Aly Raisman Is Taking Destiny into Her Own Hands

Inside Exxcel Gymnastics, young girls crowd around a photo collage, boxing each other out for the best view of their hometown Olympian plastered across the wall. Among the cluster of pictures in this Newton, Massachusetts, gym is an image of 10-year-old Aly Raisman, so determined to hold her position, her little arms holding up the entire weight of her body, while her legs and toes point to the ceiling.

Back then, Raisman was not the most skilled. Just strong. She was smaller than everyone and burned to beat everyone, whether it was press handstands or chin-ups. “Can we do a contest?! Can we do a contest?!” she’d exclaim. If she did 20 chin-ups yesterday, she’d pull off 21 the next day, even if it was not a contest.

She was seven years old.

There are also black-and-white newspaper photos of 22-year-old Raisman, roaring, as she wins gold at the 2016 Olympics, next to headlines like: “Gold Fever!” and “Alexandra the Great!” The young girls who train at the gym had huddled around a television that year, cheering Raisman’s every move in navy T-shirts that said “Team Aly.”

The girls see that Raisman was just like them: Poised. Relentless. Driven by dreams bigger than their bodies. “She is a hero,” says 10-year-old Stella Bjork. Ally Chilton, 13, gushes that she shares the same name as Raisman. “She’s really calm under pressure, which I find really inspiring,” Chilton says. “Competitions are really stressful and it’s hard to stay calm. But she does it.”

Throughout her career, Raisman kept everyone calm. She was a leader in a sport of individuals, telling nervous teammates to “Trust your training. Just breathe” before competitions. “She is there for people more than she is for herself,” says Maggie Nichols, a close friend and USA teammate since 2013, who now competes for the University of Oklahoma.

That is how Raisman found herself standing in front of a podium in a courtroom in January. Shoulders back, teeth clenched. Laser eyes, stiff upper lip. It was her time to speak. In this moment, Raisman was fighting not for herself but for the safety of girls everywhere; girls just like those at Exxcel. 

Aly Raisman gives her victim impact statement in Lansing, Mich., during sentencing for former sports doctor Larry Nassar. (Matthew Dae Smith/Lansing State Journal via USA TODAY)

Raisman didn’t stutter or flinch. Her words were quick, calculated, piercing. She hung on to each syllable a little bit longer as she stared Larry Nassar, the man who abused her and allegedly more than 200 athletes, dead in the eye, over and over, during these sentencing hearings.

Imagine feeling like you have no power and no voice. Well, you know what, Larry? I have both power and voice, and I am only beginning to just use them.

Lyndsy Gamet, a survivor who testified the day before, was moved by Raisman’s words. “When Aly spoke, it made me feel proud,” Gamet says. “I was proud that she would put [herself] out there for little girls to look up to. It showed the nation that it was OK to share your truth.”

And to demand change.

I will not rest until every last trace of your influence on this sport has been destroyed like the cancer it is.

Raisman grew louder, more forceful. She was in control now.

Abusers, your time is up. The survivors are here, standing tall, and we are not going anywhere.

There were also dozens and dozens of testimonies from women you may not know. Women who are now wading in the trenches—not for headlines but for the back-breaking work of ensuring this moment becomes a movement. They are calling themselves an Army of Survivors.

“It gave me more power than I ever had in my life,” Gamet says of her own testimony. “In that moment you understood how impactful one voice can be.”

And another and another. There was Rachael Denhollander, who refused to be silenced despite losing her church and her closest friends. There was Mattie Larson, who said she was so desperate to escape Nassar’s abuse at the Karolyi Ranch that she purposely tried to give herself a concussion.

Raisman, who hadn’t planned to speak in court until she heard the girls and women before her, has become one of the movement’s boldest leaders. Last November, the 24-year-old publicly disclosed that Nassar sexually abused her beginning in 2010, when she was 15, at various locations, including the U.S. national team training facility at Karolyi Ranch in Texas and the 2012 London Games. She sued the U.S. Olympic Committee and USA Gymnastics in March of this year for failing to stop Nassar’s abuse. The lawsuit alleges those institutions seemed to protect a predator and ignore the children and young adults he abused. Before Nassar’s sentencing, Olympic teammates Simone Biles, Jordyn Wieber, McKayla Maroney and Gabby Douglas came forward and said they were also abused by Nassar.

Raisman peered out into a crowded auditorium of women. Everything was dark but the wooden stage beneath her. It was the opening ceremony of the United State of Women Summit, held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in early May, a two-day event focused on gender equality featuring trailblazers like Michelle Obama, civil rights icon and labor activist Dolores Huerta, and actress and activist Yara Shahidi.

The lights came on and Raisman stood next to fellow survivors Tiffany Lopez, Jeanette Antolin and Jordyn Wieber. Raisman began: “Speaking out is never easy. Each time I share my story, I relive my trauma,” she said.

These days Raisman is both energized and exhausted. Her vulnerability is constantly on display as she speaks at event after event.

This new role helps heal her, but it also weighs on her. In her book Fierce, she discusses her triggers, her anxiety, her pain. The difficulties she has trusting people who walk into her life. The fear she feels when hearing a knock at her door, upon ordering room service at a hotel, for example, as she worries the server might be a man.

There are the private moments people don’t see: the nights alone in her room after all the people who call her courageous and hand her awards for her bravery are gone. She is left to contend with her own healing. That is difficult work. That is never-ending work.

It is work, too, facing naysayers within the gymnastics community and beyond who would like her to stay silent, who question her motives. Some coaches, officials and even strangers say she is only speaking to gain a bigger social media following or to get on television more.

“It affects her deeply,” says Raisman’s close friend Valorie Kondos Field, coach of the 2018 national champion UCLA gymnastics team. “She’s dealing with people that are saying that the sport of gymnastics is in a really bad place right now and it’s because these victims came forward. ... And she’s having to defend that.”

“She’s not being vocal to put Larry Nassar in jail. He’s already in jail,” Field says, as Nassar pled guilty to 10 counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct and was sentenced to up to 175 years in prison. “She’s continuing to fight to make sure that people don’t forget about this, brush it under a rug, and then allow for the same culture to develop, which is going to inflict itself on the next generation.”

“She’s not being vocal to put Larry Nassar in jail—she’s continuing to fight to make sure that people don’t forget about this.”

—VALORIE KONDOS FIELD, UCLA GYMNASTICS COACH

Raisman is pushing for all adults to take Darkness to Light’s two-hour sex-abuse education course. The rollout took just a month-and-a-half, which is very quick, but Raisman wouldn’t wait any longer.

“Aly has an inexorable spirit,” says Tarana Burke, founder of the Me Too movement. “She’s taking her destiny into her own hands. She’s like, ‘This is what I want. This is what I need, and I’m going to go after it.’ That is a powerful example of a survivor.”

Raisman spends hours signing each Darkness to Light certificate, by hand, that participants receive upon completion of the course. Once, as the story goes, her hand severely cramped up, but she refused to put down the pen until every certificate was signed. “She had this sense of urgency. There was no red tape,” says Katelyn Brewer, CEO of Darkness to Light.

Raisman was that way as an athlete, too. She hardly took a day off in the 15-plus years she spent chasing her Olympic dream. She sacrificed going to high school with her peers, traveling and time with friends and family.

Sometimes she trained double-digit hours a day, challenging her body to unthinkable limits. In her book, Raisman revealed she was once scolded by a USAG staffer for eating a slice of pizza. At times, her self-worth felt determined by the color of the medal draped around her neck. Worse was the cool breeze that circled around it when there was no hardware to keep it warm.

The stakes are high now, too. She still hardly has time off. Each day brings sobering reminders of the work left to be done—and how that work mostly unfairly falls on survivors rather than the institutions that allowed a perpetrator to move freely.

Michigan State University agreed to pay $500 million to settle claims from more than 300 women and girls who said they were assaulted over Nassar’s 29-year career, working as the team doctor for USA Gymnastics and as an employee of Michigan State University. Yet at this point, USOC, USAG and Michigan State still have not met with all survivors or completed a thorough, independent investigation.

If Raisman does not continue to speak up, who will? The hollow truth gnaws at her: She fought to bring prestige to a country that is not fighting to bring her peace.