The red brick façade of Holden Hall towered over Rachael on a warm June afternoon as she and her father, Paul Moxon, unloaded a week’s worth of luggage on the south side of Michigan State’s campus. She hobbled toward the front doors of the seven-story building, dragging her healing left foot in a walking boot, to check in for the first day of summer camp. It had been more than two months since she broke her foot during a tumbling pass over Easter weekend.
Rachael stood quietly by her dad’s side while they greeted James Muffett, one of the camp’s founders. Muffett helped start the Student Statesmanship Institute in the mid-1990s with the goal of introducing high school students to the legislative process through the lens of a Christian worldview. The campers spent their days studying real bills and playing the role of legislators arguing for or against them. Each night, they held a worship service and heard from a motivational speaker. They met with actual lobbyists and, at the end of the week, argued their positions on the floor of the state capitol building in Lansing. The six-day program was packed with long hours of intensive work.
Rachael was fifteen years old when she learned about the camp in the spring of 2000. Less than a year from finishing her high school–level courses, she was already fascinated with the law. Rachael was homeschooled, and the Moxons were part of a co-op in the Kalamazoo area that offered a set of elective, higher-level courses for the students based on different areas of expertise among the parents in the group. One parent taught physics, another calculus. Rachael’s favorite class, though, was debate. The idea of going to a camp where she could spend a rigorous week in the shoes of a politician thrilled her.
She kept her excitement hidden behind a timid veneer as she collected her room assignment and registration details from Muffett. Rachael was painfully shy in her early teenage years. Muffett recalls she barely shook his hand and stood ramrod straight while he tried to break the ice. She had trouble making eye contact. Muffett met plenty of shy teenagers at his camp each summer, but Rachael stood out.
Oh my Lord, he thought to himself. This might not work for her.
Rachael found her dorm room down one of the long corridors in Holden Hall. She settled onto the bed and loosened her walking boot for a few minutes of rest. Gymnastics had remained a regular part of Rachael’s life since she convinced her parents to let her give it a shot in the wake of the 1996 Olympics. She was not an elite gymnast and harbored no dreams of Olympic glory, but she was drawn to the practiced discipline of the sport. She spent enough time in the gym for inevitable injuries to arise. She suffered from wrist and back issues. This time around, she was overcompensating for stress fractures in her shins when a bone in her foot gave way.
An added benefit of the mock legislation camp being at Michigan State that week was the convenience of getting to see the doctor who had been helping her cope with some of her injuries, Larry Nassar. An appointment with Nassar normally required a round trip of more than two hours to reach the office and then another hour in the exam room. Rachael had started to see him for back issues a few months before she broke her foot, and he offered to help her with the broken bone as well. Her parents scheduled an appointment with him for that Thursday to save an extra journey from Kalamazoo to East Lansing.
Rachael initially shied away from the idea of seeing Nassar the week of camp. Her mother, Camille, normally accompanied her on visits to Nassar’s office, but since Paul was spending the week at Michigan State as a camp chaperone, he would be the one in the room with her this time. She didn’t like the idea of her dad witnessing some of the ways Nassar treated her back, which included her lying on his exam table wearing only underwear from her waist down. Camille suggested Rachael should tell Nassar to focus only on her foot and to skip the back treatments this time around. She agreed to the compromise. An abbreviated version of her regular appointments was better anyway, given the busy week.
At camp, Rachael settled into her daily schedule, growing steadily more comfortable with the small group of peers on her legislation team. They ate meals together in Holden Hall’s dining area. They attended study sessions inside one of the large building’s classrooms, and most of the group played volleyball in the recreation area just outside its doors. Muffett, Rachael’s dad, and the other chaperones helped corral the students to their wing of the dorm and made sure lights were out by 10:00 p.m.
Thursday morning came quickly. Rachael and her group were finalizing their arguments for the capstone debate at the state house the following day when Paul came to collect her for the doctor’s appointment. She regretted having to duck out of preparations and used the short trip to the sports clinic to tell her dad what she was learning.
Rachael and her father checked in at the reception desk in a large, welcoming lobby on the fourth floor of the reflective, glass-paneled building at 4660 South Hagadorn Road. They walked to the end of the hallway and stepped into Nassar’s corner room. A small bench for parents sat just inside the door. His exam table was in front of a large window opposite the room’s entrance, and a short countertop with a sink and bottles of lotion lined the wall in the far corner.
Nassar decorated his office with photographs of the famous gymnasts he had helped. His arm was wrapped around them in some of the pictures. Others were autographed or accompanied by thank-you notes adorned with little hand-drawn hearts and messages of love. Prominently featured among the small collage was an image of him in a red, white, and blue windbreaker on the floor of the Georgia Dome helping Kerri Strug after her gold-medal-clinching vault. Rachael, like so many other girls who came through the office, looked at that picture and felt lucky to be in Nassar’s office. This was the man who fixed the world’s best gymnasts, and not only was he her doctor but he also treated her like a friend.
Rachael, because she was spending the rest of her day at camp, wore makeup and dressed up more than she normally would for a doctor’s appointment. Nassar noticed almost immediately. “You look beautiful, and so grown up,” he told her when she and her father arrived at the office.
Paul found the comments a little odd but assumed it was just the doctor’s awkward attempt at small talk with his teenage patient. Rachael thought nothing of it at the time. Nassar often found ways to compliment her when she visited, a kind word about the shoes she was wearing or her long, brown hair.
The appointment that June was shorter than most. Nassar examined Rachael’s foot and told her the fracture looked fully healed and that she could stop wearing her walking boot. Nassar told her he would see her again soon for another follow-up appointment and hugged her goodbye. Pleased, Rachael returned to her group at camp.
The following day, Rachael and her fellow campers were bussed to the capitol building, craning their necks to admire the 130-year-old edifice and its stately, domed ceiling. They found their seats in the ornate, large room where state representatives propose and vote on new laws. Rachael reviewed her notes and ran through the details of her group’s mock legislation presentation that served as a climax of the weeklong camp.
When it came time for her to speak, Rachael’s voice boomed off the old walls. The rest of the hall, filled with dozens of her peers and many of their parents, fell silent. Rachael’s parents smiled knowingly. Their daughter might be reserved, but she was not one to shy away from a cause she thought was just.
She held the room’s attention for several minutes and gracefully parried away a rebuttal from students arguing the other side of her bill. Muffett sat in the back of the room with his mouth agape. He could not believe he was watching the same timid, meek girl who struggled to shake his hand a week earlier. He felt like he was watching a lion learn to roar.
Rachael’s experience at camp solidified her interest in public policy. She returned to the camp year after year and eventually worked as a counselor, creating her own moot court track for students who wanted a slightly different experience. Muffett looked forward to greeting her each summer. His earlier doubts about the once-shy camper were long gone. From that first Friday when she took center stage at the State Capitol, Muffett had a new nickname for her: “the Pitbull.”
Rachael’s Christian roots and curious mind combined to push her to search for a clear vision of right and wrong at an unusually young age. She was struck by the power that laws and the ideas behind them had in shaping the world around her. She decided to step away from gymnastics to focus on a new passion. When most kids her age were studying for their driver’s licenses, Rachael—having already completed high school–level requirements—signed up for a yearlong paralegal program.
Before she turned eighteen, she worked as a legislative aide for state politicians in Michigan. Within a few months of her eye-opening moment on the floor of the Capitol at summer camp in 2000, Rachael started making regular trips to Lansing to volunteer on the campaigns of candidates who professed values similar to her own.
Her trips to the MSU Sports Medicine Clinic continued too. Medical records show she visited Nassar’s office a total of five times, but Rachael remembers making several other trips he did not document during the nearly two-year stretch that she was under his care. The appointments that followed her camp-time checkup were all ostensibly to monitor the healing in her foot, but Nassar rarely missed the opportunity to “check her alignment” and work on her back.
That process involved Rachael lying facedown on the training table as Nassar, without putting on gloves, massaged her back with one hand and penetrated her vagina with the other. He pulled Rachael’s shorts down her legs and draped her with a towel. He positioned his own body directly between Rachael and her mother, who was always in the room for these treatments. His back blocked Camille’s view of exactly what his hands were doing and where they were going.
Nassar explained at Rachael’s first appointment that he could help her with hip and back issues by manipulating ligaments near her pelvic region with a technique called myofascial release. The common physical therapy treatment uses sustained pressure on the sheath of connective tissue around a muscle to help improve the range of motion or relieve pain in that area of the body. It does not include the therapist putting any part of his or her hand inside a patient’s vagina.
Camille and Rachael had previously learned through a family friend that some physical therapists use a different technique that requires them to put their fingers inside the patient. When Nassar’s fingers went inside her, Rachael assumed he was trying this other technique. She didn’t think to tell her mother exactly how Nassar was touching her because she assumed her mother could see what he was doing. How, she figured, would a respected doctor feel comfortable making small talk with her mom as he did these things unless they were legitimate?
Nassar took advantage on many occasions of the vagueness of language that people frequently use when talking about the private areas of their body. When patients told their parents that Nassar touched them “down there” or “in their privates,” the specifics were ambiguous enough for him to explain away his hand placement with legitimate medical reasons for working near their genitalia. Nassar never noted doing any type of internal work in Rachael’s medical records, and years later he initially denied putting his fingers inside her.
Rachael stopped seeing Nassar in the fall of 2001 when she was sixteen years old. He told her the broken foot was fully healed, and while she still had some problems with her wrist that needed medical attention, he had done all he could do for her.
Toward the end of Rachael’s time seeing Nassar and in the months that followed, Camille noticed bit by bit that she was seeing less of the roaring lion that emerged at summer camp. Rachael was increasingly more timid and uncomfortable around new people.
She grew tense whenever they were in public and in particular when a man she didn’t know entered the room. If they were in line at the grocery store or a sandwich shop, Rachael asked her mom to stand behind her as a buffer between her and the next person in line. Eventually, Camille started reflexively positioning herself between her daughter and any man whom they didn’t know.
Late one night in the winter of 2002, not long after Rachael’s seventeenth birthday, Camille decided she needed to ask her daughter about the behavior she had been noticing for several months. As they stood side by side in front of the kitchen sink, washing dishes—Camille’s favorite setting for heart-to-heart conversations with her children—she brought up Rachael’s growing anxiety around others.
“You know, honey, this has been happening for a little while now,” Camille said. “What’s going on?”
Rachael, always direct, did not mince words. “I think Dr. Nassar abused me,” she said.
Camille’s stomach dropped. Rachael told her mother she wasn’t sure how much of what Nassar did to her was sexual abuse and how much was a medical treatment. She didn’t know when her appointments crossed the line, but she was certain they did.
Rachael recalled one of her final visits when Nassar rolled her onto her side, covertly unclipped her bra, and massaged her breast. He told Rachael and Camille he was working on the muscles around her rib cage to help relieve shoulder pain. She remembered looking at him and noticing his eyes were closed. His face was flushed. She looked down to see a clear erection bulging in Nassar’s dress pants.
Camille could see the same scene replaying in her own mind. She knew immediately which appointment her daughter was referencing. Camille had seen the bulge too. At the time she couldn’t be sure if her eyes were lying to her. She knew Nassar’s wife was pregnant with their first child and dismissed what she thought she was seeing as involuntary. Her brain wouldn’t allow her to connect Nassar’s arousal with her teenage daughter lying on the table.
Camille stood by the stack of half-clean dishes in her kitchen and asked questions. Rachael, next to her, answered them as best she could. She stuck to facts, stoic as she worked her way through the details she could recall.
In the weeks and months that followed, Rachael and her parents waded through discussions about what to do next. They bought her a journal to record her unfolding thoughts as she processed the trauma of sexual abuse. They collected her medical records. Who could help them stop Nassar? Who would listen? Most of all, Rachael and her parents were stuck on the concern that if they did report what happened to her, no one would believe her.
Life marched forward while they weighed their options. Rachael worked as a legislative aide while she continued online paralegal school. Camille continued teaching her two younger children. At night, they would watch the news. The story captivating the country during the first few months of 2002 didn’t provide any escape from the trauma Rachael was trying to process.
At the same time Rachael was seeing Nassar, a small team of reporters from the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team were uncovering a coordinated effort by the Catholic Church to hide sexual assault allegations made against priests in Massachusetts. The Globe published its lengthy investigation in its first Sunday paper of the new year. The story soon became a daily topic in national news.
For much of America, the Globe story was a revealing, alarming tale that dragged a typically taboo subject into unavoidable public view. It shed urgent light on the uncomfortable topic of child sex abuse, the long-lasting trauma it can cause, and the way that powerful institutions can enable predators. For Rachael, watching Catholic leaders fight the accusations and conduct damage control was a regular reminder of the incredibly long odds sexual abuse victims face when speaking out against someone in a position of respect and power.
The prospects for those seeking justice are not encouraging. Even offenders who don’t have that power are overwhelmingly unlikely to be punished. According to data compiled by the FBI in 2017, fewer than five out of every one hundred people who commit sexual assault are arrested for their crimes. And among the small group who get arrested, only about 10 percent are ever incarcerated.
As Rachael watched the Catholic Church scandal unfold in 2002, she saw the amount of public pressure required to effect change. She told her parents that if she was going to report Nassar and find any success, she would have to do more than just tell the police. The general public would need someone to be the face of the story to remain interested and engaged. She would need to sit for interviews. Anonymous reports wouldn’t be enough. She was going to have to stand alone and point her finger at a man who was beloved by two different monolithic institutions—a powerful Big Ten university with a popular athletic department and a national sports organization that produced the Olympic team’s biggest stars.
Rachael had seen the way the gymnastics world reacted to complaints about poor treatment and physical abuse made by famous gymnasts like Jamie Dantzscher and Dominique Moceanu. She had read Joan Ryan’s damning book about the culture in gymnastics. She knew that the sport and its many fans were willing to live with open secrets about the bad actors that surrounded the girls they loved as long as they kept winning.
She knew there was a chance—a pretty good chance—she could share the worst moments of her life with the world, and the world would shrug and move along. She believed the law in Michigan gave her until her twenty-fifth birthday to decide if she wanted to report Nassar to the police. The Moxons decided Rachael needed to be the one to make the final decision on how to proceed. She didn’t yet see a fight she could win.
Her pragmatic mind constantly chewed through her options. She felt certain that her interactions with Nassar weren’t an isolated incident. How many others like her were out there? Had any of them tried to report him? Rachael followed her hypothesis to its logical conclusion. If others had spoken up, Nassar had been convincing enough to silence them. She was right.