Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney sat at a witness table in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room. All eyes were on her, but not for the reasons we were used to. As her teammates and the FBI director looked on, she recounted how, six years earlier, she had detailed her childhood abuse by USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar to the nation’s top law enforcement agency.
It was the summer of 2015. On the other end of the phone was Michael Langeman, a supervisory special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Langeman not only failed to act on what he heard from Maroney for a staggering 14 months, but also fabricated details of her disclosure — and still kept his job for another six years.
Maroney paused as she remembered that day, and how as soon as she finished recounting her trauma, her lingering tears were met with silence from Langeman, until finally the agent asked: “Is that all?”
Now a 25-year-old retired Olympic champion, Maroney told the committee that moment was “one of the worst moments of this entire process for me. To have my abuse be minimized and disregarded by the people who were supposed to protect me, just to feel like my abuse was not enough.”
The Sept. 15 hearing was historic in nature, as Maroney joined fellow gymnasts and Nassar survivors Simone Biles, Aly Raisman and Maggie Nichols in recounting the years of abuse and the failures of the FBI to take their reports seriously. These athletes were not only competing against other nations in the Olympics and other world events — they were fighting a monstrous predator on their own team.
System failure
Reports were made against Nassar for at least 20 years. The decades it took to prosecute him were not because of the silence of his victims, but the system that responded to the victims’ pleas with silence.
The even greater tragedy here is that theirs is a story of institutional failure not unique to those gymnasts or even to the Olympics.
When it comes to sports, coaches and medical professionals are important people in our lives — but there are bad actors, and it is increasingly clear that many of the institutions in place do not offer adequate protections for children from these predators.
On the local level, teams and athletic associations must recognize the critical role they play in protecting their athletes and weeding out dangerous staff on their payroll. After being allowed to retire from USA Gymnastics, Nassar went on to abuse countless more victims at Michigan State — with unmistakable parallels to the inaction by many others.
How many children could these institutions have saved had they believed survivors?
There is also action Congress can, and must, take on the federal level. For starters, some of the questions Maroney recounted to us showed an alarming insensitivity to the situation this young woman was living through. Under oath, FBI Director Christopher Wray promised changes at the bureau. It is my job as the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the FBI, to hold him to that promise.
I am committed to taking action to eliminate barriers to justice for survivors of child sex abuse. One measure I support will eliminate the statute of limitations for federal civil child sex abuse claims — acknowledging that for many survivors, it takes years for them to come forward and publicly speak out. I will also propose amending the bankruptcy code to prevent powerful institutions like USA Gymnastics from hiding behind bankruptcy to skirt accountability for abuse that happens under their care.
As Rachael Denhollander, the first gymnast to come forward against Nassar, wrote this summer, “too many survivors are suffering beyond their initial trauma: from carelessness or corruption among authority figures, or lack of accountability, and a culture that continues to question victims.”
Now the Senate Judiciary Committee, which I chair, has the chance to show the world that we believe survivors, we stand by survivors, and we will do everything in our power to bring justice.
Democrat Dick Durbin is the senior U.S. senator from Illinois. He wrote this for the Chicago Tribune.
