Rachael never returned to gymnastics as an athlete after her string of injuries as a teenager. The long hours she once spent in the gym were instead occupied by her new love for the law.
After completing enough college-level courses to meet the school’s requirements, Rachael enrolled in the Oak Brook College of Law a few months after her nineteenth birthday. She was one of roughly fifty new students in the small, Christian-based correspondence course program headquartered in Fresno, California. She found the format more practical than a brick-and-mortar law school because it would allow her to earn a degree for roughly the same price as buying a new car. The low cost gave her a chance to choose future jobs based on their value to the world rather than their likelihood to help her pay down student debt.
The remote classes—she studied at home in Michigan save for one week a year when the group met in Fresno—appealed to a young woman who was still grappling with how to trust the world around her. The aftershock trauma of sexual abuse can be far-reaching, unpredictable, and impossible to compartmentalize. For Rachael and many others who suffered Nassar’s abuse, those tremors showed up in unexpected places and could be paralyzing.
Nassar groomed her and others with his goofball personality and by convincing Rachael and her parents that he genuinely cared about her. He used good to mask evil. It wasn’t dark corners and long shadows that reminded Rachael of danger in the wake of abuse. Instead, friendly gestures and small acts of kindness set off the alarm bells in her head. Each time someone else’s hand grazed hers, Rachael was left to wonder whether it was a sympathetic touch or someone testing her boundaries. She viewed compliments through a skeptical lens, wondering constantly about the person’s true intentions. Was she trusting someone she shouldn’t trust?
“It basically takes every normal interaction and not only turns it on its head, but uses it against you,” Rachael said. “So, you just don’t engage with people. You shut them off. You put up walls.”
Flipping the poles of good and bad shook Rachael’s faith. She worked through her questions by writing in a private journal. Publicly, she started a blogging account on Xanga.com, where she wrote about justice, forgiveness, and a biblical worldview. She found solace and hope in the words of others like C. S. Lewis. The British author wrote about his own faith coming temporarily unmoored during World War II.
Her blog attracted the attention of a young Canadian man interested in theology. Jacob Denhollander first found Rachael’s Xanga page on the recommendation of a mutual friend. They traded comments with each other about what she was writing and their similar views of the world. Longer messages followed about their personal lives and the ways in which both arrived at their strongly held beliefs. After a couple years, they decided they should meet. Jacob traveled to Michigan to meet Rachael and her family in person. Before the visit, he brushed up on his gymnastics knowledge to help break the ice.
It was the summer of 2008, and the US team was preparing to battle China for a gold medal on the latter’s home turf in the Beijing games. Rachael had stopped training in the sport but had not lost her love for it. She coached preschoolers for a few years and continued to follow the rise of America’s up-and-coming gymnasts with her mom. Rachael kept tabs on Nassar too. She periodically searched his name on the internet, hoping to find another complaint or someone casting a faint bit of doubt about his intentions. What she found instead was that his fame and beloved status had only grown stronger.
Nassar’s picture appeared on the front page of the Lansing State Journal in a profile about his work in the weeks leading up to the 2008 Olympics. The article outlined Nassar’s career in gymnastics and the way he helped famous Olympians such as Kerri Strug and Shannon Miller. The headline dubbed him Team USA’s “Dream Builder”—a moniker he provided to the reporter himself.
“I always think of myself as a dream builder,” he told the reporter that summer. “It’s great to see people live out their dreams and achieve their goals.”
Nassar’s most valuable quality to the coaches and gymnasts was how fast he could get the girls back to work. The most common areas of injury in gymnastics are wrists, ankles, and backs. Routine hyperextension makes some types of back injury nearly inevitable for gymnasts who train for long periods of time, especially those who followed the intense practice ethos widely accepted by the world’s top coaches. Discs slip, vertebrae fall out of line, and pain follows.
Most physicians tell younger patients the best way to fix these problems is through rest. Elite-level gymnasts, though, have small windows of time to reap the rewards of their years of hard work. The coaches who invest countless hours in training them know that developing one superstar can change the trajectory of their own careers. Missing weeks or months of training represents a major blow for both gymnast and coach. Nassar told them he had a shortcut.
He told his gymnastics patients he had treatments that could alleviate their pain and allow them to keep practicing. He used his pelvic floor adjustments when other doctors might have explored options for surgery or other forms of treatment. One gymnast said she saw Nassar for months before someone recommended she get a bone scan when her pain continued to persist. The results showed she had eight fractures in her back. Whether the treatments worked was nearly irrelevant. They were enough to convince gymnasts and coaches they were safe to keep going at a time when stopping was not an option.
Physicians who knew Nassar professionally say he was not a genius. He was a specialist who became an expert in a specific procedure geared toward helping lower back and pelvic injuries, both common among gymnasts. Medical experts say the treatments, when administered under the right circumstances, are a useful type of therapy. When done properly, the therapy is always completed with gloves, a third-party chaperone, a thorough explanation, and usually after all less-intrusive options have been exhausted.
Coaches who worked with him appreciated how much he knew about the sport. In the same 2008 article where Nassar talked about making dreams come true, his old friend John Geddert said he valued Nassar’s ability to shape a rehab program around his gymnasts’ injuries.
“Most doctors that don’t know the sport will simply tell you to get off of it, rest, get out of the gym,” Geddert told the Lansing State Journal. “That wastes very valuable time, especially when you’re dealing with national-caliber athletes who can’t afford to take time off.”
Kathie Klages told the same reporter Nassar was the “most amazing doctor I’ve met in my entire lifetime.” USA Gymnastics president Steve Penny called Nassar an important member of the team who “can be trusted and has [the athletes’] best interest in mind.”
Such heaping praise helped Nassar accrue more than a dozen “Contributor of the Year” awards at the state, regional, and national level for his work with gymnasts. By 2008, with the Beijing games approaching, Nassar was traveling to fewer events. He had three children under the age of ten at home, the oldest of which had been diagnosed with autism. He continued volunteering as a doctor, but also dedicated time to teaching Sunday School at his local church. He was still eager to attend the biggest meets, though, and was on his way that summer to his third Olympic games as the head physician of the US women’s team.
Toward the end of Jacob’s first visit to Michigan, Rachael decided she wanted to tell him about Nassar and how he had sexually abused her. They slipped away from a family gathering to a small elementary school playground across the street from her home on the night before he was scheduled to return to Canada. Jacob had been just as thoughtful and engaging as his online messages thus far, and Rachael thought he deserved to know about an event that in many ways shaped her teenage years. She also wanted to see how he would react.
Jacob listened quietly while they sat on swings and Rachael revealed what very few others in her life knew at that point. He didn’t recoil. He nodded along and told her he was sorry to hear what Nassar had done. He didn’t question her story or how she had handled the aftermath. He offered her support and told her that his feelings for her weren’t any different from what they had been before.
Jacob passed the test. A year later, in August 2009, they were married in Kalamazoo. The newlywed Denhollanders moved into a small apartment with plans to eventually relocate closer to Jacob’s home in Canada. They borrowed a bed from friends and found a cheap dining room table, holding off on most furniture until they had a more permanent place to live. They did splurge for some bookshelves. They both agreed that a home is not a home without a set of well-stocked bookshelves.
Rachael also passed the bar exam in 2009, completing her long-term goal of becoming an attorney, but she watched the last months of that year slip by with dread. Her twenty-fifth birthday would arrive in December. When she looked it up years earlier, the statute of limitations to hold Nassar criminally responsible for what she knew was sexual assault appeared to expire when the victim turned twenty-five years old. Time was almost up.
She continued to comb the internet in hopes of finding some reason to believe she stood a chance. She knew she would have to overcome both the loyalty that many felt to the institutions where he worked and the personal love so many of his patients had for him, even those who didn’t yet realize he was taking advantage of them when he said he was helping them.
Rachael grew despondent. She struggled when she thought about the hundreds of other young women whom Nassar treated, certain that she wasn’t the only one who had been abused. Jacob did his best to console his new wife. They talked through all her potential options, but each led back down a path that reminded her she would be one small voice standing up against a famous man and the humongous, lucrative institutions that supported his work. She felt powerless.
On the eve of her twenty-fifth birthday, Rachael lay awake in a borrowed bed in her sparsely appointed apartment and stared up into the darkness. She had already accepted the reality that there was nothing she could do, but the finality of the date filled their room with a sense of loss. Jacob felt like they were mourning the death of a loved one. He wasn’t sure if he had seen his wife cry before, but there were tears that night as her hope faded.
Rachael resolved not to give up. She would share her story to corroborate Nassar’s actions if another victim ever came forward. She knew now, though, she couldn’t stop him on her own. She would need help, and she had no idea where she would find it.