On the night Larry Nassar was handed an effective life sentence, Rachael Denhollander strode down a curving walkway with a hope of brokering peace. Cowles House was among the first structures built on Michigan State’s campus. The earth used to form its brick walls was dredged from the Red Cedar River more than 150 years earlier. Since 1941, it had served as the formal residence of the university’s president. While Lou Anna Simon never actually moved into the building during her thirteen-year tenure as president, that’s where she chose to meet Rachael.
Jacob Denhollander and John Manly waited in the car on Abbot Road trying to wrap their heads around the week that was still only half over, like ocean swimmers gasping for a quick breath before the next wave crashed down. Clips of Rachael’s impact statement and Aquilina’s dramatic sentencing aired throughout the United States and internationally. Rachael still needed to put her finishing touches on an editorial she was writing for the New York Times the following day. In the morning, she would be in New York City to appear on The Today Show alongside Kyle Stephens and former national team gymnast Maggie Nichols.
More media engagements would fill the gap between the end of the Ingham County sentencing hearing and the beginning of Nassar’s sentencing in Eaton County, where Judge Janice Cunningham would open her courtroom in much the same way Aquilina did and add another fifty voices to the growing army of survivors. Cunningham sentenced Nassar to 40 to 125 years in prison for the crimes he committed in Eaton County, where John Geddert’s Twistars is located. The attorney general would appoint a special investigator and begin a top-to-bottom investigation into Michigan State as the Eaton County hearing unfolded. Manly and a battalion of other civil attorneys continued to press for a settlement to their civil lawsuits.
First, though, Rachael rang the bell outside Cowles House and stepped inside to meet Simon. She arrived with an offer in mind. She wanted to ask the president to show contrition, to take responsibility, and to start on a list of tangible steps to change the culture on Michigan State’s campus. In exchange, Rachael was prepared to tell Simon she would stand by her side and tell the public that Simon was still the right woman to repair the university she had spent a lifetime shaping. Rachael never got the chance to present her offer.
Simon started their confidential meeting that night—a face-to-face arranged with the assistance of the state’s lieutenant governor—by telling Rachael that she had served her final day as Michigan State’s president. She passed Rachael a copy of the resignation letter that was about to be posted to the university’s website. Manly and Jacob would read the breaking news of Simon’s ouster on social media as they sat outside in the car.
“As tragedies are politicized, blame is inevitable,” Simon wrote in her letter. “As president, it is only natural that I am the focus of this anger. I understand, and that is why I have limited my personal statements. Throughout my career, I have worked very hard to put Team MSU first.”
She remained unwilling, to the very end, to take ownership of her administration’s missteps. She noted that the review led by attorney Patrick Fitzgerald found no evidence of a cover-up. She overlooked that repeated failures by university employees to listen to and believe Larry Nassar’s victims kept him on campus for decades. Simon also never conceded that the school’s tone-deaf response under her leadership during the previous sixteen months had compounded the pain and trauma of many of Nassar’s survivors.
The board of trustees remained intact and, in a week’s time, selected John Engler to succeed Simon on an interim basis. Engler, a former three-term Michigan governor, had a well-earned reputation as a political brawler and bully during his prominent career in the Republican Party. Board members hoped Engler still held enough political clout to thwart the threats coming from the state legislature. His mission was to plow through the remaining fallout from the Nassar scandal and resolve the hundreds of civil lawsuits threatening the school’s financial future.
The political climate did not favor Engler. Buoyed by the media coverage of Nassar’s sentencing hearing, attorney Jamie White continued his lobbying campaign to make it possible for the victims of Nassar to file lawsuits even years after their sexual abuse occurred. By May 2018, White and his lobbyist had already scored major victories at the state capitol. A bill to reform the statute of limitations laws for child sex abuse cases passed the Senate. If signed into law, it would allow sexual abuse victims to file civil lawsuits for up to thirty years past their eighteenth birthdays and was retroactive to 1997, the first year Nassar was reported. More importantly, it provided a window of ninety days from the time of the governor’s signature for any Nassar victim to file a lawsuit.
After the Senate bill passed, an angry John Engler stormed in and out of offices at the state capitol, at one point slamming the door of the speaker of the house.
“We got their attention,” White told John Manly.
While the political battle raged in Lansing, Manly and the other attorneys representing Nassar survivors were engaged in yet another tense round of mediation talks in Los Angeles with attorneys from Michigan State and the school’s insurance companies. By mid-May 2018, 333 people—including two young men—had filed lawsuits claiming that they had been sexually assaulted by Nassar.
At the time of those mediation talks, the political battleground for Jamie White had shifted to Michigan’s House of Representatives and its Judiciary Committee. The Committee had approved reforms to the state’s statute of limitations laws, but that wasn’t the only hurdle facing the plaintiffs. White was most concerned about the apparent lack of support for reforms he was seeking to the state’s sovereign immunity law, which shielded public entities like Michigan State from lawsuits. White was concerned enough about the Judiciary Committee’s pending vote on sovereign immunity that he left the Los Angeles mediation talks to fly back to Lansing to help his lobbyist count votes.
It was nearing 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday, May 13, when White called Manly, who, at the time, was locked in settlement negotiations in Los Angeles with lawyers from Michigan State.
“Man, you got to get this deal done. We’re going to lose [on sovereign] immunity,” White told him. “You need to settle this case.”
What followed was the most anxious ninety minutes of Jamie White’s life. A staggering offer of $500 million was on the table for consideration to settle the lawsuits of 333 Nassar victims who were suing MSU as well as any future claims, but it was all in danger of going away if the news out of Lansing spread to Los Angeles and MSU attorneys tried to use a political victory on sovereign immunity as leverage.
Manly and the other plaintiffs’ attorneys agreed to accept the $500 million settlement, but the wait to see if that massive settlement figure would also be approved by Michigan State’s board of trustees felt excruciatingly long. As the minutes ticked by, White nervously paced back and forth inside his home just outside of East Lansing. He couldn’t bring himself to sit down.
Then the phone rang. It was one of White’s associates.
“They settled it for $500 million,” he told White.
White collapsed.
“We did it. We did it. It’s done,” he told his wife.
Of the $500 million from Michigan State, $425 million was divided among those initial 333 plaintiffs. Another $75 million was reserved for Nassar victims who had yet to come forward. The list of plaintiffs eventually grew to more than 500 people who say Nassar sexually abused them. For the survivors, the settlement felt like only a partial victory. It was the largest settlement ever in a sexual misconduct case involving a university, but it came with no admission of wrongdoing by the school and little hope for meaningful policy changes. A more complete reckoning was still to come as those who enabled Nassar over the decades would face criminal charges of their own.
Nassar’s former boss William Strampel, dean of the College of Osteopathic Medicine, was arrested in March 2018 on charges of criminal sexual conduct related to his treatment of four female students and his failure to provide oversight of Nassar after the 2014 criminal and Title IX investigation of Nassar’s sexual assault of Amanda Thomashow. On his work computer, investigators found nude and semi-nude photos of women who had Michigan State tattoos or were wearing university-branded clothing. One former student alleged Strampel hinted that she could exchange sex or naked pictures for academic help. Two others alleged Strampel groped them. Strampel’s performance reviews included complaints dating back to 2005 about his inappropriate sexual comments. He resigned from his post as dean one month before Nassar’s sentencing hearing and retired from his faculty duties in June 2018.
In June 2019, Strampel was sentenced to spend one year in prison on charges of misconduct in office and willful neglect of duty. Jurors found he displayed “complete indifference” regarding Nassar’s procedures after Thomashow filed her sexual assault complaint. Neither Strampel nor anyone else at MSU ever bothered to check to see if Nassar was following the protocols Strampel instructed him to abide by while treating female patients. Strampel was acquitted on charges of criminal sexual conduct. Strampel’s former supervisor, Michigan State provost June Youatt, resigned in September 2019 on the same day that the US Department of Education fined the school a record $4.5 million for its failures in handling complaints about Nassar and Strampel.
In June 2018, Nassar’s longtime colleague on the Team USA medical staff, athletic trainer Debbie Van Horn, was indicted by a Walker County, Texas, grand jury on charges of sexual assault of a child. Prosecutors accused Van Horn of acting as a party during Nassar’s sexual assault of at least one former national team gymnast. She was arrested in early September while getting off a plane in the Houston airport and later pleaded not guilty.
In August 2018, former MSU gymnastics coach Kathie Klages was charged with two counts of lying to police. She told investigators she wasn’t aware of Nassar’s sexual misconduct prior to 2016, even though Larissa Boyce and another gymnast both say they reported Nassar’s sexually inappropriate conduct to Klages in 1997. Klages has pleaded not guilty.
In November 2018, former MSU president Lou Anna Simon was also charged with lying to police. Simon, who has since pleaded not guilty, told investigators from the attorney general’s office that she was “not aware of the nature of the complaint” that led to Amanda Thomashow’s 2014 Title IX investigation. She denied knowing it involved Larry Nassar specifically and claimed she was only aware “there was a sport medicine doc who was subject to a review.” Simon’s public protests rang hollow to many who knew her as an administrator with a fanatical attention to detail. Simon retired in August 2019 with the understanding she would receive $2.45 million in severance pay over the course of the next three years. Her criminal case was pending at the time of her retirement.
Valerie O’Brien of the MSU police was promoted to Assistant Chief after the Nassar hearings. She was later suspended for undisclosed reasons and remained on paid leave at press time.
In September 2018, the US Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General announced it was investigating the FBI’s failure to promptly investigate the reports of Nassar’s sexual abuse of national team gymnasts. Jay Abbott, the former special agent in charge of the FBI’s Indianapolis field office, who at one time corresponded in such a familiar tone about a USOC security job with USAG CEO Steve Penny, retired from the Bureau after more than thirty years of service. The FBI and Abbott declined to answer questions for this book.
The reckoning for Penny came in October 2018 when a group of armored US marshals from the Smoky Mountain Fugitive Task Force stormed a cabin in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where he’d been vacationing with his wife and three children. A month earlier, a Walker County, Texas, grand jury had indicted Penny on charges of tampering with evidence, charges that were related to his order to remove documents from the Karolyi ranch in November 2016. Penny pleaded not guilty.
USA Gymnastics, the organization Penny ran for nearly a dozen years, had been in turmoil for months. One public relations gaffe after another led to the resignations of the two CEOs who followed Penny in the span of just two months. In November 2018, the USOC took steps to decertify USA Gymnastics, essentially stripping the national governing body of its power to control the sport. A month later, USAG filed for bankruptcy.
As of press time for this book, Scott Blackmun, the former CEO of the USOC (the organization has since been renamed the USOPC to include Paralympic athletes), was the target of a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice and FBI that began after two senators accused him of lying to Congress.
In July 2019, the USOPC disclosed in tax documents that Blackmun was given a $2.4 million buyout when he resigned in February 2018 citing health reasons. His resignation, one month after Nassar’s sentencing, also came amid mounting public criticism for his inaction after learning about reports of Nassar’s abuse.
In the months after Nassar’s sentencing, interim MSU president John Engler’s combative style continued to hurt more than help a school desperately trying to repair its reputation. Publicly, he suggested Nassar survivors were “enjoying” their time in the spotlight; privately, he suggested Rachael Denhollander was receiving kickbacks from John Manly for recruiting clients. During one highly publicized incident, he reportedly remarked upon seeing the teal cover of an alumni magazine dedicated to the Nassar incident, “Get that teal shit out of here.” Nassar survivors had taken to wearing teal, the color used to raise awareness of sexual assault, as a show of support and solidarity. In January 2019, Engler was forced to resign.
A month later, the Michigan attorney general’s office announced it was taking over an investigation into John Geddert’s allegedly abusive behavior. If charged, Geddert would become the sixth person caught in the criminal ripple effect of Larry Nassar’s downfall.
In April 2019, roughly two hundred girls and young women who say they were sexually assaulted by Nassar agreed to settle their outstanding civil lawsuits with Geddert and his Twistars USA Gymnastics Club. Geddert wouldn’t comment on the $2.125 million settlement, which was the maximum allowed under his insurance policy. As of press time for this book, claims against the US Olympic Committee and USA Gymnastics remained unresolved.
Within hours of being released into the general population of the federal penitentiary in Tucson, Arizona, Nassar was physically attacked. After that July 2018 attack, Nassar unsuccessfully appealed his prison sentences and has since been moved to the high-security Coleman II US Penitentiary outside of Orlando, Florida, where he’s refused dozens of requests to share more details about his crimes, what others knew about them, and how he avoided detection for so long.
Three months after the Nassar case concluded, Angela Povilaitis left her post as a state prosecutor to focus her efforts even more on helping victims of sexual abuse. She accepted a job as a staff attorney for the Michigan Domestic and Sexual Violence Treatment and Prevention Board. Part of her duties in the new role includes training law enforcement officials on the best ways to pursue justice in criminal investigations involving sexual assault.
She has presented her experience at conferences around the country along with one of her most trusted colleagues and friends, Andrea Munford. Detective Lt. Munford moved to a new office down the hall from her old one in the summer of 2018. The steady stream of requests for her to teach the victim-centered, trauma-informed investigation techniques that brought Nassar to justice led Chief Jim Dunlap to create a new department within the MSU police department to train officers and agents around the country.
The events of 2017 and 2018 also reshaped the personal and professional lives of many of Nassar’s survivors. Several became activists and advocates fighting for tougher laws, increased education, and better support networks for victims. Jessica Howard testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, detailing the abuses and the lack of oversight within her sport that enabled Nassar for decades. Jamie Dantzscher, Jeanette Antolin, Mattie Larson, and Dominique Moceanu were all on hand when California senator Dianne Feinstein announced new federal legislation requiring the national governing bodies of amateur sports to immediately report sex abuse allegations to law enforcement. It passed the Senate unanimously and was signed into law in February 2019.
In Michigan, Brianne Randall-Gay agreed to help the Meridian Township Police, who had dismissed her claim in 2004, to rethink the way they handle sexual assault cases.
Amanda Thomashow took a job with the state of Michigan as a campus sexual assault response and prevention coordinator. Her office in Lansing was down the hallway from Povilaitis. She left that position in 2019 to join Trinea Gonczar in starting their own education and advocacy group called Survivor Strong.
Sarah Klein, one of the earliest known Nassar survivors, had worked primarily as a business consultant when she was thrust into the national spotlight because of the Nassar scandal. She has since joined a Delaware law firm where she now represents victims of child sex abuse. She’s successfully lobbied legislatures in multiple states to put more victim-friendly child sex abuse laws on the books.
John Manly and his firm continue to represent sexual assault survivors in some of the country’s most high-profile cases. He took on the cases of the two men featured in the HBO documentary Leaving Neverland, who said the late pop star Michael Jackson sexually abused them for years when they were children.
The bonds formed during those life-altering weeks in the winter of 2018 carried forward as the survivors returned to their homes throughout the country. Most of them fell back into the rhythms of their daily lives. In dark periods, they leaned on one another, while still processing the trauma of their abuse.
Six months after Larry Nassar shuffled out of a courtroom for the final time, Jamie Dantzscher and more than 140 of the women who spoke at Nassar’s sentencing hearing gathered again, this time in the sunshine and glitz of Southern California. They donned formal gowns, and a small group of them walked the red carpet into the Microsoft Theater in downtown Los Angeles alongside Hollywood celebrities and the biggest names in professional sports.
The survivors were there to accept ESPN’s Arthur Ashe Courage Award, given annually to a recipient whose perseverance and courage in the face of adversity transcend the sporting world. Jamie patiently waited backstage for the award to be presented, while celebrities and athletes including actress Jennifer Garner, NFL wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr., and Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson and his wife, recording artist Ciara, dropped into the packed greenroom to greet survivors. Never one to impress easily, Jamie stayed mostly on the periphery while the starstruck crowd flocked around the celebrities to take pictures.
Sarah Klein, Tiffany Thomas Lopez, and Aly Raisman accepted the award that night on behalf of the group of survivors, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder behind them in an impressive display of solidarity, and told the room and the rest of the world watching on television that sharing their stories over and over was grueling and painful yet necessary to create change. They presented themselves as “a portrait of survival, a new vision of courage.” It was a moment of triumph. But the moment was missing one thing—the first woman who stood alone in front of the world asking for Larry Nassar to be held accountable.
In the months since her meeting with Lou Anna Simon, Rachael Denhollander had traveled the country as a speaker, an advocate for new laws, and an author sharing a message about the need to listen to and believe survivors. She carried the weight of sharing her story.
That night in July, though, Rachael watched on television while Jamie held hands with her former teammate from Team USA and UCLA, Jeanette Antolin, and while Larissa Boyce, who first reported Nassar in 1997, locked hands with former MSU gymnast Lindsey Lemke. She saw the cameras pan through the audience where Judge Rosemarie Aquilina, Andrea Munford, Angela Povilaitis, and John Manly all sat beaming with pride and admiration. More than two thousand miles away from the bright lights of Los Angeles, Rachael and Jacob lounged next to one another on the couch in their modest home in Louisville, Kentucky. Rachael’s doctors had prohibited her from flying across the country to join the rest of the survivors.
Two days later, Jacob helped Rachael to the family minivan and rushed her to the hospital, where she was filled with an emotion she hadn’t always associated with a doctor’s office: Hope. Rachael delivered her fourth child on July 20, 2018, into a world she helped to reshape for little girls everywhere. She and Jacob named their daughter Elora Renee Joy Denhollander. Elora, which means “to God belongs the victory,” and Renee, in honor of Detective Lt. Andrea Renee Munford, the first adult in a position of authority to believe.