Time to pay up, Michigan State. You owe it to athletes

Team doctor Nassar assaulted hundreds

Pay up, Michigan State.

You owe the second wave of athletes just as much compensation as the first wave who came forward with their accounts of Larry Nassar’s sexual assaults.

This group of about 175 women was just as traumatized by the former Michigan State University sports doctor as the first 332. Some of them, like Oak Creek’s Nicole Casady, buried those memories for decades, because that’s what assault victims do.

But athletes march on. They train their brains to perform despite pain and injury, to rebound from failure and push through the unnatural and uncomfortable moments in sports like stage fright under spotlights.

The second wave — which includes Casady — met the deadline last year and they’re just as worthy for an equal settlement.

Here’s why:

In Casady’s case it took 20 years to excavate her reality, that she was face down on a mat and endured Nassar’s assaults approximately 60 times. She had a hamstring injury – and she was sexually abused. But she buried those memories and feelings from age 15 to 35 until she came to the realization that those were not acceptable medical practices by a revered doctor, but assaults by a sicko.

The internal turmoil — to talk about it, to not — lived within her for a year, until she finally told her husband, and then her lawyer, who supported her no matter what.

“Even with those words, the level of trust you have for other human beings in

this world is down to nothing,” said Casady.

So now she goes to therapy once a week. With insurance, that’s $75 out of her own pocket for the co-pay.

And it’s more than just counseling for an hour a week. It’s time away from her four kids and her husband and her job.

It’s energy, so much mental energy, to address this trauma, first to the counselor and then to internalize and process that sadness and helplessness and anger that is now unearthed.

Casady has to do this.

She can’t set foot inside a gymnastics facility without fits of anxiety. The gym doesn’t just raise her heart rate or make her edgy. She shakes and sometimes she cries. And it’s hard to explain to her youngest kids why she’s got this fight or flight response in a place that should bring up feelings of nostalgia and a sense of belonging.

She can’t walk past a pop-up camper, because that’s where Nassar assaulted so many of Michigan State’s gymnasts. Pop-up campers are everywhere, even at Miller Park for tailgating for heaven’s sake, so instead of enjoying a game with family and friends she’s steering everyone away from the camper in the parking lot so she doesn’t feel anxious again.

She’d like to wear your Michigan State gear again, proudly, because she loved that university before the assaults, loved it through them, and loves it still. She wants to wear that Spartans green and white – her closet is full of it, the joke is she bleeds green - because this is no time to stop supporting the other MSU gymnastics alumni, and the women who are in the program now. But when she wears it, people ask, “Did you know that Larry Nassar?” And the anxiety starts again.

She must go to therapy because she looks at the faces of her four children, ages 12 to 2, at the dinner table and wants to be present for them, and not rob them another day of a mom who is not fully there.

She’s a family nurse practitioner who is horrified by another memory: being in a line of gymnasts, all who bent over for Nassar one after another, an assembly line of victims. He assaulted them, wearing no gloves, paying no attention to hygiene for their sake. So now at work she deliberately and specifically tells her patients she will be placing the stethoscope under their shirt just to listen to their lungs and heart, and she uses hand sanitizer what seems like every 60 seconds. This isn’t just good practice, it’s also a life reaction to that monster.

And she has to go to therapy because the fact is, “that man had his hands all over my body at any given time. You can feel what his hands still felt like,” said Casady. “I can go back there like that. I want to not feel that.”

And so it takes time and energy and effort and work by Casady, all of which she is willing to give, but it also takes money to restore the mental health Nassar stole from these girls and young women. That’s why you owe her, Michigan State.

“From the outside we may look like we’re still moving on and life is moving on,” said Casady. “However, internally, we’re a mess.”

It’s the unconscionable fact you employed other people who failed these women. An independent special counsel for the Michigan Attorney General found 11 examples where the girls and women did exactly as instructed – they bravely came forward and reported the strange encounters to people in position of authority. But your team sports psychologist — for God’s sake — and your professors, your coaches, your athletic trainers – these egotistical or clueless or self-absorbed, gutless individuals failed to believe the gymnasts, and so the abuse dates to the mid-1990s and includes 500 athletes. That means you had a culture of incompetence in the middle of the highest level of education. Unacceptable.

But let’s be clear. The rest of us should not stand on our sanctimonious soap boxes. We are Penn State and the Catholic Church and #metoo. We give people in sports and entertainment and elsewhere too much power and too high a priority. We must, as parents, as fans, stop trusting famous faces and start thinking for ourselves, to look out for the most vulnerable.

We change the culture by coming forward, just like Nicole Casady.

But for now, I can only hope that the cafeteria cooks grind up the prison cockroaches and season Larry Nassar’s food with them every day.

And that you pay up, Michigan State. “Sometimes I feel like the university is saying we’re done with this; but I’m not. We’re not,” said Casady. “We’re not whole; we’re not healed."