Ex-US Olympics gymnastics coach linked to Larry Nassar charged with sexual assault, trafficking

45

View
comments

A former US women’s gymnastics coach with ties to disgraced sports doctor Larry Nassar who was charged in Michigan on Thursday with two dozen crimes has died by suicide.

John Geddert died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound just hours after he was brought up on two dozen charges including sexual assault, human trafficking and running a criminal enterprise, WLNS-TV reported.

Geddert’s suicide was confirmed by the office of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. 

‘My office has been notified that the body of John Geddert was found late this afternoon after taking his own life,’ Nessel wrote in a statement. 

‘This is a tragic end to a tragic story for everyone involved.’ 

Michigan State Police tweeted that Geddert’s body was located by troopers at the rest area on EB I-96 in Clinton County at 3.24pm.

Police said no further details are available at this time and that an investigation into Geddert’s death is ongoing. 

DailyMail.com left a message on Thursday with Geddert’s Lansing-based attorney, Chris Bergstrom. 

An official in Nessel’s office said that Geddert agreed to surrender to authorities at Eaton County Sheriff’s Office in Delta Township on Thursday before 2:15pm but he never showed up. His arraignment was scheduled at Eaton County District Court before Judge Julie O’Neill. 

Geddert was head coach of the 2012 US women’s Olympic gymnastics team, which won a gold medal. 

Nassar was the team’s doctor and also treated injured gymnasts at Twistars, Geddert’s Lansing-area gym for elite athletes.

It is alleged that Nassar abused several gymnasts at Twistars. 

Geddert, 63, is accused of injuring people for years through forced labor and recruiting minors for forced labor, according to documents filed in an Eaton County court, near Lansing.

He also was charged with molesting a teen with his hands in 2012. 

Authorities said Geddert also lied to investigators in 2016 when he said he had never heard anyone complain about Nassar.

State prosecutors charged Geddert with 14 counts of human trafficking; six counts of human trafficking of a minor for forced labor; one count of continuing criminal enterprise; one count of first-degree criminal sexual conduct; one count of second-degree criminal sexual conduct; and one count of lying to a peace officer during a violent crime investigation, a four-year felony.

The two counts related to sexual conduct were brought after Geddert allegedly engaged in ‘sexual penetration’ of a girl under 16 in January 2012, according to the complaint.

‘John Geddert used force, fraud and coercion against the young athletes that came to him for gymnastics training for financial benefit to him,’ Nessel said.

‘The victims suffer from disordered eating, including bulimia and anorexia, suicide attempts and self-harm, excessive physical conditioning, repeatedly being forced to perform even when injured, extreme emotional abuse and physical abuse, including sexual assault. 

‘Many of these victims still carry these scars from his behavior to this day.’ 

Had he lived to face the charges in court, Geddert likely would have faced a maximum prison sentence of life if convicted. 

Nessel scheduled an afternoon news conference. A message seeking comment was left with Geddert’s attorney.

Geddert insisted he had ‘zero knowledge’ of Nassar’s crimes, although some gymnasts said he forced them to see Nassar and was physically abusive. 

Athletes are said to have attempted suicide, harmed themselves and suffered from eating disorders, according to Nessel. 

One woman who spoke to WLNS about Geddert in 2018 but wished to remain anonymous described him as the ‘boss, the enforcer, the screamer, the thrower, the perfectionist, the one from whom we desperately sought approval, or even just some small sign that he actually cared for us and not just for winning’.

Gymnast Lindsey Lemke described one incident to the station, saying: ‘While a gymnast would be in the spotting belt over a set of uneven bars, they would often get dropped from mid air, 15 feet up, if they made a mistake. 

‘Geddert would let go of the ropes that controlled the belt and therefore the gymnast.’

Lemke continued: ‘He would take girls by the shoulders, squeeze hard enough to leave marks, shake them and yell directly into their face. 

‘There was specifically one time where he picked up the vault hand mat and hit me with it because I couldn’t get my vault right that day and this was already after I had crashed into the vault hard enough to bruise and bleed.’

In July 2019, Sara Teristi, who met Nassar as a young teen in Michigan in late 1988, came forward in a bombshell TIME excerpt from Abigail Pesta’s book The Girls: An All-American Town, a Predatory Doctor, and the Untold Story of the Gymnasts Who Brought Him Down, implicating Geddert.

Teristi, who is now in her 40s, said that when she was 16 and suffering from a hairline fracture to her tailbone, Nassar penetrated her anally with his hands under the guise of performing a medical procedure. 

Teristi says Geddert saw some of the abuse but failed to act, instead maintaining a close personal and professional relationship with the soft-spoken doctor over several decades. 

In one instance, according to Teristi, Geddert was present in the medical room while Nassar applied an ice pack to the bare chest of the then-14-year-old gymnast and began playing with her nipples.

Rather than putting a halt to the abuse, Geddert is said to have made jokes about the size of the young girl’s chest and allowed the sexual assault to continue freely.

‘They would stand there and have a conversation right in front of me,’ she said.

‘John [Geddert] would joke about how small my “t***” were. He said if I was lucky, they would get bigger.’

Now a mother-of-two, she believes Geddert helped engineer a culture of fear that allowed Nassar’s sexual abuse to continue unabashed.

‘Your body didn’t belong to you,’ she says. ‘You didn’t get to make decisions about it.’

And in another extreme instance, she claims Geddert himself straddled her ‘in a sexual way’ after she returned from injury and landed on her hands and knees.

‘He was sitting on my back, riding me in a sexual way,’ she claimed. ‘He said, “Ooh, baby, you like it like that!”‘

Nassar, who was a doctor at Michigan State University, has been sentenced to decades in prison for sexually assaulting gymnasts at the school and elsewhere as well as possessing child pornography.

During Nassar’s sentencing, a woman said Geddert was aware in the late 1990s that Nassar had performed an ‘inappropriate procedure’ on her when she was 16. 

A prosecutor read that accuser’s anonymous statement in court.

The gymnastic coach was investigated twice by Michigan State Police – once in 2011 and again in 2013. In 2011, he was said to have gotten into an argument with an employee while he was investigated for assaulting a gymnast in 2013.

During the Nassar scandal, Geddert was suspended by Indianapolis-based USA Gymnastics in January 2018 and announced his retirement the following day. He has been under investigation since. 

On his LinkedIn page, Geddert described himself as the ‘most decorated women’s gymnastics coach in Michigan gymnastics history.’ He said his Twistars teams had won 130 club championships.

In 2012, he coached the US women’s gymnastics team to a gold medal in the London Summer Games.

That squad included the ‘Fierce Five’ – a group of gymnasts comprised of Gabby Douglas, McKayla Maroney, Aly Raisman, Kyla Ross, and Jordyn Wieber which captured the nation’s hearts.

But Geddert was often described in unflattering ways when Nassar’s victims spoke during court hearings in 2018.

‘What a great best friend John was to Larry for giving him an entire world where he was able to abuse so easily,’ gymnast Lindsey Lemke said. 

‘You two sure do have a funny meaning of friendship. You, John Geddert, also deserve to sit behind bars right next to Larry.’

Geddert’s Twistars was sued by more than 140 women and girls who alleged that he failed to protect them from Nassar.