In his twenty-five years working on a national level, Marvin Sharp developed a reputation as one of a handful of coaches across the country who could help elite gymnasts realize their Olympic dreams. Just as John Geddert did before him, Sharp started from humble beginnings. His first gym, housed within a warehouse in Indianapolis, opened in 2001. The success of his best athletes propelled his career and business fortunes. In 2008, Sharp coached Indiana native Bridget Sloan to a silver medal in the team competition at the Beijing Olympics. Sharp was by her side the entire time and later coached Sloan’s teammate from Beijing, Samantha Peszek. In 2010, he was named USA Gymnastics Coach of the Year. A year later, he moved into a bigger, more modern location of Sharp’s Gymnastics Academy, in northwest Indianapolis, a short drive from USA Gymnastics’ national offices.
In August 2015, while Steve Penny and others worked to contain complaints about Larry Nassar, the gymnastics world was stunned when Sharp, then forty-eight, was arrested inside his home on charges of child molesting, sexual misconduct with a minor, and possessing and receiving child pornography. At his gym on Georgetown Road, in a room that served as a photo studio, Sharp had gymnasts as young as five sit for photo shoots in sexually suggestive poses. A fourteen-year-old gymnast told police that, starting when she was twelve, Sharp had her pose for photo shoots in her bra and panties and, at one point, in a straitjacket. He once trimmed the girl’s pubic hair and touched her vagina during a photo shoot. He also fondled her during purported physical therapy sessions. The fourteen-year-old, who trained as a pre-elite gymnast, told investigators she was worried Sharp would kick her out of the gym or hurt her if she didn’t cooperate with him.
When police searched Sharp’s home and gym, they found locked safes with thumb drives containing thousands of images of child pornography, including minor boys engaging in oral sex and masturbation. Sharp’s arrest made national news when he was led away from his home in handcuffs. For a coach so respected within the elite gymnastics community, it was a shocking fall from grace. On September 19, 2015, just after 8:00 p.m. and less than a month after his arrest, Sharp was found dead in his cell in the Marion County, Indiana, jail. His death was ruled a suicide by suffocation.
In an August 2016 exposé, the Indianapolis Star reported that Sharp’s case was one of those instances where a complaint was buried by USA Gymnastics, locked in the cherrywood file cabinets within the USAG executive suites along with dozens of other complaint dossiers detailing the actions of allegedly abusive coaches.
The Star first reported how in October 2011, longtime gymnastics coach and judge Pat Warren sent an email to Steve Penny and USAG board chairman Peter Vidmar in an attempt to warn them about Sharp’s disturbing behavior around minors. Warren had long-standing connections with top USAG officials. Her ex-husband, Gary Warren, was a gymnastics coach, who would go on to serve as director of the National Team Training Center (the Karolyi ranch). In her email to Penny and Vidmar, Warren described how in one instance Sharp treated a ten-year-old gymnast’s hamstring injury by having her lie on her stomach as he “picked her leotard up, put it in her crack and ice massaged her hamstring.”
On another occasion, Warren wrote, Sharp had a thirteen-year-old gymnast who’d pulled her groin go into his office and take her leotard off and put on a T-shirt so he could ice massage her pelvic area. When the thirteen-year-old felt uncomfortable and called her mother, the mother, according to Warren, picked her daughter up from Sharp’s gym and moved her daughter to a new gymnastics facility the next day.
Warren explained in her email to Penny and Vidmar that when she was working as a gymnastics coach in Indianapolis in 2009, a number of her athletes were cheerleaders who’d left Sharp’s gym because “Marvin was weird and they didn’t want any part of it.” Among other things, Warren wrote, Sharp would take his young gymnasts into his office, one at a time, to measure them for their leotards.
“He has a problem and should not be coaching young children,” Warren wrote to Penny and Vidmar.
In October 2011, neither Penny nor Vidmar notified law enforcement or Indiana’s Department of Child Protective Services about Warren’s email. Years later, in August 2015, when Sharp’s arrest made national news, Penny acknowledged to Indianapolis police that they’d received a warning about Sharp four years earlier. But the police never investigated Penny or Vidmar for failing to alert authorities earlier about Sharp’s behavior. The two-year statute of limitations for failure to report had expired.
“I thought they would go after [Sharp] and they didn’t do anything,” Warren says about her attempts to warn USAG leaders, adding, “the fact that they did nothing—nothing—disgusts me to no end.”
When the Star revealed in its August 2016 investigation that USA Gymnastics had prior knowledge of Marvin Sharp’s behavior, efforts to discredit the story came from a curious source—the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department. Detective Bruce Smith was supervisor of the department’s Child Abuse Unit at the time of the Marvin Sharp investigation in 2015. He was also friends with Steve Penny. Their daughters, the Star first revealed, attended the same school and were on the same gymnastics team. In an interview for this book, Smith acknowledged his personal relationship with Penny. He said the two men chatted, as parents often do, while milling about and waiting for their daughters to finish gymnastics practices and that they often carpooled to and from practices.
In August 2016, when the Star documented multiple instances where USA Gymnastics failed to alert authorities of suspected sexual abuse by coaches, citing the Sharp case specifically, Detective Smith took the unusual step of contacting a Star police-beat reporter, telling that reporter the newspaper was “barking up the wrong tree.” Smith praised the way USAG handled the Sharp case, saying Sharp was reported to police on a Friday and in handcuffs and under arrest by that Sunday evening, and he told the reporter the statute of limitations had expired on prosecuting Penny or anyone else at USAG for failing to report the suspicions about Sharp that were raised in Pat Warren’s 2011 email. Smith went further. He drafted what the newspaper described as a press release (it was never made public) defending USAG’s handling of the 2011 complaint against Sharp. Smith says he merely provided talking points to his public information officer because he was getting so many calls from the media.
An internal affairs investigation later cleared Smith of any wrongdoing, and he denied being directed by Penny to actively defend USAG’s handling of the Marvin Sharp case; however, the USOC’s investigation of that incident found the text messages between Penny and Detective Smith during that period reflected “a seemingly single-minded focus on protecting USAG’s public reputation.”
Smith has since been promoted to lieutenant and now works in the homicide division. He says if he’s guilty of anything, it’s defending USA Gymnastics’ handling of the Marvin Sharp case at a time when the organization was facing intense scrutiny for its mishandling of the Nassar investigation.
“It absolutely cost me. It hurt my reputation and called into question my dedication to abuse victims. Until you’ve sat through a child autopsy or days and days of a child describing abuse, you wouldn’t understand. My daughter is in gymnastics. Do you think I would provide cover for somebody who didn’t have my child’s interests at heart? It’s absurd,” Smith said.
In late summer 2015, with the Sharp story making national news and the Olympic games a year away, the last thing Penny wanted on his watch was another sex scandal. The World Championships were approaching in October. Nassar had been instructed by USAG attorneys not to treat national team gymnasts, but he had yet to be formally terminated as the organization’s national medical coordinator. While the general public didn’t know about Nassar’s troubling behavior, several national team gymnasts and their parents did know about it, and as the weeks dragged on, they were frustrated by the lack of answers and progress in the FBI’s investigation. For the gymnasts and their families, it was impossible not to see the parallels between the Sharp case and Nassar.
In an August 27 email to Steve Penny and Rhonda Faehn, Aly Raisman’s mother, Lynn, wrote,
if the FBI needs to speak with Aly, please have them reach out to us directly.… Obviously we’ve read about Marvin Sharp. In a number of news articles it is alleged the sexual misconduct/abuse was during physical therapy sessions. The similarity to Larry is disturbing.
It was around this same period that Steve Penny also developed a closer relationship with Jay Abbott, the FBI agent who was first put in charge of the Bureau’s Nassar investigation. As the two men exchanged emails, they communicated with one another in an increasingly more familiar tone. The emails are documented in the USOC’s internal investigation of the Nassar case and in a July 2019 United States Senate report, which details the Bureau’s mishandling of the Nassar investigation. In early October 2015, Penny and Abbott met in Indianapolis over drinks. Penny offered to recommend Abbott for a job he knew would soon be available, chief security officer for the United States Olympic Committee. Penny even went so far as to email Larry Buendorf, the man who planned to step down from that position after the Rio Olympics.
Hey Larry,
Looking forward to seeing you in Rio. I wanted to let you know that I found a great guy who might be the perfect fit for your role when you decide to leave. His name is Jay Abbott and he is the senior agent in charge at the FBI office in Indianapolis. Let me know if you would like to speak with him.
USAG staffers say Penny’s attempts to build a relationship with Abbott fit with his deal-making personality. Penny’s attorneys say any suggestion that he was trying to curry favor with Abbott “is absurd. The only ‘favor’ that Steve wanted from Agent Abbott or anyone at the FBI was for them to promptly and thoroughly investigate Nassar.”
Penny continued through the late summer and autumn months of 2015 to ask the parents of the gymnasts involved in the Nassar case to remain quiet despite no signs of any progress in the criminal investigation. On September 4, Agent Abbott emailed Penny, telling him “pertinent interviews have been completed and the results have been provided to the FBI and [United States Attorney’s Office] in Michigan for appropriate action.”
According to the 2019 Senate investigation, the FBI conducted a phone interview with McKayla Maroney September 4 in which she “described Nassar’s explicit criminal conduct.” But no action appears to have been taken by the Bureau based on that 2015 interview, and when an agent from the Los Angeles field office conducted a second interview with Maroney in 2016, there was no mention of the original September 2015 interview, nor was there any explanation of why the Bureau had failed to act on the information Maroney provided the previous year.
Because Penny told them Nassar had already been reported and any action on their part might jeopardize the investigation, national team gymnasts and their parents remained silent about the Nassar investigation. It wasn’t until July 2016, just before the Olympic Trials and a full year after Penny says he was notified about the Nassar allegations, that Gina and Maggie Nichols received their first phone calls from an FBI agent investigating the case. By then the case had been transferred from Indianapolis first to Detroit and ultimately to the Bureau’s Los Angeles field office.
“What took you so long?” Gina asked the special agent.
Aly Raisman and her mother had similar interactions with Penny in the months after Raisman initially reported Nassar’s sexual abuse. Largely because of Penny’s assurances that the investigation was being handled, Raisman says she didn’t meet with the FBI until September 9, 2016, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a month after serving as the captain on Team USA’s gold-medal-winning team in Rio and well over a year after first reporting Nassar. Penny flew in for the interview. Raisman bristled at his presence. Penny gave her the creeps. On the flight back from Rio, Penny had texted Raisman, telling her she looked beautiful. The text made her uncomfortable enough that she shared it with her mother, who in turn told Rhonda Faehn. Raisman wouldn’t allow Penny in the room when she spoke with the FBI agent investigating the case.
“Steve Penny was trying to control when I was going to be interviewed by the FBI. He was trying to control every part of it. The biggest priority was to make sure I kept it quiet so they’d have a good Olympics. It’s disgusting,” Raisman says.
Penny, through attorneys, disputed this account. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” Penny’s attorneys say. “Unfortunately, Steve should not have relied on the FBI or legal counsel as much as he did. Upon reflection, Steve believes USA Gymnastics should have encouraged the athletes and their families to contact the FBI directly versus encouraging the FBI to contact athletes.”
The 2019 Senate report of the Nassar case documents several emails where Penny appeared to make efforts to check on the status of the FBI’s investigation. It’s not clear why the Bureau failed, for more than a year, to act on the credible information Penny and Maroney provided in 2015.
The Senate investigation concluded that the FBI “failed to pursue a course of action that would have immediately protected victims in harm’s way. Instead, the FBI’s investigation dragged on and was shuffled between field offices while Nassar continued to see patients at MSU.”
As summer turned to fall in 2015, Nassar and USA Gymnastics were still searching for a way to explain his absence from major gymnastics competitions. USAG leaders knew if Nassar didn’t attend the 2015 World Championship in Glasgow, Scotland, in late October, it would raise questions from the medical staff. By that point, Nassar had hired an attorney, Matthew Borgula, who sent USAG attorneys an email telling them Nassar would “no longer honor [USAG’s] request to provide false excuses to his colleagues, the USAG staff and/or the athletes about his absences.”
That missive from Borgula backed USAG’s attorneys and Penny into a corner. They could have come clean at that point and publicly revealed that Nassar was relieved of his duties due to an ongoing investigation about his treatment methods. That would have alerted not only the public at large but also Michigan State University, where Nassar continued to see patients daily, that serious questions had arisen concerning Nassar’s behavior with patients. It would have also been the truth. But, as USA Gymnastics’ own lawyers, Scott Himsel and Dan Connolly, made clear in an email to Penny at the time, telling the truth was not the preferred option:
We can tell the full story of what we’ve learned thus far. We think it is highly likely that would become a media story and prompt Larry to sue for defamation.… Neither Dr. Nassar nor USAG wants the attendant negative publicity at this time.… Our suggested alternative is this. Have us call back Dr. Nassar’s lawyer. Tell him that a replacement will handle the World Championships and we can work on messaging regarding that.
Neither Connolly nor Himsel would comment about their email to Penny. In an email to the authors, Faegre Baker Daniels partner Robert Stanley said the rules of professional conduct prevented Himsel and Connolly from commenting on matters relating to their representation of USA Gymnastics.
In the summer and fall of 2015, USA Gymnastics was not the only amateur sports body aware that Larry Nassar was being investigated by the FBI. In July, Penny emailed Scott Blackmun, then CEO of the United States Olympic Committee, and Alan Ashley, chief of sport performance for the USOC, informing them that national team gymnasts had made claims of Nassar sexually abusing them during treatment sessions.
Neither Blackmun nor Ashley reported what Penny had told them to other USOC board members. Like Penny, they also neglected to inform Nassar’s full-time employer, Michigan State, that Nassar was under investigation for sexually abusing young female patients. Instead, according to the USOC’s internal investigation of the Nassar case, Blackmun and Ashley deleted Penny’s email.
Under Blackmun, the USOC had increasingly taken a laissez-faire approach when it came to its oversight of the national governing bodies within the Olympic system. He helped construct what the USOC’s investigation of the Nassar incident dubbed a “loose governance model.” Blackmun was at the top of the organizational chart for the USOC, but when faced with information that a USAG doctor had sexually abused Olympians, he took a not-my-problem approach and hit delete. Blackmun and Ashley did not respond to interview requests for this book.
As it became clear to Larry Nassar that his two-decade run as the doctor to Olympic stars was about to be over, he was determined to go out on his own terms. In late September 2015, after more than two months of being barred from gymnastics events, Nassar composed a lengthy post on his Facebook page announcing his retirement from USA Gymnastics. He started by sharing a simple message in more than a dozen different languages before translating it to English.
“It is time,” he wrote. “Indeed, it is time.”
He went on to recount in detail his rise through the ranks of the gymnastics world, pointing out his many accomplishments and thanking the people who helped him throughout his career. He said he was looking forward to spending more time with his children and his wife. He wrote, “I am a better person for knowing all of you. Good luck everyone! Thanks for the memories!”
His Facebook page filled with messages of support, thanking him for his years of service. Nobody from USA Gymnastics at that time ever made any effort to explain the real reason for Nassar’s departure. He was gone and no longer treating national team gymnasts. Problem solved.
Shortly after Nassar posted his retirement message, he ran into Trinea Gonczar, one of his closest and longest-standing patients from the gymnastics world, at a medical conference. Gonczar, who had not yet processed that she had been sexually abused by Nassar, was attending the conference for her job and remembers talking to him about his retirement. Nassar told her that he wanted to spend more time with his family and pour his remaining energy into the foundation he founded for autistic children. She viewed his reasoning at the time as “typical selfless Larry.” Years later, she wonders what he planned to do while working with an even more vulnerable population of children.
While Nassar reaped well wishes and fond farewells, Amanda Thomashow’s police report about her 2014 visit to Nassar’s campus office collected dust somewhere inside the Ingham County prosecutor’s office in Lansing. O’Brien handed what she had found in her investigation of Nassar to the prosecutor’s office on the first day of July 2015.
It had been a month since O’Brien last spoke to an attorney at the prosecutor’s office who suggested she find an expert in the field of pelvic manipulations who didn’t have ties to Michigan State. At that point, O’Brien’s investigation had relied solely on those who had either close personal or professional associations with Nassar. If she ever did make an effort to find someone without a potential conflict of interest, O’Brien made no note of it in her report.
O’Brien did not make a record of any attempt to reach out to the local high school where Nassar volunteered his time to see if his behavior there raised any red flags. She didn’t note contacting anyone at USA Gymnastics at any point during her investigation. She didn’t appear to know that less than one week before she turned in the evidence she collected on Thomashow’s complaint, USA Gymnastics had hired its own investigator to delve into remarkably similar complaints about Nassar.
Years later, O’Brien refused to speak to investigators from the state attorney general’s office during a probe into how the university handled claims about Nassar. She and other members of the police department declined interview requests for this book.
The information O’Brien did collect went untouched until the middle of December, during which time Nassar continued to prey on patients while he remained the subject of an open criminal sexual assault investigation. Three months after Nassar posted his Facebook message about his retirement, police contacted Thomashow to let her know her case was closed. No charges would be filed. The prosecutor’s office suggested the police should tell her that she might want to submit a complaint to the state’s licensing board so they could review the procedures Nassar needed to follow. Thomashow says she never received that message.
Thomashow’s ambitions to attend medical school and study neurology had fizzled. Her love for the community where she grew up and the university in her backyard were gone. She worked a job in retail as she ping-ponged between feeling completely invisible and feeling like her entire hometown was laughing at her.
In 2016, she decided it was time for her to leave East Lansing. She and her partner at the time made plans to move to California. By the time students started spilling back onto campus with cars packed with duffel bags and dorm furniture, Thomashow was packing a car as well. The back seat of her car was full and waiting in her driveway one afternoon while she sat in the office of her veterinarian. Her last stop before heading west was to collect the paperwork she would need to register her dog when they arrived at her new home.
She had just received the vet’s signatures when she felt her phone buzzing in her pocket. She recognized the area code was from East Lansing. The three digits that followed were the numbers used by most Michigan State phone lines. What now? she thought as she picked up the phone. She tucked it under her ear and said hello. The date was August 30, 2016.
The woman on the other end of the phone sounded a bit shaky. She introduced herself as Detective Andrea Munford of the MSU police force. Thomashow picked up on the labored breathing of someone starting an uncomfortable conversation as she listened to Munford explain the reason for her call. Thomashow still had a busy day ahead, and her patience with her alma mater had long since worn thin.
Munford told Thomashow that she’d had a long interview the previous day with a woman who filed a report about being assaulted by a doctor on campus. Munford said she remembered the doctor’s name, Larry Nassar, from the complaint Thomashow had filed two years earlier. She wanted to know if Thomashow would like the police to reopen her case.
“Yes, of course,” Thomashow told the detective. As the angry feelings from how her case was treated in 2014 started to bubble quickly to the surface of her consciousness, Thomashow hurried to end the phone call. Before she hung up, Munford told her she should be prepared to hear Nassar’s name in the news. The other woman had spoken to reporters, and a story detailing what he did was coming soon.
Thomashow absorbed the news while a fresh wave of adrenaline and raw, familiar emotions ricocheted beneath her skin.
“Well, this is it,” she said to no one in particular. “There will be hundreds.”