Inside Story of the Attorney who Helped Take Down Larry Nassar & USA Gymnastics

By now, most Americans have heard the story of the Larry Nassar gymnastics sex abuse case. Earlier this year, the scope of his crimes shocked the nation. Yet, few people know the inside story of the attorney that helped take down a serial sexual abuser and helped expose the pedophile coaches and officials in USA gymnastics. It was the work of Attorney Jessica Wegg of Saeed & Little LLP that tipped off the Indy Star and launched their investigation.

In March 2016, Marisa Kwiatkowski, an investigative reporter for the IndyStar, was investigating a piece on failures to report sexual abuse in schools. That’s when Attorney Jessica Wegg became the source that would break the USA Gymnastics industry wide open and expose the evils lurking within.

Attorney Wegg told Kwiatkowski that she should look closely at a lawsuit in Georgia. She flew to Georgia to pick up nearly 1,000 pages of court records proving that over 50 USA Gymnastics coaches, officials, and employees had molested an untold number of girls. Those records started the intensive investigation into USA Gymnastics and ultimately Larry Nassar.

Through their investigation, Kwiatkowski realized that USA Gymnastics executives routinely dismissed complaints as “hearsay” unless they were signed. The impact of that policy was devastating to the abused children and their families. As they continued to dig, the allegations against Larry Nassar grew. Dozens of survivors began reaching out within days of the first Indy story.

In January 2018, Larry Nassar, the former team doctor for USA Gymnastics, was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison for sexually abusing more than 150 young girls and women in his care. Some of the girls he abused were as young as 6 years old.

Since the first story broke and Larry Nassar’s subsequent conviction, USA Gymnastics reached a confidential settlement in the original Georgia lawsuit that prompted the entire investigation. The original suit revealed the breakdown inside USA Gymnastics that allowed serial sex abuse to continue. Their refusal to forward allegations of child sex abuse to authorities directly led to more than 150 children becoming victims of child sex abuse.

Bringing Justice to Survivors of Child Sex Abuse

We believe that sexually abused athletes deserve justice. As such, we fight aggressively and we dig for information that institutions have buried. We work tirelessly for survivors of childhood sexual abuse to ensure that their abusers and the negligent institutions that harbored them are held accountable for these crimes. While they may try to bury the evidence of the abuse, we are relentless in our pursuit for justice and truth.