The first known complaints about Larry Nassar came just months after he officially became an employee at Michigan State University. In the five years before Rachael wrestled with her own decision about how she would address what happened to her, at least five young women told coaches or athletic trainers working for the Spartans’ athletic department that Nassar was doing things that didn’t seem right. All of them received a similar response: they didn’t understand what they were talking about.
Larissa Michell was the first. In the fall of 1997, she sat cross-legged on the floor of Michigan State coach Kathie Klages’s cramped office inside Jenison Field House, the three-story, brick, art deco building that has served as a home for a variety of Spartans sports teams since 1940. Michell was sixteen years old and among the most advanced gymnasts in the Spartan Youth Gymnastics program. She remembers the skin on the backs of her thighs prickling against the dirty, green carpet as she tried to sort through her emotions. She was horrified at the realization that her new doctor might be sexually assaulting her and mortified that her teammates and coaches were going to know about it. She was intimidated looking up at Klages, who was sitting at her desk and mentioning the far-reaching implications of the piece of paper that she was at that moment waving in front of Larissa’s face.
The modest office adjacent to the gym where Michigan State’s gymnastics team practiced belied how far Klages’s coaching career had risen. The former Great Lakes assistant and old friend of John Geddert left that gym in the summer of 1990 when the university hired her to be the new head coach of its women’s program. Klages had a softer touch than her old boss and was using it to produce impressive results with the Spartans.
As Michell sat in the office, Klages was fresh off winning her first of several Big Ten Coach of the Year awards. Her teams had been ranked among the top fifteen collegiate squads in the country for most of the two previous seasons. As part of her duties as coach, she also oversaw the budding youth program that practiced on Michigan State’s campus in the evenings after her college girls had finished for the day.
Klages had been thrilled when Nassar, her friend from their days together at Great Lakes, accepted a position as an assistant professor and a team physician at Michigan State that summer. She felt he would become an asset to the program, so much so that his presence would be part of the recruiting pitch that Klages and the other Spartan coaches gave to prospects. Nassar was reaching celebrity-like status in the sport a year after USA Gymnastics made him its national medical coordinator. His new job at Michigan State would not get in the way of that role. His contract required him to spend a large portion of his time doing volunteer outreach work at other organizations such as USA Gymnastics and a local high school in nearby Holt, Michigan.
Michell knew of Nassar and his stellar reputation when she injured her back in September, just weeks after he moved into the MSU Sports Medicine Clinic on the edge of campus. When she visited him there, he also suggested that he could see Michell during her practices at Jenison Field House right after he was done helping the college gymnasts with their post-practice treatments. Once or twice a week she stepped away from her training and walked down the three flights of broad, cement steps to the bottom floor of Jenison to see Nassar in the small room where he treated Spartan athletes and other gymnasts who trained in the building. Those sessions lasted up to an hour, long enough for one of the assistants who worked closely with Michell to wonder what was happening.
Michell told the assistant, without going into detail, that she didn’t feel comfortable with her treatments. Shortly thereafter, the assistant elevated Michell’s concerns to Klages.
In her subsequent meeting on the old, green carpet in Klages’s office, Michell nervously described what Nassar did to her, making it clear Nassar had penetrated her vagina with his fingers. Klages told Michell she had known Nassar for a long time, and she believed he wouldn’t do anything that would harm a patient. Klages called other gymnasts into the office and asked if the doctor ever did anything inappropriate to them. After several said no, Michell suggested Klages speak with one of Michell’s friends, who was a couple years younger. The two of them had spoken previously about Nassar, and her friend had expressed similar concerns about the way Nassar touched her. The other girl confirmed to Klages that Nassar touched her in places that made her uncomfortable.
The pair of gymnasts sat together on the office floor, feeling as if they were in trouble. Klages was an upbeat, maternal figure for the girls in the youth program, and they had a sense they were disappointing her. She brought in the older collegiate gymnasts to tell Michell and her friend that there was nothing wrong with what Nassar was doing. If Nassar was trying to help, the younger girls thought, they must be the ones with the dirty minds.
Klages told Michell she could file a formal report if she wanted to go forward. But even just the accusation, she said, could have a very big impact on her life and on Nassar’s life. She assured her again that Nassar was a good doctor and an even better man. She held the form up in front of Michell and asked her to make a decision. Michell told her not to file the report and then rushed out the door, sprinted to the nearest bathroom, and burst into tears. Klages didn’t tell the parents of the young gymnasts about what had been discussed inside her office that day. There’s no indication she told anyone, except Nassar.
Michell visited Nassar a few days later for her next appointment in his office. “So, I talked to Kathie,” Nassar said as he sat next to her on his stool and once again assured her that what he did to her was strictly medical treatment. Michell was flush with embarrassment again.
“I’m so sorry,” she told him. “This is all my fault and was just a big misunderstanding.” Then she hopped onto his training table, where Nassar penetrated her again. She recalled that day years later as more painful than others. “It felt like he was angry with me,” she said.
Christie Achenbach was a sophomore member of the Spartans’ cross-country and track teams when Michell’s complaints were shooed away. Achenbach earned a scholarship at Michigan State after winning all-state honors for four straight years for the high school in her tiny hometown a couple hours to the north. She didn’t know the name Larry Nassar until later in her college career when a host of other doctors couldn’t figure out how to fix a problem she was having with her hamstring.
After a string of stumped specialists and an unhelpful round of acupuncture, the school’s athletic trainer suggested Nassar might be able to help. He was an unconventional doctor, Achenbach was told, but he was achieving great acclaim and results with some of the country’s top gymnasts. In his office, Nassar explained to Achenbach that his treatment was unique and on the cutting edge of osteopathic medicine.
She called her coach, Kelli Bert, a day or two after the appointment. Bert said years later she doesn’t remember the phone call. Achenbach says she told her coach that Nassar didn’t use a glove or lubricant like a gynecologist would use before inserting his finger into her vagina. Instead, she told the coach, Nassar rubbed his hand on the outside of the region until it became naturally lubricated. Achenbach was immediately certain this was inappropriate but was too shocked and nervous to say anything at the time.
Achenbach remembers Bert telling her Nassar was an Olympic doctor and knew what he was doing. She called a fellow teammate who had seen him in the past, but the teammate didn’t have a similar experience. She told her parents, and they, too, assumed Achenbach was misinterpreting the actions of the doctor. The twenty-one-year-old small-town student had kissed only one boy at that point in her life. She wasn’t confident enough about what happened to her to push back harder. She never saw Nassar again, but her attempt to sound an alarm about his actions was swiftly muted.
Tiffany Thomas shot a wide-eyed stare at the graduate student athletic trainer in the room with her the first time Nassar sexually assaulted her. Thomas was a freshman outfielder for the Michigan State softball team, a star recruit from California who came to East Lansing in 1998. She developed a back injury during her first semester on campus that caused bouts of debilitating pain. The team’s trainers referred her to Nassar.
She lay unclothed from the waist down on Nassar’s training table when she shared her look of panic with the trainer in the room. She got an insouciant shrug in return. Thomas spoke to the supervising trainer, a woman named Destiny Teachnor-Hauk, who dismissed her concerns and said the treatment was normal. It wasn’t until a year and a half later, in March of 2000, that anyone told her differently.
Thomas and the Spartans were in Boca Raton for the Florida Atlantic Invitational tournament during Michigan State’s spring break when her back pain flared. Athletic trainer Lianna Hadden was traveling with the team and trying to get Thomas healthy enough to play. Nothing seemed to be working. Thomas says she hobbled to Hadden’s room and asked if Hadden would consider trying the things that Nassar normally did for her when she saw him back on campus. When she described the intravaginal treatments, Hadden gasped.
“I’m not doing that to you,” Thomas remembers her saying as tears welled in Hadden’s eyes. Thomas cried too. Her initial misgivings seemed to be confirmed. They talked a bit further, and Hadden suggested that when the team returned to East Lansing, the two of them should discuss Nassar’s treatments with Hadden’s supervisor. Hadden didn’t know that Thomas had already tried that route once. The following week, Thomas took a seat in the bleachers inside Jenison Field House with Hadden and Teachnor-Hauk. She walked the two of them through her experience with Nassar.
“He does this to everyone,” Teachnor-Hauk told her again, just as she had more than a year earlier.
Teachnor-Hauk, according to Thomas, said Nassar worked with some of the country’s best athletes, that Michigan State and its athletic department were lucky to have him at their disposal. She told Thomas that the treatments were necessary to keep her healthy enough to play, so if she felt uncomfortable seeing him, she had two options: suck it up or stop playing.
Thomas had grown to think of campus as a second home despite her experience in Nassar’s office. But her chronic back pain continued to increase in intensity to the point where it was hard to walk some days, let alone swing a bat or dive for a fly ball. In 2001, she returned home to California, abandoning the sport she loved and her college studies, feeling certain that nothing Nassar did to her on his training table ever helped her back, nor was it designed to do so.
Within a year of Tiffany Thomas’s departure, Lianna Hadden found herself in the midst of another emotional conversation with another star athlete shaken by an encounter with Nassar. Jenny Rood came to Michigan State with a volleyball scholarship and her father’s permission to “punch any boy in the nose who tried to put his hands where he shouldn’t.” Shoulder, back, and leg injuries were keeping Rood from matching the high expectations she had set for her first few seasons as a Spartan. Her coaches and team trainer suggested she should visit a man that her teammates had jokingly dubbed “the crotch doc” because of his unusual technique. The athletes put up with some discomfort because Nassar was also known as “something of a wizard,” a highly demanded physician with a “miracle treatment.”
Nassar told her at the appointment that he would apply pressure to the pelvic area. He said nothing about exactly where he’d put his hands or the way her body might react to his stimulation. Rood, inexperienced, believed her body would only react to an intimate touch if she wanted it to react. As Nassar continued his procedure, she lay on the table frozen in a storm of confusion, fear, and embarrassment. Nassar chatted as he worked, like a dentist making small talk during a routine appointment.
She recalls “trying to desperately understand why I couldn’t control what was happening to my body.… I felt like my body had just betrayed me, and I had built up such a wall of protection in my mind around Nassar that my first reaction was to question myself, to blame myself.”
Rood’s mind raced with possibilities as she tried to weigh her options for what to do next. She worried that she would be deemed a liar or looked down on if she told anyone what happened to her. She was afraid her peers would look at her differently or that she might be accusing an innocent man. After giving it some consideration, she decided she needed to say something.
Rood asked Hadden, the trainer whom she and her teammates called Lili, if there was a way to file a general complaint. She was still shy and confused about the specifics of what happened to her during her appointment. Hadden took her claim seriously and asked follow-up questions. She wanted to know if Rood thought what happened to her was a crime. Had Nassar physically hurt her?
Rood wasn’t ready to discuss details. She wasn’t physically hurt, and she wasn’t sure that what happened was a crime. She wanted her experience noted, though, in case others had the same misgivings and could perhaps validate the way she felt. She learned that no such reporting mechanism existed. She resolved to stop Nassar if he tried to touch her pelvic area again. It was the best she could think to do.
Nassar’s reputation and his personality unmoored both patients and colleagues. It was hard to square their vision of the man with the stereotypical image of a sexual predator.
Even police failed to see through Nassar’s smoke screens. Detectives from Meridian Township, the chartered community made up of two towns on the eastern border of Lansing, took only two weeks in the fall of 2004 to dismiss a seventeen-year-old’s claims that she was sexually assaulted by Nassar.
Brianne Randall was not an elite athlete. She had no reason to revere Nassar, and she wasn’t referred to him by someone who understood his place in the sporting world. She made no mention of his Olympic credentials when she visited the Meridian Township police station one day after her second appointment with Nassar to treat scoliosis.
Randall’s first appointment with Nassar was uneventful. He evaluated her back while her mother and a medical student remained in the room and suggested a physical therapist might help. A month later, on September 16, 2004, Randall returned on her own for a follow-up appointment at the MSU Sports Medicine Clinic, where Nassar aggressively rubbed his ungloved hand on her vaginal area and her breast. The following day, she and her mother reported her experience to the police before visiting the local hospital to complete a rape kit as part of a standard procedure for collecting evidence.
Nassar arrived at the police station two weeks later to speak with Detective Andrew McCready. He came armed with some written material and a PowerPoint slideshow he used at medical conferences to explain pelvic floor adjustments. Nassar took the detective step by step through his presentation, explaining the way muscle fibers in that area of the body connected to the lower back and the hamstrings. Nassar told him the treatment was medically appropriate and mentioned other medical journals and training videos that verified its legitimacy.
McCready summarized his discussion with Nassar in a total of six sentences. He told investigators who reviewed the case years later that he didn’t record the interview or retain more extensive notes. He reviewed the slideshow Nassar created but did not seek out any medical journal. He did not interview any medical expert to ask about the treatments, explaining that his department didn’t have the money or time to consult expert witnesses. He did not record any questions or responses about the differences between what Randall described and the way Nassar described his technique. He did not mention Randall’s claim that Nassar also massaged her breast. He did not contact anyone at Michigan State to see if Nassar had received any other complaints. He did not forward the case on to prosecutors.
McCready completed fourteen sexual misconduct investigations during his time as a detective. He sent thirteen of them to the prosecutor’s office for review. When asked by investigators years later, he said he would handle Randall’s case differently if he could do it over again and included it was “not [my] best work.”
Two days after McCready spoke to Nassar, he spoke with Randall’s mother to explain that what happened to her daughter was medical treatment. Ellen Speckman-Randall pushed back about specifics such as Nassar not wearing gloves and being alone in a room with a seventeen-year-old girl while he touched her in private areas. McCready wrote in his report that he informed Randall’s mother there was no way to prove if Nassar wore gloves or was alone in the room. It’s not clear if he ever asked the doctor those questions and, if so, how Nassar answered them.
Speckman-Randall recalls a meeting with Nassar after police informed her they considered the matter closed. The doctor told her that it was clear her daughter wasn’t as comfortable with her body as some of the high-level athletes he treats on a regular basis but that her complaint “had merit.” Speckman-Randall left the conversation with Nassar under the impression that he knew he had been “put on the radar screen.”
Years later, the police department and township manager would issue a formal apology to Randall, who then went by Brianne Randall-Gay, and invite her to work with them to improve their sexual assault investigations. McCready has not discussed his role in the case publicly, but told investigators that he was fooled by Nassar’s lies. He reportedly apologized to Randall-Gay privately. His supervisor, who signed off on the closed investigation, declined to be interviewed by investigators and told a reporter from Deadspin.com that he had no memory of the complaint.
Kathie Klages told police she has no recollection of the conversations in 1997 described by Larissa Michell (now Larissa Boyce). Track coach Kelli Bert told reporters she had no recollection of the conversation Christie Achenbach described. Lianna Hadden said the same thing when asked about her conversations with Tiffany Thomas (now Tiffany Thomas Lopez). Destiny Teachnor-Hauk, likewise, told investigators multiple times that she had no memory of a conversation with Thomas in the bleachers of Jenison Field House. Six young women say they told remarkably similar stories to five different adults in the early years of Nassar’s career at Michigan State, and not one of the adults can remember.
Nassar portrayed himself publicly as an innovative expert on a rare medical treatment. He used medical jargon and his self-proclaimed expertise as effective weapons against a steady stream of complaints during his first seven years as a Michigan State employee. But medical knowledge, while it may have been enough to easily swat away questions from the young women and Meridian Township police in 2004, was not the only tool he used for deception. To those who knew him personally, Larry Nassar was a selfless pillar of good virtue in their community. He was willing to help anyone at any time. It was hard for friends and close colleagues to conceive of his doing anything that wasn’t intended to serve others. His shield of a sterling reputation, though, was about to face its stiffest test yet.