Anyone who remembers reading about the Larry Nassar/USA Gymnastics abuse scandal when the story broke four years ago is sure to hear a degree of ominous, pitch-black irony the first time the longtime women’s national team physician is mentioned by name in the new Netflix documentary“Athlete A,”debuting Wednesday, June 24.
Early in the powerful film, directed by San Francisco married filmmakers Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk (“Audrie & Daisy,”“An Inconvenient Sequel”), we see footage of a televised competition during which Nassar rushes to help an injured gymnast in obvious pain after a floor routine injury.
“Here’s Larry Nassar,” says the upbeat TV commentator. “He keeps these women together.”
The line stings because we know just how far it is from the truth. Nassar, in fact, broke young female athletes’ trust and violated their bodies using the guise of medical treatment to cover his molestation in plain sight. His access to gymnasts at all levels, including Olympic champions like Simone Biles and Aly Raisman, went unchecked for three decades, and Nassar is now serving a life sentence in federal prison for being a serial sexual predator.
回购这些事实已经证据确凿的消息rts and even in another documentary released last year, Erin Lee Carr’s “At the Heart of Gold” (which focused on Nassar’s legal trial). What makes “Athlete A” such a riveting and unusually ambitious sports film is that Cohen and Shenk chose to tell the gymnastics scandal story from a less familiar angle. They focused on two groups of people who successfully worked together to shine a light on Nassar and USAG’s crimes: the wronged gymnasts, who were brave enough to speak up (including NCAA champion Maggie Nichols, referred to anonymously in legal documents as “Athlete A”), and a team of dogged investigative reporters at the Indianapolis Star.
“Athlete A” is reminiscent of “Spotlight,” the Oscar-winning 2015 film about the Boston Globe’s investigation of child sex abuse in the local Catholic archdiocese. At the film’s center are the Star journalists who broke the first story of abuse in August 2016 (while the U.S. Olympic team was racking up medals in Rio) and then kept digging, following leads and connecting the dots until they had uncovered the biggest sexual abuse scandal in sports history. Five hundred women eventually came forward with criminal allegations. The investigation into USAG and its former CEO, Steve Penny, is still ongoing.
Review: ‘Athlete A’ goes behind scenes of USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal
“The journalists were so key to us from the beginning,” Shenk told The Chronicle by phone.
“We always saw this story as a way to highlight the need for investigative reporting and pursuing the truth in these kind of situations where huge institutional corruption, systemic abuse has gone on for decades,” Cohen said. “I think we’re in an age right now where good, solid reporting is more important than ever. These abuses, hid for so long, were brought to light because of following leads when something’s not smelling right, and it all came out of a reasonably small newsroom in the middle of the country.”
Cohen and Shenk, whose documentary production company,Actual Films, has offices in the Presidio, were introduced to the story that became “Athlete A” when they were contacted shortly after the first Nassar story broke by former gymnastics champion Jennifer Sey. Sey admired their 2016 film “Audrie & Daisy” (about teen sexual assault in the social media age) and suggested the filmmakers take a deeper look at gymnastics culture.
Sey’s 2000 memoir, “Chalked Up,” chronicled her disillusionment with her sport’s cruel coaching methods and the toll of emotional and physical abuse on its athletes’ young bodies and minds.
“Jen was excoriated when she first wrote her book by insiders in the gymnastics world,” Cohen said. “Then, when the Nassar story started to hit, all of a sudden she was looked to as an expert and the go-to person for comment.”
Sey’s involvement and her moving testimony onscreen in “Athlete A” helped the film avoid the “one bad apple” theory of wrongdoing, said Shenk, “the pitfall that sometimes happens with documentary film of blaming one person and letting the system off the hook.”
In other words, it’s too easy to just blame Nassar, one pedophile, when he was given unfettered access to girls by coaches as esteemed as Bela and Martha Karolyi, and permitted to keep working despite earlier whistle-blowing. (Nichols was at the Karolyis’ famous training ranch in Texas in 2015 when she first spoke up to her coach about Nassar’s molestation.)
“He’s a symbol of what can happen when all of the people who should be doing the right thing turn a blind eye,” Cohen said. “We’re hoping to lead viewers to look more broadly and more deeply at what allowed Nassar to be successful.”
As Sey says onscreen, “In other sports, the athletes are adults and they can reasonably make choices about what they want. I don’t believe that’s true in gymnastics. From a young age, the line between tough coaching and child abuse gets blurred.”
Shenk says it’s key to recognize the fortuitous timing of women in “Athlete A” blowing the whistle on Nassar’s crimes and USAG’s cover-up “during what you might call the peak of the #MeToo movement” in 2017. They probably gained confidence seeing other women speak up for the first time about abuse they had survived at the hands of Roger Ailes, Harvey Weinstein and many others.
“I think the power of the ‘Athlete A,’ is that, even though of course one wishes the authorities would have acted more responsibly from the beginning, it’s the journalists and the survivors gathering together to successfully expose this culture and this system,” Shenk said. “It brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it. It’s a story of hope winning, and truth winning, even though there’s still a ways to go.”
“那可能不是一个相当后#我们l MeToo世界iving in now,” added Cohen, “but it is definitely a different world. It is different for men and boys, and hopefully for institutions as well if they think they can get away with the crap that they’ve gotten away with in the past.”
“Athlete A”(PG-13) debuts Wednesday, June 24, on Netflix.