GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Larry Nassar is now known as a convicted sex offender, but it wasn’t always that way. Before the allegations against him came to light, he was a well-known sports physician.
Indianapolis Star reporter Marisa Kwiatkowski and two of her colleagues broke the story about Nassar’s sexual abuse in September 2016.
Kwiatkowski went to Grand Valley State University and was back at the school's Grand Rapids campus Monday to talk about the story that led to Nassar’s fall from grace.
It was Nassar survivor Rachael Denhollander, a Kalamazoo native, who provided the first tip about him, said Kwiatkowski.
“She told us that she hadn’t told anyone what had happened to her, but that for the first time she thought she may be believed, and she wanted to share her story with us,” Kwiatowski said.
Denhollander was soon followed by two other victims who said Nassar had sexually assaulted them.
“And once we knew that there were three people with similar allegations who were sharing their stories, and had no connection to each other, we had a club-level gymnast, an Olympic medalist, and their stories were so similar, we decided to really focus our attention on (Nassar),” Kwiatkowski said.
Kwiatkowski says there was a lot of pushback to the Nassar story. After all, he worked at MSU and was running for school board at the time.
“We were so meticulous in the editing process that we knew when we published that Larry Nassar piece that the information that we gave the public was accurate,” she said.
After the story broke, the accusations against Nassar started piling up. Now, hundreds of girls and women say Nassar sexually abused them, with allegations dating back some two decades. Earlier this year after marathon hearings in two counties, he was sentenced to up to 300 years in prison on state-level sexual assault charges, on top of a 60-year sentence for federal child pornography charges. He's now imprisoned in a federal facility in Arizona.
The case has led to a package of bills in the state Legislature aimed at reforming the state's child sexual assault laws and civil lawsuits involving survivors.
Kwiatkowski says it’s important to give voice to those who generally don’t have one and to expose wrongdoing.
“I look at it like it’s not about me, it’s not about my colleagues, it’s about the people who trusted us to share their stories,” she said. “And for some of them, they finally got justice after decades of not having been believed or no one listening to them when they were trying to tell their stories.”