I realize this story doesn't need to be told a million ways, but this is the most definitive report I've read about Nassar, and the one to learn the most from. for anybody who asks why this happened, it's more than institutional abuse. some startling excerpts:

Nassar often invited gymnasts for extra sessions at his home. parents would sit in while he assaulted them casually in the same room, under the guise of general physical treatment.

"There was a chair a few feet away, by the television, where Dawn (mother) sat that day and many, many days afterward. It was angled such that she could see only Trinea's (her daughter) head and shoulders. Larry maintained a steady, quick patter through the treatment. While she was on her stomach, out of her mother’s view but without breaking the flow of conversation with her, he penetrated Trinea with his ungloved hand."

****

many of the gymnasts who were assaulted did not even believe it themselves, until police found Nassar's hard drive of illegal pornography.

"When the Star broke the story, in September 2016, and all of elite gymnastics read it, not a single person interviewed for this piece believed that Denhollander and a second, anonymous accuser had been assaulted by Nassar. Dawn Homer asked Trinea Gonczar whether Larry could be capable of such a thing, and Trinea said, unreservedly, “No.” She waited patiently for medical experts to come forward and defend the practice.

“They’re describing,” Chloe Myers told her parents, “the exact same treatment I was receiving.” It had helped her back pain, she reasoned, and thus was legitimate. “They weren’t remembering right,” Chloe’s father concluded.

"It was, rather, a set of external hard drives — tossed to the curb in the trash in the days after Denhollander went public, on a day when the garbage crew was behind schedule, and recovered by a police officer.* Had the crew been on time, had the officer been late, had the warrant come through a day after Nassar decided to dump his digital history on the street, he might still have the support of most of the people he abused."

"Healthy people tend not to distinguish between varieties of child pornography or think much about the habits of its consumption, but Nassar’s accumulation of more than 37,000 images suggests an unusual level of deviance even among pedophiles. According to a sentencing memorandum issued by federal prosecutors for the Western District of Michigan, these images form a particularly “graphic” and “hard-core” collection, including children as young as infants and images of children being raped by adults."

"Here was a fact that one simply could not integrate into the image of a dedicated doctor attacked by confused or malicious women. The story stopped making sense. Mothers struggled to find a way to ask their girls whether they’d been digitally penetrated at the gym. Parents awoke for the first time to the possibility that their daughters’ first sexual experience had taken place at the hands of Larry Nassar, often as said parent watched from a few feet away. “Did Larry do anything to you?” Michael Weiszbrod, an affable state administrator, asked his 13-year-old daughter, Ashleigh, a few times, and she shook her head no. He and his wife took this as authoritative until one day, months later, when Weiszbrod found himself watching Nassar’s sentencing hearing at work. He was thinking about another physician who worked at the gym, Brooke, whom Larry was training. When he got home, he put down his bag and turned directly to Ashleigh, who was hunched over her homework, legs crossed on the couch. “Did Larry touch you,” he asked, “different than Brooke touched you?” Ashleigh was very still, and then she was crying. She had seen Larry at Twistars once a week for three years."

https://www.thecut.com/amp/2018/11/how-did-larry-nassar-deceive-so-many-for-so-long.html?