Culture of pain: Inside sport’s biggest abuse scandal
Survivors — not victims. This is the way the one-time gymnasts featured in Athlete A describe themselves.
Netflix has recent form in gaining a wide audience for these documentaries about sex abuse — the four-part series Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich was, for several weeks of lockdown, the most-watched programme across the platform.
Athlete A, their next exposé, is a feature-length account of how young girls were lured into the clutches of USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar, who has been convicted so far on 10 counts of assault and sentenced to a total prison time of 360 years.
Nassar’s crimes were far from a one-man operation.
The film details the culture within the national team that made his predations possible, hid them under the bonnet for years, and continued to cover them up even after the Indianapolis Star began reporting on the accusations.
In 2015, national team member Maggie Nichols was the first to come forward.
Sixteen at the time, she won a gold medal that year in the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships and was considered a strong contender for the 2016 Olympics team.
It became the worst year of her life.
Not only did a torn meniscus steal away her momentum, but the treatments she’d been receiving from Nassar — who was the only adult member of the organisation the girls found kind or approachable — started raising red flags.
This was insidious abuse, by a beloved member of the medical establishment, often conducted with family members mere feet away.
Working under a towel, Nassar would cover his tracks with medical terminology about the pelvic region, while digitally penetrating his patients — most of whom had no sexual experience and assumed this was a legitimate technique.
Nichols had an inkling something wasn’t right. She informed a coach, and then her parents, who received a call from Steve Penny, then CEO of USA Gymnastics.
He assured them Maggie’s claims would be fully investigated, but no such thing happened.
In a filmed deposition, Penny says it was never company policy to refer such cases to the police or FBI. Nichols was simply ignored.
And then, mysteriously, Nichols got the boot.
She wasn’t even picked among the three alternate members of the Olympics squad, though her level of performance should have made her a shoo-in.
Blame falls heavily here on Bela and Marta Karolyi, the Transylvania-born co-ordinators of the US team, whose training programme, as the film depicts it, was so severe and uncaring it amounted to a whole other category of abuse.
Girls with existing injuries were pushed into competing in agony to get results.
Girls being molested by Nassar at the time — up to 120 have come forward — were too scared to say anything.
The journalistic angle in this film, which brings us inside the newsroom of the Star and reconstructs the story as it unfolded, carries strong echoes of Spotlight, 2015’s Oscar-winner about the Boston Globe’s investigation into abuse by the Catholic Church.
Meanwhile, the exploration of the alleged cover-up allegedly masterminded by Penny and the Karolyis calls to mind a lawyer’s especially pithy line from that film: “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.”
An Olympic village, in this case. The focus on scores, medals, careers swept all empathy out of the picture.
For Penny, who has since been indicted for alleged evidence tampering, success was paramount. (Penny has denied that there was any cover-up and has said he is “repulsed” by Nassar’s crimes.)
It’s only later in life that many of this man’s patients — some recalling the same invasions 20 years before — have felt courageous enough to add their voices, starting with Rachael Denhollander, whose call to the Star opened the floodgates.
What’s striking about the film’s tone is its redemptive warmth.
Though the details are chilling, it’s as if a cathartic space has been opened for these girls and their families to explain what they went through.
The only answer to such a systemic vacuum of human feeling is to fill it back up, and that’s what the filmmakers, Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, emotionally provide.
When the plaintiffs each get their day in court, with Nassar in the dock, the sense of a weight being lifted is giddymaking.
The workings of justice, so damagingly slow for whole lifetimes here, are unclogged by a mass will to see it served. —