Between the first complaints to the FBI and the time the agency took action, Nassar sexually abused some 70 women and girls. One of the agents who was supposed to investigate was angling for a job at USA Gymnastics
When she was in Tokyo for a competition, the former Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney told the Federal Bureau of Investigation, she was afraid that she might not survive the abuse of Larry Nassar, the former sports medicine doctor and prolific child molester. “I thought I was going to die that night because there was no way he was going to let me go,” Maroney repeated to a Senate hearing on Wednesday. At the time she gave her interview to the FBI, Maroney was just a teenager. She hadn’t yet told her own mother about the extent of Nassar’s sexual abuse. But the agent she spoke to over the phone, from the FBI’s Indianapolis field office, didn’t seem particularly moved. “Is that all?” she recalls him asking.
Ultimately, the FBI would barely investigate Maroney’s accusations, according to a scathing report issued by the Department of Justice’s inspector general this summer. Allegations against Nassar were largely discarded at first, and a meaningful inquiry was delayed for months. Of the three gymnasts who initially came forward to the FBI in 2015, Maroney was the only one who was interviewed. Her conversation with the FBI agent was not properly documented for 17 months; when it was, the agent who authored the report misrepresented what she had told him. The FBI did not refer the allegations to state and local authorities, as it is required to do in such cases. And one of the agents assigned to the case, W Jay Abbott, seems to have been hoping to get a job with USA Gymnastics or the US Olympic Committee. When internal investigators later asked Abbott about his job queries, he lied about them, according to the report.
