While Munford and Povilaitis made their short trip to visit Kyle Stephens in October, Michigan State’s top leaders were looking to Chicago for help as well. The university had not yet been named in a lawsuit. None of its employees beyond Nassar were named in a criminal investigation. Nonetheless, Michigan State president Lou Anna Simon and her board of trustees could see the crisis developing on their horizon. Simon surveyed the options in front of her and weighed her responsibilities to the massive fifty-thousand-student institution she steered. She decided to start by playing defense.
On October 10, 2016, Simon and her trustees hired Chicago-based attorneys from one of the largest law firms in the country. The group from Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom included one of its most famous partners, Patrick Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald’s track record during his time as a federal prosecutor before joining the firm garnered comparisons to giant-slaying investigators of another era that inspired Hollywood films. Fitzgerald convicted two former Illinois governors during his time as a US attorney and worked on high-profile cases such as prosecuting the men who conspired to attack the United States with a plan that included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
His role at Michigan State started out with much less fanfare. University leaders made no public mention of their decision to hire Skadden until four months later. At that point, board chairman Brian Breslin said that Fitzgerald and his team would conduct “a factual review necessary to address the allegations being made and to assess Nassar’s former work at the university.”
Breslin’s words led many to believe that the firm’s main role would be to spearhead an internal investigation that would assess Michigan State’s past actions related to Nassar and share them publicly, much like the investigation done by former FBI director Louis Freeh in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal at Penn State University. Fitzgerald and his team, though, had no intention or directive to produce a public report or share findings that would hold anyone at the university accountable for missing warning signs about Nassar. Breslin decided not to say anything about the last section of the contract the two parties signed in October 2016, which said Skadden would also provide “assistance in anticipation of and with respect to any civil litigation that may arise.”
Fitzgerald and his group weren’t hired merely to investigate the circumstances of Nassar’s misconduct at Michigan State. They were defense attorneys hunting for the university’s liabilities. When the inevitable civil lawsuits did come, everything that the law firm uncovered in its investigation was all considered privileged information between an attorney and their client, protected from law enforcement and the public.
Simon’s reaction in the first few months after Michigan State fired Nassar set the tone for the university’s response. Her analytical mind saw the vulnerabilities and played out the scenarios that could unfold. The math did not look pretty for the institution she had elevated through her life’s work. She plotted a course forward with the fear of watching her legacy crumble serving as her compass.
A week after the contract with Skadden was signed, Michigan State’s lawyers began interviewing the employees who had worked most closely with Nassar. No one from the university attempted to contact Rachael Denhollander or any of the other women coming forward to learn more about their stories or provide a show of support. No one from the athletic department or Nassar’s old clinic reached out to his old patients to inform them of the allegations against him or to let them know whom to contact if they had a similar experience. Simon, who had trumpeted the importance and the simplicity of speaking up years earlier in the wake of Penn State’s scandal, stayed conspicuously silent. Her counterparts at USA Gymnastics adopted a similar approach.
On November 8, 2016, two Texas investigators made the lonely trek down the dirt road that leads to the Karolyi ranch. Their visit was unannounced. By then, Tom Bean, a detective with the Walker County Sheriff’s Department, and Steven Jeter, a sergeant with the Texas Rangers (a statewide investigative law enforcement group), had already interviewed several former national team gymnasts who said they were sexually assaulted at the ranch by Larry Nassar. Bean and Jeter wanted to get their hands on documents that might indicate who else Nassar had treated. They were hoping to take a look around the Olympic training site and see the so-called end room, where several gymnasts say Nassar penetrated them during treatment sessions. At that point, Nassar was already being investigated by Michigan State University police and the FBI. Bean and Jeter hoped to add more charges to the sprawling criminal case. They barely made it past the front gate.
Amy White, the national team travel manager, was at the ranch that day working with the acrobatic gymnastics program and greeted the two men. Rather than allow them to search the property, White called her boss, Steve Penny, for instructions. Eventually, Ranger Jeter spoke directly with Penny, who told him that they were not to search the ranch and that if they wanted to do so in the future, they’d need a warrant. Frustrated and visibly upset, Detective Bean and Ranger Jeter left determined to return with a search warrant.
As Bean and Jeter drove away from the ranch that day, through the dense forest of east Texas, Penny immediately took steps to remove some of the evidence the investigators were seeking, according to testimony White provided as part of the USOC’s investigation of the Nassar case. On November 8, White said, she and Gary Warren, a director who helped run camps at the ranch, were ordered by Penny to remove documents. Penny specifically told White to immediately bring “anything that has Nassar’s name on it” to the USAG offices in Indianapolis, according to White’s interview with the USOC’s investigators. White proposed shipping the materials via FedEx and told Penny she didn’t have a big enough suitcase for all the paperwork to fit.
An agitated Penny told White to buy a bigger suitcase if she had to and insisted she bring the documents herself. So, White then purchased a suitcase from a nearby Target and, with Warren’s help, packed up the documents and then paid the extra baggage fee to fly the overweight suitcase from Houston to Indianapolis. Medical forms. Waiver forms. Emails. Rooming lists. Flash drives. Anything with Nassar’s name on it or anything that appeared related to his work was packed in that suitcase bound for Indianapolis.
The next day, warrant in hand, Bean and Jeter returned to the Karolyi ranch to find White and everyone else, outside of a few staffers, gone. The few documents they were able to retrieve on that second visit appeared incomplete and provided nothing revealing about Nassar’s medical treatment of gymnasts at the ranch.
“I just knew the documentation we were getting wasn’t what we were looking for,” Bean says. Neither Bean nor Jeter would ever see the missing documents.
Rachael Denhollander did her best that autumn to continue to fill the void of information coming from USA Gymnastics and Michigan State. To keep pressure on the entities pursuing Nassar, she knew it was important to keep the story in the news. She also felt the pressure of knowing that the only way to be sure he wasn’t molesting other children was to get him behind bars. The responses from the big institutions she was pitted against thus far had inspired no confidence that they would hold Nassar and his enablers accountable.
Rachael remained the lone public face for the burgeoning case for almost all of 2016. Interview requests flooded in, and she reviewed past work from each publication and journalist before deciding how to respond. She believed outside pressure would be crucial to continue to keep the case moving forward. She was also wary of any misinformation cementing in the public’s mind through reporters who didn’t understand the nuances of Nassar’s abuse. Much of the community around East Lansing and in the gymnastics world still wanted to believe Nassar’s deeds could not have been as devious as Rachael described.
Life for the Denhollanders during that time unfolded with a degree of chaos that outpaced the usual bedlam for a family with three young children. Rachael’s two daughters were teething. Her son, a toddler, suffered from a neurological issue that doctors had trouble diagnosing. Overnight stays in hospitals to help find the problem often meant she and Jacob subsisted on cat naps rather than full nights of sleep. Jacob remained a full-time carpenter while slogging through his first semester of doctoral studies.
Other than her family, Rachael remained largely isolated as she strained to keep momentum for her case headed in the right direction. As the only woman to share her name with the public at that point, she received the brunt of criticism from the large crowd that believed Nassar was being unjustly persecuted.
She couldn’t connect with other survivors because their conversations could be construed as collusion by defense attorneys if they sounded too similar. Munford and the rest of the police department weren’t able to provide frequent updates either. Rachael didn’t meet Povilaitis in person until many months later. The fear of any detail or step in the process going wrong consumed the Denhollanders’ minds on a daily basis. Keeping up with all these developments while continuing to navigate the other parts of their busy lives was exhausting but unavoidable. The meticulous attorney in Rachael struggled with having to trust others to handle the investigation properly. In the first few months after reporting, Rachael frequently learned about updates in the process she started when she read about them in the news or received a phone call from a reporter. She was in the middle of changing a diaper in mid-November when a reporter called to ask if she had heard anything about Nassar being arrested. Charges were coming soon.
Larry Nassar was filling the tires of his car with air at a Belle Tire auto shop a few miles from the university the Monday morning of Thanksgiving week, 2016. He was wearing jeans, a red sweater, and a large, black winter coat when he was approached by MSU officers in an unmarked car. They informed him they had a warrant for his arrest, handcuffed him, and drove him back to the station on the edge of campus.
Nassar made small talk with the arresting officers as they worked their way through a forty-five-minute intake process. He asked where he would go next while they took mugshot photos and fingerprints and swabbed his mouth for a DNA sample. They chatted about the Spartan football team’s close loss to Ohio State a few days earlier while he waited for someone to drive him to the county jail.
Rachael learned he was in custody that same afternoon. Kyle Stephens heard from Munford while Nassar was still in the back of the police car. The warrant for his arrest included three charges of sexual assault related to the story Kyle had told Munford and Povilaitis a month earlier. On Tuesday afternoon, the state’s attorney general held a press conference to announce Nassar’s arrest and let people know that the three charges against him were “just the tip of the iceberg.” More than fifty women had reported Nassar to the police, but the majority of the charges against him were still months away from being filed.
Kyle smiled, thinking about the way the week would unfold for Nassar. She knew Thanksgiving had always been his favorite holiday.
Nassar returned home on bond after his arrest, but his freedom would be short-lived. Less than a month later, federal prosecutors were ready to unveil what police had found in the large brown trash can at Nassar’s curb in September. He was arrested again on December 16 on charges of possessing child pornography. His mugshot was printed at the top of the front page of the Lansing State Journal the next morning. This time, he would be denied bail.
The news of Nassar’s pornography collection raced through the gymnastics community in the final weeks of 2016. The façade Nassar curated for a quarter century shattered for hundreds, if not thousands, of people who had defended him and minimized the allegations against him. Women who previously believed Nassar had spent years treating them in good faith suddenly saw the warm, friendly man through an entirely different lens. For many of them, the rest of the pieces fell into place quickly. They realized the things he had done to them on his training table weren’t innovative healing techniques. The man they had been defending had sexually abused them too.
Nassar’s closest supporters clung to the last shreds of hope that they had not so wildly misjudged their friend. Kathie Klages, who not long before broke down in tears and had her Spartan gymnasts sign a sympathy card for him, now searched for a way to make sense of the new charges. In a conversation with Christy Lemke-Akeo, whose daughter Lindsey competed for Twistars and Michigan State during her gymnastics career, Lemke-Akeo says Klages suggested that perhaps the hard drives found at the foot of Nassar’s driveway had been planted there by police who were trying to make their case stronger.
Other Michigan State employees, who had known Nassar for decades, reckoned with their misperceptions or racked their imaginations for an innocent explanation. Coworkers who knew the cheery side of Nassar struggled to digest the news in late December that FBI agents had discovered thirty-seven thousand pornographic images and videos, including videos that showed children engaged in sexual acts. In some of the files recovered, an agent told the court, Nassar appeared to record himself fondling a child in his backyard pool.
Sally Nogle, the veteran head athletic trainer for the Michigan State sports teams, emailed that afternoon with Tracey Covassin, who ran the undergraduate athletic trainer education program on campus.
“It is so hard to believe, but what we are seeing is so awful I am now believing it,” Nogle wrote. “Just too much info from what I am reading. How could he fool us and so many others?”
Covassin responded hours later: “Can I still hold out hope? I have never seen him do anything inappropriate and have not heard of anything inappropriate.… Is there any chance that the photos were of him doing procedures?”
Their emails came as Michigan State’s athletic department was thrust into turmoil by new revelations. On December 21, 2016, with attorney John Manly by her side at a conference room table in Southern California, Tiffany Thomas Lopez told a room full of reporters that she had filed a civil lawsuit against Nassar and others at Michigan State who had ignored her cries for help.
Months earlier, Thomas Lopez had returned home from a trip to the grocery store to see Nassar’s face on the nightly news. She tearfully relived her attempts to raise warnings about Nassar more than fifteen years earlier. She remembered the responses she got from athletic trainers Lianna Hadden and Destiny Teachnor-Hauk. After calling police back in Michigan to share her story, she read more about the case in news reports and learned that Manly and his law office were not far from her home in California. A few days before Christmas, she became the first former Spartan athlete to come forward as a survivor of Nassar’s sexual abuse. She shared her name and sat for interviews. Rachael Denhollander was no longer alone in the public eye. More reinforcements would be arriving shortly.
As the calendar year drew to a close in East Lansing, Covassin emailed her staff to let them know how to handle any questions about the unfolding case. She wrapped up her note to Nogle by telling her that she ought to let Destiny Teachnor-Hauk know that she should consider hiring her own attorney. The attorneys hired to protect Michigan State months earlier would be ramping up their internal review and would be asking questions to protect the university, not its individual employees.
Covassin signed off by wishing Nogle “Happy Holidays!!!” December was coming to a close, and on Michigan State’s campus and in USA Gymnastics centers around the country, many were only just beginning to grasp the size of the public reckoning that would consume both institutions in the year to follow.