More than anything, she remembers the fear. As Jamie Dantzscher walked briskly through the executive air terminal of the Oakland airport she was gripped by a familiar churning in the pit of her stomach. It was the same feeling she experienced years earlier at every practice, competition, and trip to the ranch.
By the summer of 2016, Jamie thought she was on her way to putting gymnastics in her past. She’d recently earned her real estate license. She hoped it would be her ticket away from the gymnastics camps and coaching that served as a source of income but that were also a constant reminder of her own career in a leotard. She even avoided watching gymnastics on television. The thought of hearing praise for Bela and Marta Karolyi, the legendary coaching couple who steered Jamie and her teammates to a bronze medal at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, made her feel sick.
Jamie never felt proud of her decorated, elite gymnastics career. The memories of physically abusive training, eating disorders, and suicidal thoughts would forever outweigh the stacks of awards and honors she collected. The best day she experienced in the sport, she often told people, was the day she quit.
At thirty-four, Jamie was finally poised to put that part of her life behind her when a conversation with another gymnast unearthed the darkest and most repressed of her gymnastics memories. It was something she’d never shared with anyone. She consulted with a former teammate before fully accepting the truth: she was a victim of sexual assault. Jamie’s former teammate Dominique Moceanu had then connected her to a woman named Katherine Starr, a former Olympian and sexual abuse survivor in Southern California, who worked as a legal consultant on child sex abuse cases.
Starr made the ninety-minute flight to Oakland that morning on the Beechcraft King Air twin turboprop owned by the man she wanted Jamie to meet. John Manly had never heard of Jamie before their August 12, 2016, meeting was scheduled. Never laid eyes on her until she was walking through the terminal. The Irvine, California–based attorney had met with hundreds of victims of child sex abuse through the years and represented more than two thousand of them. He had never heard a story like the one Jamie would begin to unravel.
Inside the meeting room, John Manly sipped a soft drink and squinted as he peered through the miniblinds and watched Jamie draw closer.
“Boy, she’s tiny,” he thought to himself as the former gymnast came into focus.
The room was a tight fit. Housed in what looked from the outside like a portable classroom, it was no more than eight-by-eight feet and felt even smaller when Manly closed the blinds. Jamie, dressed in yoga pants and a T-shirt, her brunette hair pulled back in a ponytail, settled into her seat and fixed her brown eyes on the attorney. She’d just come from coaching a practice.
Manly started, as he always did, with an apology. He told Jamie what happened to her was not her fault and that she displayed courage by making it to the airport hangar that morning. Jamie steeled herself and, for the first time, started to tell these virtual strangers about her former doctor.
“He was my buddy,” she began, as she recounted her time on the US national team.
She explained that the doctor told her to call him by his first name, snuck her candy when she was weak from hunger, and comforted her with hugs after particularly hard training sessions. He was so kind that she never thought twice about his unsupervised visits to her hotel rooms. He sat on the edge of her bed at training camps and told her he was treating her injuries while he slipped his hands over her breasts and inside her vagina. Manly and Starr listened quietly while looking at Jamie. Her eyes held a “thousand-yard stare,” the demeanor of someone describing a near-death experience.
Jamie was not the stereotypical high achiever filled with bubbly energy, the gymnastics personality of television broadcasts and Olympic competitions. Manly was struck by a dark sadness in her face as she described her time as one of America’s best young athletes. It was a look he knew well. He ticked through his list of standard questions he asks at the start of a sexual assault case. “Have you ever been married? Do you have trouble keeping jobs? Do you have trust issues with men?”
Jamie’s answers confirmed what Manly and Starr believed when they agreed to make the trip to Oakland. He locked eyes with Jamie from across the conference table.
“I believe you were sexually assaulted,” Manly told her. “I want to take your case.”
My case? What case? Jamie thought to herself. She hadn’t come to the meeting prepared to file a lawsuit. She thought the meeting was a step in the process of reporting a man who’d molested her while she was pursuing her Olympic dream.
“Nobody’s going to believe me, and they’re going to come after me,” she told Manly.
“Yes, they will,” he assured her. “Because you’re telling the truth.”
Jamie managed to hold back the tears until she left the conference room. They were streaming down her face by the time she got back to her car. She’d dealt with the people who wielded power in the world of elite gymnastics for so long, dealt with the control they exercised over every aspect of her life. She criticized the sport before and wanted no part of the people and responses that would follow if she spoke up again.
The thought of returning to that lonely place filled her with a sense of dread. The reality that she was a victim of sexual assault was only now starting to take shape in her mind. As she drove away, her first instinct was to tell her mother about what had happened in her meeting with Manly, and that’s when the full weight of it came down on her.
What the fuck is going on with my life?
The skies were cloudy on the first day of the fall semester in East Lansing, Michigan. A cool breeze swept through the campus of Michigan State University. Groups of young men and women walked and rode bikes along the banks of the Red Cedar River, mapping out new schedules and morning routines. A few blocks south, a line snaked out the front door of the university police department headquarters. Students lingered outside the squat, utilitarian building, chatting excitedly about their summers and the year ahead as they waited to collect their campus parking passes.
Rachael and Jacob Denhollander steered their silver minivan around the students and into the small parking lot outside the station. Jacob cut the engine. They sat side by side staring through the windshield, and together they prayed.
The night before, the Denhollanders and their three young children drove from their home in Louisville, Kentucky, to the house where Rachael was raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The kids stayed with her parents, who were happy for the distraction. They tried to keep their minds from replaying the stories Rachael was about to tell the police.
Neither Rachael nor Jacob was looking forward to what lay ahead. Truthfully, they had no idea what would come of their trip to East Lansing. The previous few weeks had been a nerve-racking, sleep-deprived whirlwind. On August 4, Rachael had come across an article on the Indianapolis Star’s website, an in-depth investigation of the way USA Gymnastics—the national governing body for the sport—had for years mishandled sexual misconduct cases by failing to alert authorities to multiple allegations of sexual abuse made against coaches. To Rachael, the trio of reporters whose names appeared at the top of the page seemed to be thorough, fair, and knowledgeable on a subject that other outlets had struggled to cover in the past. A spark of hope flitted inside her. Perhaps, she thought, the opportunity she spent half her life waiting for had finally come.
Rachael fired off an email to the newspaper’s investigative team to ask if, in their reporting, they had come across any complaints about a particular prominent Olympic physician. After eleven anxious nights, a reply arrived in her inbox from reporter Mark Alesia. He wanted to talk. Someone else, Alesia explained, was asking questions about the same doctor. Alesia told Rachael he couldn’t share much about the other tipster, only that it was an attorney based in California, someone who had also come across their article when he was doing his own research on sexual assault in elite gymnastics.
For years, Rachael and her parents had wondered if she was the only one who was violated in the exam room at the end of the hallway at the MSU Sports Medicine Clinic. Her mother sat in the room for several appointments and harbored misgivings after a couple of them, uneasy feelings that Rachael eventually confirmed were warranted.
Surely there were others, they thought. They wondered if anyone else had raised concerns about the doctor’s methods and been waved off. Perhaps someone had spoken up and nothing came of it. They coped together, never sharing the full story with anyone in a position of authority. Rachael didn’t see the point in battling a powerful community figure when she didn’t feel there was a chance to stop him. She promised herself, however, that if a window ever opened, if the opportunity for justice ever arrived, she would be ready to leap through it.
“You cannot imagine,” she replied to Alesia, “what it means to hear there is someone else who mentioned him.”
It was time to leap. Rachael agreed to share her story with the Star reporters in the hope that it would convince others to come forward. She went to work gathering any shred of information she could find to prove she was telling the truth. She collected old medical records and notes compiled from years of trying to understand what happened to her. She called medical experts and lawyers to get their opinions on her case. One of them surprised her by letting her know that it was not too late to file a police report.
After weeks of phone conversations and late-night research, Rachael scheduled a trip to East Lansing to meet with a detective. She compiled all her evidence and typed out a cover letter to summarize what happened to her. She kept the inches-thick stack of paper inside a manila folder, which now rested on her lap inside the minivan parked outside the university’s police station. She and Jacob finished their prayer and unclipped their seatbelts.
“Well, this is it,” Jacob said. She nodded, and they made their way to the front of the building.
Rachael told the cadet seated behind the glass partition at the reception desk that she was a few minutes early for an appointment with Detective Andrea Munford. They sat on a wooden bench and waited, Rachael in a long skirt and professional blouse, Jacob in a blazer and khakis. They watched as a parade of flip-flopped, bed-headed college students shuffled past.
Rachael gripped her husband’s hand and held it tightly to one side of her body. On the other side, she kept the thick manila folder tucked snugly against her ribs. She tried to bury her concerns about what they were about to do and the even bigger concerns about where she had to do it. The MSU police chief, she knew, reported to the same university president who sat at the top of the chain for the medical school where her abuser had worked for nearly twenty years. He was a beloved man and an asset to a prestigious academic program and athletic department. Rachael’s mind was filled with all the obvious reasons why Michigan State might want to make her and the problem she was about to present go away quietly. That was not her plan.
Munford, the leader of the department’s special victims unit who joined the force shortly after graduating from Michigan State nearly two decades earlier, met the Denhollanders in the lobby and walked them back to a small, sparse interview room in a quiet part of the building. The short, dark-haired detective greeted them with a firm handshake. Rachael tried with little success to get a read on what preconceived notions the exceedingly professional, no-nonsense woman might hold about her case. She took a seat next to Jacob on a sofa built for two inside the cozy interview room. Munford sat in a comfortable chair on the other side of the table. A mini-fridge hummed in the corner. The lone box of tissues beside the Denhollanders went untouched.
Rachael’s folder lay open on the coffee table. Piece by piece, she worked her way through the documents she had collected as she outlined for Munford a technical, matter-of-fact version of her story. She told Munford about participating in gymnastics as a young girl. She explained that she loved the sport despite the toll it took on her long, spindly body—a frame not built for gymnastics. She pulled old medical records out of her manila folder and showed the detective her different ailments and where she went to have them treated. Munford nodded along and scribbled notes on the pad in her lap.
Rachael told her that as a teenager her gymnastics coach had helped her get an appointment with a famed physician who worked with Olympians and some of Michigan State’s top athletes on campus in East Lansing. She explained how the doctor groped her and put two of his fingers inside of her vagina while telling her that his “treatments” would fix her back problems. She told Munford that both she and her mother saw that the doctor appeared to be aroused after one of her final appointments. She pointed out that the records in front of them on the coffee table made no mention of internal treatments.
With the confidence of an expert witness testifying in court, Rachael then flipped to a series of articles from prominent medical journals and walked Munford through the science of pelvic floor adjustments. The articles described how physicians can manipulate muscles near a patient’s groin to help solve some types of hip and back issues. The authors explained the value of a treatment that could be uncomfortable for obvious reasons. They also drew clear distinctions about when and how it was appropriate to use the technique.
Munford leaned over the table and asked questions as Rachael highlighted certain passages. This, Rachael told her, was how the doctor would try to justify the way he touched her if Munford questioned him. She suggested a few ways that Munford might challenge those assertions if the police decided this was a case worth pursuing.
She started to explain to Munford why she was only now in East Lansing talking about her experiences more than a decade after her last appointment. Munford assured her that waiting to report wasn’t abnormal. Even so, Rachael wanted to prove that she was trustworthy. She pulled a letter out of her folder from a Michigan prosecutor, an old family friend who helped Rachael prepare for their meeting, vouching for her character. She had several similar letters from other community members confirming they believed Rachael to be smart, well-intentioned, and honest.
Rachael pulled out copies of case law and legislative history that would be key to determining if her sixteen-year-old case was within the limits of what could still be prosecuted. She showed Munford the Indianapolis Star’s exposé on the gymnastics world. She told her she had contacted reporters at the newspaper and that they said she wasn’t the only one who had mentioned the doctor’s name.
Munford nodded. The veteran investigator continued to play her cards close to the vest. She didn’t mention that she already knew that Rachael wasn’t alone.
The previous week, after speaking to Rachael on the phone to set up her appointment and go over the basic information of her complaint, Munford walked down the hallway and poked her head into the office of her boss, the department’s assistant chief, Captain Valerie O’Brien. The name Rachael mentioned on the phone had sounded oddly familiar.
“Hey,” Munford asked. “What was the name of the doctor you investigated for sexual assault a couple years back?”
O’Brien didn’t take long to answer. “Larry Nassar,” she said.
Munford thanked her. That’s what she had thought.
Days later, as Rachael finished showing Munford the contents of her folder in the interview room, the detective held on to her stoic expression. Munford knew Nassar had talked his way out of at least one complaint in the past. His medical credentials and the long line of supporters willing to attest to his kindhearted, devoted personality were convincing. She knew sexual assault cases were hard to prosecute even when they involved perpetrators with far seedier reputations. But Rachael’s story was convincing too, and Munford could tell the couple in front of her was braced for a long, painful process. The odds were stacked against them, but Munford saw a battle worth fighting.
She thanked the Denhollanders for their time and said she would follow up with them soon while she walked them back to the front door. She kept Rachael’s contact information by her desk on a small, rectangular, white piece of paper. The slip of paper would stay there for years, long after their fight reached a conclusion that seemed impossible, unthinkable even, in the late summer of 2016. It served as a reminder of how a world-changing moment begins. Three bold words are printed across the top: Start by Believing.