Larry Nassar had a slight hitch in his gait as he walked into a sparse interview room inside Michigan State’s police headquarters for the second time in a little more than two years. A video camera in the corner of the room shows him entering wearing a dark polo shirt with a Holt High School logo on the left breast. His khakis stretched tight over his knees as he settled into an armless chair opposite Detective Sergeant Andrea Munford. It was 4:15 p.m. on August 30, 2016.
It had been a little more than twenty-four hours since Rachael Denhollander sat in a different room in the same building and described in painstaking detail what Nassar had done to her. Rachael told Munford that she had previously spoken to a team of investigative reporters in Indianapolis who might be publishing a story about Nassar in the near future. She explained that the reporters had received other complaints about Nassar from gymnasts she had never met. Munford, taking Rachael’s story seriously, wanted to get the doctor’s side of the story as soon as possible.
Just as Valerie O’Brien, now a captain and Munford’s boss, had in the spring of 2014, Munford thanked Nassar for responding so quickly to her request to meet with him. She told him he was not under arrest and was free to leave at any time. He shrugged off the suggestion that he’d feel the need to cut their conversation short. Why would this time be any different?
Munford told him that she knew he and O’Brien had discussed reviewing some of the things he did when treating patients a couple years ago. “What do you recall about that investigation?” she asked.
Munford was a sergeant on the university’s police force during Nassar’s first visit to the interrogation room in 2014. She was part of a small group of officers selected that year to join the department’s new special victims unit, which was touted at the time as one of the first SVUs at a campus police department in the country. Police Chief Jim Dunlap saw Munford, who went by the name Andrea Beasinger at the time, as a natural fit to supervise the group.
Munford graduated from Michigan State in 1996 and joined the force shortly after receiving her criminal justice degree. She worked in the bicycle unit and investigated crime scenes as she moved up the department ladder. In 2007, Dunlap tabbed her to lead the investigation of the department’s only remaining unsolved murder.
The rape and murder investigation dated back thirty-seven years to 1970, years before Munford was even born. It stalled decades earlier, but after eleven months of work, Munford’s group found their man by matching DNA from old evidence to a convicted felon who had died in a Florida prison years earlier.
DNA analysis wasn’t the only tool Munford employed to catch sexual offenders. When she became one of the original members of the newly formed special victims unit in 2014, Munford used a style of investigating known as a victim-centered and trauma-informed approach. She embraced the philosophy that her interactions with victims should help restore a sense of control that is often taken from them during an assault. Munford’s top priority was helping victims get a sense of justice in whatever legal form was best for them.
Munford positioned herself as an experienced guide to help victims through a daunting criminal justice system. She tried to take into account the complicated effects of trauma on a victim’s memory when questioning them. Actions that may have caused detectives to doubt the account of a victim, such as laughing during an interview or forgetting specific details or chronology, are a normal neurological response to traumatic situations, Munford learned in training. She worked on asking questions and responding to answers in a way that wouldn’t cause additional harm to victims, who often hold deeply seated fears that they won’t be believed.
She helped the department secure grant money to inform local bartenders and cabdrivers to spot troubling situations and intervene before they became sexual assaults. As the university’s sexual assault investigation process was being reviewed and found lacking by the federal government in 2015, Munford’s tact stood out to women who reported campus assaults. One woman told the Detroit Free Press that the investigators who handled her Title IX case at Michigan State “didn’t believe me. They kept delaying. They didn’t interview all my witnesses. It constantly felt like I was under the microscope and not him.” The same woman said Munford left a much different impression. “She really had an understanding of what I was going through. She really listened to me.”
Munford, as one of a small group of detectives in the department who handled similar cases, had investigated dozens of sexual assault complaints and conducted hundreds of interrogations by the summer of 2016. She had seen clear examples of her approach producing results. As she sat across from Nassar in the small interview room, she was armed with the exhaustive research and documented evidence Rachael Denhollander brought her a day earlier. She also had confirmed with O’Brien that Rachael wasn’t the first former patient to lodge a complaint about the renowned doctor who was now crouched over in his chair a few feet from her in the interrogation room. She was ready to make him feel uncomfortable.
She interjected with follow-up questions as Nassar, with his typical air of confidence, started to walk her through the medical purpose of his pelvic floor treatments just as he had done in the same building two years earlier. She didn’t offer a sympathy laugh when he told her he had been making videos of his technique since “thirty pounds ago” and patted his stomach.
“Well, the reason I’m asking is we did have another complaint,” Munford told him after several minutes of talking in general about his treatment methods.
“Really?” he said, rocking his whole body forward as he tilted his head to the side. For the first time in either of his taped interviews, Nassar began to stutter.
After a few more minutes of asking about his technique, Munford took a deep breath and told Nassar she had an awkward question she needed to pose. Nassar nodded.
“When you have young girls in there. They’re athletes—” she began.
Nassar cut in: “They’re usually with their parents. They’re usually with their parents, that’s why I explain a lot.” Munford continued talking over him.
“Well, yeah,” she said. “They’re athletes—”
“Right,” he said between her words.
She continued: “They have lovely figures—”
“Right. Right, right, right.”
“They’re very cute girls—”
“Right.”
“Do you ever get aroused during these exams?”
“Do I ever get aroused during the exams?” Nassar repeated, straightening himself up in his chair. Munford got more specific and asked if he would ever have an erection during one of his exams.
“Obviously, you don’t, you know what I mean. So, I, I, I…” Nassar stuttered and shook his head.
Munford’s voice stayed calm and steady. “Is there a reason that you would during an exam?”
“I shouldn’t be getting an erection during an exam,” he said as he scrunched his face into an anguished look.
Munford explained to him she was asking because both the woman who lodged the new complaint and the woman’s mother remembered noticing that his face was flush and his pants were bulging as he finished one of their appointments years ago. Nassar let out a guttural sigh as he searched for an explanation. Less than fifteen minutes after introducing himself to Munford, Nassar wore the look of a man who was no longer in control.
The interview continued for another half hour. Unlike in Nassar’s previous interviews with police in 2004 and 2014, Munford let him know that this was not just a matter of perception or misunderstanding. She told him the description she heard a day before was significantly different from what he was telling her. He objected strongly when she told him that the woman said he penetrated her with his fingers even though he could not recall any details of the appointments from sixteen years ago. He grew more frustrated as he asked why this woman would not have said she felt uncomfortable in the moment. Munford asked him to imagine that he was a vulnerable teenager in the office of a powerful, well-known doctor and to consider the confusion that might have been filling her mind. She yielded no ground.
Munford eventually guided the conversation back toward the signs of sexual arousal he showed in the exam room.
“I mean, c’mon,” he said, fidgeting in his chair. “I’m not trying to gain some type of sexual gratification out of doing that. If there was arousal it, it, it would be because of, of, whatever, I don’t know. Ya know?”
“What is ‘whatever’?” Munford pressed. “I don’t know.”
“When you’re a guy sometimes you get an erection, but I don’t—” Nassar said. Now it was Munford’s turn to interject.
“Well, you get an erection when you’re aroused,” she said.
“You know, well, I don’t know, I’m just saying you, you, you, uhhh, I’m not uhh…” Nassar scrambled for the right words. “How do you say this? If I had an erection, I don’t understand why I’d have an erection from the treatment, from what I’m doing. And that’s rather embarrassing. It would be rather embarrassing, okay? To have that happen, okay? That’s not appropriate, okay? That’s just not professional, you know what I mean, I don’t know how else to explain. Yes, I’m a guy, and yes they’re young ladies, but I’m trying my best to be professional.”
Nassar tried to push their conversation back toward a clinical tone. He explained that he attempted to elicit feedback from all of his patients. Two years earlier, he had beat himself up inside the interview room. He told O’Brien he must have missed some signs and that he needed to explain himself better. Now, he was on the defensive. He did explain what he was doing to his patients, he told Munford. They must not have understood.
Munford sat calmly across from Nassar while he explained to her that he communicated with his patients throughout their treatment. He said it was his “protective mechanism” from claims like these. When something hurts them, he said, he needs the patients to tell him, and then he adjusts. Munford suggested there was a difference between feeling physical pain and the type of pain that comes with being sexually assaulted. Nassar attempted to convince her that a patient would let him know if she felt uncomfortable in any way. Munford disagreed.
She excused herself to get a business card in case he had anything else he wanted to add later. Nassar’s forehead dropped into his hands as soon as Munford left the room. For several minutes, he sat in silence and pinched the bridge of his nose, never taking his eyes off the tops of his shoes. Munford returned, and they talked for a few more minutes.
“About how many times would you say you’ve done this procedure?” she asked him.
“It’d be thousands, you know, over the years,” he said. “It’s been a long time that I’ve been doing it.”
Thousands. Nassar continued to sputter through his last attempt at an explanation as the magnitude of his career-long con started to sink in. He saw hundreds of young girls, some of them hundreds of times. Munford had one of them on record and knew of one other who had complained a couple years earlier. There can be power in numbers, she knew, when trying to build a case on a subject that is incredibly hard to prove. Finding the others, or rather having the others find her, would require a serendipitous stroke of good timing. Munford didn’t know then that the puzzle pieces that would unlock the floodgates of Nassar complaints had already started falling into place nearly two months earlier in a hotel room more than two thousand miles away.