The Catholic Church has been rightly reviled for its years of covering up for the horrendous crimes of a small core of paedophiles in its ranks. So why aren’t other organisations who are still doing the same not subject to the same opprobrium?
Think schools, for example: abusers are possibly even more rife in schools than the churches. Notably, a growing cohort of teacher-abusers are female. Many schools have conspired to cover up abuse in their organisations. Hollywood comes to mind, too: the same elite who can’t give themselves an award without posing as our moral superiors also run cover for creepy abusers in their own ranks. The BBC spent years covering up for, if not enabling, one of Britain’s most prolific abusers.
Now we can add the FBI to the grim list.
Olympic gymnast Simone Biles held back tears on Wednesday, as she told lawmakers how the FBI and U.S. gymnastic and Olympic officials failed to stop the sexual abuse that she and hundreds of other athletes suffered from former doctor Larry Nassar.
“To be clear, I blame Larry Nassar and I also blame an entire system that enabled and perpetrated his abuse,” she said before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee alongside fellow gymnasts McKayla Maroney, Aly Raisman and Maggie Nichols.
Nassar was the team doctor for the US women’s national gymnastic team for nearly 20 years. He seems to have regarded his charges as an endless meat parade: Nassar, already convicted for possessing child pornography, was convicted in 2018 of seven counts of abusing minors. But accusers say he may have molested nearly 300 young women and girls.
Sports officials covered up for this creep throughout his career. And, when he was eventually exposed, so did the people supposedly investigating him.
The emotional hearing painted a damning picture of FBI, which botched the Nassar investigation so badly that he was able to continue abusing more victims for over a year before he was finally arrested.
FBI Director Chris Wray made no excuses and said the bureau had fired one of the agents who had falsified the details of Maroney’s 2015 interview about the abuse.
One of Nassar’s victims spent three hours telling the FBI her story. The Feds not only hid her evidence, they also falsified it.
Several of the gymnasts said they were furious that the FBI failed to immediately interview them about the abuse after they had reported it.
Once the FBI finally did contact them, they said the agents tried to downplay the severity of the abuse.
“I remember sitting with the FBI agent and him trying to convince me that it wasn’t that bad,” Raisman said.
These were not just low-level gumshoes, either. The agent fired for falsifying Maroney’s statement was a supervisory special agent who led a task force investigating child sexual exploitation.
Another Special Agent in Charge not only failed to open a formal investigation for two years after the allegations were reported by officials, he actually used the investigation to ask the US Olympic Committee for a job.
The delays and cover-ups had consequences beyond potentially affecting Nassar’s trial: the creepy “doctor” used the intervening years to abuse even more victims.
Yet neither of the two agents was ever prosecuted.
“We have been failed and we deserve answers,” Biles said.
Reuters
As Aly Raisman also said, by covering for Nassar for so long, sports officials effectively enabled the abuse of possibly hundreds of girls.
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