What the #MeToo Movement Can Learn From the Women Who Put Larry Nassar Away
On Wednesday, as Judge Rosemarie Aquilina sentenced Larry Nassar to a prison sentence up to 175 years, after more than 150 of his victims had delivered impact statements over a week in court, it was reported that the victim of former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner, known as Emily Doe, had withdrawn from plans to add a memorial plaque to the site where Turner sexually assaulted her in 2015. After rejecting Emily’s choice of phrases (culled from the statement that she read at Turner’s sentencing) for the plaque, the university allegedly offered its own its own suggestions, including, “I’m okay, everything’s okay,” prompting Emily to decline to participate in the project.
As video footage of Judge Aquilina and her own choice of phrasing went viral at Nassar’s sentencing hearing (complete with a GIF), I couldn’t help but think of Emily Doe’s own viral moment, when that victim’s impact statement, from which “I’m okay” comes, was published by Buzzfeed, almost two years ago. The crimes of Nassar and Turner are not comparable, beyond that they center on acts of sexual violation, but the media firestorms around the victim’s statements are. As is what happened to each man after, which could not be more different. Despite the profound pain Emily Doe described in her letter to Judge Aaron Persky, which resonated with so many who read it online, he sentenced Turner to only six months in jail. He got out after three.
I’ve been wondering whether Persky might have ruled differently had Turner’s trial and sentencing, like Nassar’s, occurred post-#MeToo, the movement founded by Tarana Burke in 1997 that’s gained explosive momentum post-Harvey Weinstein. Or, if it had happened instead a few years from now, whether the result would have been the same. The #MeToo force, of women speaking out against their abusers and the abusive cultures of their industries, has been so dominant as to have spread from Hollywood, to Congress, to Parliament, to the New York Times. It’s almost impossible to imagine that there was anything that came before it.
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I spoke to Joan Ryan, a journalist who wrote a book over 23 ago on the culture of physical and emotional abuse in elite gymnastics called Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, who remembers the time before. She was candid about what she believes made people finally willing to accept in 2018 what athletes said about the environments that enabled Larry Nassar, created by Michigan State University and USA Gymnastics, which she had reported on in 1996. Number one, “It’s televised,” she said. Number two, “It’s the stars, the heroes of USA Gymnastics” who came out as victims. “When I wrote my book, USAG and the coaches said, ‘They’re losers, they’re just making excuses for why they failed.’ ” Dozens of women had gone on the record with Ryan, but none of them were household names, or champions. The interest, in other words, wasn’t equal to allegations from a star from the Wheaties box, or Tide Pods commercial.
The sudden impact of the televised sentencing hearing belies not only how long critics like Ryan have been voicing their concerns about gymnastics, but the defining characteristic of Nassar's abuse as well as the profound neglect of the institutions that became his de facto enablers, which is longevity; how he was able to prey on young women without anyone stopping him for decades. There were eight different times since 1997 that we know of in which women, some of whom were children, reported Nassar to parents and coaches who didn’t believe them, or told them they had misunderstood what had occurred. As recently as 2014, Michigan State University investigated Nassar after a complaint from a recent graduate, and found that his procedures were medical in nature. The woman who had reported him was told she was wrong to interpret them the way that she did. He was asked to wear gloves and have someone else in the room. Both stipulations went unenforced.
The conflation of Nassar’s downfall with #MeToo momentum also distorts what led up to the sentencing hearings that have been broadcast over the world, and the statements from some of America’s most elite gymnasts, which was not a tidal wave of allegations. Instead, it began with one single woman, former gymnast Rachael Denhollander, who was willing to speak out against Nassar after reading an IndyStar report on USAG’s history of failing to report abusive coaches. She had no idea what would follow. She was initially regarded with contempt by Nassar’s institutional supporters, some of whom have stepped down from prominent positions. “This precedes #MeToo,” Kate Wells, a public radio journalist who was present at every day of the sentencing hearings, wanted me to know. “These women,” Denhollander and Olympic bronze medalist Jamie Dantzscher, who joined her, “went out on their own when it wasn’t an okay thing to do yet.”
Why is it important to recognize how Larry Nassar’s downfall unfolded before it got America’s attention? When we approach abuse and harassment against women as a monolith, as has happened under the #MeToo hashtag, we grow the army of women revealing the harmful and misogynist ways their worlds operate. But we risk creating a bubble around the most high-profile of events, one that will simply pop rather than reverberate out into institutional reform, as well as one that traffics in female pain. When I asked Wells if being present in the courtroom was “empowering,” she was wary. “Here’s where I worry about this narrative that these women are so empowering, and so awe-inspiring—they are,” she told me. “But that feels like a thing we only say about women. And I worry that that is a way for people to try and put a bow on this: ‘You know, they’ve really taken their power back and what a healing experience it was.’ Yes, absolutely . . . but I worry that we rush to say, ‘That was great when you got your moment, good job.’ ”
Which is exactly what can’t happen if the women of the world want to prevent more suffering. One of the more heartbreaking aspects of the Nassar victims’ words, among a litany, was hearing some of them describe how it felt to learn that others were assaulted after them. How badly they wish they had been the last, how culpable they couldn’t help but feel for the next victim’s pain. There is something troubling about #MeToo’s spiking national attention, which seems to be galvanized only by outrageous numbers, and by an abundance of confessions from women who have been abused: Already Nassar’s victim count is being compared to Weinstein’s and Bill Cosby’s—“more than Weinstein’s and Cosby’s combined.” But that “count” is an accumulation of many ordinary moments, a majority of which could be described as routinely as women going to see a trainer at their gym.
Which is why both Ryan and Wells want to focus on the gyms, the coaches, the institutions who employ them long after the victims and their voices have left the spotlight, and the law. “What we’re dealing with in gymnastics is children,” Ryan says. “You have to have oversight of these gyms. Why aren’t these children covered by child labor laws?” Wells believes that we are in need of a cultural shift in how we think about predators, as well as how we believe victims, especially children. “When children report, it’s easy to dismiss them,” she told me. We need more education that “charismatic, socially skilled leaders can be groomers and abusers.” Despite Aquilina’s triple-digit sentencing, Olympian Aly Raisman, abused by Nassar, doesn’t think “justice was served” until the organizations involved, even the U.S. Olympic Committee, have been razed and rebuilt.
On June 5 of this year, voters in Santa Clara County, California will be able to recall Judge Persky if they choose. A campaign led by Stanford Law School professor Michele Dauber, who also confirmed Emily Doe’s withdrawal from planning the plaque, collected enough signatures. Emily has already recounted what happened to her. It has already been shared, retweeted, and discussed on cable news. If the currency of the #MeToo movement is the stories of victims, I worry hers has been spent by the time Persky’s recall comes around. But I hope not; it would be the first time a California judge has been ousted in a recall election in 85 years.
