for a variety of reasons, some as trivial as Geddert not liking the way she did her hair on a particular day. She recalls Geddert snapping her bra the first time she wore one to the gym, drawing unwanted attention to her reaching puberty. When Geddert decided the girls would switch from a uniform of black leotards to white ones for their meets, Berry says he told her that she should start going to tanning salons to look better in the new uniform. At twelve or thirteen years old, the gymnasts worried about the switch in color because the white would make them look a few pounds heavier.
Weight was always an issue, as it was in many high-level gyms across the country. Geddert made frequent comments about girls gaining weight and placed them on strict diets. Later in his coaching career, other gymnasts say he punished the girls who were caught eating something they shouldn’t eat by making them clean the gym bathrooms with a toothbrush.
Like Bela Karolyi, Geddert could turn on his charming side when he needed it. He was a strapping man who carried himself with a magnetic, cool confidence. His gymnasts craved his approval and would put themselves through torture to get it.
“The bad was really bad,” says former Great Lakes gymnast Trinea Gonczar. “But the good was really good.”
Geddert required each girl to give him a hug before they left the gym at the end of practice. He could crack a joke and flash a devil-may-care smile with the right parents to keep himself in their good graces. Rumors about his sexual conquests were as common around the gym as hearing him barking orders. The teenage gymnasts who traveled around the country with Great Lakes used to joke that Geddert’s hotel room remained vacant most nights while he was out chasing women.
“You would have to be nuts not to know,” Berry says. “It was well known about his extracurricular activities.”
Shelby Root first met Geddert in 1985 when, at sixteen, she began training at Great Lakes. In an account revealed in the 2019 book The Girls, written by journalist Abigail Pesta, Root described how Geddert, her former coach, helped her advance in gymnastics to the point that she earned a college athletic scholarship. Root says Geddert also groomed her through a series of physical encounters that were increasingly more inappropriate and sexual in nature. When she was eighteen and no longer being coached by him, Root accompanied Geddert to an out-of-state gymnastics meet, where she wasn’t competing. She described to Pesta an encounter she had while swimming with Geddert in the hotel pool.
I remember he eventually had me with my back against the pool wall, and he was in front of me, one arm on each side, and he kissed me for the first time. I remember being surprised and not sure how to react, and I went along with it.… He moved my bathing suit bottom over to the side and proceeded to have sex with me. It was my first time, so I didn’t have any experience and wasn’t sure how to respond.
Geddert was married and eleven years her senior. Root had just gotten her braces off the previous year. She went on to describe to Pesta how she fell in love with Geddert and continued to have sex with him after she went off to college, first to the University of Iowa and later to Central Michigan University, Geddert’s alma mater.
Connie Root, Shelby’s mother, told Pesta that after her daughter’s eighteenth birthday she “suspected a sexual relationship,” adding, “The sexual nature was not discussed, but, as a mom, I knew.”
Geddert did not comment for Pesta for The Girls nor has he commented for this book about Root’s revelations.
Years later, in a Facebook message sent to a former USAG staffer, Geddert acknowledged “past indescretions [sic].” He didn’t mention Root specifically and described his “indescretions [sic]” as “my business,” adding that they occurred at a time when he was separated from his wife for three years.
Geddert was also known to take time during trips to grab a beer with his loyal friend, Larry Nassar. Nassar, in the eyes of the gymnasts he treated, was the polar opposite of Geddert. He was “a puppy dog,” awkward and androgynous compared to their machismo-filled jock of a coach. Geddert won their admiration by withholding. Nassar was overly eager to help or lend a kind word. He might tell an inappropriate joke from time to time, but he blushed when he did. He snorted when he laughed. He wore undersized track shorts and oversized glasses.
“He was a big dork, honestly,” remembers former gymnast Laura Szczepanski-Scudder. “He was goofy, but he was somebody you learned to trust very quickly. A lot of things changed as he was in the gym more. He made it a little more tolerable. You went to him when you needed something.”
In the gymnasts’ eyes, Nassar was a hero. What Geddert broke, Nassar could fix. He was a ball of positive energy. The makeshift training room behind the heavy, brown doors inside Great Lakes could feel like a safe haven amid a world filled with threats. He greeted each girl with a smile and a soft voice asking how he could help. His trainer’s bag was filled with solutions. He taped their ankles and wrists before practice. He usually had a few small candy bars to sneak someone who was having a bad day or in need of a treat that didn’t comply with their restrictive diets. He had bottles of lotions to employ the osteopathic massage methods he was learning in school to help ease their pain. If that didn’t help, he kept a steady supply of sample pills in his bag and handed those out as well.
The former gymnasts say Nassar found a way even before he had his medical license to write prescriptions for those who needed pain relief. If their parents couldn’t afford the medication, he quietly asked other families if they’d fill the orders to help out. He created regimens that sometimes included up to nine Advil pills per day for girls who weighed barely one hundred pounds. Others took the small handful of pills he provided for them at the gym without knowing what they were. He had their trust.
When time to heal ran short, Nassar found more powerful drugs to help gymnasts get back on the floor. He administered cortisone shots. Berry says he provided her with a shot of Toradol—a potent painkiller, not intended for pediatric use, that is known to cause peptic ulcers and gastrointestinal bleeding—in 1994 when she was fourteen or fifteen years old and needed to compete in a regional meet on Michigan State’s campus with an injured ankle. It wasn’t until two years later, laid up in a hospital room to treat a stomach full of ulcers and still battling the chronic effects of masking an ankle injury rather than fixing it, that Berry realized Nassar might not have been qualified to perform all the treatments he offered.
Nassar also soothed the problems medicine couldn’t help. He listened to their complaints and seemed to care about their well-being. When the girls needed surgery, he traveled to hospitals in Detroit or Cleveland to be supportive and was among the first faces they saw after coming out of the operating room. When asked how he had time for those trips during his schooling, Nassar told the gymnasts and their families that it was a valuable part of his education.
Nassar didn’t completely ignore the classroom as his time continued at Michigan State. He was happy to be around medical innovators at one of the few osteopathic schools attached to a public university at the time. In 1989, early in Nassar’s second year of medical school, a senior associate dean at the school named Dr. Philip Greenman published a book titled Principles of Manual Medicine. The book and Greenman’s long career teaching those principles were heralded by the osteopathic community and helped provide another layer of legitimacy to a field of medicine that still had many skeptics. Greenman earned international acclaim for a series of videos he created to explain the fundamentals and techniques of “manual medicine.”
Greenman appears in the series of fourteen hour-long videos wearing his white lab coat inside a doctor’s office. He starts by explaining that the roots of manual medicine stretch back even further than Hippocrates. Using a male model clad in a black Speedo, Greenman walks his viewers through a series of tests and treatments they should use to evaluate and help patients for different parts of the body. As a student at the same medical school at that time, there is little doubt Nassar would have watched the videos and noted the authority and legitimacy they lent to Greenman. Years later, Nassar would create his own set of videos—first on tape, then on YouTube—to stake a claim as an expert in his own specific field.
One of Greenman’s videos was dedicated to treating the pelvic area, and it begins with a warning. Greenman tells the camera this is “one of the more complex and controversial areas of the field.” He goes on to discuss in specific detail the proper hand placement and movement when working on the joints and muscles in that area. He uses both a skeleton and his Speedo-clad model to demonstrate the treatments Nassar would modify for his purposes in the years to come.
Nassar developed a fascination with working on that part of the body during his studies, and he did not keep that interest to himself. He spoke regularly with colleagues about the potential healing power that could be found by treating the pelvic floor.
“He emphasized it a lot,” says Steven Karageanes, a former medical school classmate and longtime professional acquaintance. “I thought [the technique] was helpful, but there are a lot of other techniques that were helpful.”
Nassar sought out Greenman on Michigan State’s campus to ask about developing new treatments and manipulations in the pelvic region. Later, Nassar said in a letter to his superiors that it was Greenman himself who suggested the young doctor focus attention on the sacrotuberous ligament—a large, rough ligament that stretches from the pelvis to the lower back beneath the gluteal muscles. Nassar would eventually teach others that the ligament was the “grand junction” of the body, a place that could be manipulated using a technique called myofascial release to solve a multitude of problems occurring elsewhere in the body.
Working extensively in this “complex and controversial” area when so many of his patients were preteen or teenage girls did not seem to give Nassar significant pause. When he gave presentations or wrote about the pelvic area for textbook chapters, he referred to the perineum as the “no fly zone” and made it clear that a doctor should always get permission and put on gloves before treating the area. He told Karageanes that his patients kept their clothes on and that he never did internal work on the young gymnasts in his care, statements that turned out to be lies. When Karageanes asked Nassar if he was worried about a parent or patient getting mad or uncomfortable with where his hands were going even if he was doing everything correctly, Nassar laughed it off. He appeared to believe the health benefits outweighed the risk of backlash. Any other motives he had for his budding interest remained hidden.
At Great Lakes, when Nassar started to employ his new methods, few questioned the necessity or intent of what he was doing. He was the good guy. Nassar convinced Geddert to tone down a few of his conditioning drills and adopt healthier nutrition guidelines that were less focused on weight loss. At times, he held gymnasts out of practice when they were in danger of injuring themselves seriously. He asked the gymnasts about personal problems and offered advice. He conducted full physicals for them at the gym. He knew where many of the gymnasts were on their path through puberty and suggested remedies if their maturation had been slowed by small caloric intakes and the hard work of training.
As years passed, it was clear that Nassar’s role was much more than just an athletic trainer. To his gymnasts, he was an advocate, a confidant, and a friend. Nassar was willing to help the Great Lakes girls wherever and whenever he was needed. He saw them at the gym and traveled to meets when they needed him. Other times, he told the girls to meet him at the medical facilities where he worked as a resident. He made house calls and invited the girls and their parents to his own modest apartment if he ran out of time to treat their aching bodies during practice at Great Lakes.
Behind the heavy, brown doors at the old Walter French school, he cautiously tested the boundaries of the trust he was building. One former gymnast remembers he started by unclipping her bra as she lay prone on his training table. After several massage sessions, it felt normal for him to remove layers of her clothing. Nassar started to slide his hands closer and closer to intimate areas as he worked on her hips and pelvis.
Another former gymnast, Sara Teristi, remembers Nassar rubbing ice cubes on her bare chest to treat an injury shortly after he arrived at Great Lakes, according to details she revealed in Pesta’s book The Girls. Teristi said a rib cage injury when she was fourteen prompted Nassar to apply ice to her chest, first over her leotard and eventually on her nude upper body. At times, she said, Nassar would turn his back to her after his “treatments” and angrily demand that she dress quickly and get out of the training room. Teristi told Pesta she remembers a musty smell in the room, which she now believes was due to Nassar ejaculating. She recalls other times when Geddert would walk into the training room while Nassar was icing her chest and touching her bare nipples.
“They would stand there and have a conversation right in front of me,” Teristi said. “John would joke about how small my ‘tits’ were. He said if I was lucky, they would get bigger.”
Towels now hung over the skinny glass windows between Nassar and the gym full of coaches, athletes, and parents. Usually isolated and unmonitored, Nassar pushed further with many of the gymnasts who sought his help. His hands lingered by their genitals, and he touched them in ways that felt intrusive and uncomfortable. By then he had built up enough trust among the gymnasts that they assumed he wasn’t doing anything devious. His most brazen acts, though, were reserved for the privacy of his modest apartment.
Sarah Klein, another Great Lakes gymnast, remembers visiting Nassar’s one-bedroom apartment a few miles from Michigan State’s campus by herself when she was only twelve or thirteen years old. Klein’s mother thought of Nassar as a good friend. It was the early 1990s, and many parents at Great Lakes felt they owed Nassar a debt of gratitude for the amount of attention and care he showed their daughters. So when he called a select few of them to ask if their daughters would be willing to help him with some experiments he was conducting for his schoolwork, they didn’t hesitate. The girls felt special to be picked for his study. Their parents had been just as effectively groomed.
The apartment was sparse, a second-story walk-up that was clearly the home of a student. Nassar’s training table and a stack of gymnastics magazines were set up in the living room, which led to a small kitchenette and overlooked a local park. Nassar, single and approaching his thirties now, invited Klein inside and explained he wanted to compare the flexibility of cold muscles to the flexibility of warm ones. He pulled out the notebook where he had recorded the marks of other girls who had already participated in the same experiment.
He asked her to start by performing center splits in the family room. Klein lay with her torso and chin flat against the carpet and pushed her legs out at a 180-degree angle. Nassar crouched behind her with a ruler so he could measure how far her crotch hovered above the floor in the split. He jotted down notes, and then led Klein into his small bathroom where the tub was already filled with warm water. He told her he’d leave the room while she removed her clothes and hopped in.
For nearly a half hour, Klein soaked in the tub tucked into one corner of Nassar’s small East Lansing apartment. An egg timer counted down the minutes. He popped in once, making a big, goofy show of casting his eyes skyward.
“I’m not peeking,” he said with a giggle while he handed Klein a gymnastics magazine to keep her busy while she waited. Klein and the several other girls who sat in the tub—some in leotards, some completely nude—don’t know for certain where Nassar spent the rest of those twenty minutes while they soaked or what he did to occupy the time.
Klein climbed out of the tub, toweled off, and dressed before returning to the living room. Nassar told her to drop into the center splits again and retrieved his ruler to see if Klein’s midsection stretched any closer to the carpet after her time in the tub. Nassar thanked her and told her for a “reward” to climb on to the training table for a massage. There in his family room, with Klein naked and covered by a bedsheet, Nassar’s hands worked their way across her body, and he put his fingers inside her vagina.
Teristi visited Nassar’s apartment as well, according to The Girls. After several conversations with Pesta, Teristi unearthed a memory she said she repressed for decades. She recalled Nassar locking the door to his apartment and telling her to go into his bedroom and lie down on his bed. Teristi said Nassar then performed oral sex on her and anally raped her. She told Pesta she left Great Lakes after the rape and never saw Nassar again. It would take Teristi three decades to report the rape to police and the Michigan attorney general’s office.
While it’s not clear precisely when Nassar’s sexual abuse of gymnasts began, it is clear that he spent the early years of his career in the sport growing gradually bolder and pushing boundaries.
“Looking back now,” Klein says of that period, “I think that what Larry was trying to figure out was: Can I really get away with sexually abusing little girls?”