What Is a Girl Worth?: My Story of Breaking the Silence and Exposing the Truth about Larry Nassar and USA Gymnastics

If you can’t prove it, don’t speak up. Because it will cost you everything.

love is the greatest motivator one will ever have.

The idea many people want to cling to—that survivors just don’t know how to speak up—simply isn’t true. It’s a notion we need to let go of and instead do a better job understanding what really keeps victims silent.

I was also relearning the very painful lesson that full healing never really comes. I wanted healing to mean that I would go back to being who I was before I was abused—like it hadn’t happened. But the scars from Larry’s abuse were visible to the whole world. They would never not be part of my public identity now.

garden hose

It’s never been the hand in the dark, I remembered with a flash. It’s always the hand you hold.

It wasn’t “good timing,” most would say, but that little baby was there, and its tiny heart was beating strong, and that little life had value. And we could rejoice in that.

The weight of how we fail our children pressed on me as an attorney for victims who’d been abused by priests told a Globe investigative reporter: “Mark my words, Mr. Rezendes. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.”[1]

My parents showed us that love was the foundation for everything, and they modeled what it looked like lived out. Love didn’t thrive on authority; it thrived on sacrifice. Love sought to communicate and understand. Love was humble, admitting wrongs and seeking to repair the damage. Love protected.