Since pedophile Larry Nassar was just stabbed in prison, now seems like a good time to revisit the FBI’s botched investigation that allowed the former USA Gymnastics team doctor to assault at least an additional 70 young women.
Although the FBI first caught word of Nassar’s behavior in 2015, it took the department months to conduct a proper investigation. The Department of Justice found in 2021 that senior FBI officials in Indianapolis “failed to respond to allegations of sexual abuse of athletes by former USA Gymnastics physician Lawrence Gerard Nassar with the urgency that the allegations required.” The officials did more than fail to respond.
The FBI’s Indianapolis field office met with USA Gymnastics officials, including president Steve Penny, in July 2015 to address allegations that Nassar sexually abused multiple gymnasts. After consulting with attorneys and special agents, the Indianapolis office decided to transfer the case to the Western District of Michigan, where there would likely be federal jurisdiction. That transfer never happened, even though W. Jay Abbott, the special agent in charge, told Penny and FBI officials that it did.
Weeks after not transferring the report, Abbott met Penny at a bar to discuss a job opportunity. From there, the case was stagnant for eight months until USA Gymnastics officials alerted the FBI’s Los Angeles field office of Nassar’s misdoings. When contacted by the Los Angeles office, the FBI’s Indianapolis field office said it had no record of the initial report.
It gets muddier. The Los Angeles office began to investigate Nassar in early 2016 but didn’t notify Michigan state or local authorities. So, with an open FBI investigation, multiple claims of assault against him, and an employer that knew about the sex-abuse allegations, Larry Nassar for months continued to treat patients. It took a complaint filed with the police department at Michigan State University, where Nassar was a doctor, by one of his former patients in 2016 to finally nail the guy. Within a month, MSU police seized Nassar’s stash of child pornography from a dumpster outside his house. The FBI arrested him later that year.
Only one FBI agent has been fired. One — out of the tens, maybe more, who failed to document, report, or investigate claims that an Olympic doctor sexually assaulted girls as young as six.
Nassar is in prison for life. Law-enforcement officers who bungled the investigation now demand our attention. The Nassar scandal has faded in and out of the media for years, but key players have yet to be held accountable: Take, for example, Penny, who schmoozed the lead investigator in the case, misled parents and victims about his communication with the FBI, derailed the investigation, and refused to fire Nassar after initial allegations. Charges of evidence-tampering against Penny were dismissed last year.
We’ve heard from Olympic athletes. But a majority of the girls Nassar assaulted were startlingly ordinary — Lansing natives, grade-school gymnasts, even his friends’ daughters. Here’s an example of what law enforcement failed to stop, in case you have any doubts that Nassar’s former case agents should be next to him in prison: The former doctor pleaded guilty to abusing Kyle Stephens, whose parents had regular dinner parties with the Nassar family. Nassar exposed himself to her in a dark boiler room, rubbed his penis on her bare feet, and put his finger in her six-year-old vagina. She hadn’t yet lost all of her baby teeth.