![]() ![]() I was crying because I felt like a disappointment to Márta and Béla.” She says after winning the gold, she felt empty. “At the Olympics, before I received my gold medal, I was crying. And it scared the 'bejeebies' out of me.” Even up until her Olympic win, she was terrified. I was terrified every time I went to the gym - my coaches would threaten me, that if I didn’t perform well enough, to their liking, they would call my father … and Béla had that deep voice. The adults around the sport should have spoken up more when they saw this toxic culture.” Moceanu says, “calling my father, to enforce physical punishment on me, was the scariest thing of it all. With her coaches, she says, “it was verbal and emotional abuses running rampant. But she's also disappointed that her contemporaries haven't stepped forward to support her, to this day. Moceanu says she's proud of the women who have come forward to testify against Nassar. Because all they cared about was they were winning. ![]() “‘Do you know the long-term damage to these young ladies when they leave the sport? Have you thought about that?’ No. "I recognized how dangerous this culture was it was headed down a very dark road.” Moceanu was shocked by the amount of pushback she got, including from the then-president of USA Gymnastics. I said something when I finally had the courage to, in 2008," Moceanu told The World. ![]() Márta Károlyi said the way Moceanu remembered things made her “sad.” And there was the constant implication - including from some fellow gymnasts, that Olympic training is just hard. A decade later, she publicly accused coaches Béla Károlyi and Márta Károlyi of emotional and physical abuse. USA Gymnastics dismissed her allegations. In 1998, when she was 17, Moceanu broke the image of the happy, perky champion gymnast when she emancipated from her father, whom she described as violent and manipulative. She was admired by girls all over the country and hailed as an American hero. At only 14, in 1996, Dominique Moceanu became the youngest US gymnast to win Olympic gold. But over a decade ago, there was another voice calling out abuse in the gymnastics world. The Nassar case has garnered national and international attention, in part because of the unbelievable scope of his abuses. In a scathing interview with ESPN last week, Olympian Aly Raisman said of USA Gymnastics, “Their biggest priority from the beginning and still today, is their reputation, the medals they win and the money they make off of us.” Gymnast McKayla Maroney, who alleged sexual abuse by Nassar over the course of five years, signed a confidential $1.25 million settlement agreement with USA Gymnastics in the fall of 2016. And when USA Gymnastics let Nassar go, in July of that year, they failed to contact Michigan State University or the training camp in Huntsville, Texas (run by legendary coaches Béla Károlyi and Márta Károlyi), where Nassar continued to see patients.Īthletes were pressured and coaxed to stay silent. The Indianapolis Star found that USA Gymnastics caught wind of Nassar’s behavior in June 2015, and it took them five weeks to contact the FBI. USA Gymnastics is now being called out for egregious negligence. In 2014, USA Gymnastics President Steve Penny said Nassar’s “contributions over the years are immeasurable and will continue to be so.” And he was able to do so with the blessing of USA Gymnastics. Nassar hid behind the gymnasts’ successes. And you would not have done anything differently.” Sexual predators are extremely agile at manipulating their communities. ![]() Swinehart’s daughter, Jillian Swinehart, is one of the gymnasts who accused Nassar of abuse. “Quit shaming and blaming the parents,” said Anne Swinehart to the court earlier this week. That's what a Michigan judge said on Wednesday, when Larry Nassar, the former doctor for the USA Gymnastics team, was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison for sexually abusing more than 160 girls and women over the past two decades, including a number of prominent Olympic athletes who came forward in recent months.Īmid a barrage of harrowing testimonies, the inevitable question was, how could this happen? ![]()
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