Simone Biles is truly one of a kind, able to do things with her body that less than 1% of the entire world could even begin to imagine doing. What she has done in gymnastics likely won't be equaled any time soon, even without the medals she could have won this year had she been able to compete.
But what was done to her body against her will puts her in sadly more inclusive categories: the number of sexual assault victims who contemplate suicide, which is as high as 40 percent depending on the study. The 41.8% of women who have experienced or will experience sexual violence. The 80% of sexual assaults committed by someone the victim knows (and, in many cases, trusts).
According to RAINN, every 68 seconds, someone in America is sexually assaulted. Every nine minutes, that someone is a child.
Former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar sexually assaulted hundreds of women and girls, including Biles. He is part of the rare 1% of sexual assault perpetrators who will face justice, which is the least that could happen to him after all the harm he has done.
When I heard the news that Biles was pulling out of the Olympics, I had the same reaction most people did. I was disappointed that we wouldn't get to watch Biles be great. And then, almost immediately, I was angry at Nassar all over again.
I can't be inside Biles' head — none of us can — but the Biles I saw the first few days In Tokyo was a far cry from the Biles we had been seeing leading up to the Olympics. She seemed very much not herself.
Yes, Biles was caring for her mental and physical well-being by pulling out of the team and individual all-around events. But when we praise Biles for valuing her mental health, as we should, we should also recognize what contributed to getting her to a place where she couldn't trust her body to be in sync with her mind.
It took Biles herself a long time to admit she'd even been sexually assaulted. She, like so many other women, had something happen to her at the hands of a male authority figure that made her deeply uncomfortable, but she rationalized it to herself.
Around the time that athletes began arriving in Tokyo, a report came out that should be a significantly bigger story than it is: the FBI's failure to act on reports of Nassar's abuse led to as many as 70 women and girls being assaulted after that report.
Jay Abbott, head of the Indianapolis FBI field office, was trying to get a job on the Olympic Committee via his buddy and then head of USA Gymnastics, Steve Penny. The former lied to the FBI when they investigated the agency's failures; the latter was forced to resign and has been charged with evidence tampering in Nassar's case. Abbott's supervisor also was found ot have lied to the FBI during the investigation, and he still works for the agency.
Penny formed a relationship with an up-and-coming gymnast named Simone Biles not long after learning of the accusations against Nassar, and sent her to train with him. She was 18 years old. Meanwhile, Abbott sat on the information about Nassar for 13 months. Nassar was let go by USA Gymnastics, but he continued to hurt women while working at Michigan State.
Biles is a competitor, yes. And she loves her teammates and the sport.
But the only reason she even went to Tokyo this year at all is to continue to pressure everyone involved at every level to hold the institutions and people that let her and so many others down accountable.
And there are so, so many of those.
As recently as January 2018, literally while Nassar was being sentenced, USA Gymnastics was going to have its athletes continue to train at Karolyi Ranch in Texas, the very site where many of these abuses happened. Biles pushed back on that, and USA Gymnastics terminated their relationship with the ranch.
Bela and Marta Karolyi are also being sued for allowing Nassar's abuse, and their own abusive training methods have been called into question. But the survivors wanted the Texas Attorney General to investigate what happened to them there, since so much of Nassar's abuse occurred on that ranch.
Instead, the Texas Deputy Attorney General tweeted disparaging comments about Biles after she withdrew from the event.
So it looks like the office at least had the time and inclination to weigh in about how a victim of sexual assault should behave, as opposed to holding the perpetrators and enablers of it accountable. He has since deleted the tweet and apologized.
It is a very good thing that Nassar was allowed to be confronted by his victims in court, even the ones whose names weren't on the case. Many, many victims don't even get that measure of justice. It's a very good thing that he will remain behind bars for the rest of his life, although it's certainly less than ideal that he is avoiding paying his victims the money he owes them while instead spending the money on himself.
Many victims of sexual assault don't bother to report at all, and who could blame them? If even the world's most successful gymnasts can't get the attention of authorities, who will?
How often do most of us hear stories like these and wonder how people could do this? How could they fail to report? How could they sit on this information? Who could just sit idly by and let this happen to so many women?
Well, have you ever heard about an accusation of sexual assault against someone you liked, be it an athlete or person you know, and your first reaction was skepticism? How much time have you spent thinking about the years of mental anguish that the trauma of sexual violence can cause? How that trauma can ripple throughout generations?
And if it was going to make your own life more difficult, either personally or professionally, to report an alleged sexual assault, are you so sure that you would?
How often do you frequent media outlets that joke about sexual assault? Have you ever laughed at a joke about rape, even in relative privacy? How often has a player on your favorite team been accused of sexual violence? And how often did you cheer for that player in spite of it? What about your favorite politician, or movie star, or musician? Did you stop spending money on products they produce?
Some of you might give the right answers to all of these questions. Bravo to you. But far too many of us, if we're being honest with ourselves, would not.
It's easy to justify almost any bad behavior when holding someone accountable for it would inconvenience your own life, even in just a small way. Someone else will take care of it.
But no one else did, and so many women are left to pick up the pieces. The victims and their families – their children, their spouses, their friends, their parents. Trauma and its impacts are rarely limited to just the victim.
Don't be fooled into thinking that the Nassar trial was their moment of catharsis and closure. It's far from it. He's the one who hurt them, but countless others betrayed them, including USA Gymnastics. The same organization that would like to make a payout to the many, many victims contingent upon shielding those who knew and did nothing from liability.
Don't be fooled by USA Gymnastics' public support of Biles. It's good that they're saying the right things. But they continue to act in ways that suggest they don't care about what she or the hundreds of other women have gone through that might have led her to, you know, need to care for her mental health.
Most of us aren't going to commit acts of sexual violence against someone else. But chances are very good that you know someone who has been a victim of it, even if they haven't told you.
Jail is not the best solution for every wrong committed in this country. But how often do we see people credibly accused of sexual assault eventually able to carry on with their normal lives as if nothing happened? How often do we see the people who call this out shunned as the ones who are "dredging up the past"? How often do we see allegations of sexual assault used as some sort of rivalry cudgel between arguing fans who think their team is somehow morally superior, without any real care for the victim?
And how many stories of sexual assault do not include the countless steps along the way where the victim was failed by someone who either allowed it to happen or actively worked to circumvent the justice system once it did? Or both, in the case of USA Gymnastics?
Abbott is now enjoying a cushy retirement. His boss, who also lied to the FBI, will also not be prosecuted for a crime most Americans would be prosecuted quite harshly for, and understandably so. Except most Americans who lie to the FBI don't do it with these kinds of dire consequences involved. And USA Gymnastics would have you believe it's best for those liable for protecting Nassar over his victims to go unpunished and, in some cases, unnamed.
They are far from the only enablers of sexual violence in this country or worldwide to get off scot-free. But without those enablers, the predators cannot flourish. We cannot abide the enablers any more than we can the perpetrators. But we seem to do a good enough job tolerating both.
Bill Cosby was just let out of jail on a technicality. In spite of the women who came forward to tell their stories, there is still pushback from those who do not believe them. It's thankfully limited, but it exists. And there were so many people who knew about what he was accused of and pretended everything was normal until it was no longer socially acceptable to do so.
We hear a lot about second chances. People do deserve that, even abusers and assaulters. But most of the time when people wrong us, they have to apologize before we give them another chance. At the very least. Often, high-profile people accused of sexual abuse don't even have to do that much as they're hired by the next place glad to have their services at a discount. They just hope everyone will forget about it.
The sad thing is they're usually correct. The reaction to Biles is just the latest example of that.
As superhuman as Biles is, even she can't force the world to take sexual assault seriously.
She doesn't owe us anything more than she's already given us, which is so much.
But we owe her, and all of Nassar's victims, and the countless victims of sexual violence both known and unknown.
What sexual violence costs society, both in terms of lost potential and the harm it does, is far too much and in many ways it's incalculable. Biles' medals she could have earned this year, are part of it. But what about her peace of mind? What her trust in institutions that were supposed to protect her?
She and so many women will never be the same. In all likelihood, a man or woman you know is not reaching their full potential because of struggling with trauma from past sexual abuse. They put a smile on their faces and muddle through it and act like everything is fine until they quite literally no longer can.
Don't let them keep doing it alone.
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