A day after former USA Gymnastics CEO Steve Penny was arrested following a grand jury indictment for tampering with evidence in the investigation of Larry Nassar, the New York Times has a new report detailing how Penny behaved with the FBI as its agents looked into reports from gymnasts about the former national team…
Former USA Gymnastics president and CEO Steve Penny has been arrested after a grand jury indicted him for tampering with evidence related to the investigation into years of sexual abuse of athletes by former national team doctor Larry Nassar, according to officials in Walker County, Texas. He was indicted by a Walker…
The Miles City Unified School District in Montana has denied that it had any knowledge of sexual abuse carried out by James “Doc” Jensen, who was an athletic trainer at a Custer County high school from the early 1970s through 1998. The denial was in response to a lawsuit filed against the school district on behalf of…
The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team just published the first part of a six-part series on the life of former Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, who died by suicide last spring in a Massachusetts prison. It’s a heartbreaking story that digs deeper into the foundational early years of Hernandez’s short, painful life,…
Rachel Mitchell, the GOP hired gun who shot blanks during last week’s Brett Kavanaugh hearing, told Republican senators immediately after the public fiasco (but before the FBI investigation had begun) that she would not have prosecuted the nominee for his alleged assault of Christine Blasey Ford.
With many of the cameras and reporters gone, the fourth Senate hearing about sexual abuse in Olympic sports took on a different tone. There was no yelling. There was no demanding of answers. CEOs of the organizations that oversee Olympic sports had a few chuckles. The grandstanding was gone, just the empty gestures of…
Another lawsuit was filed earlier this week against USA Diving, saying the organization ignored repeated reports by multiple divers of ongoing sexual abuse by a coach. The lawsuit, filed in federal court, also names an Indiana club known as RipFest Diving, the man who oversaw that club, former Olympic diving coach…
When I wrote about the first anniversary of Rachael Denhollander coming forward in the Indianapolis Star about how Larry Nassar sexually abused her under the guise of medical treatment, I struggled with the headline. I generally do, but the story kicked up a bit of a debate over whether the headline should center…
The U.S. Center for SafeSport has banned three-time Olympic taekwondo medalist Steven Lopez, declaring him permanently ineligible earlier this week for “sexual misconduct involving a minor.” According to a copy of the notice of the director’s decision and other SafeSport records, which Deadspin reviewed, the…
Disgraced former Michigan State and USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar lost today on another one of his requests for a new sentencing hearing, this one in Eaton County, Mich. Like in the case filed against him in Ingham County, multiple women in Eaton said Nassar sexually abused them under the guise of medical…
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the U.S. Department of Justice is conducting a probe into how the FBI mismanaged its investigation into sexual abuse allegations made against former Michigan State and USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. Thiis comes after the FBI conducted its own internal review into…
Kerry Perry, we hardly knew ya. This is mostly because in the nine months that you were in charge of USA Gymnastics, you avoided the media like it was the plague and you had a high deductible health insurance plan. But just because Perry, who was asked to resign by USAG’s board on Tuesday, never really said hello…
Larry Nassar is 0 for 2 so far in appeals of his state and federal prison sentences. First, he lost his appeal of his federal sentence for child porn. And today, his appeal of his sentence in Ingham County, Mich., was denied by Judge Rosemarie Aquilina, the same judge his court-appointed attorneys unsuccessfully …
Back in June, the Detroit Free Press reported that Michigan State president John Engler spiked a special issue of the alumni magazine that was supposed to focus exclusively on the Larry Nassar sex abuse scandal, the victims, and the fallout. Such an issue seemed like a natural thing for the magazine given the…
In December, Larry Nassar—the former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State physician who sexually abused hundreds of women and girls under the guise of medical treatment—was sentenced for the first of three times. In that case, Nassar was sentenced to 60 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to possession of child…
The Detroit News reported in May that disgraced former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State doctor Larry Nassar was assaulted by fellow inmates at the United States Penitentiary, Tucson, “within hours of being released into the general population,” according to his attorney. Now it appears that Nassar is being…
Jean Lopez—the former U.S. taekwondo coach who was banned in April 2018 following a report from SafeSport that described “a decades long pattern of sexual misconduct by an older athlete/coach abusing his power to groom, manipulate and, ultimately, sexually abuse younger female athletes”—will be reinstated, according…
Just the other day, I was talking to a fellow gym nerd about the upcoming world championships in October. “Who’s your number two?” she asked, by which she meant who did I think would win the silver at worlds. I won’t say my answer because I am almost always wrong about these things. I don’t have to say that my number…
Former U.S. Olympic and current UCLA gymnasts Kyla Ross and Madison Kocian have added their voices to the over 150 women who have spoken out against the sexual abuse they experienced from disgraced and imprisoned doctor Larry Nassar. Ross, an Olympic gold medalist on the 2012 team, and Kocian, a gold medalist in 2016,…
The chief judge of Ingham County Circuit Court denied today a request by defense lawyers for Larry Nassar to have judge Rosemarie Aquilina disqualified from one of the disgraced former doctor’s criminal cases. Nassar’s lawyers had argued that they believed Aquilina’s statements in court showed that she had made up her…
