Several well-known American gymnasts — including Simone Biles, Aly Raisman and McKayla Maroney — gave powerful testimony to a Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, saying that current and former FBI agents should be held accountable for how they mishandled the FBI’s investigation into sexual abuse allegations against Larry Nassar, the former doctor for Team USA.
Nassar was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison in 2018, after more than 150 women and girls said in court that he had sexually abused them.
“They allowed a child molester to go free for more than a year and this inaction directly allowed Nassar’s abuse to continue,” Maroney testified on Wednesday. “What is the point of reporting abuse if our own FBI agents are going to take it upon themselves to bury that report in a drawer?”
Biles testified, “It truly feels like the FBI turned a blind eye to us and went out of its way to help protect (USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee).”
And Raisman said the agent investigating the case, “diminished the significance of my abuse. It made me feel my criminal case wasn’t worth pursuing.”
A Justice Department inspector general report from July said FBI officials “failed to respond to the Nassar allegations with the utmost seriousness and urgency that they deserved and required, made numerous and fundamental errors when they did respond to them, and violated multiple FBI policies.”
The report said Nassar continued his abuse while the FBI investigation sputtered along.
The New York Times’ Juliet Macur wrote, “In a remarkable turn, the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, acknowledged the agency’s mishandling of the case and apologized to the victims. He said the F.B.I. had fired an agent who was involved in the case early — the one who interviewed Maroney. It was the first time anyone at the agency had submitted to public questioning about the F.B.I.’s failure to properly investigate a sexual abuse case that shook the sports world to its core.”
(For more details on Wednesday’s hearing, check out Macur’s story or this story from CNN’s Tierney Sneed.)
The three big cable news networks — CNN, Fox News and MSNBC — carried much of the testimony live. And ESPN did a lengthy piece near the top of its 6 p.m. Eastern “SportsCenter.” It was good to see this much attention given to this story.
On “CNN Newsroom,” anchor Alisyn Camerota interviewed Jessica Howard, another one of the gymnasts who was at Wednesday’s hearing.
Howard told Camerota, “We were told we don’t matter. We were told we were worthless. And then we tell somebody about this kind of abuse — to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to the highest level of law enforcement in the land — and then you’re still dismissed, and nothing happens. … It’s the deepest level of corruption I can think of.”
In a piece for The Washington Post, Candace Buckner wrote, “They publicly recalled the worst moments of their lives at the risk of triggering pain they may need months to recover from, as Raisman achingly pointed out, because they know accountability doesn’t happen until somebody brave enough steps forward and speaks up. Their stories should compel senators to take action. And as uncomfortable as it may be to hear such raw truth, they should compel all of us to listen.”
All of us includes the media, which needs to continue covering and amplifying this story.
A grim number
Here’s a number that is hard to wrap your head around: 1 in 500 Americans has died from COVID-19. Dan Keating and Akilah Johnson wrote about the grim milestone for The Washington Post.
They wrote, “The goal of testing, mask-wearing, keeping six feet apart and limiting gatherings was to slow the spread of the highly infectious virus until a vaccine could stamp it out. The vaccines came but not enough people have been immunized, and the triumph of science waned as mass death and disease remain. The result: As the nation’s covid death toll exceeded 663,000 this week, it meant roughly 1 in every 500 Americans had succumbed to the disease caused by the coronavirus.”
The Post piece delves into the numbers and breaks them down among age, race and state.
The Los Angeles Times’ last hope?
Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo has a story on new Los Angeles Times executive editor Kevin Merida. After serving as a senior vice president at ESPN, Merida was hired in June to replace Norman Pearlstine. Pompeo makes a fair point when talking about the Times under owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong.
Pompeo writes, “But still, three years after the Soon-Shiong family’s nearly $500 million deal to acquire the Times, it’s not entirely clear whether the paper’s future looks brighter than its tortured past.” As far as Merida, Pompeo writes, “In the blink of an eye, Merida, 64, went from a relatively under-the-radar figure to one of the most talked about news executives around — a veteran Black journalist who, on the heels of a long-overdue reckoning around race, soared into the still overwhelmingly white stratosphere of the news business. Some might say he’s the L.A. Times’s last great hope, because if Merida can’t position the place for long-term success, who can?”
After taking the job, Merida told Pompeo, “I didn’t come here because I don’t think we can have success. Whatever happened before was before, and now we have a chance to start right now.”
Merida added, “We have a chance to reinvent the L.A. Times, to make it better. I would like to redefine what a modern newspaper is.”
