Olympic gold medalist McKayla Maroney claims that she too was a victim of sexual assault. Perpetrated, she said, by a former USA Gymnastics doctor.
The string of women in Hollywood who have stepped forward to charge movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual misconduct, spurred the gold medal gymnast to reveal her own molestation. Maroney said she was inspired by the “me too” movement which is encouraging women to open up about past assaults to bring awareness to the issue.
Maroney says that the assaults began when she was a 13-year-old attending a gymnast training camp. The famed gymnast said she was molested for up to seven years.
“It seemed whenever and wherever this man could find the chance, I was ‘treated,'” Maroney wrote in a long Twitter post. “It happened in London before my team and I won the gold medal, and it happened before I won my Silver.”
https://twitter.com/McKaylaMaroney/status/920548528870400001
Maroney claims that Dr. Larry Nassar once slipped her a sleeping pill so that he could molest her in a hotel room in Japan.
“I thought I was going to die that night,” she wrote of the 2011 incident in Tokyo.
Dr. Nassar is now a registered sex offender after he pleaded guilty to child porn possession in July of 2017.
Maroney said she was thrilled to have had such a successful gymnastics career, but noted it wasn’t without cost.
“Sure, from the outside looking in, it’s an amazing story. I did it. I got there, but not without a price,” she wrote.
Nassar still faces possible consequences from his actions for all those years.
“Nassar has been accused of molesting dozens of young athletes associated with USA Gymnastics and his Michigan State University clinic,” the New York Daily News wrote today. “He is being sued by more than 125 women claiming he sexually assaulted them under the pretense of medical treatment.”
It was not immediately known if Maroney had joined the lawsuit against Nassar.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.
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