CNN : Olympic gymnasts McKayla Maroney and Simone Biles ripped the FBI and the Justice Department in Senate testimony Wednesday for how FBI agents mishandled abuse allegations brought against Larry Nassar and then made false statements in the fallout from the botched investigation.
“They allowed a child molester to go free for more than a year and this inaction directly allowed Nassar’s abuse to continue,” Maroney told the Senate Judiciary Committee after recounting the vivid details she provided the agent interviewing her about Nassar’s abuse.
“What is the point of reporting abuse if our own FBI agents are going to take it upon themselves to bury that report in a drawer?” she added.
Maroney, Biles, Maggie Nichols and Aly Raisman were assaulted by Nassar, the former USA Gymnastics team doctor who is now serving a several-decade prison sentence.
“It truly feels like the FBI turned a blind eye to us and went out of its way to help protect,” USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, Biles testified while holding back tears.
“A message needs to be sent: If you allow a predator to harm children, the consequences will be swift and severe. Enough is enough,” she said.
Raisman called for more investigation into how the Nassar probe was mishandled and said that the FBI pressured her to accept Nassar’s plea deal.
“The agent diminished the significance of my abuse. It made me feel my criminal case wasn’t worth pursuing,” Raisman said.
Allegations into Nassar were first brought to the agency in July 2015. Several violations of protocols led to months of delay, as captured in a scathing Justice Department inspector general report released in July.
While the federal investigation languished, Nassar abused scores of victims, the inspector general report said.
FBI officials “failed to respond to the Nassar allegations with the utmost seriousness and urgency that they deserved and required, made numerous and fundamental errors when they did respond to them, and violated multiple FBI policies,” the report stated.
Maroney identified herself as gymnast described — but not named — in the report who spoke to the FBI about her allegations in September 2015. The agent who took her interview violated key FBI procedures and made false statements in a summary the agent wrote of the interview more than a year later, according to the inspector general’s report.
She and others criticized the Justice Department for its decisions, according to the IG report, to not prosecute the agent as well as an FBI supervisor who was also accused of mishandling the probe and then later making false statements about it.
“The Department of Justice, refused to prosecute these individuals. Why?” Maroney said, while calling out Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco for her absence at the hearing Wednesday. “It is the Department of Justice’s job to hold them accountable. I am tired of waiting for people to do the right thing, because my abuse was enough and we deserve justice.”
Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin noted at the start of the hearing how athletic institutions had failed to protect the athletes from abuse.
“It shocks the conscience when those failures come from law enforcement itself,” Durbin said.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz and FBI Director Chris Wray will also testify.
Nassar pleaded guilty in 2018 to seven counts of criminal sexual conduct in a case brought by Michigan’s attorney general. He was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison, after more than 150 women and girls said in court that he had sexually abused them over the past two decades.
In recent weeks, an FBI agent accused in the inspector general’s report of failing to launch a proper investigation was fired by the FBI, US law enforcement officials told CNN. A supervisor who was also singled out in the IG report for violating protocol and false statements retired from the FBI in January 2018.
