You want to take a picture of a prototypical NGB, you take a picture of us.… We’re the No. 1 country in the world in the medals count.… Every metric that I could provide you is going up.
—STEVE PENNY, FORMER USAG PRESIDENT AND CEO, SPRING 2015
It was well known among the national team gymnasts training at the Karolyi ranch that unless you got to practice half an hour early, you were considered late. So, it was around 8:00 a.m. one morning in early June 2015 that a chain reaction of events began that would ultimately bring an end to Larry Nassar’s time with Team USA and send the organization he’d worked with for nearly two decades into a tailspin.
It was typical for Alyssa Baumann, seventeen, and her roommate at the ranch, Aly Raisman, then twenty-one, to sit on the gym floor each morning and apply heat packs or roll out stiff muscles before practice officially began with a regimented formality known as the lineup. Raisman, the veteran, had won gold in London three years earlier, and Baumann, who’d been a national team member since 2013, was attempting to make her first Olympic team. Each day at the ranch Baumann, Raisman, and the other gymnasts would assemble at precisely 8:30 a.m. and stand shoulder-to-shoulder, shortest to tallest, in military-style precision under the intimidating gaze of Marta Karolyi. It was a routine reminiscent of a drill sergeant conducting morning inspection of the troops. The half hour prior to the lineup was one of the few times in the gym that gymnasts could relax and speak freely. On this particular morning, Baumann and Raisman’s teammate Maggie Nichols, who was seventeen at the time, joined the conversation. The subject turned to Larry Nassar and how uncomfortable he made them feel when he penetrated them during their sessions with him.
“Does he stick his fingers up there? Do you jump when he does that?” Baumann asked her teammates. “I think it’d be weird not to,” another one added. They all agreed.
Sarah Jantzi, then thirty-five, was Nichols’s personal coach from Twin City Twisters, a gymnastics club located in the northern suburbs of Minneapolis. Days later, after a practice at her club in Minnesota, she pulled her star gymnast aside to ask her about her experiences with Nassar. Nichols told Jantzi that when she went to see Nassar for her knee injury, he massaged her groin area “too close” to her vagina and that he also sent her a private message on Facebook, telling the seventeen-year-old she looked beautiful in her prom dress.
Jantzi suspected Nassar’s behavior was sexual abuse and alerted Gina Nichols, Maggie’s mother. On June 17, ten days after the national team camp broke, Jantzi sent a text message to Rhonda Faehn, the senior vice president of USA Gymnastics and the head of the women’s program, asking if Faehn could talk on the phone. Faehn made contemporaneous notes of her conversation with Jantzi, which she later turned over to a Senate subcommittee investigating the Nassar case.
6/17—Sarah Jantzi called me @ 5:48 pm (I called her after she texted me to speak).
She notified me of her athlete having 3 uncomfortable encounters of therapy w/ trainer Larry Nassar.
She stated he massaged her on the groin area and too close to the vagina for her knee.
2013 Worlds Selection Camp 2015 Italy selection camp 3 Xs.
Also stated that he private FB messaged her that she looked beautiful in her prom dress. She just felt uncomfortable.
2 other athletes agreed about the uncomfortable factor
Simone Biles
Aly Raisman
After speaking with Jantzi, Faehn immediately called Steve Penny, relaying what Jantzi had shared. What happened in the weeks and months following that conversation would set Steve Penny’s career and the organization he led on a path to ruin.
In June 2015, a little more than a year before the Rio Olympics, the women’s gymnastics team looked well positioned to repeat its gold-medal-winning performance in London. Simone Biles, arguably the greatest gymnast America has ever produced, was the sport’s undisputed star. She hadn’t lost a meet of any kind in two years and, in October 2015, would win her third consecutive all-around title at the World Championships in Glasgow, Scotland, something no gymnast had ever done. Nassar survivors and their supporters would later conclude USA Gymnastics was driven by two goals: the pursuit of money and medals. In June 2015, both were in abundant supply. Then Penny got that phone call from Rhonda Faehn.
When Rhonda Faehn first told Steve Penny about the troubling way Nassar had conducted himself with Maggie Nichols, Penny responded “that he would handle the matter and notify the proper authorities.… By ‘proper authorities,’ Ms. Faehn understood Mr. Penny to be referring to law enforcement,” according to the USOC’s internal investigation.
But on June 17, 2015, Penny didn’t notify the proper authorities. He didn’t call law enforcement or the Department of Family and Protective Services in Texas, which the law in that state required when an allegation of child sexual abuse is made. He did what had become standard operating procedure whenever reports of sexually inappropriate behavior reached his desk in Indianapolis. He called his lawyer.
Penny says that after speaking with Faehn and Jantzi, he was given the impression “that an athlete was uncomfortable with Nassar’s treatment.” It was not “an unambiguous claim of sexual abuse,” Penny’s attorneys said in response to questions from the authors. But Penny’s actions suggest he had enough concern about the report concerning Nichols that he wanted to keep it quiet. A day later, he called Nichols’s mother, Gina, in Minnesota.
“I understand Maggie has some concerns,” Gina Nichols recalls Penny saying as he started the conversation.
“He never once said, ‘Is Maggie OK?’” Instead, Gina Nichols says, Penny told her, “We need to keep this quiet. It’s very sensitive. We don’t want this to get out.”
Ten days later, on June 28, Penny attended a USAG board meeting, but he did not mention Nassar to the full board. After the meeting, Penny met privately with the chairman of the board, Peter Vidmar, a two-time gold medalist from the 1984 Olympics, and vice chairman Paul Parilla, a practicing attorney. Vidmar told Parilla and Penny the allegations involving Nassar “made [his] blood curl,” and that Nassar “will never touch one of our athletes ever again,” or words to that effect, according to the USOC’s investigation.
Despite Vidmar’s strong reaction, nobody from USA Gymnastics notified police or the Department of Family and Protective Services in Texas at that point either. Instead, on July 3, USAG hired Fran Sepler, a consultant and investigator in workplace harassment who had experience interviewing sexual abuse survivors but no prior experience with USAG. Over the course of the next three weeks, Sepler conducted in-person interviews with Maggie Nichols, Aly Raisman, and McKayla Maroney, in that order, and asked them about their experiences during treatment sessions with Nassar.
Nobody from USAG ever reached out to Alyssa Baumann at the time, even though Rhonda Faehn emailed Steve Penny alerting him to Baumann’s concerns.
“Sarah Jantzi came to me yesterday and said she knew she wasn’t supposed to talk about Larry but Maggie brought it up to her… that now Alyssa Baumann came forward apparently when the girls started talking in their rooms to say that Larry massaged her oddly as well,” Faehn wrote to Penny.
Faehn would later admit in sworn testimony in a civil lawsuit and in testimony submitted to the United States Senate that in June and July 2015 nobody, to her knowledge, contacted Simone Biles either, even though Faehn, according to her own handwritten notes, was aware that Biles was also uncomfortable with Nassar’s treatments. According to Biles’s attorney, John Manly, Faehn and other USAG officials knew in the summer of 2015 that Biles, the reigning world champion and their top gymnast, may have been sexually abused by Nassar but nobody bothered to pick up the phone to call Biles or her parents, and neither Biles nor Baumann was interviewed during USAG’s internal investigation.
Were Steve Penny and USAG attorneys in the days and weeks that followed the start of Sepler’s internal investigation trying to keep a lid on a potentially explosive story? Penny only informed a handful of USAG employees about the investigation of Nassar and stressed the need to keep the matter confidential. He attempted to exclude the parents of gymnasts from interviews with Sepler. Rhonda Faehn later told Senate investigators she refused to follow Penny’s directive, saying as a parent herself she would want someone to notify her if her child were involved. After Faehn raised her objections, Penny relented and said parents could be present during interviews.
In an interview with the attorneys conducting the USOC’s internal investigation, Sepler said her July 11 meeting with Maggie Nichols “was inconclusive as to whether abuse or misconduct had occurred.” After her second meeting with Raisman, on July 17, Sepler texted Raisman, stressing the need for discretion: “Please remember that there are risks in sharing information at this point. There is a process in place and staying clear of the process will protect you and others.”
Raisman has since said she interpreted that text from Sepler as an attempt to silence her. Sepler responded that she wasn’t trying to silence anyone and merely wanted to inform Raisman that an investigation was already under way. In fact, there was no police investigation going on at that point. In mid-July 2015, Fran Sepler was the only person looking into the matter.
After meeting with Sepler, Raisman called Faehn and told her she was “rattled by the interview.” She went on to explain to Faehn that she neglected to mention to Sepler the troubling incident involving McKayla Maroney at the 2011 World Championships in Tokyo, when Nassar sexually assaulted Maroney in a hotel room.
“Raisman told me that Nassar would text Maroney to come to his hotel room for private treatments,” Faehn wrote in her testimony to the US Senate, adding, “I told Raisman I would report Maroney’s experience to Penny right away, which I immediately did.”
In early to mid-July 2015, Nassar remained unaware he was the subject of an internal review by USAG. He had no idea Team USA gymnasts had even raised concerns about his behavior. That changed on July 22. The Secret US Classic, a qualifier for nationals, was scheduled in Chicago that coming Saturday, July 25, and two of the gymnasts who’d spoken to Fran Sepler, Maggie Nichols and Aly Raisman, were scheduled to compete, along with Simone Biles and other national team members. As the national team doctor, Nassar expected he would be making the trip to Chicago that weekend to treat athletes. That day he received a phone call from USAG attorneys Scott Himsel and Dan Connolly and then an email that same day from Himsel summarizing the call:
As we explained on the call, USA Gymnastics has been made aware of concerns regarding some of your therapy techniques, and that athletes are uncomfortable with certain areas of their bodies that are being treated. These concerns are being reviewed, and USA Gymnastics has decided that it is in everyone’s best interest that you not attend the Secret US Classic in Illinois this weekend. As we mentioned on the phone, I am sure you can appreciate as a medical professional that in today’s atmosphere, we need to address these concerns thoroughly and discreetly.
Nassar responded that he felt “horrible” that any gymnast would feel uncomfortable with his treatments. He agreed to send Himsel links to videos of his techniques, which he said he’d used “for educational purposes,” and then falsely told Himsel that he had “not had any complaints in the past.”
In a follow-up email, discussing how his absence from the upcoming competition in Chicago would be explained to his colleagues, Nassar proposed a solution: “Can we just say that I am sick?” he asked. Himsel agreed with Nassar’s suggestion to use that cover story.
A day later, Nassar’s attempts at deception only continued. He emailed Himsel again, telling him,
I am very disappointed in myself for not being better at explaining my treatments but I always talk to the athlete and get feedback while doing these treatments since they are in a sensitive area.… There are always other people present and all is done out in the open. Actually, when you think about it, it is an amazing accomplishment to have gone 29 years on the national team without a single complaint about my treatments.
In what would be her final interview on behalf of USA Gymnastics, Sepler met with McKayla Maroney on Friday, July 24, two days after Nassar sent his email to Himsel. The devastating details of that interview made an impact on Penny, who seemed to instantly recognize how damaging it would be if details of Maroney’s experience ever saw the light of day. Penny summarized Maroney’s sexual abuse in a series of graphic bullet points, noting that she saw Nassar “100s of times” and that, in her case, Nassar was “rougher, more aggressive, pulling in the vaginal area.… Much more troubling, she reported digital penetration three times—in Japan 2011, London 2012, Belgium 2013.” He added that Maroney “felt no therapeutic effect but felt he [Nassar] was getting sexual gratification” and that her session with Nassar involved “penetration of 3 fingers for a sustained period, then Dr. Nassar stopped and breathed heavily. Thereafter Nassar began sending her gifts. He also began bringing her coffee.”
It’s not clear whether Penny made those notes for his own benefit in order to inform USAG attorneys of the details of Maroney’s sessions with Nassar, or in preparation for what was to come the following week. That next Monday, Penny met with three attorneys from Faegre Baker Daniels, the Indianapolis law firm that served at the time as counsel for USA Gymnastics. Later that day, he called the FBI field office in Indianapolis to set up a meeting, and a day later, Penny, USA Gymnastics vice chairman Paul Parilla, and attorney Scott Himsel finally met with the FBI to share what they knew about Nassar’s treatment of Nichols, Raisman, and Maroney.
“I believed that Nassar needed to be reported to law enforcement for investigation,” Penny says he’d concluded by that point. But, he adds, “no determination had been made by USA Gymnastics or me about the validity of the ‘medical technique’ used by Nassar.”
It took Penny more than five weeks from the initial report to involve law enforcement in the Larry Nassar case. He did so only after a three-week-long internal investigation and after multiple consultations with his in-house counsel, evidence that suggests the organization’s public image remained one of his chief concerns. On July 30, Penny sent an email to Jay Abbott, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Indianapolis field office. “We have a very squirmy Dr Nassar,” Penny wrote to Abbott. “Our biggest concern is how we contain him from sending shockwaves [sic] through the community.”
There is another explanation for Penny’s delay in reaching out to the FBI. It can also be attributed to a well-established practice USAG had in place for handling reports of sexual abuse. For years, complaints about sexually inappropriate behavior by coaches at USAG-sanctioned clubs weren’t referred to police, as is required by Indiana law. That was only done when the complaints were made directly by the victims themselves or, in the event the victims were minors, by their parents. Instead, the files detailing suspected abuse by coaches were tucked away in two locked cherrywood file cabinets, each four drawers high, within the executive suite inside the USAG offices in downtown Indianapolis. Steve Penny and his executive assistant, Renee Jamison, were the only ones with the keys.
That procedure of locking away a report of suspected abuse rather than making the report known to the proper authorities was followed in a different sexual abuse case, one that actually went public in the late summer of 2015. That case also involved a prominent member of the USA Gymnastics community, who was facing troubling accusations.