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Believed, a brilliant podcast about the Nassar scandal. The woman was in the room while Nassar
treated her daughter, sitting a few feet away.
And I remember out of the corner of my eye seeing what looked to be potentially an erection.
And I just remember thinking, “That’s weird. That’s really weird. Poor guy.” Thinking, like,
that would be very strange for a physician to get an erection in a patient’s room while giving
her an exam…
But at the time, when you’re in the room, and he’s doing this procedure, you just think he’s
being a good doctor and doing his best for your child. He was that slick. He was that smooth.
In another instance, a young girl goes to see Nassar with her father. Nassar puts his fingers
inside her, with her dad sitting in the room. Later that day, the gymnast tells her mother. Here is
the mother looking back on the moment:
I remember it like it was five seconds ago. I’m in the driver’s seat, she’s in the passenger seat,
and she said, “Larry did something to me today that made me feel uncomfortable.”
And I said, “Well, what do you mean?”
“Well, he…touched me.”
And I said, “Well, touched you where?”
And she said, “Down there.” And the whole time you know what she’s saying but you’re
trying to rationalize that it can’t be that.
She called her husband and asked him if he had left the room at any time during the
appointment? He said he hadn’t.
And…God forgive me, I dropped it. I filed it back in the parenting filing cabinet until 2016.
After a while, the stories all start to sound the same. Here’s another parent:
And she’s sitting in the car very quiet and depressed and saying, “Dad, he’s not helping my
back pain. Let’s not go anymore.” But this is Larry. This is the gymnastics doctor. If he can’t
cure her, nobody will cure her. Only God has more skills than Larry. “Be patient, honey. It’s
gonna take time. Good things take time.” That’s what we always taught our kids. So, I would
say, “OK. We’re gonna go again next week. We’re gonna go again the following week. And
then you will start seeing the progress.”
She said, “OK, Dad. You know. I trust your judgment.”
The fact that Nassar was doing something monstrous is exactly what makes the parents’
position so difficult. If Nassar had been rude to their daughters, they would have spoken up
immediately. If their daughters had said to them on the way home that they had smelled liquor on
Nassar’s breath, most parents would have leapt to attention. It is not impossible to imagine that
doctors are occasionally rude or drunk. Default to truth becomes an issue when we are forced to
choose between two alternatives, one of which is likely and the other of which is impossible to
imagine. Is Ana Montes the most highly placed Cuban spy in history, or was Reg Brown just
being paranoid? Default to truth biases us in favor of the most likely interpretation. Scott
Carmichael believed Ana Montes, right up to the point where believing her became absolutely
impossible. The parents did the same thing, not because they were negligent but because this is
how most human beings are wired.
Many of the women he had abused, in fact, defended Nassar. They couldn’t see past default to
truth either. Trinea Gonczar was treated 856 times by Nassar during her gymnastics career.
When one of her teammates came to Gonczar and said that Nassar had put his fingers inside her,
Gonczar tried to reassure her: “He does that to me all the time!”
When the Indianapolis Star broke the Nassar story, Gonczar stood by him. She was
convinced he would be exonerated. It was all a big mix-up. When did she finally change her
mind? Only when the evidence against Nassar became overwhelming. At Nassar’s trial, when
Gonczar joined the chorus of his victims in testifying against him, she finally gave in to her
doubts:
I had to make an extremely hard choice this week, Larry. I had to choose whether [to]
continue supporting you through this or to support them: the girls. I choose them, Larry. I
choose to love them and protect them. I choose to stop caring for you and supporting you. I
choose to look you in the face and tell you that you hurt us, you hurt me…I hope you will see
it from me in my eyes today that I believed in you always until I couldn’t anymore. I hope
you cry like we cry. I hope you feel bad for what you’ve done. I hope more than anything,
each day these girls can feel less pain. I hope you want that for us, but this is goodbye to you,
Larry, and this time it’s time for me to close the door. It’s time for me to stand up for these
little girls and not stand behind you anymore, Larry.
Goodbye, Larry. May God bless your dark, broken soul.
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