While Rachael, Jamie, and others struggled through life after gymnastics, John Geddert was thriving. By 2011, he was already the most decorated gymnastics coach in Michigan history. He’d coached more than twenty US national team members at his Twistars USA Gymnastics Club, which he opened in 1996 after leaving Great Lakes Gymnastics. None of his students was more promising than a powerfully built five-foot-two gymnast from nearby DeWitt named Jordyn Wieber. She was Geddert’s biggest star, and in 2011, her first year on the senior national team, she won the all-around competition at her first senior-elite event, the American Cup. Barring an injury, Wieber seemed destined to become Geddert’s first Olympian.
Mandatory training sessions at the Karolyi ranch continued, but they were less frequent since Bela Karolyi stepped aside in 2001, handing the role of national team coordinator to his wife, Marta. With fewer trips to Texas, the role of gymnasts’ personal coaches took on added importance. In 2011, few coaches within the sport had higher profiles than Geddert, who was then fifty-three.
The demanding coaching style that continued to push Geddert forward was also wearing thin on some at his gym. At the time that his star gymnast was hitting her peak, Geddert was also navigating police investigations that threatened to send his elevated status in the sport crashing down to earth. Geddert’s hair-trigger temper led to allegations of assault and battery in multiple incidents at Twistars.
In the first incident, reported in November 2011, the parent of a Twistars gymnast who also worked at the club as a coach told state police that during a heated argument after an evening practice, Geddert followed her into the parking lot, screamed obscenities at her—among other things calling her “white trailer trash”—and physically assaulted her by stepping on her foot and chest bumping her to prevent her from leaving.
In the second incident, in October 2013, eleven-year-old gymnast Makayla Johnson (she later changed her name to Makayla Hampton) told state police that Geddert pulled her off the floor during a Twistars practice to discipline her. Hampton and her grandmother, Jacqueline Hampton, both described that night. Hampton says she had a mental block and had been unable to perform a round-off, back-handspring layout. Geddert’s frustrations with the young gymnast’s limitations boiled over for everyone on the gym floor to see. Fuming, he pulled Hampton into the locker room, alone.
“I felt scared. I thought if I went in that room, he would choke me or something,” Hampton told police.
Once inside the locker room, Hampton says, Geddert screamed at her and stepped on her foot so she couldn’t back away. He then grabbed and twisted her arm, she says, pushing her into the wall and down onto a bench. Hampton says she can’t recall specifics of what Geddert said. She only remembers being in tears and afraid. She then returned to practice to do conditioning drills as a form of punishment. Jacqueline recalls picking her granddaughter up from practice and seeing Geddert pacing the gym with a threatening look on his face. During the car ride home, Hampton broke down in tears as she described the incident. The next night, Jacqueline had her granddaughter file a report with the Michigan State Police.
On the same evening that police interviewed Hampton, they showed up on Geddert’s doorstep in Grand Ledge, Michigan, to question him about the incident. It was after 10:00 p.m., and Geddert had a glass of wine in his hand when he answered the door to find two state troopers on his front porch. His wife and son were at home at the time. He led the troopers to his basement for the interview.
Geddert told them Hampton “got her ass chewed” but denied stomping on her foot and said he only grabbed her arm to guide her to a chair, even demonstrating on one of the troopers how he’d touched the young gymnast. When asked if it was normal to touch a gymnast in this way or whether he had her permission to touch her at all, Geddert responded with a question of his own: “Is this something I need to call a lawyer on?”
Geddert, with his career potentially on the line, instead turned to a close and loyal friend who he knew could help. Shortly after reporting the incident, Jacqueline received a series of text messages from an unexpected source. It was Larry Nassar, pleading with her not to pursue criminal charges against Geddert.
“Just ask to drop it, if you are not 100% sure you want to close John’s gym and have him banned from USAG for the rest of his life,” Nassar said in his text message, adding, “Having the police come to his house was a huge lesson for [John] already.… If you are able to tell the PA [prosecuting attorney] that you want to drop the case it would go a long way for sure. Remember this is not just about John but also effects [sic] every family at the gym. If John makes changes everyone wins. If John is banned from gymnastics, solo, many many people are affected.… I have nothing to gain by being deceitful and everything to lose. My life is about honesty and trust or there is not a single person that would see me.”
Nassar went on to explain that “John just sent a policy out that from now on all staff members are not to be allowed to be with a gymnast alone and not allowed to be in any room without the door being open.”
Whether such a policy ever existed at Twistars is unclear, but if it did exist, it was either ignored or it simply didn’t apply to Nassar. He saw hundreds of girls on his training table in a room at Twistars, with the door closed and without another adult present. Parents would routinely sign their children up on Monday evenings and wait hours for a chance to have their daughters treated by the man who worked on Olympians. The Twistars gymnasts would gather near the start of the vault runway waiting for their turn to enter the double steel doors to Nassar’s training room. Once inside, while on his training table and surrounded by shelves of cleaning equipment, dozens of those girls and young women say Nassar sexually assaulted them.
Geddert was never criminally charged in either the 2011 or 2013 investigations. After the 2013 incident involving Hampton, he was ordered by the Eaton County Prosecuting Attorney to complete counseling.
It turned out that these incidents were part of a pattern that stretched back decades earlier, to Geddert’s days at Great Lakes Gymnastics. In a December 1986 report, filed with Lansing police, Geddert was accused of pushing a teenaged male (a police report of the incident has the person’s age redacted because he was a minor at the time) down a staircase and kicking him in the middle of the back. Geddert denied pushing or kicking anyone and told the investigating officer he merely escorted the teen and his friend out of the gym after they’d disrupted his class.
In a 1990 incident, also reported to Lansing police, a male gymnast, who’d been going to Great Lakes gymnastics for two and a half years, accused Geddert of pushing him down from behind during a confrontation at a practice. Geddert told police the gymnast was being disruptive, that he grabbed the gymnast by the shirt, saying, “When I talk to you, you listen,” and that the young gymnast then jerked away from Geddert’s grasp and fell to the floor without being pushed. Neither of those cases resulted in criminal charges either.
While it’s not clear what prompted it, in the spring and summer of 2014, USA Gymnastics paid Don Brooks, a Lansing private detective, to investigate the history of complaints against Geddert. Brooks interviewed Hampton, among others, about her reported assault inside the locker room. Brooks said it would be professionally inappropriate to discuss his findings, which he turned over to USA Gymnastics in September 2014. It’s unclear if the organization did anything with the information he provided.
In late February 2019, the Michigan attorney general’s office announced that it was taking over a criminal investigation of Geddert. Makayla and Jacqueline Hampton both spoke once again with state investigators. Multiple complaints about Geddert’s coaching tactics had previously been investigated by the sheriff’s department in Eaton County, Michigan, but none had resulted in criminal charges by the county’s prosecuting attorney by the time the state took over the case.
Larry Nassar was well aware of John Geddert’s aggressive personality. He’d seen Geddert’s fiery temper on display at Twistars and dating back to their days working together at Great Lakes Gymnastics. What’s not clear is how much Geddert knew about Nassar’s serial sexual abuse. On at least one occasion, however, Geddert walked into the trainer’s room at Twistars while Nassar was penetrating a young gymnast with his fingers, according to the woman’s court testimony.
“All I remember is him [Nassar] doing the treatment on me with his fingers in my vagina, massaging my back with a towel over my butt, and John walking in and making a joke that I guess my back really did hurt,” the woman testified.
Just how much Geddert saw, whether he knew the young gymnast was being penetrated, remains unclear. Geddert allegedly was in a position to hear complaints about Nassar’s treatments on two other occasions, according to a report commissioned by the United States Olympic Committee in 2018.
Boston-based law firm Ropes & Gray conducted more than one hundred interviews and reviewed more than a million pages of documents in a probe into Nassar’s misconduct led by two former federal prosecutors. Many of the survivors of Nassar’s sexual abuse didn’t speak with investigators from Ropes & Gray out of concern about the independence of the investigation. But the final report was surprisingly critical of both USA Gymnastics and the USOC. Much of it centered around who knew what and when about Nassar’s sexual assaults, including Geddert.
A former Twistars gymnast told the investigators that in 1998, her mother reported an inappropriate treatment by Nassar to Geddert, who then “arranged for the gymnast not to see Nassar again for one-on-one treatments, but took no further action.” A second former gymnast, who trained with Geddert in the 2000s, said her mother “reported Nassar’s conduct to the tight-knit Twistars community, but that no action was taken.” The Ropes & Gray report cites survivor interviews in each case and does not provide answers to key questions. What did the mother of the gymnast tell Geddert in 1998? To whom in the Twistars community did the report get delivered in the 2000s, and how much of that concern made its way to Geddert?
Perhaps the better question is, given the culture inside Geddert’s gyms—Great Lakes and later Twistars—what did gymnasts and their parents feel comfortable sharing with Geddert about Nassar? Many of Geddert’s former gymnasts remained silent and afraid of him years after they ended their careers and shied away from sharing their experiences with anyone asking questions. Former Great Lakes and Twistars gymnasts, their parents, and former office employees and coaches, who’d worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Geddert, were reluctant to say anything critical about him. Many of them cited his intimidating and vindictive personality. All of them were mindful of the power he wielded within the local gymnastics community.
Priscilla Kintigh was there the day Geddert started as head coach at Great Lakes Gymnastics. She was coached by him, worked later as his office manager at Twistars, and had a son who was also coached by Geddert. All told, she’s known Geddert for more than thirty-five years.
“John and Larry were like this perfect storm,” Kintigh said. “You become so unapproachable that your own gymnasts don’t feel comfortable telling you what’s going on. There’s no way any of the girls would have felt comfortable saying anything to John [about Nassar]. Kids were terrified of him.”
By 2011, the lack of any meaningful oversight of Larry Nassar within John Geddert’s Twistars USA Gymnastics Club had become routine. As the decades-old partners who started in an abandoned school building in Lansing reached the pinnacle of their sport together, a similar dynamic was about to play out on the world’s biggest stage.