Since #MeToo became a national and global movement, there have been many upsetting moments that have forced us to ask, “How could we have let this happen?” One of the most striking was the seven days of personal statements read in court during the sentencing of Larry Nassar, the former doctor for the US Women’s Olympic gymnastics team. As 156 of Nassar’s victims stood up to publicly confront their abuser, it was both staggering to realize how many women he had hurt in his 30-year association with the team and infuriating to come to terms with the fact that while athletes like Simone Biles and Aly Raisman were winning gold medals for the US, they were also victims of abuse from someone meant to help them.
The new documentary At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal, which screened at Tribeca this evening, attempts to reconcile that history.
Directed by Erin Lee Carr (Mommy Dead and Dearest), the film uses a mix of archival footage and interviews with Nassar’s victims, related parties, and various experts to tell the girls’ (many of them now grown women) stories. Though listening to their statements is what attracted so much media attention, Carr first begins by examining what about the sport and the way it’s handled in the US created an atmosphere where Nassar could go unpunished for so long.
Carr starts with Béla and Márta Károlyi, the Romania-born couple who coached Kerri Strug to Olympic glory in 1996 and took control of America’s training program in 2000. Before the Karolyis, gymnastics was a sport for grown women, but their goal was to train girls intensely from an early age. As girls who attended the couple’s monthly training sessions at their Texas ranch describe it, the culture they created was one where the girls were deliberately isolated from their coaches and parents and where they were taught to suppress both physical and emotional pain in order to succeed. It’s no wonder then that a predator like Nassar, who professed to put the girls’ health first and who those interviewed describe as “charming” or a “guardian angel,” was able to do what he did.
While the interviewees can only speculate on how much the Karolyis (who aren’t interviewed) knew, Carr’s condemnation of the administration at Michigan State University (where Nassar worked for nearly 20 years) is far more damning. Mostly, that centers on former MSU Gymnastics head coach Kathie Klages and the way she handled Larissa Boyce’s allegations in 1997, shortly after Nassar began working there.
Klages herself doesn’t appear likely because she’s at the center of ongoing litigation related to the abuse Nassar perpetrated at MSU, so Boyce can tell the horrifying story herself. As she describes it, Klages starts by assuring her she misunderstood the “procedure” Nassar performs, then brings in other girls to convince Boyce that it didn’t happen, tells her that filing an official report will get both Boyce and Nassar in trouble and ends by telling Nassar about the allegation before letting him again treat Boyce unsupervised. It’s a chilling sequence made only more upsetting when later, it happens all over again with MSU athlete, Amanda Thomashow in 2014.
In both cases and throughout, the interviews give Carr’s film its power. While it’s sobering to see just how many victims are willing to speak with her, the interviews with non-victims are equally important to her point. There’s, Dawn Homer, mother of former gymnast, Trinea Gonczar speaking of the anger she felt during Nassar’s sentencing. There’s Nassar’s lawyer, Shannon Smith, who is so restrained in her interview that the closest thing she says to a positive thing about Nassar is to note that the 7 days of sentencing created an atmosphere where a father of three of Nassar’s victims lunged at him in court. And then there’s Marci Hamilton, CEO and Academic director of CHILD USA, who notes that adults are predisposed to privilege and believe other adults rather than children, giving context not only to Massar’s case, but to child sexual abuse generally.
It’s impossible to deny that At the Heart of Gold is a tough watch. What happened to these girls is at turns infuriating and deeply saddening and while Carr only has so much space to widen the lens and question the American people’s complicity in what USA Gymnastics allowed Nassar to get away with, it’s also impossible not to feel a degree of shame to see what was justified for some gold medals. What we should do with those emotions or what USOC can do to keep this from happening again are not something Carr or her subjects can easily answer—nor should they. There is no easy way to solve a problem that goes so deep and involves reprogramming lifetimes of mistakes, but at the very least, we can do is what the adults involved should have done in the first place: listen to them.
