While the new wave of national media exposure focused attention on Larry Nassar’s criminal charges playing out in public, an equally ugly legal battle was being waged behind closed doors. In a series of depositions, resulting from attorney John Manly’s civil lawsuits filed in California, coaches and administrators within USA Gymnastics revealed not only a stunning lack of oversight of Nassar but also the national governing body’s ineffective and long-standing practice of not reporting sexual assault complaints.
Steve Penny; Ron Galimore, USAG’s chief operating officer; Marta Karolyi; and Rhonda Faehn all acknowledged in sworn testimony in cases filed by gymnasts Aly Raisman and Jamie Dantzscher that it was a violation of USAG policy for any adult to be alone with gymnasts, particularly in the gymnasts’ hotel rooms, and yet they all said they had no idea Nassar had access to the athletes in their cabins at the Karolyi ranch or in their hotel rooms at competitions.
Renee Jamison, Steve Penny’s former executive assistant and the woman who for years had the keys to the cabinets at USAG headquarters where dozens of secret dossiers detailing sexual abuse allegations against coaches were filed away, explained to lawyers conducting the deposition how sexual abuse complaints were routinely handled by USAG.
Q: “So when you received a complaint about a coach that had engaged in—or that you suspected had engaged in criminal conduct, your job was to immediately call the police; is that right?”
A: “I was told to forward all such matters to our legal counsel.”
Q: “So your first reaction wasn’t to call the police, it was to refer it to a lawyer for USA Gymnastics?”
A: “Yes.”
In his June 2017 deposition, Bob Colarossi, the former USA Gymnastics president and CEO who preceded Penny, explained how sexual abuse complaints were only taken seriously and investigated by USAG if the complaint came from someone who actually witnessed the abusive conduct:
COLAROSSI: “It had to be someone with firsthand knowledge.”
MANLY: “What does firsthand knowledge mean?”
COLAROSSI: “They either witnessed what happened—well, it would have to be—they would have to have witnessed what happened.”
MANLY: “How many sexual abuse cases are you aware of where the abuser abuses the victim in front of another person?”
COLAROSSI: “I’m not aware of any.”
During an afternoon break in Colarossi’s often heated deposition, Paul Parilla, an attorney for USA Gymnastics and vice chairman of the USAG Board, walked into the lobby of Manly’s Irvine, California, law firm and could no longer contain his dislike for the attorney, who’d been questioning Colarossi, by that point, for more than four hours, calling him a “dickhead,” as was later captured in the deposition.
MR. MANLY: “Your client walked by my secretary—my receptionist, who is standing right there as he was walking out of the room and yelled, ‘Fucking dickhead.’ She heard it. Is that right, Caroline?”
MS. AKHAVAIN: “Yes.”
“If you say anything like that again, you want to call me a name, you call it to my face,” Manly told Parilla that day.
The contentious atmosphere did not bode well when mediation talks began again in earnest in late October 2017. John Manly and the other attorneys representing the girls and women suing Larry Nassar, Michigan State University, Twistars Gymnastics, and USA Gymnastics had set aside a week, beginning on Monday, October 30, to attempt to resolve the cases outside of the courtroom. Attorneys from the United States Olympic Committee declined to attend the mediation talks even though the USOC was named at the time as a defendant in multiple lawsuits. By that point, more than 130 women had come forward identifying themselves as victims of Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse. They ranged from minors as young as fourteen to women as old as fifty-seven years of age.
The referee chosen by all parties to mediate the cases was Jon Muth, a respected Grand Rapids attorney who’d handled well over a thousand mediations in his career. This would be one of his most challenging. Muth took the job while battling a life-threatening illness. In the summer of 2014, he was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a rare disease that, for unknown reasons, results in scarring of the lung tissue, making it hard for those affected to take in a breath and get enough oxygen. Muth had never smoked and was an avid cyclist who averaged more than three thousand miles a year. Doctors told him he had a 10 percent chance of living beyond five years and that his disease was incurable, untreatable, and progressive. Undeterred, Muth continued working beyond his retirement, taking on mediation clients on a contract basis as his health allowed.
In a typical mediation, there are three rooms—one for the plaintiffs and their lawyers; one for the defendants and their lawyers; and then a third, neutral room. It’s the role of the mediator to float back and forth between the rooms, relaying messages and offers to the opposing sides and then bringing parties into the neutral room so they can engage directly with one another in order to reach a settlement.
By late October, John Manly had partnered with Grand Rapids attorney Stephen Drew and Okemos, Michigan–based attorney Jamie White to represent the largest group of Nassar victims. Okemos attorneys Mick Grewal and his associate David Mittleman were in another room at the mediation with a group that included at least a dozen of their clients and the family members of clients. There were attorneys in attendance from Michigan State University, who served as the school’s in-house counsel; attorneys from the school’s insurance company; and the insurance company’s adjuster. There were so many attorneys representing so many different interests—perhaps twenty that Muth can recall—that Muth, a man with 35 percent lung capacity, kept an oxygen tank with him to catch his breath as he constantly floated between five different rooms.
The mediation took place at the Dominican Center at Marywood, a former boarding school for the Dominican Sisters of Grand Rapids. The irony was not lost on Manly, the product of a Catholic school education whose firm by that point had won settlements or judgments in excess of $1 billion suing the Catholic Church in priest abuse cases.
The various attorneys set aside the first few days of mediation to deal with those plaintiffs who’d filed claims against Michigan State. Thursday was scheduled to address lawsuits filed against Geddert and his Twistars USA Gymnastics Club, and Friday was the day attorneys planned to deal with lawsuits filed against USA Gymnastics. They never made it to Thursday.
Muth and the attorneys involved are ethically prohibited from speaking about what transpired in those first few days of mediation, but according to people with direct knowledge, the talks broke down when Michigan State’s lawyers indicated the school would pay no more than $20 million to settle all claims. It was an insultingly low offer. Privately, those close to the case estimated that any settlement would likely run into hundreds of millions of dollars. As a reference point, more than $100 million had been paid by Penn State University to settle claims by at least thirty-five people who accused assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky of sexual abuse. When talks stalled in Grand Rapids, a lengthy legal battle appeared inevitable.
The girls and women suing Michigan State at that time faced a challenging legal hurdle. The vast majority of their claims were well outside the existing statute of limitations. Back then in the state of Michigan, victims of sexual assault had up to three years from the date of the incident or, if the assault happened when they were a child, until their nineteenth birthday to file a lawsuit. There was also a law on the books in Michigan granting sovereign immunity to state entities like Michigan State. The well-intentioned law, by no means unique to Michigan, was designed to prevent massive lawsuits from financially crippling publicly funded institutions. While a half dozen exceptions to the sovereign immunity law existed, none provided solid legal ground for the attorneys representing Nassar’s victims to make a stand in their cases against MSU, and the university’s attorneys knew it.
Laws, however, can change. Around the time of the first failed mediation talks, Jamie White, one of the Michigan-based attorneys who’d joined forces with John Manly in the case, began spearheading an aggressive lobbying effort to change the laws in Michigan in order to make them more favorable to sex abuse survivors.
Nassar’s survivors were now waging an increasingly public fight on multiple fronts. Rachael put her experience and connections in the state legislature in Lansing to work. She and Sterling Riethman, a twenty-five-year-old former diver who was also sexually abused by Nassar, worked with state politicians starting in the fall of 2017 to draft a proposal for laws that would make it easier to hold predators and the institutions that harbored them responsible. The proposals, which included changing the statute of limitations and the protections received under sovereign immunity, were informed by a better understanding of how long it takes some victims of sexual abuse to feel comfortable sharing their stories.
Jamie and her former Olympic teammates, meanwhile, were using their notoriety to make progress in the court of public opinion. The 60 Minutes episode and subsequent interviews set up by the well-oiled media arm of John Manly’s law firm brought more attention to the case and, more importantly, emboldened other national team gymnasts to come forward. In October 2017, McKayla Maroney, then twenty-one, defied the confidentiality agreement she’d signed months earlier and revealed in a lengthy Twitter post that Nassar had sexually assaulted her starting when she was thirteen.
“Our silence has given the wrong people power for too long, and it’s time to take our power back,” Maroney wrote.
A month later, Maroney’s teammate in London in 2012, Aly Raisman, revealed during a 60 Minutes interview and in her autobiography, Fierce, that Nassar had also sexually assaulted her. Raisman, the captain of gold-medal-winning teams from London and Rio, was the highest-profile former national team member yet to come forward as a survivor. USA Gymnastics, Michigan State, and leaders at both institutions were sent reeling by the news. The media spotlight burned with greater intensity as the criminal case against the man responsible for it was only weeks away from its scheduled start.