Giving Larry Nassar’s Victims Their Own Voices

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The sentencing hearing for Lawrence G. Nassar — the former U.S.A. Gymnastics team doctor who was accused by scores of women of sexual abuse, many when they were minors — was already an anomaly when it began on Jan. 16 in Michigan. Eighty-eight women were expected to give victim impact statements in court, and just the day before, Simone Biles, one of the best athletes ever to grace the Olympic Games, had joined the rising chorus of voices with a statement posted on Twitter.

As a former gymnast, I always have one ear tuned to that world, and I was wondering why the media coverage of the case felt so slim. (A few other outlets were reporting the story, including The Indianapolis Star, which broke the news in August 2016.) Carla Correa, a digital news editor with whom I had partnered to cover women’s gymnastics during the 2016 Rio Olympics, was also wondering, and voiced her frustration in a group message on Slack.

We wondered what we could do with the resources of The New York Times, in the few days between statements and sentencing, to amplify the voices of these women. It was easily the largest number of accusers in a sexual abuse case in sports history — what could we do, in the short time we had, to communicate the staggering scale?

I’m the deputy editor on our Digital News Design desk, a team whose task is to find opportunities to use visuals to tell a compelling story. I wanted to let the women represent themselves, through both photos and their own words. I wanted to represent the anger and the power that come with facing your accuser in court, which is what I saw on every face as I searched through photos from the hearing. The photo editor Beth Flynn kept editors on top of this for the next couple of days to help search through images and get permission for photos from other organizations. I also called on the graphics editor Josh Williams, who wrote the application that powers the digital presentation.

By the end of Friday, when the number of accusers was estimated at 140 and more than 100 had signed up to speak, we knew we would have another few days of statements before sentencing. Over the weekend and into Monday, Carla and I spent much of our time collecting material.

Carla took on the heroic task of listening to every second of the sentencing hearing — recording names, who was there, who spoke publicly and who spoke anonymously. As she listened, she marked times and transcribed quotations that she thought were compelling or would work well in the story.

As she listened, I was in our photo database, working alongside our photo editors to track down every single name. I was determined to gather as many portraits as we could, to represent as many women as possible. For those who chose to remain anonymous but still spoke in court, I reached out to one of our art directors, Agnes Lee, to create a silhouetted drawing to include in the grid online to stand in for the anonymous speakers.

There were multiple times, as I pulled up yet another photo of a woman facing her abuser in court, that I wanted to burst into tears at my desk. The reason visual storytelling is so compelling is because it creates an intense connection between you and the subject. It’s also the reason creating these pieces can wear on you.

Carla concurred. “Much of what I heard during the hearing was not new to me, but it still kept me awake at night,” she said. “I understood the scope of the problem long before now, but seeing and hearing the women speak simultaneously broke my heart and inspired me.”

Gymnastics requires a particular combination of dedication, strength and grace. So it’s fitting to me that it was a group of gymnasts, and other athletes, who finally exposed this unprecedented scale of abuse — and who stood their ground in court, made their stories public and proved the power of women standing together to amplify one another’s voices. Dr. Nassar was sentenced to up to 175 years in prison.

Larry Nassar’s abuse went on for so long partly because these women weren’t trusted to tell their own stories or to be witnesses to their own lives. We hope this piece, along with the excellent and emotional reporting by Scott Cacciola, Juliet Macur, Christine Hauser and others, helps these women bear that witness.