Celia Downes: Athletes who were abused by physician need closure

The promise of a new probe into how the FBI bungled its sex abuse investigation of former USA Gymnastics physician Larry Nassar is a step forward, but still comes much too late for the scores of victims who remain scarred years after he molested them.

Last week the Justice Department said it was renewing its look into the FBI’s mishandling of the Nassar investigation, less than a month after an emotional Senate hearing with four of Nassar’s victims brought new attention to the tragic and infuriating case.

The hearing itself stemmed from the release in July of a damning report from the Justice Department’s inspector general that found gross errors in how the FBI worked with the victims and their stories, often neglecting to recognize or acknowledge the seriousness of what happened to them.

Nassar, who abused young athletes for decades during his time at Michigan State and USA Gymnastics, was first identified by one of his victims back in 2014. The FBI didn’t begin its investigation until the following year and even then let it languish. Official action on the sex abuse charges wasn’t taken until 2017; by then Nassar had already been arrested on child pornography charges.

Nassar continued to harm girls and women for more than a year while the FBI failed time and again to take the victims seriously.

He is now in prison after being found guilty in the child pornography case as well as on multiple charges of criminal sexual conduct. His sentences total more than 200 years behind bars.

One of the most searing accounts of the FBI’s neglect has come from McKayla Maroney, who most recently testified alongside three other elite gymnasts at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last month looking into the FBI’s missteps in the Nassar case.

Maroney said that while she spoke to an FBI investigator in 2015 about the abuse she endured, it took a year and a half for the agency to document her report, and it misrepresented her words once it finally acted.

She’s not the only athlete who said her statements were ignored. Aly Raisman, who also testified last month, said the FBI agent who interviewed her didn’t seem to take her account seriously and, she said, tried to downplay the severity of what happened.

Simone Biles summed up her peers’ sentiments during her at-times tearful testimony.

“To be clear, I blame Larry Nassar and I also blame an entire system that enabled and perpetrated his abuse,” she told the senators.

To his credit, FBI Director Christopher Wray is just as disgusted and frustrated as the athletes are over the actions — or inactions — of the agency. Wray became director in 2017, after the Nassar scandal broke.

In his opening statement at the Senate hearing, Wray said he was “heartsick and furious” upon hearing that his own agency’s failures helped perpetuate Nassar’s abuse. An internal review he ordered led to the Justice Department’s investigation.

Just one FBI agent has been fired as a result of the probe. Another who was implicated resigned before he could face disciplinary action, something else Wray decried at the hearing.

It’s a small consolation that officials now are willingly stepping forward to hold people accountable. But nothing can change the indifference years ago that left so many girls and women with even deeper emotional and psychological scars than what they suffered under Nassar’s control.

Hopefully the new investigation will proceed swiftly and lead to some sense of closure.