The walls in Larry Nassar’s exam room at Michigan State were a mosaic of pictures and posters of gymnasts in leotards and personal thank-you notes written on bright stationery in bubbly, swirling script. In spring 2014, Amanda Thomashow entered the exam room and, like most of Nassar’s new patients, darted her eyes across the busy walls trying to digest the taped-up monument to his famous patients. The iconic image of Kerri Strug limping from the vault platform in Atlanta still loomed large. Strug’s photo was joined now by dozens of other girls, including some from the 2008 squad that won silver medals in Beijing and the famous group that won gold in London.
Thomashow, twenty-four, was not a gymnast. The oldest of three sisters, Thomashow grew up blocks from Michigan State’s campus, close enough to hear the cheers coming from the football stadium on Saturday afternoons from their backyard. Her parents enrolled their daughters in the youth program at Jenison Field House in the late 1990s, but Amanda abandoned gymnastics shortly after breaking her wrist as a grade schooler. She decided very early the injuries and intensity weren’t worth it for her.
She spent her high school years as a cheerleader at Lansing Catholic High School before enrolling at Michigan State, the university where her father served as the director of the university’s plant research laboratory and her mother had obtained a medical degree. She graduated in 2012 and was planning to head back to campus and enroll in graduate courses to work toward her own medical degree that summer. She decided she wanted to become a neurologist. She still loved Michigan State, but after two dozen years of steeping in the school’s tradition, her green-and-white blood was jaded. Thomashow’s jaw didn’t drop at the sight of Nassar’s celebrity connection flushed out on full display on his walls. If anything, she found the photographs and notes a bit off-putting.
Hip and back pain from old cheerleading injuries nagged her after college, which is why she found herself in Nassar’s office on March 24 for her first errand on what was scheduled to be a busy day off from work. She mentioned her appointment to a coworker a day earlier at the retail shop where they took inventory, folded clothes, and helped customers. The coworker, another East Lansing native, by chance had visited Nassar for an injury of her own in the past.
“Oh really?” she said when Thomashow mentioned his name. “He’s kind of a creep.”
Thomashow laughed. “What do you mean?”
Little warnings and bits of advice weren’t rare among the girls and young women Nassar treated. Along with the string of pointed cries for help that had been ignored in the past, there was a steady undercurrent of uneasiness about Nassar’s methods and his friendly demeanor. Gymnasts prepped their peers for a feeling that was going to be “weird” or “icky” when they lay out on Nassar’s training table. Athletes from the Michigan State teams he treated did the same.
Skeptical parents harbored reservations about the way Nassar interacted with their children. Some members of the church where he volunteered as a Sunday school teacher had raised concerns in the past. Even Facebook, where Nassar interacted and scheduled appointments with many of his young patients, found his pattern of behavior odd enough to disable his account a few years after he joined, according to police reports.
Nassar’s reputation still smothered all doubts. At this point, he had been working at Michigan State for seventeen years. Inspired by his oldest daughter, he started a charity to get autistic children involved in gymnastics and was approaching the end of his second decade with the US national team. His coworkers laughed off the Facebook ban as a misguided algorithm. Parents who whispered concerns to other gymnasts’ parents as they watched practice were waved off as being paranoid. For most, the hunches and misgivings never amounted to enough to speak up against the dedicated doctor—a man who they were told was a key, rare asset to helping their daughters achieve their dreams.
Thomashow knew that her younger sister, who was still in gymnastics and training at Twistars, had seen Nassar for treatment in the past. Her mother, a pediatrician, recommended Nassar to some of her patients. She had gone out of her way to help Thomashow schedule an appointment and assured her that there was no need to worry, Nassar was the best. So, she brushed off her coworker’s concerns about Nassar’s personality and showed up at the MSU Sports Medicine Clinic the following morning.
She took a seat on Nassar’s training table as Nassar wheeled his chair up next to her and a young female resident took her place a few feet away from them. They chatted about her family and about her injuries. Nassar nodded along and occasionally reached out to touch her thigh. He had her stand and examined her gait. He touched her hip and then left his hand for several seconds on her butt. Thomashow shot a confused, concerned look at the resident in the room and thought she saw the woman return a similar expression. Neither said anything at the time.
Nassar sent her down the hall to get X-rays for her hip injury. He showed her the images and pointed out that one of her hips was out of place. He recommended some exercises she could try to fix her issues and asked her to try a couple of them. She mentioned one of the twists he had her attempt actually caused some pain in her shoulder. Turning back to the X-rays, he suggested to the resident who was still there with them that she should check in on a patient in a different room.
When the door closed and the resident was gone, Nassar turned to Thomashow and told her he thought he could do a few things to help alleviate her pain right away. The appointment had already been long, almost an hour, and uncomfortable. She figured the sooner she agreed, the sooner she could leave.
Nassar asked her to lie on her side on the training table and massaged the shoulder she said was hurting with one hand. With the other hand, he reached over her and into her shirt. He cupped her breast in his hand in what he later described to investigators as an attempt to release tension in tissues that ran between her shoulder and the ribs beneath her breast. Thomashow believed the doctor had other intentions. She asked him to stop.
He told her to flip over onto her stomach as he walked to a counter in the far corner of the room where he kept a large bottle of hand lotion. He massaged her lower back and worked his way toward her pelvic floor. He placed three fingers over her vaginal opening and massaged the area, coming “extremely close” to inserting a finger inside of her vagina. Thomashow says it took her a couple minutes to process what was happening and muster the courage to tell him to stop.
“I’m almost done,” she remembers him saying, before he walked back to the far corner of the room and stood for a conspicuous length of time with his back toward her. She noticed he appeared to have a large bulge in his pants.
Nassar insisted she schedule another appointment as soon as possible. Thomashow sat in shock as he tried to open a calendar on his computer. She remembers scanning the room as she tried to come up with excuses not to return and seeing the dozens of smiling faces on the pictures hanging from Nassar’s walls.
“Oh my god,” she thought. “He does this all the time!”
Thomashow knew immediately that what happened to her in Nassar’s exam room was sexual assault. She said so out loud as she settled into a chair at her therapist’s office less than an hour later. The visit was previously scheduled, the next item on her list of appointments and errands for the day.
“Okay, Amanda,” the therapist told her. “Do you want to leave now to report this to police or should we finish your session first?”
She needed to tell her mother first. She needed to process exactly what had happened and come up with a plan for how to proceed. Two weeks later, she returned to the MSU Sports Medicine Clinic building at 7:00 a.m. on a Monday morning, arriving early in hopes of avoiding a chance run-in with Nassar. She had called Dr. Jeff Kovan, a fellow physician and the head of the small group at the clinic, over the weekend and explained her concerns. Dr. Kovan agreed to meet with her as soon as possible and for privacy ushered her up a back staircase—the same one Nassar frequently used for his after-hours appointments.
Thomashow apologetically explained to Kovan why she felt violated. She told him Nassar massaged her vaginal area with three of his fingers in a circular motion for more than a minute. She told him about the touchy-feely exam before then and the resident leaving the room. She told him she’d heard from other friends that he made them uncomfortable as well. She mentioned she had checked Nassar’s Instagram page and could not understand why a fifty-year-old man was liking so many photos of young girls.
According to Thomashow, Kovan chuckled at the last comment. He said Nassar had told his colleagues years earlier that he had been flagged for suspicious behavior on Facebook but that it was a misunderstanding because he used the site to keep in contact with his young patients. Facebook doesn’t publicly share information about any action it takes against individual accounts, but a spokeswoman said the company removes accounts that exploit children. They monitor potentially exploitative behavior with technology that can recognize child nudity in images and also rely on other users to raise concerns about problematic messages or activity. When an account is removed, it can’t be reinstated. Someone would have to create a new account to rejoin the site. Nassar’s coworkers knew his access to Facebook was restricted at one point, but he later returned to the site and continued to use it and other social media to communicate and schedule appointments with his young patients.
Kovan assured her Nassar was an expert of pelvic floor manipulations but said he would send her concerns through the proper channels.
Three weeks passed before Thomashow heard from anyone else at the university. In mid-May, she received a phone call from a woman named Kristine Moore, who told Thomashow she was an assistant director at the university’s Office of Inclusion. Part of her job was to investigate complaints of sexual assault to see if they violated Title IX policy.
Thomashow recalls Moore sounding surprised as she laid out the same details she had described to Kovan weeks earlier. Kovan, Thomashow says, had clearly not relayed all the information from her complaint. In notes about her conversation with Kovan, Moore wrote that he did not seem to take the complaint seriously and was defending Nassar. After hearing more details from Thomashow, Moore told her she believed they should meet in person and open a Title IX investigation.
Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments in 1972, making it illegal for any university to allow discrimination on the basis of sex. The law created more opportunities for women in research, on athletic fields, and in many other areas of campus life. Through a series of Supreme Court rulings and legislative changes through the 1980s into the early 2000s, Title IX also became a tool used to hold universities responsible for keeping their students and employees safe from sexual violence. If schools didn’t meet the US Department of Education’s standards, they could be punished by losing federal funding.
Universities appoint Title IX coordinators to oversee the process of investigating and adjudicating claims of assault and harassment. In 2011, the US Department of Education crafted what has become known in the higher education industry as the “Dear Colleague Letter,” which reshaped the Title IX process with detailed guidelines that each university should follow to be compliant with the law. The list of changes included lowering the burden of proof to show that sexual violence occurred to a “preponderance of the evidence,” which is a lower bar to clear than the standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt” that exists in criminal courts. It also required schools to respond to claims of sexual violence in a timely manner; make greater efforts to inform those who report incidents about their options for pursuing justice; and offer them support services for counseling, academic assistance, and personal safety.
Two months after the new guidelines went into effect, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights received a complaint from a Michigan State student alleging, among other concerns, that the school was too slow to respond to her report of being sexually assaulted by a pair of athletes on campus. Another complaint about the university’s response to a different case three years later prompted the federal agency to launch its own investigation, which would eventually expand into a review of Michigan State’s overall handling of sexual violence complaints against students and employees.
The investigation, one of dozens that the department conducted at universities across the country during that time, reviewed three years of grievances against Michigan State and eventually found the school fostered a “sexually hostile environment” on campus. The investigators reviewed 150 different claims sent to the office that handled Title IX complaints and found “significant concerns” with about 20 percent of them. Specifically, the federal investigators found that in multiple cases involving university employees, the Title IX office had evidence of inappropriate conduct but failed to respond adequately, and the behavior continued. They also discovered Michigan State failed to maintain complete grievance files, which “could potentially prevent the Title IX Coordinator from recognizing related incidents or patterns of incidents that need to be addressed.”
Those missteps were related to cases other than complaints about Nassar. As part of its resolution with the Department of Education, Michigan State agreed to make several changes and provide documentation for all prior complaints of sexual abuse or harassment by the end of 2015. Michigan State didn’t send those documents until nearly a year after their due date, and when they arrived, Thomashow’s complaint about Nassar was notably missing. The university later said it omitted Thomashow’s report by mistake.
Federal investigators were in the process of scrutinizing Michigan State’s Title IX operation as Thomashow’s claim started to make its way through the system. Her call with Moore prompted the school to begin its first official investigation of Nassar on May 15, 2014. Four days later, Michigan State president Lou Anna Simon had a discussion with one of her senior advisors, Paulette Granberry Russell, a woman who had directed the university’s diversity and inclusion efforts since before Simon took over leadership in East Lansing.
Granberry Russell met routinely with the president to make sure Simon was briefed on any diversity or Title IX issues that might become “hot-button topics.” If a high-profile employee were involved in a complaint, members of Michigan State’s Title IX office say they knew Simon would want to be aware. Granberry Russell learned about the complaint against Nassar on a Friday morning. She reviewed the file and sent an email to Simon: “We have an incident involving a sports medicine doc.”
Their discussion took place the following Monday morning. Granberry Russell would say years later in court that she couldn’t recall whether she and Simon met in person or spoke over the phone. She also couldn’t remember if she specifically shared Nassar’s name with Simon, who claims she didn’t know the identity of the “sports medicine doc” until several years later.
Physical evidence from that time shows that Granberry Russell scratched a couple notes on the outside of her file folder that held the agenda for her meeting with Simon. “Sports Med,” she wrote, “Dr. Nassar, SA.” SA served as shorthand for sexual assault. Simon’s printed notes for the same meeting included a bullet point for “Sexual Assault Cases.” In the margin next to it, she jotted down three letters in pen and underlined them: COM—College of Osteopathic Medicine. For the first time, whether Simon knew his name or not, a complaint about the school’s resident gymnastics celebrity had reached the highest office of the university.
Almost any noteworthy event that occurred on the Michigan State campus eventually found its way to the desk of the university’s long-serving president. A decade into her stay in office, Simon was known as an omnipresent manager who had constructed a culture that prized loyalty and longevity.
Many of her closest advisors were fixtures on campus. Granberry Russell was in her sixteenth year in the same job. Simon’s general counsel, Robert Noto, had served for nineteen. One of her most ardent and powerful supporters on the board of trustees, Joel Ferguson, had first been elected to his spot in 1986. Simon herself was a rarity in higher education, a woman who rose through the ranks to the top of a major university without ever changing her zip code.
Simon moved to East Lansing in 1970 after spending the first twenty-three years of her life in central Indiana. She was born to blue-collar parents and worked in her grandfather’s lumberyard before earning a scholarship to Indiana State University, where she studied mathematics. She came to Michigan State for a doctorate in higher education and transitioned into teaching on campus when she finished her own classes.
She charted a course toward a role in the university’s administration but never abandoned her background in math. Statistics and data served as her compass as she rose through the ranks. She first landed on the board of trustees’ radar as a presidential candidate in the early 1990s. She didn’t get the position that time around, but was elevated to provost—the highest academic officer of the university.
She got her shot as interim president in 2003 and took over the position on a full-time basis two years later, more than thirty years after she first came to East Lansing. She made it her business to know the minute details of running every facet of the university.
“You would never handle a sensitive topic without making sure Lou Anna was aware of it because you’d get your head back on a plate,” a former longtime MSU administrator said.
During Simon’s leadership, Michigan State thrived under the metrics often used to measure success in higher education. The school’s endowment tripled to more than $3 billion under her watch. The land-grant school with a strong agricultural foundation grew the scope and amount of research it produced in a number of scientific fields.
Many employees were in awe of Simon’s seemingly tireless involvement in and knowledge of the way an institution with thousands of employees and tens of thousands of students operated. She was a “data wonk” who processed information like a robot and held the dispassionate disposition to match.
Michigan State’s profile grew on a global stage with Simon steering the ship. She understood the importance of fundraising and embraced the role athletics and branding could play in helping those efforts. She threw her support behind athletic director Mark Hollis, football coach Mark Dantonio, and basketball coach Tom Izzo—three more high-profile employees who had deep roots and long tenures in East Lansing.
Simon involved herself more directly in the world of college sports in 2012 when she took over as the chair of the NCAA’s executive committee. A week before she was installed in that position, the organization levied unprecedented sanctions against fellow Big Ten school Penn State. The penalties stemmed from the university’s administrators ignoring warnings about assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky’s misconduct with young boys. Sandusky was later convicted of forty-five counts of child sex abuse.
Simon told reporters at the time that she used the scandal playing out in Pennsylvania as a chance to remind all of her employees how they should react to concerns or allegations of sexual abuse.
“The right thing is saying something when you see something, and doing something after you said something,” she said. “It’s really that simple.”