The head of USA Gymnastics told two US Olympic Committee honchos in 2015 that an internal probe found possible criminal behavior by Larry Nassar against athletes — but the committee took no action, according to a new report.
A 2015 phone call and email shed new light on the Olympic Committee’s knowledge of a scandal that has since roiled US gymnastics, sources familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal.
The communications raise questions about why the USOC — which oversees USA Gymnastics and has slammed its response to the Nassar scandal — didn’t contact athletes, police or the depraved doc’s other employers before allegations against him emerged in late 2016.
During that period, a federal probe languished and Nassar continued to see — and allegedly sexually abuse — his patients in Michigan, the paper reported.
The USOC declined to comment to the Journal about its communications with USA Gymnastics, which didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In a statement, USOC spokesman Mark Jones repeated the committee’s plan to launch an “independent investigation into the decades-long abuse by Larry Nassar to determine what complaints were made, when, to whom, and what was done in response.”
The USOC has provided a variety of statements about when it first learned of the sordid allegations against Nassar.
In response to a gymnast’s lawsuit, the USOC said last month it was “first made aware of the possibility that a USA Gymnastics physician had sexually abused USA Gymnastics athletes in the summer of 2015, when we were informed by USA Gymnastics.”
At that time, “USA Gymnastics indicated they were in the process of contacting the appropriate law enforcement agencies.”
In June 2017, USA Gymnastics’ officials expressed their “deepest regrets” to athletes who had been abused. In recent days, the organization’s board of directors resigned as part of an overhaul of the group sparked by the Nassar scandal.
In July 2015, USA Gymnastics then-president Steve Penny called USOC head Scott Blackmun to ask for guidance, a person familiar with the call told the Journal.
The call was made after an Olympic gymnast described to an internal investigator what appeared to have been a sexual assault by a team doctor. At the investigator’s recommendation, Penny said he planned to contact law enforcement, the source told the news outlet.
Blackmun told Penny to “do what he had to do,” the person familiar with the call told the paper — but Blackmun provided no further guidance to USA Gymnastics about the matter in the ensuing months.
A couple of months later, Penny emailed the USOC’s chief security officer, Larry Buendorf, to describe allegations by three top gymnasts against Nassar — including one involving the insertion of his finger into one gymnast’s vagina.
The email — which was described to the Journal by people who have reviewed the correspondence — appears to be the first documented instance in which a USA Gymnastics official mentions Nassar by name to a USOC official.
The USOC has previously said no one at the organization knew Nassar was the alleged abuser until media reports in September 2016.
Nassar, who was arrested in November 2016 on sex-abuse charges in Michigan, was sentenced last week to up to 175 years in prison on some of those charges.
Nassar has already been sentenced to 60 years in prison for child porn charges.